Yard War (5 page)

“He's a
Ne-gro,
” said Andy, making his mouth real big. Calvin and Kenny laughed. Stokes still looked at the ground.

“I'll tell y'all something, I don't care.” And when I said it, I knew it was the truth. All these people worried about whether somebody is white or colored, that didn't mean I had to worry about it. Not if I didn't want to. “He's Willie Jane's son.”

“So?” said Andy.

“So Willie Jane is one of the family.”

“Does that make y'all brothers?” said Andy, and now they really laughed.

“Is that what you're saying, Trip?” said Calvin. “Colored boy here is your brother?”

“I'm saying wait till you see him throw a pass. Dee can play some football, can't he, Stokes?”

Stokes finally looked up and nodded and said, “Dee can play. And if he's playin' instead of workin', we can have our field.”

Good ol' Stokes.

“I don't know about this,” said Kenny, trying to sound like the older guys.

“Play in Calvin's yard if you want to,” I told them.

“You comin' with us?” Calvin asked me.

“I'm stayin' right here.”

“Can we use your ball?” asked Kenny.

Andy's ball is shorter and fatter than my Spalding and harder to throw.

“I'm stayin' right here, and my ball is stayin' with me.”

E
verybody just stood there awhile with their faces scrunched.

Then Stokes said, “Okay, my team is the Nighthawks.”

“We're the Rebels,” I said.

Stokes picked Andy. I picked Dee. Then Stokes picked Calvin, which left Kenny for my team. Fine with me. I'd have the best quarterback–split end combo in town. All Kenny had to do was snap the ball and try to get in the way of whoever was rushing long enough for Dee to throw it to me.

I went over the rules for Dee: Two-handed touch, because our moms don't like tackle; you have to run for the extra point, but it just counts one, like a kick;
if a tree blocks a kick or a pass, you run the play again. The first team to score five touchdowns wins.

Andy flipped his buffalo nickel, and I called heads. Heads it was. The Nighthawks lined up on the rose-bed side, and the Rebels lined up on the driveway side. Me and Dee played deep to receive the kick.

“Ready?” I said, so he would look at me and see me smiling and know that we were about to have some fun.

He nodded but he didn't smile back. He had the same determined face as when he was doing yard work.

I wondered if I had goofed up. Was I forcing Dee to play with all these white boys when he didn't really want to? Maybe he didn't know how to tell me he didn't want to. I had to admit he looked way out of place. And he must have felt it.

I was about to ask him if he'd rather go back to raking, but here came Calvin running at the tee like an angry bear. Calvin always brings the tee he got for Christmas last year, which gives him automatic kicking rights. The trouble is he can't kick worth a flip.

Thunk!

It barely got across the sidewalk and dribbled on the ground for about ten yards. Stokes grabbed it and flew by us, all the way to the end zone.

“Touchdown!” yelled Andy.

“You can't receive your own kickoff!” I screamed.

“Onside kick! Onside kick!” yelled Andy. He and Calvin were laughing like the luckiest, best thing in the world had just happened.

Stokes stood on the driveway and held the ball up for everybody to admire and yelled for us to come down there and line up for the extra point. “If the ball goes at least ten yards, it's a free ball. Anybody can pick it up,” said Andy, which was true, now that I thought about it, but they didn't have to laugh so much.

“It's not like Calvin kicked it that way on purpose,” I said.

“I did too,” fibbed Calvin.

We lined up for the extra point and they ran it in and it was Nighthawks 7, Rebels 0.

I stood up close for the kickoff. Kenny stood at midfield and Dee stood all the way back. Calvin actually got it in the air this time. Dee caught it and took off and Stokes got two hands on him around midfield.

On our first play from scrimmage Dee took the snap from Kenny; then Kenny backed up and tried to block for Dee. I ran out for a pass, about twenty yards down the sideline. Dee took a few steps back, planted his feet, and threw it right to me. On the next play, we did the same thing again and scored.

