Yard War (9 page)

Whenever I tried to catch a pass, Dee would bat it away and grin at me like I was supposed to say congratulations. He intercepted two.

The Rebels tried a couple of flea-flickers that would have worked against any other team, but the Stompers were always ready for it. Before things even got started good, the Rebels were behind 21–0.

“Y'all ready to give?” yelled Andy, being a terrible sport like always.

“It's five touchdowns to win,” I told him. “Y'all have three.”

“That's three more than y'all,” yelled Dee, lining up for the kickoff. He was definitely feeling like one of the guys now, and I knew I should be glad, but the grin was really getting on my nerves.

Before Andy could kick it, I jabbed my fingers into the palm of my other hand in the time-out signal. “Time! Time!” I had an idea.

“What the heck?” yelled Kenny.

I huddled up with Stokes and Calvin.

“Look, y'all. A kickoff return might be our best chance. It's time to run the juggernaut.”

They said “juggernaut” on
Combat!
the other night. That's one of mine and Daddy's favorite shows. I asked Daddy what “juggernaut” meant, and he said, “It means you can't stop it.”

“Soon as I catch the ball, y'all come up on both sides of me and kind of cover me up and we all run together like a giant force that cannot be stopped.”

“I can't run as fast as you,” Calvin said.

“I won't be running that fast. It's not about speed, it's about power. Stokes is tall and you're wide and with both of y'all blocking them off as we go, they can't reach me. See what I'm sayin'?”

“I see.” Stokes scrunched up his face like he didn't think it would work.

“We have to try
something.
”

I stood way back because Andy had been booting it pretty good. When Kenny brought his arm down, Andy kicked a grounder that bounced into Calvin's hands.

I was yelling
“M-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e!”
as hard as I could, but Calvin froze.

Just when Dee was about to tackle him, he turned around and pitched it to an invisible player between me and Stokes. I tore over there and snatched up the ball and yelled “Juggernaut!” and tried to twist away from Dee and fell.

“We're not playing tackle!” I said.

“It's not my fault!” he said. “Maybe that's why they call you Trip.”

Everybody thought that was hilarious.

And then, before I could stop myself: “Maybe that's why they call you a…” I almost said it.

The way Dee looked at me…like he didn't trust me now. I turned out to be a typical white kid after all. I might as well have slugged him in the face.

“A what?” he said.

I tossed him the ball.

“A what?” he said again. I wanted to tell him he
could
trust me, but how could I say that in front of everybody? I walked back to the huddle.

“That jugger-thing didn't work,” said Calvin.

“ 'Cause you didn't do it right, spazmo!” Stokes yelled.

“That's okay, that's okay,” I told them. “We'll do it with a running play. Even better. Juggernaut on three.”

Calvin snapped the ball to me and moved back to my right side and Stokes moved over on my left and we launched the juggernaut. We weren't even going Calvin speed, just slow, smooth, and steady. At first I thought we might go all the way. Then Calvin got tangled up with Andy, and Dee tried to get around Stokes on the left, and suddenly I was all by myself, so I took off. Kenny didn't catch me until I was ten yards into Viking Stomper territory.

“You can't cover up the runner like that!” Andy screamed.

“Yellow-bellied cheaters!” yelled Kenny.

The juggernaut had worked, just not the way I thought. So we did it again, and this time we scored.

We huddled up to figure out the extra point, and I got behind Calvin for the snap.

“Hut one! Hut two! Hut three!”

Calvin snapped the ball and pulled back to my right, Stokes shifted to my left, and we plowed straight over the goal line. It was perfect.

Somebody was yelling behind us.

“Hey, nigger!”

I
could see Tim Bethune's ugly grin when I heard it. I didn't even have to turn around.

“You havin' fun, Sambo?” he said.

The scraping sound was his brother, Tom, dragging a baseball bat on the concrete. He was bunched up with Tim and Johnny Adcock and a couple of older guys. They were coming down the sidewalk like a pack of wolves.

I was thinking, Please keep walking, please keep walking, but they stopped and stood at the edge of the yard and looked at us the same way Coach Montgomery looks when he's about to use his paddle on you. I couldn't believe these were the same guys who used to play football and hide-and-seek with us. I wanted to say, “Hey Tim, don't you remember that
time you showed me how to put cards on my bicycle spokes?”

Johnny Adcock used to play with us, too, until he decided he was a Beatle and started combing his hair all down in his face and wearing black all the time. They were all wearing boots and leather and black, and it was like they never knew us at all. What happens when you get to be a teenager?

“I said, are you havin' fun?” Tim stared at Dee.

Dee stared back.

