Call Me by My Name (31 page)

Tears moved down her face, tracking toward her ear. I wiped them away with my thumb. “What about the part where he loved me?” she asked.

“Yeah, that one, too.”

“That happened?”

“Yes,” I said. “It happened.”

I
live today in Vienna, Virginia, a suburb of the city where I spent the bulk of my pro career before my retirement from football in 1995. The old town where I grew up is eighteen hours south of my front door, and each summer since I left the game I have climbed into my pickup truck (yes, I still drive one) and made the trip home. The road is long, but it beats flying, and the hours alone are good for me. I listen to old rock stations on the radio or music from the sixties and seventies that my daughter, Rachel, a senior in comparative literature at the University of Virginia, burned for me on CD. I break the trip in half and spend a night in either southern Tennessee or northern Alabama, depending on how hard I push it. I rent a room by the interstate, eat a hot meal at Shoney's, and call Regina on my cell.

“My left leg down to my toes is tingling,” I tell her. “It feels like sciatica again.”

“You wouldn't be feeling that if you flew back like a normal person.”

“Sasquatch is too big for planes.”

The last time I visited the town was especially hard on me. More than forty years had passed since Tater's death, and I stupidly surrendered to a nostalgic impulse and made a tour of all the places he and I had known together. I started on West Landry Street and the site where the Little Chef had been. The restaurant and patio were gone, replaced by a large metal storage shed and a lean-to under which someone had parked a sports car. I stepped out and had a look around. The Palace Café hadn't changed much, but the Delta Theater had morphed into something called the Delta Grand. The picture-show marquee with its burning bulbs had been removed decades ago, and the old building, barely recognizable now, served the community as a rent-a-hall for wedding receptions.

You have to be a masochist to seek out moments with losses such as these. But there I was, trembling at the reality of all that was gone.

I drove down Market Street through South City Park, which people in the town now call South Park for some reason, perhaps in an effort to distinguish it from the place where a teenager could be assaulted for being a certain race. Activity at the tennis courts was as busy as I recalled, although now it was mostly African Americans swinging rackets in the yellow sunlight. I couldn't have survived a visit to the pool, but on a whim I walked the shell drive to the baseball fields. America's favorite pastime might've dipped in popularity in other parts of the country, but by all appearances it was still much appreciated here. The players, almost all of them, were black, and I wondered where the white children had gone. I leaned against the fence at the Babe Ruth League field and waited for a familiar face to come along. None did. The calls from the players were the same as those we'd made long ago, but as I stood there watching a new generation outfitted in bright nylon uniforms that made our old ones look like burlap sacks, I wondered if any of the boys had ever even heard of Tater Henry.

Later at the assisted-living facility where he lives, I asked Pops about the situation at the park. Dementia has purged his memory of some things, but on the important subjects he never wavers. “Oh, that changed a long time ago,” he said. “The whites have their own baseball park now. It's not exactly a private league, far as I know, but there aren't many blacks. I haven't been in years, not since your mother and I took T. J. that time to show him how we do it here in the country.”

T. J. is Angie's son, the eldest of her three children and her only boy. He's in medical school today in New Orleans, where Angie settled after college and met Tom Robinson, the man she would marry. Tom worked as an investigative news reporter until a scandal cost him his career. Although I've heard Tom blame the Internet for making him obsolete, the reports that accused him of fabricating quotes and had his editors issuing public apologies couldn't have helped. Luckily for all concerned, Tom's parents are old Uptown money, and Angie contributes with her modest earnings as a guidance counselor at Sacred Heart, a school for Catholic girls.

I have tried to like Tom. I have made an effort. But I drank too much at a party some years ago and called him a loser in front of Angie and their kids, and since then things have been strained between my sister and me. We speak on the phone only twice a year—at Christmas and our birthday. These perfunctory chats are beneath us, but the truth is they're all we have left.

“Does Angie ever talk to you about Tater?” I asked Pops.

“About who?”

He might've been eighty-four years old, but hearing wasn't one of his problems.

“Tater Henry,” I said. “You remember Tater, don't you, Pops?”

The question accomplished one thing my appearance in his room had failed to do: He got up from his chair and walked over to where I was standing. “It's been years since she mentioned him,” he whispered. “You could always ask her, Rodney, but I don't know if it's wise you do that.”

“Still too hard, huh?”

“Too a lot of things,” he answered. “For one, I don't think Tom would appreciate the question. Would you like somebody asking your wife about her past with a colored boy?”

“Don't call him that, Pops.”

“What do you propose I call him, then? African American? Those people, I tell you. They change their names so much it's impossible to keep up.”

“I don't think I'd care,” I said.

“You wouldn't care about what, Rodney?”

“I wouldn't care if somebody asked Regina about an old boyfriend.”

“Not even a colored one?”

