Call Me by My Name Page 9

  They made a loud clap when they hit the table, and both Angie and I jumped. “Rodney, don’t be long, son. And remember to keep your head on a swivel.”

  Ten minutes later we were parked in front of Tater’s house. I walked to the door with the paper while Angie waited at the curb with the windows rolled down even though it was close to freezing out. I knocked against the old board siding next to the door, and Tater answered, holding his game cleats. He’d been polishing them and shiny black tar stained his hands.

  “Thought you’d like to know what people are saying about you,” I said, and slapped the folded paper against his chest.

  He stepped out onto the porch and gave Angie a wave, then he put the shoes down and had a look at the story. He didn’t read past the headline. “Just think what they’ll write when a Chinese quarterback has a big game,” he said.

  I didn’t understand.

  “Not that I ever met one,” he said, “but they’re supposed to be yellow, right? Chinese people?”

  He walked past me and stood on the steps where there was more sun. “Yellow quarterback excites in defeat? You think they’ll say that? Or what if it’s an Indian? Now that would sell papers: Red quarterback excites in defeat. I’d even go out and buy me a copy of that one.”

  “You should be grateful,” I said. “Instead you’re sounding like a militant.”

  He turned back around and made sure I was paying attention. “Would it have been so hard to have the headline say, ‘QB Henry Excites in Defeat’? Come on, Rodney. Don’t just see what color some dude is. Call him by his name.” He hopped down from the steps and jogged to the truck, still holding the paper.

  “Everybody’s talking about somebody by the name of Tater Henry,” Angie said.

  He looked at her for half a minute. “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey,” she answered.

  “That was nice of y’all to bring the paper, Angie. I’ll make sure to show my auntie when she gets home from work tonight.”

  I got back into the truck and started the engine.

  “I wonder if Coach will let Curly play next week,” Tater said. He leaned in the passenger-side window and brought his face up close to Angie’s.

  “As long as you’re healthy, Curly will never get in another game,” I said. “Do you understand what you did last night, Tater? You rushed for a hundred and fifty-seven yards. You threw for nearly three hundred more. And you did it against one of the best defenses in the state in less than three quarters of football.”

  From the look on his face I could tell he still didn’t believe he’d supplanted Curly on the depth chart. Coach Cadet had put him in against New Iberia only because Orville was hurt, Curly was suspended, and there was no one else. To Tater’s way of thinking, earning the position by playing well still wasn’t enough.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” I said, “but it can’t be about that anymore.”

  “White quarterback excites in defeat,” he said. “How come they never say that?” Then he walked back to the house and disappeared inside.

  We traveled to away games in a yellow school bus, two men to a bench seat. Tater and I always sat next to each other. We made the trips already dressed in our uniforms, shoulder pads and helmets riding on wire luggage racks above our heads.

  The state had three distinct regions: New Orleans, North Louisiana, and Acadiana, the twenty-two parish southern area where we lived. Lafayette High had the best team among Acadiana schools, and the Lions had been destroying everybody, including other highly ranked programs from our district. If they could beat us tonight, they would finish the regular season undefeated and enter the playoffs as a favorite to win the Class AAAA state title. One sports columnist had predicted that we would lose by forty-eight points. He said we would lose by more if for some reason Tater Henry didn’t play.

  “Lord have mercy,” I heard Coach Valentine say as we pulled up to their stadium.

  It was twice as big as ours, and their fans were already tailgating in the parking lot. I saw what looked like hundreds of honey-haired women in green outfits, every last one of them watching us with a smirk on her face. “How dare you?” they seemed to be saying. “How dare you come here in your yellow school bus and pretend to be good enough to share the air we breathe.” The men, too, were all preppy types, and all attitude, dressed today in the same obnoxious green.

  In the bus we sat enveloped in silence and took in the carnival past our windows—the pewter flasks, the Chinet plates piled high with ham and potato salad, the furry lion mascot waving the knot at the end of its tail. HEY, TIGERS, GO CRY IN YOUR GUMBO read a hand-painted sign on the side of an Airstream travel trailer.

  Lafayette High was the largest, richest, and whitest school in our district, and its fans were the snottiest. “Get ready, Tater Henry!” one of them shouted. “We’re going to bury you, boy.”

  This prompted Rubin to rock his head back and roar, “Yeah? You and what army?” which prompted cheers from the rest of us.

  Tater and I had watched enough film the night before to understand what we were facing. Their defense hadn’t been scored on in three weeks, and their offense mowed people down.

  Blue-chip players destined for college careers populated their roster, and one of them, running back Levi Woodworth, the best of only three black starters on the squad, had set a state record in the one-hundred-yard-dash last spring. Earlier in the season recruiters from Michigan and Ohio State had made trips to Lafayette to see him play, but word was he favored Notre Dame.

  Most of the Lafayette players were sons of privilege and wealth. Their fathers were petroleum engineers, oil industry executives, offshore helicopter pilots, doctors, lawyers, and university professors. Ours were yam-kiln operators, tractor mechanics, soybean and chicken farmers, grocery clerks, bricklayers, and night watchmen. Our blue-collar pedigree should’ve produced stouter athletes, but as a team they were bigger, stronger, and faster than we were. I wondered why this was: Did they eat better than we did? More likely they were superior specimens because their school had a much larger male population. Their coaches had more athletes to choose from, while ours had to take what they got.