Now he was smiling.

He said his yard shoes were slowing him up and he wanted to play barefooted. I said I wouldn't do that if I
was him because there might be stickers, but he didn't care. Then he took off his old red shirt. Underneath, he was wearing one of those T-shirts that are cut out under the arms and have straps over the shoulders. There was a fresh tear in the back, plus lots of others.

“I'd throw that thing away if I was you,” I told him.

“What thing?”

“That shirt's got so many holes. Why don't you wear another one?”

“Ain't got no other one. 'Cept for my going-to-church T-shirt.”

“You wear a T-shirt to church?”

“Under my good shirt. One good shirt, one good T-shirt. Church only.”

I concentrated real hard on setting the ball on the tee when he said that. I wasn't making fun of him. It's what I would have said to any of the guys—but they all have plenty of T-shirts.

The Rebels were a pass-completing machine. Dee kept sailing perfect spirals, and I kept hauling them in. I dropped one, and a tree intercepted one, but the rest of the time, we were unstoppable.

But Stokes is smart. Every time Dee had Andy covered, Stokes would keep it or dump it off to Calvin, and they would make five or six yards before I could get there, so they kept making first downs. Then when they got close to the goal line, Stokes handed
off to Andy on an end around and he beat us over the goal line.

It must have been more exciting to watch than our usual games. It seemed like almost every car that drove by that afternoon slowed down when they went by. Mr. Bethune even parked his big white truck and watched us. It made me feel important.

I kept one eye on Dee the whole time to make sure nobody was mean to him. At first they ignored him. But when everybody saw how he could throw the ball, they started treating him like a regular player.

When it was Nighthawks 14, Rebels 14, Stokes leapt like somebody in a flying circus, intercepted Dee's pass, and cut into the end zone just out of my reach.

“Luck!” Dee shouted.

“You mean skill!” Stokes shouted.

But they were smiling.

Leave it to Andy to try and mess everything up.

Dee was leaning over, retying his shoes, and Andy walked by and mumbled something. Dee shot up straight: “What'd you say?” Andy looked back and shrugged like he didn't know what Dee was talking about.

I called the Rebels into a pre-kickoff huddle.

“What'd he say to you?” I asked Dee.

“It was nothin'.”

“I want to know.”

“Well, y'all white boys talk kind of funny, but it sounded like he called me a name.”

I almost asked what name.

If Andy could get Dee rattled, it would be that much easier for the Nighthawks to win, and nobody wants to win more than Andy does. “Don't let it bother you,” I told Dee. “We'll get him back by mashing his team in the dirt.”

“Yeah!” Kenny said.

We had good field position after the kickoff and scored quick on a long bomb from Dee to me. Stokes answered with a bomb to Andy and it was Nighthawks 28, Rebels 21.

On the next kickoff, darn if Calvin didn't boot it all the way to where I was standing on the driveway. I was thinking so hard about running, I forgot to make sure I caught the ball first. By the time I picked it up off the ground, Andy was on top of me, and we ended up with first down on our own five-yard line, worst field position of the day.

On our first three downs we gained zero yards because Andy and Stokes doubled up on me and made it impossible to catch a pass. They had four touchdowns and we had three, and if we didn't score on this drive, the game was pretty much over.

We stayed in the huddle so long, they started yelling at us, but I was making up a play and it took a while. I called it the Rebel Rouser. Kenny snapped
the ball to me and tried to stay in front of Calvin. I pitched the ball to Dee and took off running. Dee took three steps back and pump-faked a long pass to me. By this time Calvin was charging hard at Dee, but right at the last second, Dee floated the ball over Calvin's head, right into Kenny's hands. And since Andy and Stokes were both covering me, Kenny took off down the other side of the field. Nobody ever expected Kenny to get the ball. All he had to do was not drop it before he crossed the goal line.