“No, Pops. Not even that.”

The old flame came up in his face again, and I understood that nothing would ever put it out. Bent at the waist, he shuffled over to his chair and fell back into a pile of fishing magazines. “How is football?” he asked.

“Good,” I said, even though I hadn't played the game in eighteen years.

Nothing's really right there anymore without Mama, but I make these annual visits as much for my benefit as for his. I need to see him, need to hear his voice in person, need to smell the talcum powder he wears under his khaki pants and western-style shirts with faux pearl buttons. I still love my father, but I don't understand him any better than I ever did.

I suspect the day is coming when he doesn't know me anymore. For now, though, we have a great old time confusing each other. I drive him by the plant and show him how little it's changed, then I take him to Wal-Mart and buy him new artificial lures even though he doesn't fish anymore. We eat hamburgers and milkshakes at the fast-food joints by the interstate, and finally, after the silences have had their effect, our long handshake leads to a tearful farewell hug.

He stands waving good-bye at the lobby door, and I keep to routine and head out for a few last stops before leaving. I bring flowers to the graveyards and say the prayers I learned as a boy. Then I run by Helen Street and the little house that burned colors in the rain. Of all the stops I make, this one is toughest.

Pops sold the house once he could no longer keep it up, but the new occupants aren't any tidier. Today there's a dented aluminum bateau resting on sawhorses on the front lawn, and a kid in a sagging diaper digs with a stick in the dirt where Mama had azaleas. I sit with the engine idling, and I halfway wait for my sister to emerge from the carport door. I want her as she was at seventeen, striding out with her sketchbook and paint box, defiant of those who would deny her and too sure of their love to back down. But in the end the only person who shows is a beefy young mother brandishing a kitchen spatula to spank her kid with.

Tater and Angie. It's a sorry confession, but I've lost them both, the one on the field that night, the other to a destiny that wasn't meant for her.

“I know you,” an elderly African-American man says to me at the Exxon where I've stopped for gas. Joubert's Esso is long gone, so I pulled over at one of those places with fifty do-it-yourself pumps and a TV playing commercials in each one. Dapper in a new seersucker suit, a doctor or a lawyer or some other professional, he stands at the pump next to mine, squeezing gas into a Lexus so new it still has temporary tags.

I smile the way I always do when a fan says hi. “Rodney Boulet,” I say.

“Rodney Boulet,” he repeats. They usually tick off highlights from my career now: LSU and the NFL, the seven trips to Honolulu for the Pro Bowl, the bust in Canton. But this old bird isn't that easy.

“You're Angie's twin,” he says.

“That's right,” I tell him.

“And how is Angie?”

“She's fine, last I heard.” He seems satisfied with the answer, but I suddenly miss her and feel a need to say more. “She was never the same after Tater died. It's like she died with him. The person we knew, anyway.”

It's a morbid confession to make to a stranger, but he's kind enough to offer a sympathetic nod. I put the gas cap back on and return the hose to the pump.

“How'd you know Angie?” I ask.

“I didn't—not the girl,” he answers. “But we all know the legend.” Then he gets into his car and drives off.

What else can I say about Tater Henry? That he never lost a game as a starting quarterback? That the town honored him with a memorial parade that turned out more people than the ones for Mardi Gras and the Yambilee combined? That a photo of him, framed in gold plate, still stands on display in the trophy case at the high school?

For a long time I wondered what he might've made of his life—what he might've become, you know? It was the same question he'd once asked about his sister, Rosalie, and I was no better at answering it than he had been. I also tried to see Tater as an adult with Angie, the two of them happy together, making their way in a world more tolerant than the one we knew. But it was so painful an exercise that I had to stop doing it.

We go on. We don't want to and sometimes don't think we can. We almost hate ourselves for trying. But we do.

ATHENEUM BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS

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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2014 by John Ed Bradley

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bradley, John Ed.

Call me by my name / John Ed Bradley.—First edition.

p. cm

Summary: “Growing up in Louisiana in the late 1960s, Tater Henry, has experienced a lot of prejudice. Despite the town's sensibilities, Rodney Boulett and his twin sister Angie befriend Tater, and as their friendship grows stronger, Tater and Rodney become an unstoppable force on the football field. Rodney's world is turned upside down when he sees Tater and Angie growing closer. Teammates, best friends—all of it is threatened by hate Rodney did not know was inside of him. As the town learns to accept notions like a black quarterback, some changes are too difficult to accept”—Provided by publisher.

ISBN 978-1-4424-9793-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-4424-9795-5 (eBook)

[1. Race relations—Fiction. 2. Prejudices—Fiction. 3. Friendship—Fiction. 4. Football—Fiction.

5. African Americans—Fiction. 6. Louisiana—History—20th century—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.B72466Cal 2014

[Fic]—dc23

2013031133