Safe from the Neighbors (20 page)

That line resonated. Dead animals began appearing in his driveway—a skunk here, a possum there, the occasional exotic creature like a porcupine or an armadillo. He made mean sport of the perpetrators. “Thanks to some of our friends and neighbors,” he wrote, “I’ve been sending a lot of business to a certain taxidermist over in Greenville. Before long I’ll be putting the results on display in an exhibition that I plan to title ‘Pets of the Citizens’ Council.’ An art critic at the
New York Times
has announced his intention to attend the grand opening.”

That’s what was going on in his life when he turned around one afternoon in the Piggly Wiggly and saw an absurdly tall woman with frizzy auburn hair staring at him. He’d noticed her around town before—always from a distance—but didn’t bother to ask anybody her name. She wasn’t news. Why should he care?

He had his kids with him. They’d come in search of ketchup, mustard and mayonnaise, for a cookout later on that day.

“You look,” she said, without introducing herself or saying hello, “like you could still ring one in from thirty feet.”

It had been years since anybody said anything to him about his exploits on the basketball court. The only sport that matters much in Mississippi is football. “Believe me,” he told her, “I never hit from thirty feet in my life.”

“I’d love to trust you,” she said, “but in this instance I don’t. I used to listen to your games. I heard you hit from thirty a bunch of times.”

“You heard Stan Tinsley telling lies. You know what we used to call him?”

“Mouth of the South?”

He nodded. “Did you go to Ole Miss?”

“No, but I played basketball.”

“Where?”

“Hard Cash High. They don’t have a team anymore. The town chose not to exist.”

“It’s a pity more towns don’t make that choice, isn’t it?”

“This one, for instance?”

Rather than answer, he told me, he snapped his fingers. “Hey, wait a minute. You didn’t play on that state championship team, did you? Back in Forty-nine? Wasn’t that Hard Cash High? Beat Jackson Murrah by two in overtime?”

This time, she was the one who didn’t answer. Because before she could reply, his son grabbed his hand and jerked it. “Daddy! Come
on.”

No single emotion, she’d tell him later, would account for the look that flitted across his face. Annoyance was certainly part of it, she said, but she detected traces of guilt, confusion and resignation, too. All sensations with which she’d forged an intimate acquaintance.

“We probably ought to head home,” he told her. “Their mom likes to eat at six sharp.”

She stepped closer, as if to measure his height and let him measure hers. Six feet, he guessed. Maybe even six-one.

“Want to shoot a few sometime?” she asked.

“A few what?”

She almost died laughing. “Baskets,” she said. “What’d you think I meant? Kids?”

“South of the tracks,” Ellis said, “there used to be a basketball court. Really, it was just a patch of mud packed hard by all the
bare feet that had played on it. Near the end of Church Street, behind what used to be called the Negro Masonic Building. We went down there because both of us knew that while a few eyes might be watching us through parted curtains, what they saw would never make it across the tracks. White people could meddle in black people’s business all they wanted, but we took it for granted they’d never meddle in ours.”

The hoop, he said, had been welded to a rusted deck plate that looked like it was lifted from a cotton gin, and the deck plate was bolted to a telephone pole. Which was odd, when you thought about it, because in that part of town, at that time, few people had phones.

Dribbling idly with his right hand, he used his left to point at the goal. “If I drive and dunk on you,” he said, “at least we won’t have to worry about the backboard falling on us. That thing’s really up there.”

“What makes you think you can drive and dunk on me?”

He didn’t really think he could. He’d never dunked in his life, though he’d once had the bad luck to play against the Oklahoma A&M center Bob Kurland, who’d park himself beneath the basket and stuff them in all day. Threatening to dunk on her just gave him something to say. His legs didn’t feel springy, they felt shaky. He felt shaky all over.

He’d felt no different the day before when he called her house. He’d jogged back to his office and dialed the number after seeing her husband walk into the Western Auto. When she heard his voice, she laughed and said she’d been wondering when he’d call. A real ballplayer, she told him, couldn’t resist a challenge.

“I might drive and dunk on you,” he said, continuing his dribble. “You’re a girl. I’m a boy.”

