Call Me by My Name (2 page)

He waited four years before coming back out for baseball. It was 1969 now, and he came up the same route as before, walking past the pool and the pool house and the snowball stand, crossing Market Street, and then entering the old shell road half-dancing to whatever music was playing. My age group had graduated to the Babe Ruth League, and once again we were waiting for tryouts to start. Unlike before, nobody threw shell at him. Instead they all stood together and stared, and they really let him have it with their mouths.

“Hey, boy, you get lost on your way to the projects?” one of the coaches yelled.

“What's wrong, my man?” another of the dads shouted. “Haven't you heard what happened to that preacher in Memphis?” That was Martin Luther King Jr., murdered the year before.

Tater just kept coming. When he got closer and it started to look like Curly might go at him again, I stepped out a ways to make sure there weren't any problems. Puberty had found me the year before, and I was already six-foot-two and two hundred and thirty-five pounds. I was what Mama called “husky,” and when we shopped for my clothes we had to drive an hour to Baton Rouge to find a specialty store for the big and tall. The one good thing about being so large was that nobody messed with me—
ever
.

“Good to see you, Tater,” I told him.

“You too, Rodney.”

I walked with him through the guys staring wild-eyed and the men chewing toothpicks, and we set up off to the side and started playing catch. He had a good arm and his throws popped in my mitt, making everyone turn for a look.

“They hate me and they don't even know me,” he said between throws. It wasn't that he felt sorry for himself. It was more like he suddenly needed to say something that was true.

“Don't let it bother you,” I told him.

Then he threw the ball so hard I thought for sure he'd broken a bone in my hand.

Tater dazzled us all during the tryout, or at least those of us who bothered to pay attention to him. He still had that little oil-wet glove, and even though it was no bigger than his hand, nothing got past him. During drills, one of the coaches hit fly balls in the outfield, and we took turns catching them, and when one came off his bat too hard and sailed high over our heads and past us, it was Tater who broke from the group and chased it down, catching it at a full gallop with his back to the hitter, like Willie Mays. He could throw the ball on a rope from the outfield fence to home plate, and he was fastest on the base paths.

The coach of the Redbirds, Junior Doucet, won a coin toss and made me the first pick of the draft, and all those boys later he made Tater the last pick. Tater had outperformed the other kids and me, but he'd come to us black, and for that he had to wait. That the park allowed him to play at all was the biggest surprise, although I learned later that some of the coaches thought the federal government had sent Tater to test town leaders who'd been resisting integration.

One day that summer I got up the nerve to ask Tater why he was there.

“South City Park is closer to where I live,” he said. “It's less than a mile away. North City Park is more like three miles.”

“We thought maybe you were sent to infiltrate the white culture and gather information for rabble-rousers bent on toppling our way of life.”

“Who told you that?”

I didn't want to admit that it was Pops so I said, “I just heard it around.”

Tater shook his head. “It's two miles difference, Rodney. I don't own a bike.”

Mama worked at home as a seamstress. Pops worked as a night watchman at the plant in town where they made cooking oil.

He punched in at 11:00 p.m. and punched out at 7:00 a.m., five days a week. Even though he had to get his sleep during the day, he still never missed any of my games, including those with early afternoon starts. I'd always look for him on the other side of the fence down on the first base line, standing by himself in his blue clothes, the leather strings on his steel-toe boots hanging loose. He never cheered or said anything when I got a hit or picked off a base runner trying to steal. He kept quiet even when we won close ones. My teammates said he looked “hard to know.” I explained that he'd served in Korea and just wasn't one for any nonsense.

I inherited my size from Mama's people. She actually stood two inches taller and weighed about fifty pounds more than Pops. She called her business Unique Boutique, and she specialized in evening gowns. Ladies were always coming to the house to get measured, and there were always bal masque outfits draped over the furniture. You'd have to sit on the floor to watch TV so as not to rumple the pretty things she was making.

Mama suffered from lupus and didn't feel well outside in the hot sunlight, and this kept her from attending many of my games. Over supper I'd have to tell her how they went, and whenever I described something sensational like a grand-slam home run or a triple play, she'd turn to Angie and say “Is your brother lying again?”

Angie was on the South City Park swim team and sometimes had to practice when I was playing, but she made most of my games and sat in the bleachers behind the backstop. She showed up with a sketchbook and a paint box full of colored pencils, and she made pictures of whatever caught her fancy: a player sliding into home, the pitcher coming out of his windup, dragonflies lighting on top of a batting helmet. Most people never guessed that we were twins—Angie was a green-eyed blonde and trim, while I was a brown-eyed monster who could make little kids cry if I looked at them too long—but Angie herself always said we were “one and the same and nobody without each other.”

I believed this to be true, although we probably weren't much different from most twins. We shared a room and slept in beds pushed up next to each other until a year ago when she got her first period and Pops decided it was time to turn the sleeping porch into a bedroom. I liked having my own space, but some nights I felt so lonely I couldn't stand it. I'd return to Angie's room, clear out a place on the floor next to her bed, and sleep there on a pallet of pillows.

