Call Me by My Name (5 page)

The sun had combined with chlorine to streak her hair with gold strands. Bands of muscle and sinew stood out on her long limbs. Every time she came out of the pool dripping with water, I wondered how we could be related, let alone twins.

“Is he with you?” I heard somebody say. It was a park employee, standing behind the bleachers.

“Yes, he is,” my mother said.

“That colored person there?”

“That's right, George,” Mama answered when Pops wouldn't. “This is Tater Henry, my son's teammate on the Redbirds.”

George Fontenot was older, maybe sixty. Dressed all in khaki, he usually handled maintenance at the park. “Yeah, all right,” he said. “He's the one got kicked out for picking a fight with the Trussell boy.”

Tater had come wearing all new clothes and a belt with his name on it, and even they weren't going to be enough to spare him today.

“George, your pool looks lovely,” Mama said.

“Kind of you, thanks. Every morning at seven o'clock sharp, when I skim the surface, I wish they'd built it somewhere else on account of them trees. You can get the leaves easy enough, but it's the moss that gives you fits. Who builds a pool next to trees?”

“Only somebody with a man like you, George,” Mama said.

You could see what her words did to him. He no longer was worried about Tater. Instead he hitched up his pants and went back to spearing trash with a nail at the end of a stick.

The meet featured only three teams, ours and two others from nearby towns. Angie easily ranked as her team's strongest individual female competitor, and she also anchored the girls' relays. There was no limit to the number of events a single swimmer could participate in, and by the last race Angie had already won four medals, three of them gold and one silver. Tater and I stood tall and cheered like crazy people without a thought to how it might be taken by the visitors from out of town.

As Angie was stretching before her last event, a man looked back at us from his seat at the bottom of the bleachers and spoke to my father. “Is all that really necessary?” he asked.

Pops didn't answer, and the man got up and walked over to the fence. He stood leaning against it, but I could tell he wasn't done yet. Right before the swimmers stepped on their starting blocks, he returned to the bleachers and sat in his old place.

“Please ignore us,” my mother said. Then she brought a finger up to her lips and gestured for Tater and me to keep quiet.

It must've been the man's daughter who swam the second leg of her team's last race, a freestyle relay. When the girl in that spot hit the water, he started yelling, “Kick, kick, kick,” but actually saying, “Keek, keek, keek.” She was a strong swimmer and built a two-stroke lead, which the next girl was able to maintain for the team's anchor. The bleachers were shaking as people pounded their feet on the boards. I whistled again right before Angie dove into the water for her team's last leg. By the time she reached the other side, she'd already caught up to the leader. She passed the girl after coming out of her turn.

Both Tater and I had forgotten Mama's warning to keep quiet, and we were making more noise than anyone else in the bleachers when Angie thrust ahead by half a dozen strokes to end the race. Next came the medal ceremony, and we might've escaped without incident had Tater not thought to add one final cheer.

“Keek, keek, keek!” he shouted.

Pushing between spectators, the man climbed the bleachers and grabbed Tater by the throat before any of us could react. Pops reached for the guy, but lost his balance and fell sideways against the boards. I landed a right to the side of the man's face and whipped his head back, but somehow he held on to Tater. It was Mama who stopped him. She gripped his earlobe and pulled it, as if she'd lost one of hers and needed a replacement. Tater broke free and fell over coughing and spitting out ropes. Then Mama let the man go.

“What is wrong with you?” she said.

It was a while before the man could answer. “You know what's wrong,” he muttered.

It was time to leave. “You're not walking home alone,” Mama said to Tater. “Let's go. You and Rodney climb in back.”

We sat on the bed with our backs against the bulkhead. The wind felt good after the moist heat under the trees, and I had a moment to think about what had just happened. I seemed to understand that for as long as we were friends and he was black and I was white, there would be apologies to be made—if not for my own words and actions against him, then for the words and actions of others.

On Abe Lincoln, Pops pulled up to the curb, and Tater jumped out even before we'd come to a stop. It was my first good look at him, and I saw the smudges on his shirt and the rips to his pants. His neck was red and there were four round marks, each about the size of a dime, left by the points of the man's fingers.

Pops had his window rolled down and his arm poking out, the elbow bleeding from a scratch he'd suffered in the melee. Splinters stood out in the meat of his forearm.

“Please tell Angie I said it was great she won all them races,” Tater said.

Pops seemed to be trying to decide whether it was too big a request. Eventually Mama said, “We'll do that, Tater.”

“Mrs. Boulet, I'm grateful to you for helping me out the way you did.”

“Not everybody is so full of contempt for his fellow man as that fool,” she said, although by the look on her face I wondered if she believed it.

“I'm sorry if I caused any trouble.”