It was cool out, but she wore yellow shorts along with a pair of red Keds and a black worsted pullover. He had on an ancient pair of sweats, the same ones he’d worn years earlier at Ole Miss.

“I’m a girl,” she said, “that plays like a boy.”

“Twenty-one?”

“Yeah, but no free throws.”

He tossed her the ball. “Ladies first.”

She tossed it right back. “Do you see any ladies? I sure don’t.”

“Okay. Have it your way.” He backed up a few feet, then dribbled into the area where the lane would have been if there was one. Pulling up, he shot right over her. Too late, she put her hand in his face.

The ball whooshed through the remains of the net, his first basket in years. He didn’t go to games anymore or listen to them on the radio. He’d never even seen one on TV.

“See?” he said. “The fact is, I’ve got a natural height advantage, and more often than not that’s what this game comes down to.”

“There’s such a thing as court intelligence, too. And I have a feeling that I’m probably smarter than you.”

The next time he hit from twenty feet. “You may be smarter, though I seriously doubt it, and in any case it doesn’t make much difference. Your body is a prison.”

“Yeah, and I have a feeling yours is, too.” She grabbed the ball and zipped it to him. He realized only later, he told me, that it was an unusually crisp pass. Passing, when he played, was his weak point, but the offense was set up for him to be the ball hog.

He drove the lane again. This time she jumped in front of him, sticking her face right in his chest, and he bowled her over. Rather than pull up and shoot, he reached down and offered her his hand, letting the ball skip into the ditch.

She slapped him on the wrist. “That was a charging foul,” she said. “My ball now.”

“Au contraire, ma’am. That was a blocking foul. Your left foot was about six inches off the ground. I’m not even sure the right one was down.”

“Bullshit. But if you need to cheat to stay ahead, take the ball. And by the way? Fuck you.”

It was the first time in his life, he said, he’d heard a woman use that expression, and he knew the shock showed on his face. But she’d provoked another reaction, too. They were playing a game and, when they started, the object was merely to score the most points. The end result was a foregone conclusion. Now the object of the game, as far as he was concerned, was to lower her self-esteem. Why should she have so much of it anyway? She might be a tall, good-looking woman, but she’d never gone to college and was married to a terminal redneck.

He lifted the ball out of the ditch, wiped off the slime, then walked to the end of the court, turned and drove on her. This time she got set, determined to hold her ground. He gave her a little head fake, which threw her off balance, and breezed right past her for a layup.

He walked the ball back up the court, bouncing it chest high. “You should have accepted my offer”—
bounce!
—“to let you go first. At this rate”—
bounce!
—“you’ll never get to take a shot. If you’d gone first”—
bounce!
—“you could’ve taken exactly one.”

The next time down the court, he switched the ball to his left hand and shot over her right shoulder. He hit from fifteen, from twenty. She was breathing hard, her face bright red, her sides starting to heave. “I can’t believe,” he said, after hooking one in down low, “that it’s in a school district’s best interests to spend money on girls’ basketball. Maybe that’s why your town went broke. Hard Cash? What a joke.”

He told me he finally decided that in order to complete her reduction, he really ought to let her shoot one. So on his next possession, he drove the baseline, lifted his right foot as high as he could and shot between his legs. “Damn,” he said, when it caromed off the makeshift backboard. “Missed one.”

She grabbed the ball and shoved it at him. “Look, I don’t
need your charity, okay? We can just quit if you don’t want to play.”

“I don’t really want to quit yet. I actually expected to make that shot. Why wouldn’t I? I’ve made everything I put up all day. Maybe you don’t want to play? Scared you’ll get stuffed?”

She wasn’t fooling anymore, he said, and hadn’t been for the last few minutes. Her sweater was damp, dark spots spreading under her arms. He found himself wishing he could see her glistening flesh.

“I’m not scared I’ll get ‘stuffed,’ as you put it.” She still had the ball in her outstretched hands.

He wasn’t about to take it. “You know you can’t make a shot on me,” he said, smiling as if to show he bore her no ill will for that “Fuck you,” though he did and he could tell she knew it. “Are we agreed about that?”

“No, we’re not agreed about that.”