He dropped it. Ten yards from pay dirt.

When he turned around to get it, he accidentally kicked it all the way back to midfield. Calvin had it in his fingers when I swooped down and snatched it away from him.

I had to score. Now.

A long time ago, when I was eight, a bunch of us were playing King of the Mountain on a giant dirt mound where they were building a new house. These three older guys were shoving everybody off the mountain every time we got close to the top. I remember I was lying on my back at the bottom of the mountain and I was so mad I just started screaming at whatever was not letting me be big enough and strong enough to charge up that hill and beat those guys.
Aaaaahhh!
And all of a sudden it felt like some kind of monster got inside me, and I
was
big enough, twice as big as those older guys and ten times more dangerous, and
nobody and nothing could stop me. I charged up that pile of dirt and slung every one of them off until I was all by myself, screaming down at them, daring them to try and climb back up. Nobody tried. They looked like I had broken some rule by winning the game.

When I saw the football in my hands and only Andy, the jerk who had insulted my friend, standing between me and the goal line, that monster got into me. I came at him like Frankenstein in a Corvette, and he knew he better get out of the way or die.

“Touchdown, Rebels!” I flung the ball in the air.

“It worked!” yelled Kenny, like the plan had been for him to drop the ball and kick it the wrong way.

We had to make this extra point and the game would be tied. This time Dee played center and snapped me the ball. I pretended to hand it off to him and he ran outside to the right and took Stokes and Andy with him, while I walked into the end zone. Kenny ran like he had the ball, which was not part of the plan, and when he got across the goal line, Calvin landed on top of him. We call it “getting Calvined.” It hurts. We had to wait for Calvin to push himself off the ground before we could see Kenny again and know that he was all right.

Nighthawks 28, Rebels 28. The next touchdown would win the game, it was our turn to kick off, and we hadn't stopped them from scoring yet.

I got everybody into a huddle.

“Listen up, y'all. This is it.”

“What's the plan?” asked Dee.

“No plan. I'm going to boom it all the way down to the other end of the yard and we just have to stop 'em.”

“We can't,” huffed Kenny, still catching his breath from being Calvined.

“This time we will,” I said.

“We could call it a tie and do something else,” Kenny said.

“No we couldn't.”

“It's just a game,” he said.

“No,” I said, “it's not just a game.”

He would have been right any other day. Winning isn't usually that big a deal. You cheer for your side, make fun of the other team, and get something to drink. But today we had to win because
Dee
had to win. Then nobody could say he didn't deserve to play with us.

Kenny made a fake whistle noise and raised his hand in the kickoff signal and brought it down. I ran to the ball.

I tried to kick it too hard, like I do everything too hard, and got my foot too far under it, and it hung in the air like a wounded duck, barely past midfield.

Calvin was watching it come down, waving his arms for a fair catch.

“You can't fair-catch a kickoff!” screamed Andy.

Calvin turned around to Andy and the ball bounced off his head right into Dee's hands. Dee streaked downfield and crashed into the end zone. Rebels 34, Nighthawks 28, Roses –5.

“Rebels win! Rebels win!” Kenny was spinning like a crazy person with his arms stretched out.

“Woo-hoo, mercy!”
I yelled.

The Nighthawks were standing around looking at each other like they couldn't understand what had happened.

“No fair!” Calvin yelled.

“Once it goes ten yards, it's anybody's ball, remember?” Dee said.

“Yeah, but…he went too fast!” Calvin said.

Some of the roses were just bent and some were all the way torn off. I checked the house to see if Mama was watching and told Dee it was okay, that it had happened before. I hid the broken ones in the pine straw and propped up the others. Then I put my arm around his shoulder and held up the ball like a trophy.

Andy was so mad, he was almost crying.

“Dee can haul butt.” Stokes was still panting. “I'll grant you that.”

“Dee!” At first I thought Willie Jane was cheering along with us. “Dee! Come here right now!”