  We were wearing our away uniforms—black pants, orange jerseys, and white helmets. As we left the bus and marched single file toward the field, I heard one of their fans shout: “Hey, somebody tell them Halloween’s over!”

  A hard rain soaked the field as we were warming up, but the wet turf didn’t slow them down any. They scored touchdowns on three of their first five possessions and hit on a field goal late in the second quarter. For all their success, we had our share as well, and it was Tater again who provided it, outgaining Levi Woodworth on the ground, and throwing for more yards than Ronny Rome, their all-state quarterback. At half, the score was 24–14, and I believed we had a shot if only our defense could play better and stop them.

  I was trading strides with Tater on the way to the locker room when he stopped suddenly and looked off down the sideline toward a corner of the end zone. There on the track that encircled the field stood Miss Nettie, dressed tonight in a purple pantsuit that flapped against her in the wet wind. She was holding a striped golf umbrella over someone in a wheelchair, but for the distance I couldn’t make out who the other person was. Tater waved. Miss Nettie hollered out something in reply, while the figure in the chair—man or woman, I couldn’t tell—sat without moving.

  “Who’s that with her?” I asked him.

  “Tell you later.”

  “The Millers let her come to the game?”

  “Later,” he said, then ran on ahead.

  Tater was sixteen years old. He was six-one and a hundred and seventy pounds. Until the spring he had never even taken a practice snap at quarterback, and only two weeks before he was still running scout squad. But in the second half he did it the way all the great ones do it, and that primarily was by equal p
arts talent and force of will. He refused to make a bad read or throw a bad ball, and he refused to be tackled, even when they came at him three and four at a time.

  We scored three touchdowns in the third quarter, all of them through the air. Louie had two, T-Boy the other. After each touchdown Tater came off the field, took a knee down the sideline where he had an unobstructed view, then stared past the end zone at Miss Nettie and her charge in the wheelchair.

  “Who is it?” I asked him again as the fourth quarter was starting.

  “Not now, Rodney.”

  “Tell me. It’s driving me crazy.”

  He shook his head. “No.”

  Rubin, playing middle linebacker, also dominated in the second half. He ended one of Lafayette’s possessions with a diving interception that gave us good field position, and he tackled Ronny Rome for a safety the next time the Lions got the ball. Rubin also made Levi Woodworth look quite ordinary. The state’s best running back gained only forty-seven rushing yards, his lowest total on the year.

  Not that it mattered much, but I wasn’t so bad either. I owned their all-American defensive end, Saul Ernestine, driving him around the field as if his cleats had popped off. And once in pass protection, I hit him so hard his knees gave out and he dropped to the ground like an old quilt falling off the bed.

  Our last touchdown came with less than a minute on the clock, and this time Tater did it with his legs. After faking the dive to Jasper Bacquet, he cleared scrimmage and found himself on a clear path to the end zone on the right side of the field. Instead he ran to the left where Lafayette’s defenders were in pursuit. He had to beat at least six of them, and he did so with moves I’d never seen from a high school kid before. He hurdled the last of them and came down on his feet, and rather than kneel and pray and toss the ball to the official, as was his way, he ran straight out of the end zone and handed the ball to the person in the wheelchair.

  I realized now why he’d run left through a minefield when to run right would’ve been the easier way to go: He wanted to finish the play in front of Miss Nettie and her companion.

  The refs flagged him for delay of game, but the touchdown counted and the game was ours. Lafayette would go on to win state that year, but we’d beaten them by ten points, mainly because of Tater.

  We mobbed him in the corner of the end zone, and I saw now that the person in the chair was a woman—a black woman—who appeared to be physically disabled. She hid her face behind a dark curtain of lace hanging from her wide-brimmed hat, but you could see scarring and what looked like pebbles standing out on the surface of her face. One of the refs ran up to her and asked for the ball. She held it out to him, a task that required such effort you’d have thought it was a fifty-pound dumbbell.

  Tater left her and jogged to the sideline to wait out the last seconds of the game, and fans on our side started chanting his name.

  “Tay,” the right half of the bleachers called out.

  “Ter,” answered the left half.

  “Tay . . . Ter . . . Tay . . . Ter . . .”

  On the bus ride home I was once again seated next to him. Somewhere on the interstate south of Grand Coteau, a car passed in the lane on the side of the bus with a young woman breast-feeding her child in the passenger seat. The car’s interior light was on, making her hard to miss.

  “Hey look!” Marco Miller shouted, “That lady’s got her boob out.”

  In an instant we all moved to the left side, upsetting the balance and making it feel as if we were going to tip over. The baby must’ve been around six months old, and the woman had her breast poking through a flap in her bra. It was the first time I’d ever seen a mother and child this way, and I found it exciting and repulsive both at once. This seemed an act for animals, not people. True, people were animals, or so Dead Eye Dud had taught us. But I couldn’t believe we were that kind of animal. I had to fight off a gag impulse, even as I was awed by the heavy engorged breast and the nipple the color of an Allegheny plum.

