Call Me by My Name (23 page)

I dropped the empty cup between my feet and put my helmet back on. I should've apologized. I should've told him I didn't want to be the way I was. But Port Barre had turned the ball over again, and the coaches were calling us back onto the field.

I could never sleep after games, and tonight was no different. In the locker room earlier I'd swallowed a handful of salt tablets to fight cramps, but they weren't working. My hamstrings kept seizing up on me, and the muscles in my neck bunched up in knots and pulled against my skull. As I lay in bed trying to get my body to relax, I could hear Angie through the wall behind my head. She was playing records in the living room—not loud, but loud enough to let me know she was there.

I finally got up. Still wearing her cheerleader uniform, garter hanging loose at her ankle, she was sitting on the sofa in the dark. Mama had been working on a collection of bridesmaid dresses, and the cranberry-red outfits covering the furniture made the room look like Christmas had come early.

“I don't know how to do that with a boy,” Angie said. She'd obviously been waiting for me. “How am I supposed to know how to do that, Rodney?”

“You're asking me?”

“I've never even had a date—not a real one. But I have notions about how things should be when I do give myself to someone. And these notions, you should know, don't have me covered with mosquito repellant on a hot night next to a bayou crawling with water moccasins and my dumb, drunk brother snoring on a blanket a few feet away. They don't have me giving away something so precious in a cow pond, either, with leeches sucking on me.”

“He shouldn't have said anything,” I said.

“I'm
good
.”

“I know that.”

“I'll always be good. This doesn't mean I don't have carnal thoughts. But I haven't acted on them. Still, though—and this is important, Rodney: Wouldn't I still be me? Wouldn't I still be good?”

“Angie?” I walked over and stood in front of her. “Forgive me, Angie. I don't know what's wrong with me lately.”

“I never touched him that way. And he never touched me. But what if I had? And what if he had?”

“I don't know.”

“Do we know a better person than Tater Henry? Do we have a better friend? And who is more handsome and down-to-earth? Who's more popular?”

I shook my head.

“Who works harder, Rodney? Who
tries
harder?”

“Nobody.”

She got up and put on
Romeo and Juliet
. I wished she'd chosen something else; I was beginning to hate that album. But now wasn't the time for me to question her choices.

“I'm embarrassed, Angie,” I said. “Why am I this way? Where did it come from?”

She cleared some room for me on the couch, and we sat next to each other. “Do you really want an answer?” she asked.

I shook my head, and she wrapped her arms around my head and pulled me against her chest, then she started rocking in a gentle motion, like a mother would do, and after a while I could hear her reciting lines from the soundtrack.

In the morning I wouldn't remember falling asleep, but we woke up together on the floor, with the stereo needle, having run out of grooves, bouncing against the paper label at the middle of the record. I had my left arm around Angie's waist, and a couple of Mama's bridesmaid dresses covered our legs.

“I'll change,” I told her. “I'll do better.”

But she didn't hear me, she was still asleep.

I kissed her face, then went down the hall to soak in the tub.

In the team meeting that afternoon Coach Cadet reviewed the game film from the Jamboree with little commentary. But when he reached the plays where Tater threw the ball against my helmet, he used the clicker to repeat the action over and over. A low rumble of laughter accompanied each screening. Coach Cadet also seemed amused. He touched the back of his head every time the ball spanked my helmet.

“Either one of you want to explain what's happening here?” he asked.

Tater and I were sitting on different sides of the room. When neither of us spoke up, Coach rewound the tape for another look.

“What am I seeing?” he asked. “Are the throws misfires, or is Rodney out of position?” We watched it again. “It's one or the other,” he said.

Neither of us answered, and we had the pleasure of yet another review.

“Tater? Rodney? Somebody needs to own it or we spend the rest of our lives here trying to figure it out.”

Tater was taking aim at my head a fifteenth time when I heard the projector malfunction and a block of white light filled the screen. The film had torn in half, a common occurrence when Coach got too familiar with it.

Somebody turned on the overhead light and for a moment I kept my head down, not wanting my teammates to see my face burning red. But then as Coach Cadet patched the tape, I felt myself rising to my feet, and I heard myself calling the room to attention. “I need to say something,” I announced.

The locker room went silent. I looked around from man to man before finally coming to Tater.

“What happened last night was my fault, and I got what I deserved. Tater, you should've thrown a brick at me instead of a football.” I waited until the laughter stopped. “I'm sorry, Tater. I hope you'll forgive me”—he was already nodding—“and I hope the rest of you will forgive me too.”

Coach had fixed the tape. He started playing it again, and I was glad to see that he had moved past the passes hitting my head.

“So in other words you were out of position,” he said.

“Yes, Coach. I was out of position.”