She walked the ball to the other end of the court. He bent his legs, crouching. She turned and dribbled towards him, keeping the ball close to her body, dribbling with the pads of her fingers. When she drove close enough, he committed and went for the steal, but she had a nice spin move. He recovered in time to slap at the ball, but he knew perfectly well that he’d hit the back of her hand. “Foul on me,” he said.

“Foul on you.”

She brought it in again. This time he took nothing for granted, moving with her towards the corner, then back to the top of the key, keeping his left foot forward, left hand extended, palm up, to swipe at the ball. She was a lot better on offense, he told me, than defense.

When she tried her spin move this time, he was ready. She leaned into him as she put up her shot, and he got nothing but ball. He shoved it right in her face.

She wheeled away, holding her nose.

“Hey, look, I didn’t intend to do it so hard,” he said, which wasn’t exactly true. He laid his hand on her shoulder.

He told me he never saw it coming. One minute she was bending over with her back to him, and the next thing he knew she’d punched him in the mouth. It hurt. She hit like a man.

He put his hand to his mouth, then lowered it and looked at his bloody fingers. “You know what?” he said.

Her nose was still red. “What?”

“Fuck you, too.”

He said it, and God knows he meant it, but when she stepped closer he couldn’t make his feet move. Her face grew big, then even bigger. Her mouth opened, her tongue flicked out and she licked that blood from his lips.

Listening to him talk about the day they shot baskets, I wondered if I’d ever run into him when my mother took me into town on her shopping trips. I didn’t know him then, so he would’ve looked like just another man who was obviously better off than my father, who wore a tie and wasn’t a farmer. If I had seen him around this time, I wouldn’t have known that he’d lately been split down the middle, that over the next several months two versions of Ellis would inhabit the same space, each trying to outlast the other.

“We never played basketball again,” he said. “We took to meeting wherever we could, often around noon, usually in a town nearby. Our favorite was Belzoni. I didn’t know anybody there, and neither did she. There was a café on the highway back then that served the best chili burgers either of us had ever eaten. She had this way of hiding her mouth behind her palm if I made her laugh while she was chewing. The gesture would’ve seemed precious and dainty if a smaller woman like my wife had made it, but when she did it there was an offhandedness about it that I found entrancing.

“I loved drinking with her in the middle of the day. She always had alcohol. Sometimes it was regular bonded whiskey, in a bottle with a printed label. Sometimes it was clear stuff in a Mason jar and she wouldn’t say where she got it, just laughed, turned it up, took a swig and smacked her lips. She’d say things like ‘Who would’ve thought corn and chicken shit could taste
this
good?’”

He told me it thrilled him when she said “shit” or “fuck” or even mild swearwords like “damn” and “hell.” Those words were exciting not because they sounded dirty in her mouth but because they didn’t.

Most of all, he loved how she behaved when removing her clothes in a motel room, talking about inconsequential things, mostly, as if nobody was watching her disrobe. “Ever heard the term
hill-dropping
?” she once asked, unbuttoning her blouse on a blustery day in January. They were in a motel across the highway from the café in Belzoni. The radiator was on—you could hear water gurgling through the pipes—but so far it hadn’t accomplished much.

“Hill-dropping?
I don’t think so.”

She tossed the blouse onto the foot of the bed and reached around behind her back to undo her bra straps. “That’s how they plant cotton now. They’ve got these four-row planters that drop four or five seeds in little hills about eighteen inches apart. It used to be that the planter would just drop a steady stream of seeds down the middle of the row, but not anymore.”

“And it’s an improvement?”

“Yeah, because they don’t have to put hoe hands in the field to thin the cotton out.” She dropped the bra on top of her blouse. “Remember when they first started calling those things bras instead of brassieres?”

“That was just after the war.”

She unbuttoned her jeans and pulled them down over her thighs. “My momma had a thick accent like they do back in the
woods in Sharkey County, and she never learned to say ‘bra.’ She called them ‘briars.’”

He said she didn’t make love like he’d expected. Given her aggressiveness on the basketball court, the forthrightness with which she stripped and her occasionally profane tongue, he was prepared for a certain degree of crassness, but instead she always lay down beside him and rested her head on his chest and said, “Hold me for a while before you get after me.” And so he always did. He held her and stroked her hair, and she put her palm on his stomach and let it lie there.