Call Me by My Name (21 page)

“What is wrong with you?” he asked in front of my teammates. “You're the last person I'd expect that from.”

I considered running down the list of things that were wrong with me, beginning with the fact that I couldn't sleep at night for fear of dreaming about leeches and my sister's blood, but I preferred to have him think of me as a hothead than a psycho so I apologized and dropped it.

Angie and I celebrated our seventeenth birthday five days later. It was the same day that two-a-day practices for football began, and Mama and Pops waited to throw us a party until after the afternoon workout was done. A dozen or so classmates showed up, as many of them black as white. Pops never explained why, but he stayed outside the entire time, turning links of pork sausage on the barbecue and sucking on his lumpy cigarettes. Tater and Rubin and the other guys hung out with me in the living room, and the girls helped Mama with the potato salad in the kitchen. Minutes before we sat down to eat, Patrice Jolivette showed up at the front door. She'd driven all the way from Baton Rouge, where she was undergoing freshman orientation at Southern University. Angie was so happy to see her that she broke into tears.

Angie had told everyone not to bring gifts, but Tater defied her order. He presented us with custom-made T-shirts with a big Oreo cookie on the front of each one. Angie's shirt was number one and mine was number three. They were both black. “Long live the Oreos!” somebody shouted as we were holding up the shirts. Then Tater made a big production of revealing that he'd come to the party wearing his own Oreo shirt under his dress shirt. It was number two, wouldn't you know, and it was the same white as the cookie's cream filling.

We made po'boys with the barbecued sausage on foot-long tubes of crusty French bread, and each serving of potato salad came with an artful sprinkling of warm, crushed bacon on top. Ever since we were babies Mama had insisted on doubling the candles on the cake, to give each of us a chance to blow out our own, and today's total came to thirty-four. Angie's were the pink ones on the right side; mine were the blue on the left. We counted to three and blew in unison and got the job done, and then we annihilated the lemon
doberge
cake that Mama had baked that morning. Rubin and I ate most of the cake by ourselves. I answered every piece he ate with one of my own.

“Just another excuse to compete,” I explained to the others.

“Don't eat the candles,” Angie said. “They're made of wax.”

“Did somebody say candles?” asked Rubin. And this, of course, prompted the two of us to pretend to make a meal of them.

Pops never did come inside. After he finished cooking he moved his lawn chair away from the hot pit and placed it in front of his garden. Surrounded by tomato plants, a bottle of mosquito repellant at his feet, he was content to stay outside until the guests left. It was almost 10:00 p.m. when I went out and told him we were taking Tater home.

“He can't walk?” he said.

“It's too far. And we had practice today.”

“Then don't be long, Rodney,” he said. He'd stood in barbecue smoke for hours, and he could barely keep his eyes open. “Don't let your sister—”

“I won't, Pops.”

He was squinting. “Thank you, son.” And he patted me on the shoulder.

In the truck, Tater sat between Angie and me. We had our first workout tomorrow at 8:00 a.m., and I was already dreading it. The muscles in my legs were sore, and a cramp stabbed my calf every time I lifted my foot to work the clutch. Even worse was how my head felt. It would take a while to get used to wearing a helmet again. We'd just turned left on Dunbar Street, heading toward Parkview Drive, when I heard music approaching from behind us. As always with Smooth, I heard the car before I saw it, and by the time I saw it he was already sitting on my back bumper.

We crossed the bridge and came to a stop. Smooth revved his engine and pulled up beside us in the next lane. In the night, his car looked sinister, with its white stripes floating against a field of gleaming black, and the darkened windshield reflecting a silvery sky.

“This ends now,” Tater said. “Let me out.”

“No!” Angie screamed.

I turned right onto Parkview, and Smooth turned with us, staying even with the Cameo in the next lane as I worked through the gears and began to pick up speed. The street was quiet tonight and there was no oncoming traffic. He followed us going the speed limit for about a quarter of a mile. Hoping to shake him, I stupidly decided to punch the accelerator and hold it against the floorboard. But the Cameo was no dragster. Smooth stayed with me all the way down the street until he suddenly braked, cut his wheel hard to the right, and pulled up on my tail.

We now were at the intersection of Bertheaud and Parkview—the corner, it occurred to me, where affluent, white Parkview transitioned to mostly black Railroad Avenue. Smooth couldn't have been more than a few inches off the back bumper.

“I'll teach him,” Tater said. “Come on, Angie. Let me out.”

Tater made a move to get past her. She blocked him. “No,” she said.

“Rodney?”

“No way, brother.” I leaned forward and hugged the wheel. I turned left and crossed the tracks, Smooth still hanging close. I stopped in front of Tater's house and cracked my door, and the gleaming black car shot past us, its stereo blasting “Patches” by Clarence Carter, a song I'd halfway liked until now.

He parked in the middle of the street, about sixty yards away, his foot on the brake pedal, lighting the fronts of the little houses, and seemed to be contemplating his next move. We stood huddled outside and waited, as Clarence Carter wailed on:

“He said Patches

I'm dependin' on you, son

To pull the family through

My son, it's all left up to you”

Then without a word Tater broke from Angie and me and went running toward him. He showed classic form as his knees came up high and his arms pumped close against his ribcage to help him accelerate.

