Call Me by My Name (25 page)

“I'd commit to you tonight, Coach, if you gave me your commitment to play Tater at quarterback.”

I was looking right at him when I spoke, and even in the strange light I could see how surprised he was by the offer. I could also see how tempted he was to accept it. But in the end he only gave me the same uneasy smile he'd given Pops earlier.

“I'll take that under consideration,” he said, “but I suppose I should first tell you straight up about my reservations. Your dad's position is shared by a lot of people, Rodney—I'd even say by most of them. The proposition of a black boy quarterbacking my football team stops being about the game and becomes about something else.”

“I don't know why race has to matter, Coach. Isn't the field the same one hundred yards for the black players as well as the white ones?” I should've given Tater credit for the line. But instead I said, “Have you told him you weren't sure where to play him?”

“No, I have not.”

“The northern schools all say he's a quarterback. Most of the ones down here avoid answering the question when he brings it up. Ole Miss told him he projected as a cornerback, and he asked them not to come around anymore.”

The Sedan de Ville, white with purple and gold trim, was as long as our house. He got in and pulled the door closed. The electric window came down.

He'd set Mama's catfish on the seat next to him, with the foil peeled open. “Let me talk to some people, Rodney. Everybody might not want it. But everybody's not Beau Jeune, now, are they?”

On Thursday Tater and I kept with tradition and met again to watch film in my bedroom. Mama made redfish sauce piquant, and we ate in the room with the reel rolling for the second half. When we were finished, Angie came in to take our trays away, and as she was leaving, Tater said, “My auntie knows Clifton Chenier. You heard of Clifton Chenier before, huh, Angie?”

She nodded.

“He's playing at Richard's in Lawtell this Saturday. He told her we should come.” A second or two passed and he said, “You and Rodney and me.”

“We can't go to bars,” I said.

“It's a dance club more than a bar. They'll also be serving barbecue, my auntie says. We can eat and hang out and listen to the music. They won't bother with us as long as we don't order a real drink—you know, a beer or whatnot.”

Angie never could hide much. “We'll have to get permission,” she said, then let out a squeal as she pulled the door closed behind her.

Richard's, pronounced
Ree-shard's
, wasn't a place I'd ever thought about visiting. You saw it on trips to Eunice, standing back past a ditch in the shade of some loblolly pines, its tin roof covered with rust, aluminum windows facing out. Some of the faster kids at school went to the all-white Southern Club, also on that road, but Richard's attracted mostly black people from nearby towns like Frilot Cove, Swords, and Mallett. Many of these people had French ancestry and French surnames, and the musicians among them had taken Cajun music, jazzed it up with a saxophone and a rub board, and turned it into Zydeco, a French word that meant “snap bean.” Chenier's admirers called him the “King of Zydeco,” although that wasn't saying much. Zydeco was just being discovered outside the region, and locally its popularity had made little headway into the white community. No one I knew listened to it.

We knew better than to ask Pops for the green light, so we waited until he'd left for work that night and ambushed Mama as she was getting ready for bed. Seated at her vanity, rubbing cream on her face, she looked at us in the mirror as we entered the room and stood next to each other in a show of solidarity. I let Angie do the talking.

“I'll need to discuss this with your father,” Mama said in a harder tone than usual.

“He'll just say no,” Angie said.

“And in this case he'd probably be right to.” She turned in her chair and faced Angie, her mask of cream shining against the frosty white bulbs. “Is this a good idea?”

“I swear nothing will happen,” Angie said. “We'll come home early. Rodney will protect me, won't you, Rodney?”

“Anybody gets too close,” I said, “and I'll give them one of these.” And now I punched the air with a forearm.

In the morning Mama waited until Pops had gone to the bathroom for his shower before giving us an answer. We were in the Cameo, letting the engine warm. She came outside still dressed in her robe and tapped on my window. I lowered it.

“Don't make me regret this, but I'm giving you permission to go. You can't drink, and you have to be home by midnight. And you must never tell your father.
Comprends?
”

“
Comprends
,” Angie and I said in unison.

“One more thing,” Mama said. She held up a finger. “Don't forget who you are. Will you promise me?”

“Promise,” Angie and I answered at once.

But on the drive to school that morning, as Angie rattled on about how much fun we were going to have, Mama's warning messed with my head a little. Over the years coaches had told me to remember who I was when they wanted to stress the importance of staying humble and showing class after big wins, but her command sounded different and had an undertone that left me confused.

Don't forget who you are
. . . .