“No, baby,” Mama said. “We're the ones who are sorry. The world has a lot of growing up to do. You go on inside now and tell Miss Nettie to call me if she has any questions about today.”

Tater climbed up on the porch and stood at the door, straightening out his clothes. They might've been new, but they were also ruined. He tucked his shirttail back in and brushed dirt off his pants, and he made sure his belt was in place, with his name facing out from the rear to anybody who might be curious about who he was.

Mama was too upset to cook supper that night, so Angie and I ate fried bologna sandwiches on TV trays in the living room. Pops left for the plant after the news, and it was midnight before we went to bed. Even then nobody slept much.

I lay awake in the dark, trying to make sense of things I'd probably never understand. Finally I got up and moved to Angie's room. “Poor Tater,” I heard her mumble, even though she looked to be sleeping.

Toward dawn I sat up on the pallet on the floor and glanced over at her. Angie was a person people automatically liked just because of how she looked. But what about those who brought out hatred in others for the same reason? I wondered what it would be like to have people want to choke your neck before they even knew you, and it all made me wish that I lived in another time—not in the past when things might've been worse, but in the future when all the madness had been worked out.

Tater stayed clear of South City Park the rest of the summer. He didn't see us lose the Babe Ruth League title by dropping two straight to the Steers in the season's last game and tiebreaker playoff, and he missed the awards banquet at the barbecue pits, where, in his absence, I won the trophy for the Redbirds' most valuable player. Mama asked me if I saw him around anymore. I told her no, why would I? And that was the truth, even though it was also the truth that I'd spent a lot of time looking for him.

I rode my bike down past the barbecue pits to the bayou and whiled away many an hour on the pedestrian bridge. I spat at the water until I had cottonmouth. I stared off at the trail, trying to will him to materialize. One day I was hanging around by the snowball stand, listening to music when The Beatles came on. They were singing “She Loves You” again. It made me feel so bad I got on my bike and rode out of the park as fast as I could.

I wanted my reuniting with Tater to seem accidental, but I knew he was done with us, and the only certain way to see him again was to show up at his house.

It was the first week of August, and the park was starting to quiet down, with the baseball and swim programs finished until next year. I rode to Abe Lincoln and stopped on the corner and had a look around. I wasn't there long, maybe five minutes, when I heard music coming from down the street. I recognized the car. It was the one from three months ago, the black sports model with white racing stripes running from end to end on the hood. It moved faster now and fishtailed around the corner. Then after another few minutes I heard it approaching again, only now it was coming right at me.

I don't know why I didn't try to get out of the way. The only defense I put up was to wave my arms, and then the driver's door flew open, slamming into me and the bike and sending us sprawling against the curb. It happened so fast I didn't have time to brace myself. I hit the ground hard, and one of the bike's pedals dug into my shinbone just below the knee.

I didn't get a good look at the driver, and he was long gone by the time I got my wind back and stood up again. I could feel blood from my knee running down into my sock. My shorts had split open along the seam that ran from the waist to the crotch. My right shoulder and ribcage were throbbing.

What had I ever done to that dude? I wondered.

I limped over to Tater's and banged on the front door. It took only seconds for him to pull it open, and he immediately started calling for his aunt. I would learn later that the kind of house they lived in was a shotgun, with a total of four small rooms leading from one to the next, all the way to the back. Tater put my arm over his shoulder and led me through a living room and bedroom. Next up was a bathroom, and past it I could see a kitchen. His aunt Nettie, appearing by my side all of a sudden, was not quite as ancient as I'd imagined. She seemed familiar, and then I remembered the lady with Tater at the movies four years ago. She wasn't wearing a domestic's uniform but a stylish outfit with a lot of color and open-toe shoes that showed her painted nails.

I roughed out a description of the incident, and she shook her head. “Lord, that boy,” she said.

“You know him?” I asked.

She didn't answer. Instead she guided me to the bathroom and turned on the water in the tub. It was an ancient claw-foot job with a metal hoop above it holding a shower curtain. She removed my shoe and sock and put my leg under the water. It didn't burn for long, and then the water went from cold to warm, and I could feel the pain go away and my body begin to relax. I felt like a little kid, the way she handled me. She rubbed the tips of her fingers over the cut and puckered her lips and blew on it. “Shh, shh,” she kept saying. The pain in my ribs and shoulder was still there, but I'd been hurt worse, and the truth was I worried more about the rip in my shorts than the injury. The rip had left me exposed, my underwear showing.

“You're going to be fine, Rodney,” Miss Nettie said in a reassuring voice.

“You sure I don't need stitches?”

She shook her head. “You got a cut, nothing terrible. But it's more a brush burn—you must've scraped it on the cement.” She said it this way:
see
-ment. “Some air will do you good, so let's not cover it just yet. When you get home put some Mercurochrome on it. Will you make sure to do that?”