“No, Tater,” Angie called out. And in that instant Smooth dropped to a shooter's stance, held a handgun out in front of him, and opened fire. The
pop pop pop
of the pistol sent me diving against Angie, and I could see Tater fall to the street as I tumbled with her into the weeds. Smooth squeezed off a few more rounds and then was gone, rounding the corner with a squeal of tires, music receding in the night.

Tater was sitting on the blacktop and feeling his body to make sure he hadn't been hit. “I'm fine,” he said before we even reached him.

“Tater . . .
Tater
. . .”

“He missed on purpose. They all went over my head.”

He and Angie held each other. Whimpering and shaking with fear, she ran her hands over his face, and he did the same to hers.

Along the length of the street, porch lights came on, but nobody stepped outside. The man across from Tater's house watched us from his front window. I thought how odd we must've looked in our Oreo T-shirts, moments after being shot at. I leaned back against the hood and listened for Smooth's return, but there was nothing: no music and no sounds of a car speeding. “We need to call the police,” I said.

Tater was standing by the side of the road now, Angie leaning against him. He had his arms around her.

They're still together,
I thought.
They've always been together.

“Can I use the phone in your house?” I said. “Let's call them.”

“No,” Tater said. He turned back to me. “It wouldn't do any good.”

“The guy just shot at you, and you won't call the police?”

“He shot over me, and it wouldn't help. I can't count the number of times me and my auntie called them before. Most times we're lucky if they even show up. No, man, there are other ways to handle it.”

“Like at the prom? Like how you did it then?”

Tater patted his chest. “He's two up on me. It's my turn next.”

“I'm with Tater,” Angie said.

“Yeah, Ang,” I said. “You are, aren't you?”

“I mean I agree with him. I don't see the point in calling the police either. Suppose they send Mr. Charlie again. Is that what you want?”

They must've been pretending all these months. The real reason she hadn't gone to the prom wasn't because she hadn't wanted me to spend the night alone. It was because of Tater. If she couldn't go with him, she wasn't going to go with anyone. And Tater's thing with Patrice? That was all a show too. He'd used her the same way Angie had used Donnie Landry—to give the appearance that it was over between them and they'd moved on, to mollify Pops, and maybe even to get me off their backs.

I was too tired to argue with them, and besides, Tater was probably right—if the rest of them were anything like Charlie LeBlanc, the cops wouldn't do.

My hamstring was starting to tighten up, and I knew I had to get off my feet. “Let's go home, Angie,” I said.

“Not yet. Just a little more time, please.”

“But Pops is waiting.”

That was all it took.

On the drive back to Helen Street, I kept checking for Smooth in the rearview mirror, and I saw his ghost car pulling up behind me, even though it wasn't really there. Still crazier was how I couldn't get the song “Patches” out of my head.

“I know you wouldn't tell Pops,” she said, “but please don't tell Mama, either. Will you promise me, Rodney?”

In the light from the dash she looked years younger, like a little kid.

“They don't need to worry, do they?” she said. “I've already made them worry enough.”

We were back on Dunbar Street now, crossing the bridge over the bayou. “You're right they'd worry,” I said. “And who knows, Angie? This time Pops might really stop you from ever seeing Tater again.”

She let out a sob from deep inside. I thought I knew everything about her, but this was a sound I'd never heard before. “That too,” she whispered.

Nothing else passed between us, but I stopped talking to her, and she stopped talking to me.

We couldn't very well avoid each other at home, and yet we did somehow. When I had an errand to run in town, I no longer invited her to join me. We didn't visit the Little Chef or go to mass together, and she stopped coming to me with her drawings and paintings for approval. Our Oreo shirts, still new, went unworn. I drove her to school in the morning, but the only voice in the cab came from the deejay on the radio. Our seating order in class changed. I let the two of them sit together, while I found a desk on the other side of the room.

There was turmoil in my head like I'd never known. Even with football to keep me occupied, I thought I was losing it.

I decided he didn't love her the way she loved him. Yes, he loved her, but it was another kind. I did believe she was in love with him, and desirous of him, desperately so. I believed she wanted to be his girlfriend. Because she could be so serious and single-minded, she probably also dreamed about a future with him after they graduated and left town. But I never got the same from him. Angie offered something else—the family he never had, maybe the sister he'd lost. If he was in love with her, why didn't he look at her the way other guys looked at the girls they wanted?

He had a phone at home, but he rarely called. Was he afraid Pops would answer? I supposed it could've been Pops, but I'd always had the impression that Tater wasn't afraid of anyone.

I didn't want to believe she'd given her virginity to him that night by the bayou, but in my weak moments, despite piles of evidence to the contrary, I couldn't help myself. I revisited their words and actions and became convinced that they'd made love on a quilt only a few feet away from me while I was sleeping off a drunk. “I don't want to get in trouble,” she'd said shortly before leaving. Had she been talking about Pops and the Comet or about getting pregnant?