Call Me by My Name (30 page)

I've kept that slip of paper ever since, even as I've changed out wallets over the years, discarding old ones for new ones. Sometimes before big games, in locker rooms where fear had my teammates in its grip, I held the paper in my hands and spoke Tater's name into the chaos and the silence, and this comforted me.

It was the black funeral home in town that finally brought him home. Not wanting him to make the long drive alone, players for Byrd's team followed behind the hearse in their parents' cars. Adding to the procession were more than four hundred people from town who returned to Shreveport and formed a caravan like the one that had gone up for the game. There were cars and vans and pickup trucks. And there were equal numbers of whites and blacks, burning their headlights as they tracked southward from the pine forests and red clay hills to the swamps and prairie. Some of the cars were still dressed with orange-and-black crepe paper hanging from antennae, the paper bleached of color by last week's rain. Others still had windows decorated with paint:
GEAUX BOYS WIN STATE, PROUD PARENTS OF #53, TIGERS FOREVER
.

I didn't make that trip, having decided to stay in town with Angie in a private room at the parish clinic on Market Street. After the game, and after a long night at a Shreveport hospital where they'd rushed him to no avail, I'd returned home with the team, while she had traveled with Mama and Pops in the Comet. She'd barely said anything at all, Pops told me later, and she hadn't cried. Instead she lay under a blanket on the car's backseat, shivering against the cold even though Pops had the heater on.

They arrived at Helen Street at midmorning and she went straight to her room and put on “her record,” as Pops called it. Mama was down the hall by now, and Pops was sitting alone in the living room. From Angie's room came the voices of actors delivering their lines, as the volume was louder than usual, and the music from the movie was so gloomy, Pops said, he thought about going outside to escape it. But then he looked up and there was Angie standing in the kitchen. Her cheerleader uniform had dried tight on her body, and her eyeliner stood out against her light eyes and pale, freckled skin.

“You hungry, baby?” he asked. “Can I fix you something to eat?”

His voice seemed to startle her, and before he could get up from the couch she had walked past him and reached for the Chiang Kai-shek rifle that hung on the wall.

“Angie?” he said.

The gun wasn't loaded, but Pops was on her before she could swing the end of the barrel around and press it against her chest, which seemed to have been her intention. He grabbed the rifle with both hands and pulled it away from her. Even as she fought him, he thought he should lock it in the trunk of the Comet. He was carrying it to the carport when she ran past him and went for the drawer in the kitchen where Mama kept the knives.

“No, Angie!” he yelled. “Angie. No, Angie. No, Angie.”

He knocked her to the ground and wrestled the knife away before she could hurt herself, but she fought him, he told me. He'd never seen someone so determined, and he was shocked both by her strength and resolve. “She really wanted to do it,” he said, weeping at the thought.

An ambulance drove her to the general hospital, where they sedated her and she spent the night, then we moved her to the clinic. She stayed under for two days. And when she finally came to, she began to scream and to fight against her constraints, and they gave her something that knocked her out again. Orderlies moved a gurney into her room and placed it flush against her bed, and I slept with her now, my arm thrown around her as I used to do. I left her only to change clothes at home and to attend Tater's funeral. I lost track of time, but I think it was exactly a week after the game that we buried him.

Coach Cadet owned some plots in a cemetery on the south end of town. And he offered one to Alma and Miss Nettie, but they wanted to put him in the little graveyard down the street from the Baptist church where they worshipped. “His sister's there,” Miss Nettie explained.

Little Zion couldn't accommodate the mob that came to wish him good-bye. Hundreds mourned inside the building, and a thousand more stood outside in the damp December cold. I saw Coach Jeune from LSU. I saw another college coach who'd recruited him and who'd come all the way from Los Angeles. Inside a modest pine coffin, Tater wore his game jersey with the number 11, the ball from the title game tucked between his body and right arm. Invited to give the eulogy, Coach Cadet faced the congregation and spoke off the cuff, his voice broken by crying. The doors and windows to the church were cracked open, letting his words reach the people outside. He said he'd never known a finer young man. He also said God must've really needed a quarterback to take ours away from us.

I was one of six pallbearers, an honor I shared with the four other starters on the offensive line and Rubin Lazarus. There were also some sixty honorary pallbearers, all of them teammates who walked in double file behind the casket, each with an orange rose boutonniere pinned to his lapel. We approached the old yard crowded with aboveground cement crypts and modest headstones, and from the street in front of the church came music. I had dismissed the possibility that Smooth would show up, but suddenly he came rushing at us from the crowd. “Tater!” I heard him shout.

Dressed in a suit and tie, hair cut short, he pushed his way through the mourners and lunged at the coffin. Rubin blocked his way, using his hands to subdue him the way he did offensive linemen, and soon other teammates were providing interference. They were gentler with Robert Battier than I would've been.

“Let me . . . let me
through
. He's my brother, I tell you. He's my brother, he's my—”

Then he was weeping in Alma's arms. Years later I would tell a friend, after describing the scene, that I couldn't figure out Smooth's behavior that day, but the truth was I thought I understood it at last. Having already lost everything, for years he had given Tater his jealous cruelty, and now he had run out of even that.