  The coaches hollered for us to get back to our seats, and when I returned to mine I realized that Tater was the only player on our side who hadn’t rushed over for a look. He was sitting forward with his head on his arms, and he was sobbing into his pads.

  I understood who the woman in the wheelchair was.

  I never took him for a liar, but he really did have a talent for keeping secrets. How else could he have gone so long without telling me his mother was alive? Angie and I discussed the subject that night when we got home. She’d worked out all the answers in her head, and she presented one in the form of a question: “If Pops tried to kill Mama and then killed himself, would you want to talk about it?”

  “That wouldn’t happen.”

  “But just saying it did.”

  “Then I would talk to you about it.”

  “Anybody else?”

  She had me. “No.”

  I was as frustrated as I’d ever been. I knew I couldn’t approach Tater for a thorough personal accounting without expecting to be laughed at or challenged to a fight. I supposed I could’ve asked Angie to get the story out of him, but it would’ve been underhanded, and I didn’t do things that way. Having no other option, I decided to talk to Coach Cadet. I needed to clean out my locker the next morning, anyway.

  I put my personal effects in paper shopping bags, then walked to his office. He was watching film; I could hear the projector through the door. I knocked, and he hollered for me to come in.

  When he saw who it was, he put down his clicker and had me turn on the ceiling light.

  “That lady in the wheelchair when we played Lafayette High?” I said. “That was Tater Henry’s mother, Coach.”

  The coils in his chair squeaked as he leaned back and brought his arms over his head. “Sit down,” he said.

  “All the time I’ve known him I believed she was dead.”

  He was quiet as he sat appraising me. I could tell he was trying to figure out what I was after.

  “Her name is Alma Henry,” he said. “She is indeed his mother. She lives in a government-run facility over on the north end.”

  “She lives in town?”

  “It’s a place for poor people who can’t afford the medical attention they need. Chateau Something. The lady Tater lives with . . . his aunt? The two of them go and see her every Sunday after church for lunch. Alma has only partial eyesight. Tater told me the aunt made the arrangements to have her travel in a van to see him play against Lafayette. It was Tater’s first start and he wanted his mom to be there. You can appreciate that, can’t you, Rodney?”

  “Yes, sir. But I thought his father killed her. That’s what I always believed.”

  “Do you have private things you don’t like to talk about?”

  “I’m sure I do, but she’s his mother, Coach.”

  He picked a rubber band off the desk and began to roll it around with his index fingers. “He came to me a few days before the game and asked if I would mind if she was there. It’s hard to read Tater sometimes, but I think he was worried his teammates would fix on her and make a big deal of it. ‘Your daddy tried to murder your mama?’ ‘He blew the side of her face off with a shotgun?’ Things like that. Definitely not the kind of distraction anybody would want before a game with the best football team in the state.” He kept rolling the band. “Anyway, I’m glad she could make it. He was a warrior that night, and I’m sure it did a world of good for them both.”

  “He had a twin, he told me.”

  “I don’t know anything about that. I thought it was just him.”

  “She died when they were born.”

  He shook his head. “News to me.”

  I got up to leave. I went to flip off the light, and I heard the coils in his chair squeak again. “You said it was a girl?”

  “Yes, sir. He told me her name was Rosalie.”

  A meta
l filing cabinet stood against the wall. He opened a drawer and pulled out a manila folder. TATUM HENRY was written across the tab in orange ink. Coach Cadet kept one of these files for every player on the team. I saw familiar papers inside, mostly questionnaires and consent and medical forms our parents had been required to fill out before we could go out for the team.

  Coach leaned back in the chair. “She died, you say? Rosalie?”

  “Yes, sir. And he lived, and I guess . . . Well, I wondered if it had something to do with why Tater seemed so secretive sometimes. Like there was a connection between what he lost and who he was, if that makes sense.”

  Coach glanced up from the papers. “R-o-s-a-l-i-e?” He wrote the name on the side of the form.

  “I don’t know how to spell it.”

  “There well could’ve been a twin. I don’t have any reason to believe that story isn’t true. But this questionnaire was filled out and signed by the aunt. And it says right here there’s a brother.” He pointed to the place on the page, and now he began to mumble to himself. “Robert Battier. Are you kidding me?” He said it this way: Batch-yay. “Could’ve been a half brother, I suppose, which would explain the different last names.”

  “You’ve lost me, Coach.”

  “Robert Battier,” he said, louder this time. “Tater’s brother.”

  “Don’t know him.”

  “Robert Battier might’ve been the best football player J. S. Clark ever produced. He was several years ahead of you boys, would’ve long since been gone by the time of integration. He carried them to the semifinals for the black schools, then got busted for drugs and kicked off the team.” He waved the paper between us. “I don’t read these things, and I definitely never knew he and Tater were related. This is a shock. An absolute, unmitigated shock. Of course without him, Clark went on to lose the championship. And Robert sat in the parish prison for a good, long while before they let him out.”