Today she was wearing a tank top and short shorts. You could see the tan lines on her shoulders left by her bathing suit, and she had a tied-off leather string hanging from around her neck with a key at the end of it.

The key opened the lock on the rear gate of the park's pool yard. Angie wore it like jewelry, she once explained to me, because it was good luck and a source of pride and something no other swim team member had, not even Craig Fink, the boys' captain and a state champion in the breaststroke. The key meant she could let herself in anytime she wanted, and she often did so, bicycling to the park at 5:00 a.m. to get some laps in before the pool house opened at seven. Angie was oblivious to the reaction she brought out in guys our age, but that didn't stop them from saying things.

“God, she's fine,” I heard Randy Billedeaux say at the start of batting practice.

“Knock it off. That's his sister,” Tater said before I could speak up.

He and I were waiting for our turns at the plate. Five cuts were all you got before games, and things moved fast.

“We're what's called fraternal twins,” I told him, for some reason thinking he should know. “Mama might've carried us at the same time, but somehow we came out different. I was born before she was, but I never knew if that's why I'm so much bigger.”

“I had me a twin once,” he said.

“What do you mean you had one?”

“It was a girl too. Rosalie. She came out already deceased. That's what my auntie told me, anyway.” He pronounced it
ahn-tee
. “My great aunt, I should say. She's my mom's mother's sister. I live with her.”

“Why don't you live with your parents?”

“I just don't.”

“But why don't you?”

“Because I don't, all right?”

I couldn't imagine life without my parents, but life without Angie would be even worse. “All right,” I told him.

By the bottom of the fifth inning the score was 9–0. We were winning again, and the game must've been boring to watch because the bleachers were quiet and even Angie had stopped cheering. The league had a ten-run rule, which meant we needed only one more run for the umps to call the game. Tater was the first batter up, and I was right behind him in the lineup.

“Which one of you is going to end this thing and let us go home?” Angie called from her seat.

I was in the on-deck circle. I lowered my bat and lifted my gloved left hand over my head. Tater stepped out of the batter's box and signaled for a time-out. Now he raised a hand too.

“Do it for me, Tater,” Angie said.

He shook off a laugh and seemed to have trouble regaining his concentration, but he still managed to crush the first pitch that came at him. The ball flew high over the left field fence for a home run, and the game was over. Tater ran around the bases at a slow jog. He crossed home plate and fell into my arms and those of our teammates. Then he casually walked over to the backstop. Angie was standing and applauding along with everybody else. Tater pointed at her. “You asked for it,” he said.

But the old lady standing in front of Angie thought Tater was talking to her. “I did?” She tapped a wrinkled hand against her chest. “Why, thank you, boy.”

I guess that taught him. Tater would hit more home runs that summer, but he never again was quite so proud of himself afterward.

We lived about a mile from the park on Helen Street, and even after Pops converted the porch, the house still had only about a thousand square feet of living space. There was one bathroom for the four of us, and it was barely large enough to hold a sink, a toilet, and a tub. The house had a TV antenna on the roof and striped metal awnings over the windows. We thought the asbestos siding was pretty, especially during a rainstorm when the material repelled water and shone with a pearl's iridescence.

Pops wasn't a complicated man, but I still didn't understand him. His happiest moments seemed to come when he was by himself—out fishing at Bayou Courtableau or tending to his vegetable garden behind the house. He grew some pretty tomatoes, along with cucumbers, squash, snap beans, and eggplant. He'd put the vegetables in brown A&P bags and drive in the Cameo from house to house, knocking on doors and taking his hat off when somebody answered. “We're about drowning in them,” he'd say as he handed over each bag. It was strange seeing him be all generous with the neighbors, especially when you compared him to the Pops we got at home. Angie always said that the only time we saw flowers in the house was on days after Pops had a moody spell and needed to make up with Mama.

We couldn't afford to have a black lady come in and clean the house like others on the south end could. These neighbors weren't well off either, but their jobs as bank tellers and schoolteachers and auto mechanics earned them enough to hire full-time maids and yardmen. I couldn't imagine how little a maid and a yardman were earning if they depended on the guy from Lalonde's Cajun Plumbing for their livings.

That first summer with Tater was just starting when one of the guys on our team, Marco Miller, pulled me aside during practice and told me he had a secret. He looked around to make sure we were alone. “Tater's auntie, the lady he lives with . . . ? She's our maid. She cleans our house.”

“Yeah?”

“Her name is Miss Nettie. Last night I rode with my mother when she took her home. I knew Miss Nettie had somebody she was raising, but I didn't know it was Tater until we got there. It was starting to drizzle, and he came outside with an umbrella. I don't think he saw me, but they live in a shack. It's so small, it looked more like a doghouse than a house where people live.”

Tater was in the outfield shagging flies. We both looked at him.

“So that's your secret?” I said.

“Mom told me Tater's father shot his mother, then shot himself. Tater was just a baby in the house in a crib, but that's how he wound up with Miss Nettie. Miss Nettie is
old
. She didn't want to take him, but there wasn't nobody else.”