“My brother asked you a question,” Tom said, tapping his bat in his hand.

Calvin and Kenny looked like they were about to throw up. Even Andy looked scared.

“Well, I sure hope y'all have enjoyed your game,” Tim said. “ 'Cause it's over now.” Tom raised his bat and pointed to Dee with it.

“I don't know how that team can even see to play, with it being so dark over there.” They laughed.

We got closer together, and I said to Dee, out of the corner of my mouth, “You ought to get in the house.” He acted like he didn't hear me. Calvin and Kenny said they had had enough football for one day.

Then Stokes said, “Yeah, they only needed one more touchdown. They were gonna win anyway. Let's go.”

Stokes and Andy walked off slow enough to show they weren't scared, but I knew they were. Kenny and Calvin ran behind the house. Me and Dee moved
toward it. When we got to the porch, Tom yelled, “And don't let me see you out here again, colored boy! I'll bring this bat down on your head!”

We watched out the front window until they finally went on down the street. I felt so ashamed that I had let those guys talk to Dee like that, and boss us around and make us go inside. My cheeks were burning.

All I could do at first was look at the carpet. “Dee, I'm really sorry.”

“That's okay.”

“It's not okay. But there were too many of them,” I said. “It wouldn't have been a fair fight.”

“I guess not.”

“I'm…I'm sorry about the other thing, too,” I said.

He shrugged. I didn't know if that meant “Don't worry about it” or “I expected it to happen, white boy.”

We went to the kitchen to get some apple juice. Willie Jane turned off the vacuum cleaner in the den and said she was finally through with this day. I didn't want to tell her what had happened to our game. Dee didn't say anything. But what if he told her later? All of a sudden I got this terrible feeling Dee might not be coming over anymore.

“Can he come back next Saturday, Willie Jane? Please?” I looked at him. “Don't you want to, Dee?”

“Sure.” But he wasn't acting sure.

“You better think of a chore, if you want Dee to come back,” Willie Jane said.

“What chore? The grass has about quit growing and the leaves are raked up good for a while. Why does he have to have a chore?”

“Ask your mama can she find somethin' else for him,” she said.

“Okay, I'll ask. Y'all don't leave yet.”

“Uh-uh, we gotta go. Don't bother ya mama, she's getting ready for her party. You have all next week to ask her.”

“Please!”

I yelled through the bathroom door that I wanted Dee to come back next Saturday and did he have to have a chore, or could he just come over? Mama sloshed around in her tub and said it would be better if we had something for him to do. I heard them leaving the house.

“What can he do, Mama? Hurry!”

“Let me think about it and we'll tell Willie Jane on Monday.”

“I have to know now.”

“Why?”

“Because! Please, there must be something.”

They were getting into the car.

“Well, we do need to get the flower beds ready for winter. I guess he could mulch.”

I ran outside, and they were already driving off. I tore down the middle of the street, waving my arms and screaming, “You can mulch! You can mulch!”

They stopped. Dee rolled down the window and slid halfway out.

“What?”

“You can mulch in the flower beds!”

“What's that?”

“I don't know! But you can do it!”

He nodded and slid back into the car and they drove away.

I went back to my room and lay down. The more I thought about what had happened today, the madder I got. If only I had fought back. But I had chickened out.

I couldn't wait until next Saturday. If Tom Bethune came around scraping his bat, I'd take it away from him and bring it down on
his
head. Then I'd get Tim Bethune in a scissors hold so powerful it would squeeze his stomach in half. I'd light into those redneck jerks so hard, they'd beg me to stop. They'd be sorry they ever came into my yard. I would not chicken out again. I asked God to help me be brave and forgive me for almost calling Dee that word.

—

I keep my transistor radio on WRBC Rebel Radio Top 40. They play the best stuff. I put the radio under my pillow every night and it helps me fall asleep—unless they play a Beatles song. I'll stay awake for that.
They finally showed
A Hard Day's Night
in Jackson. It's not so much a good movie as a completely different movie from any I've ever seen. For one thing, I couldn't understand half of what those guys were saying.

The music was definitely the best part, but every girl in the theater was trying to scream louder than the girls in the movie. A little blond girl was crying in the lobby and screaming, “Good-bye, Ringo! I love you!” I looked at her for just a second and she kicked me and told me to shut up. I hadn't even said anything.

I told Mama I wanted to grow my hair long like the Beatles, and she said that was definitely not going to happen. I don't get why hair has to be such a big deal. The police are stopping people's cars if they have long hair. Some of the restaurants around here won't even let you sit down at a table if you have long hair. It's like you walked in with a sign:
COMMUNIST ON DRUGS
.