Did she mean we shouldn't forget that we were white? It didn't sound like her. Besides, I'd already decided that the one thing we weren't likely to forget in a roadhouse filled with black people was the color of our skin.

It was too cold for Tater to ride in back, so he and Miss Nettie squeezed in the cab with us. As we drove out west of town, we listened to Cajun music on the radio, the songs punctuated by wails and moans that had the four of us wailing and moaning along with them. We arrived at the club at around seven thirty, early enough to beat the crowd and to claim a table by the stage. On the side of the red-painted building, a couple of men were standing by a huge barbecue pit with no less than three smokestacks on the lid. They were drinking bottled beer and listening to LSU–Kentucky on the radio. We followed Miss Nettie to the door, where admission was three dollars a head. Just inside, Patrice Jolivette stood waiting, and she and Angie fell into each other's arms.

“You're home,” Angie said. “Oh, I've missed you so much. How did you know we would be here tonight?”

Tater held up his right hand, as if taking an oath. “Guilty as charged,” he said. “I thought I should invite another girl. Ain't no way you can keep up with me by yourself, Angie Boulet.” Then he did a little dance that spun him around in a circle.

“Somebody's been practicing,” Angie told him.

Miss Nettie ordered a whiskey sour for herself and Cokes for the rest of us. We also had pulled pork sandwiches still hot from the pit and dripping barbecue sauce. People kept filing in, some of them familiar faces from town. One lady was a server in the lunchroom at school. It was the first time I'd ever seen her without a hairnet, and Angie had to tell me who she was. I also spotted the man who made deliveries in our neighborhood for Clover Farm Dairy. During the day he was dressed all in white, carrying milk bottles in wire crates, but tonight his black suit, black western boots, and turquoise rings gave a different image.

“He looks like the dude from
Shaft
gone country,” Tater said, and that about covered it.

I suppose the thing that surprised me most about the place was the diversity of the crowd. You had old men in cowboy outfits and young ones in nylon shirts and bell-bottom pants. Some of the women looked like they'd just put their hoes down and left the farm, while others had fancy ways about them and fancy hairdos and clothes. At around nine o'clock, Clifton Chenier and his band came through a back door and mounted the stage. Chenier played blues accordion, and the one he harnessed to his shoulders looked like a fireplace bellows grafted onto a piano keyboard. He wore a white dress shirt with a bolo tie, white pants, and black church shoes, and his hair, which glistened with oil in the hot lights, was swept back in a Little Richard pompadour. Several men walked up to the stage to greet him. “What's happenin', soul,” Chenier said to each of them.

I've pretty well established here that I'm a large person, a Sasquatch, a tractor-trailer rig, a monster, and a load. I've been called all these names. But no one ever accused me of being a dancer. Chenier had barely hit the first note of “Bon Ton Roulet” when I lured Miss Nettie out on the floor and got things started. She might've put me to shame had shame been a possibility for me. Tater, Angie, and Patrice soon joined us, and for the next half hour we swapped partners from one song to the next as both couples and trios, allowing for any number of combinations except the one that had me dancing with Tater.

When Chenier arrived at “Louisiana Blues,” it was my turn with Patrice, and what luck I had that it was a slow one. I held her close because that was my job, and Tater held Angie close because that was his. Even Miss Nettie was feeling it, tied up with the milkman who went ahead and nibbled on her ear while he was at it.

“Come hug me, Nettie,” Chenier called out between songs. She ran up to the stage and did as she was told, and then he broke into
“Zydeco Sont Pas Salles”
, which if my eighth-grade French was correct, translated to “Snap beans aren't salty.”

“Cut a rug with me, Rodney,” Miss Nettie said, then she and I were going at it again, dominating the floor and pulverizing anybody who got in the way.

I never had a better workout. When Angie and Patrice finally conked out, and Miss Nettie's sore feet put her in a chair, Tater and I recruited other women in the club and gave them spins on the dance floor. Sweat poured down our faces and soaked our shirts, and all the while Chenier's accordion kept driving us.

A clock over the bar said eleven thirty, and that meant it was time to go. Angie and Patrice returned for one last dance, dragging an exhausted Miss Nettie by the hand. The song, “Jolie Blonde”, was about a pretty blonde, and suddenly all eyes were on Angie.

“Where would I be without my offensive line?” Tater yelled as we stumbled out the door when it was over.

He jumped on my back and wrapped his arms around my neck, and I took off running with him under the pines.

A
gainst Eunice the next week, he got sick.

We were playing on the road, and although it now was October, we still had to deal with more heat and humidity than seemed fair, even for people accustomed to suffering because of the weather. I struggled to catch my breath between plays, and I saw misery on the faces of my teammates and the guys across the line.