On Sunday after mass we picked up Tater and Miss Nettie in the Comet and drove with them to Soileau's Dinner Club. Angie had talked Tater into letting us join them on their weekly visit with his mother, and now we were retrieving the lunches Miss Nettie had ordered to bring with us—fried shrimp salads, pecan pie, and sweet tea.

Despite our insistence on paying, Miss Nettie said she would walk home if we didn't let her treat. While she and Tater were inside, Angie bought a copy of the local paper from a newsstand by the front door. The paper wasn't published on Saturdays so the story about the Jamboree had not appeared until this morning, two days after the fact. I'd seen it earlier at home, but apparently Angie hadn't.

There was a photo of Tater and me on the front page, with a caption that read:
Henry, Boulet lead Tigers in Jamboree blowout; LSU's Beau Jeune says they're going places.
Tater and I were shown sitting next to each other on the bench. I recognized the moment—it had come after the series when he'd thrown the ball at me. The photo gave the impression that Tater was lecturing me about the game, when in fact he had been lecturing me about my attitude. The actual subject of his remarks, who looked especially fetching today in a simple white dress that Mama had made, held my face in her hands and kissed the corner of my mouth.

“I'm proud of you,” she said. “My word, you're going places. Wherever might that be?”

Tater and Miss Nettie returned to the car, carrying a stack of white cardboard boxes. Miss Nettie sat in front with me, Tater in back with Angie. Angie leaned over the seat, holding the paper for Miss Nettie to read.

“Boy, you need a haircut,” Miss Nettie said to Tater as she studied the photo. “I knew Rodney was special, but what's this Beau Jeune saying about you?” She mumbled the words “going places” under her breath, then turned to Tater with a smile. “Don't let it go to your head.”

Chateau De Chene must've been built about six or seven years before, at the same time the government was constructing housing projects around town. It was a long, low-slung building of red brick and white-board trim, with a jumble of television antennae on the roof. It stood at the end of an alley of ancient oak trees with massive limbs hanging low to the ground.

“Whenever you see trees like this,” Miss Nettie said as we drove down the alley now covered with a cement drive, “you know the place was a plantation once, where there was a big house for the white people and little cabins for the slaves.”

Race again. It didn't matter that shrimp salad and pecan pie were on the menu, there was no escaping the subject. I parked and walked around the car and opened Miss Nettie's door.

“Maybe I shouldn't have mentioned that,” she said, offering her hand. “But we're all family here, aren't we, Rodney?”

“Yes, ma'am. That we are.”

She led us into the building and down a hall to a room with a label that said
ALMA HENRY
on the door.

“Hey, Mama,” Tater said. His mother was sitting in a wheelchair; he stooped down to kiss her. “You look pretty today, Mama.”

“You lie,” she said.

“No, I swear, Mama. You do.”

I wished I'd prepared myself for the reality of her condition. She had only half a face, with one small hole and a mound of tortured flesh where her nose should've been. Even though she was wearing sunglasses, the light was bright enough in the room to let you see past one lens to the sewn-shut socket that once held her right eye. I wondered if the bumps on her skin were birdshot. Her left ear had not been damaged, but what remained of the right one was a mass of red, fleshy tissue.

Miss Nettie leaned over and hugged her now, then she came up tall. “Angie, Rodney, this is Alma, Tater's mom.”

“So nice to meet you, Mrs. Henry,” Angie said.

“I was never married,” she said. She waited a moment. “Why don't you just call me Alma?”

I stepped up and offered my hand. “Pleasure to meet you, Alma.”

“Pleasure's all mine, Big Rod.”

She wasn't as old as our mother. She might've been thirty-three or thirty-four, but it wouldn't have surprised me to learn that she was actually years younger.

“It's a nice day,” Tater said. “Why don't we go outside and eat at one of the picnic tables under the trees. Sound good?”

She nodded. “I don't mind the bugs if you don't mind the bugs.”

Miss Nettie helped her put on the same hat that she'd worn to the game last year, its lace veil covering her head and puddling on her shoulders. Pushing her chair at a slow pace, Tater led us down a corridor and out of the building to a metal table that was bolted to a concrete slab in the ground. I was carrying the food, and the smell of fried shrimp was so good I thought I might have to stop and sample it. We'd forgotten the tea in the car. Angie went now to get it.

“Such a pretty girl,” Alma said.

She was looking at me, but Tater said, “Thank you,” before I could reply.

We talked about the Jamboree and the recruiters who'd come to see us play. We talked about our classes at school and our teachers and friends. Alma knew we called ourselves the Oreos, and she seemed familiar with the name of every friend we mentioned. In order to eat she had to pull up her veil, and it didn't take long to get used to looking at her, to take her as she was. From the undamaged part of her face you could see that she'd probably once been a beauty herself. A breeze came up and helped with the heat. I ate and let them talk, and even though the salad had its merits I wished I'd ordered something more substantial, like a T-bone steak and a stuffed baked potato.