My all-time favorite way to fall asleep, though, is not listening to the radio. It's when Mama and Daddy have a party like they had last night. I lay there in the dark and listened and couldn't make out exactly what anybody was saying because my door was shut, but the sound of all that music and talking and laughing felt like a warm blanket to pull under my chin. I even like the smell of the cigarettes.

I was almost asleep when I heard Daddy and Dr. Freeman and Dr. Reeves talking in the hall. I've known Dr. Freeman since we moved from New Orleans to Jackson so Daddy could join his clinic. Dr. Reeves lives on our street. He's an eye doctor.

I could hear the ice tinkling in their glasses. Daddy was talking louder than usual and his words sounded blurry, which means he was drinking
liquor.

I asked him about liquor one time, because Stokes told me liquor is illegal and anybody who drinks it is breaking Mississippi law. He said his dad has a bootlegger from Rankin County who leaves it in a sack at their back door. I told Daddy I didn't see how liquor could be illegal when him and Mama and everybody who comes to their parties drinks it. I've seen the bottles sitting out. They usually keep them locked up in a cabinet.

Daddy said he wasn't going to lie to me, that yes, anybody drinking liquor was “technically” breaking Mississippi law.

“Worse than that,” he said, “they're breaking
Baptist
law.”

Those are two kinds of laws I thought nobody was ever supposed to break, but Daddy kind of winked when he said “Baptist.” And now he was out there with his glass, breaking the law again.

He was saying, real loud, “But why? Why have 'em wait in separate rooms?”

Dr. Freeman said, “Because that's how we've always handled it, Sam. You can't suddenly say, ‘Hey everybody, coloreds and whites are gonna all sit together now!' What's the point of messing with the way things have always been?”

Then I heard Dr. Reeves say, “Sam's right. So far the HEW is only worried about hospitals, but they'll get to doctors' offices sooner or later, you know they will. Things can't stay the way they've always been. We have to obey the law.”

“What the HEW wants and what will actually work in the state of Mississippi are two different things,” Dr. Freeman said. “This new law wants the coloreds going to the same bathrooms, drinking at the same water fountains, going to the same schools, but do you see any of that happening? And it's not gonna happen.”

“Sooner or later it will,” Dr. Reeves said. “If Johnson has to bring in troops to enforce the Civil Rights Act, he'll do it. Just like Kennedy did at Ole Miss.”

“Okay,” said Dr. Freeman, “let's put 'em all in the same waiting room. What do you think that'll get us? I'll tell ya what. Delivery rooms full of mulatto babies! Is that what you want this country to look like in fifty years? Is that who you want running things?”

“I'm just sayin' it doesn't seem right,” Daddy said.

“Has somebody been complaining to you about it?”

“No.”

“Well, let's wait till they do before we get all hopped up on what's right for the coloreds.”

“Somebody will be complaining, all right,” said a voice I didn't recognize. “Martin Luther Coon is tellin' them they're all African kings and queens.”

Daddy said, “I don't think that's what Dr. King wants to—”

“He just wants them to take over the country, is all,” interrupted the voice. “With him as the grand poobah. He knows that every time he goes somewhere and gives a speech and stirs everybody up and has another march, more people are gonna get hurt and go to jail, the people he supposedly cares about. I'll tell ya who Dr. King cares about and that's Dr. King.”

“Martin Luther King wants—”

“He wants 'em all to be up in white people's business. You mark my words. First it's waiting rooms, then it's restaurants, and before you know it, they're sitting next to you on the pew on Sunday.”

“Now that's where I draw the line,” said Dr. Freeman.

“Amen, brother,” said the voice.

“Look, I just want what's fair for everybody,” Daddy said.

Then his voice mixed in with all the others, and I didn't hear him again. I hope he said more about what's fair. I bet he did.

—

The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was my clock, so I know the bomb went off at 1:37. It sounded like thunder right next to my head.

The party was over, and the house was dark. Farish was already out on the patio, holding Mama's hand. Daddy stood there with his arms folded. Everybody was coughing. The backyard was thick with smoke like the foggin' machine had just driven through. It smelled terrible.

“Dadgum bunch of idiots,” Daddy was saying. Then he saw me and said, “It's all right, pal.”

When the smoke cleared, we could see the hole in the yard.

“You think it was cherry bombs, Daddy?” I asked.

“It was more than cherry bombs.”

Mama was madder than I've ever seen her. She was trying not to scream. “Call the police, Sam.”

“What good would that do?” said Daddy. “We don't know who did it.”

“Of course we know who did it!”

She meant the Bethunes.

Daddy told me everything was going to be all right and not to worry and to get on back to bed.