Tater was the best-conditioned athlete on our team, but he was seriously winded in the first half, and in the huddle his voice was so thin it was hard to make him out. It sounded like he'd had the wind knocked out of him and couldn't get it back, and when he made calls at the line he had to drop his voice to a lower register to project the words and numbers. I saw him grimacing in pain, and on the sideline he adjusted the straps on his shoulder pads to give them a looser fit. As usual he outperformed everybody else on the field and seemed able to score at will, but his obvious discomfort had me worried.

“You coming down with the flu?” I asked.

He didn't answer.

“You have us twenty-one points ahead. It wouldn't be the end of the world if you sat out the rest of the game.”

“I can't do that.”

“Why not?”

He sat, thinking about it. “People paid good money to see me play. Wouldn't want to disappoint them.”

Late in the third quarter, he broke free on a quarterback draw and was racing down the sideline when he suddenly collapsed. He landed on his back and fumbled the ball, and Eunice recovered. I thought he'd slipped. But he tried to stand and quickly went down again, staggering, then falling sideways like a boxer who'd taken one on the side of the head. By the time I got to him he was vomiting. His helmet was still on, and the stuff was shooting out through the bars of his face mask.

“Stomach virus,” Coach Cadet said.

Rubin ran out from the sideline to help, and he and I threw Tater's arms over our shoulders and carried him to the bench. Two other players on the team had come down with the same thing, and we brought Tater to where they were pulling guard duty by the water buckets.

“I ain't staying here,” he said.

“Yes, you are,” I told him. I carried his helmet to a faucet on the side of the bleachers and washed it off. When I looked up I could see faces in the crowd, looking down at me as if for an explanation. Pops got up from his seat and took two steps at a time coming down.

“That didn't look right,” he said.

“There's a virus going around.”

“It looked like he passed out cold on his feet.”

“He probably did. Alfred and Timmy are sick with it too.”

“Yeah, but still—”

“It's always something, huh, Pops?”

It was a cheap shot, and I wished I could take it back as soon as I said it, but he was already climbing back up to his seat.

Our team doctor hadn't made the trip, but the one for Eunice came over to look at Tater. I saw him shine a penlight in his eyes. He did a few other things and asked some questions: “Did you take a shot to the head?”

“No, sir.”

“Are you woozy?”

“I was earlier, but I'm not now.”

“Are you cramping?”

“I had me some, nothing too bad. They went away. I promise I feel good, Doc. Can I go back in the game?”

The ice in our coolers had already melted, so the doctor dipped a towel in our drinking water, wrung it out, and draped it over Tater's head. “You're done for the night, son. Not another play, you understand?”

Tater gave no indication that he'd heard him, much less understood.

“I'm going to the concession stand on the other side of the field to get you some ice to suck on,” the doctor said. “You stay here and keep still. You want to be well enough to play next week, don't you?”

The doctor walked over and said something to Coach Cadet. They both turned and looked at Tater. Curly Trussell, expelled from school the week before when he was caught with pot in his locker, was no longer available as a replacement, so Coach called over sophomore Jay Meche and told him Tater was done and the offense was now his to run.

“I ain't done, Coach!” Tater yelled from the bench. “Coach, I ain't done.”

But he was done.

The doctor returned and wrapped Tater's head with another cold towel and gave him a cup of ice. And for the rest of the game Tater sucked on the ice and sat staring at the ground. He looked up only when the offense came off the field and he had words of encouragement for Jay or when he wanted to slap our hands after a score.

“Do you remember what Huey Long said before he died?” Tater asked me on the bus ride home.

The late Louisiana governor and US senator, assassinated in 1935, was the last person you'd expect anybody to bring up during a long drive across the prairie after a football game. But Tater seemed to want an answer, and I couldn't provide one.

“Come on, Rodney. You should've learned this in Louisiana history class. That man had shot him in a hallway at the State Capitol, and Huey Long was in the hospital. He opened his eyes and said, ‘I can't die yet. I got too much left to do.' And then not long after, he was gone.”

“But all you've got is a bug, Tater. Nobody shot you.”

He laughed, the first time tonight. “But I understand where he was coming from. I can't be getting sick now, Rodney. I got too much left to do.”

By Monday he felt better and was able to practice. On Thursday I had him over for film, and he was in such good spirits, and seemed so much like the old Tater again, that none of us thought to ask how he was feeling. I usually drove him home afterward, but as we were getting ready to leave, a charley horse gripped my right calf and dropped me to the floor.