When the service was over, I drove alone in the Cameo to Tater's house. A portable table, loaded with food that people from town had sent, stood outside on the porch. Schoolboys in starched white shirts picked at platters of finger sandwiches and shooed the flies away with their too-long neckties. It was so crowded inside it was hard to move, and to my surprise the mood was more festive than somber. I briefly spoke with Alma and Miss Nettie, then worked my way to the bedroom where four or five kids were sitting on the floor. I had to duck to get through the door, and one little boy nervously laughed at the sight of me. “Big, huh?” I said. I waited for his nod, then I scratched under my arms like a monkey and puffed out my lips. “Me Sasquatch. Me . . .
hungry
. . .” And I unloosed a growl like that of a monster with an empty stomach and a meal in sight.

The boy ran from the room. Then the other children followed, racing out without a sound but for their shoes on the floor.

I had the room to myself now, and I noted that it had changed little since the day I first saw it. I wondered why at seventeen he would still share the room with his auntie, when the house had space that he could've claimed as his own. The photo of Bart Starr still hung over the smaller of the two beds, and on the nightstand between his bed and Miss Nettie's was a group of framed photos, among them the picture I'd taken of Tater and Angie standing in front of her blue-ribbon painting at the Yamatorium. I studied it a moment, trying to remember what she'd called it.

“
All Kinds
,” I finally said out loud.

Next to the photo was a cigar box with his name written in colored chalk across the lid. I opened it and saw a boy's personal effects: a tarnished tie clip, a shoe buckle, three or four vintage cat's eye marbles, a report card from first grade, old stamps from foreign countries, a broken pocket watch. A packet of photos caught my attention; I removed the ink-stained rubber band that encircled it and had a look. The photos showed people I didn't know and had never met—black people, all of them. The edges were stamped with dates. The earliest, stained red from juice or something else, showed a baby in a crib, and on the back the name
TATUM
scrawled in pencil.

Another photo depicted a girl in a spring dress, standing in front of a clapboard house. A bolt of light fell from a chinaberry tree and illuminated her soft, poetic face. Hair in pigtails, a broad smile squeezing her eyes closed, Alma was barely a teenager when the photo was taken.
ME RIGHT BEFORE YOU AND ROSALIE
, the notation on back said.

I returned the photos to the box and went next to a letter, folded in half, with Angie's handwriting across the face of the envelope. Inside there was a note on stationery scented with Crepe de Chine and written in the precise script that had won her penmanship awards as a girl. Taped to the page was the key to the pool gate—old Miss Daigle's key, never returned.

I want only this time, no other. It is our time. Let them talk about us, say what they want. Will you forgive me if I don't care? It's not our problem they don't understand. For heaven's sake, Tater, what I feel for you isn't invisible like the air! It's like this key or a tree or a door. It's real, it's a hard thing. . . .

Later, as I was trying to make my way outside, Miss Nettie sidled over and asked me how Angie was doing. I hesitated, and she pulled my head down toward hers and kept a hand on my face. Word had spread about the incident with the gun and kitchen knife, and I was relieved to have the chance to tell someone that she was doing better. “We can't help who we love,” Miss Nettie said in a tone that almost sounded apologetic.

I wondered if she'd caught me digging around in the bedroom.

“At night when we went to bed,” she said, “we always said our prayers first, and then we talked. He asked me if it was okay to love her—not as a replacement for Rosalie, but as a girlfriend. Well, I laughed at that. Can you imagine? I told him it was the nineteen seventies, he could do anything he wanted. And you know what else?”

She seemed to be waiting for me to reply. I shook my head.

“I told him love was something he never needed to check with me or anyone else about. Love didn't need permission.”

She came up on her toes and brushed her mouth against my face, and I stumbled outside where the streetlights had come on and the little boys in church clothes were playing football on the blacktop. I watched them a while, then started for where I'd left the Cameo, when the ball came bouncing in front of me. I reached down and picked it up.

“Go long,” I said to no kid in particular. And all eight or nine or ten of them went running in the opposite direction.

“Me!” they were shouting. “Me. Throw it to me.”

“Longer,” I said, and waved them on.

You could hear their dress shoes pounding the pavement and echoing between the houses. “Longer,” I yelled again.

They were still running when I cocked my arm back and let the ball fly.

I draped my suit coat over the back of the chair and loosened my tie. I rolled up my sleeves and removed my shoes. I was relieving Pops, whose shift with Angie had just ended, and whom I'd hugged out in the hallway before sending him home. Angie's gown, pressed this evening by Mama's iron, seemed to glow in the room's dim light. I sat on the gurney and swung my legs over, and my effort to get comfortable woke her. She moaned and shook her head. I moved now to get out of the bed, thinking she would need water and pills, but she reached over and grabbed my hand. I settled back in but said nothing, in case she wanted to go back to sleep. Her eyes fluttered open, then closed again.

“Was it a dream?” she asked.

I lay there, looking at her. “Which part?”

“The one at the game where he fell down?”

“No,” I answered. “No, I'm sorry, but it wasn't.”

“That was real?”

“Yes, it was real.”