“I'll take him,” Angie said.

“No,” Pops said. He walked ahead of her into the kitchen and removed the truck keys from the table. “Let me.”

“I'll be right back. I promise.”

“No, Angie.”

“It'll take fifteen minutes, twenty tops.”

“Not tonight.”

Yelping for the pain, I staggered to the living room and fell on the couch. I glimpsed Tater's face as he was going through the door to the carport. It twitched as if against tears, and he gave his head a shake. I considered running out after him, but I worried that it would only lead to the admission that went: “Pops won't let Angie drive you by herself because as her father it is his duty to protect her virtue and her future.” Instead I shouted, “Remember to always carry out your fakes. Their Sam linebacker gets fooled easily.” But he was already outside.

Angie started kneading the spasm with her knuckles. “I could've taken him,” she said. “Nothing would've happened.”

“It's late. They'd worry.”

“Late isn't why and you know it.”

I stopped myself from mentioning Smooth. It would've been like calling her a liar.

I thought of a story Mama liked to tell about when we were little. Our baby cribs had stood next to each other, with the head of mine touching the foot of Angie's. Mama had walked in one day and found Angie sticking her foot through the slats of her crib into mine. Upset at the sound of my crying, she had offered me her toes to suck. “And you were going to town,” Mama always said. “I worried that you would never let her have her foot back.”

Until now I never doubted that Angie would do practically anything for me, and that she'd put me above anyone else. But tonight I wasn't so sure that still held true. Tonight I was just in her way.

She worked on my lower leg until Pops came back. He walked into the kitchen and dropped the keys on the table. At the sound of them hitting the boards, she whipped her head to the side, as if she'd been slapped. “I won't always be seventeen,” she said. “Do you think he realizes that?”

“I think he would trade you for Angie at seven or Angie at twenty-seven, but Angie at seventeen makes him nervous.”

She went to the kitchen sink and washed her hands. Pops had to report to work in the next hour; he was drinking coffee at the table.

“What did you and Tater talk about?” she asked.

“He told me that was the best gumbo he ever ate in his life.”

“That's it? He liked the gumbo?”

Pops brought his cup to his lips but stopped before taking a sip. “Oh.” And now he smiled at Angie. “He said he liked your peach pie, too.”

The Acadiana Wreckin' Rams fought hard to keep it close. They ran a Veer offense that gave our defense fits, but they weren't as strong on the other side of the ball, where they had a healthy Tater to deal with.

He threw two touchdown passes and ran for slightly more than a hundred yards—a great night for most quarterbacks but just an ordinary one for him. People were so spoiled by his performances that they thought he was slacking when he didn't have five touchdown passes and two hundred rushing yards. The polls for Class AAAA had us ranked second behind Shreveport's Byrd High, which had been treating schools in the state's northern redneck parishes in the same fashion that we'd been treating the Cajun ones in the south.

After the game we took the bus back to school. I left the showers and found Coach Jeune waiting at my locker; his recruiting coordinator, Nolan Moore, was talking to Tater in a far corner of the room. As a rule Coach Cadet didn't allow recruiters into our private area, but by now I knew what he wanted for Tater and me. The recruiting blitz had been as exhausting for him as it had been for us, and he'd been encouraging us to end it. More to the point, he wanted us to verbally commit to LSU and “put all the other schools out of their misery,” as he'd told us just a couple of days before.

“I'm ready for that commitment, Rodney,” Coach Jeune began. He shuffled up close to me, until he was inches from my face. “You have mine if I have yours.”

“You would do that, Coach?”

“I would and I will. How long did you say the field was?”

“A hundred yards, Coach.”

“Tater's a quarterback and a great one. If people don't like it . . . well, tough.” I could tell he wasn't joking, even though he laughed and said, “They always say the most popular person in the state of Louisiana is the head football coach at LSU the week after he wins a big game. Well, we won big last week and that means I can do whatever the heck I want. I want Tater Henry to be my quarterback, and I want you blocking for him.”

I had a home visit scheduled with Alabama the next week, but who did I know in Tuscaloosa? Would Angie and the folks get to see me play if I went there? Where was Tuscaloosa, anyway?

“Okay, Coach. It's a deal.”

“You're committing?”

“I give you my word. Now comes the hard part—telling all those recruiters to stop coming around. I hate to let them down.”

He looked over at Tater, who was still hearing it from Nolan Moore. “Tell him you've committed, Rodney. Go on, son. Do it now.”

Still wearing only a bath towel, I walked over and waited until Nolan Moore understood that it was my turn. He walked outside with Coach Jeune.