Call Me by My Name (20 page)

“What are y'all doing?” Angie asked this one night when she stepped from the car.

“We're camping,” I said. “What does it look like?”

“But what are you
doing
?”

Only now did I understand that she'd intended the question for Tater.

“Camping,” he said. “Doing what you do when you camp.”

She wouldn't stop. “Such as
what
?” He started to answer, but she cut him off. “Where do you use the bathroom, for instance?”

“Wherever they like,” Mama answered. “Let's move on, baby.”

But Angie was still waiting for Tater's reply.

“Behind trees,” he said at last. He looked off at an old oak thirty yards away. A roll of toilet paper sat on the tree's roots.

“We usually designate one for that purpose,” I explained.

“Can you imagine what life must be like for your bathroom tree?” she said. “You're standing along the bayou, minding your own business and making the world a pretty place and processing loads of carbon dioxide and putting oxygen in the air, when all of a sudden you two show up. It must be traumatizing.”

I supposed she was hoping for laughs. She got none.

“Where's Pops?” I asked.

Neither of them answered, which told me he'd decided to stay home. It was his way of protesting, I knew. He didn't want his daughter involved with Tater, and he wasn't happy about his son's involvement with him either. “Why can't you go camping with T-Boy or one of those?” he'd asked me, producing the same silence that lately I answered most of his questions with.

Angie hopped to her feet and brushed off the seat of her pants. “I'm ready when you are,” she said to Mama. Then she ran ahead to the Comet.

“I'm so sorry,” Mama said to Tater.

It was hard to tell whether she meant for just now or for other things. Tater put his arm around her shoulders and led her to the car. “Don't worry about it, Mrs. Boulet,” he said. “I sure don't worry about it.”

I didn't know what to make of Angie. She might've been a cheerleader at school, but she usually was a modest, private, serious-minded girl, and the type who made every effort to distract attention from the fact that she even used the bathroom. When we shopped with Mama at the A&P, Angie hid the toilet paper under other items in the buggy. The bathroom at home was always spick-and-span because she kept it that way, and I never once heard her pass gas let alone belch.

I wondered if she was trying to be one of the guys, talking the way she thought we did when members of polite society weren't around. It didn't register that she might've been calculating whether she would be comfortable on a campout until the next Saturday when she showed up at our campsite alone. She arrived in the Comet, and rather than leftover supper and frozen dairy bars, she brought two six packs of beer. The cans were warm, and I figured she'd raided the stash Pops kept stored in the shed. By now Tater and I had already drunk the pint of tequila that Tater had pilfered from Miss Nettie, so the beer was much appreciated. Angie made room for the cans in the ice chest, then she removed a grocery bag from the car, holding a change of clothes, toiletries, and a family-size bottle of mosquito repellant.

“Which tree is it tonight?” she asked, getting right to the point.

Tater pointed to a towering pecan with a large trunk, excellent for privacy. “If you want to spare the tree's feelings,” he said, “there's an abandoned outhouse in that overgrown stand of chicken trees on the edge of the pasture. Only problem, last time I stopped by, there was a moccasin coiled up on the seat.”

Had I wanted Angie to camp with us, I'd have invited her. I didn't feel like arguing in front of Tater, but she needed to let us know her plans for the night.

“I told them I was going to a slumber party at Julie's house,” she said. “There really is one, and I really did go. But I left after an hour and came here.”

“So you didn't lie. That's what you're saying.”

“I didn't lie. No. In the morning, if Mama asks how it went, I'll tell her—truthfully again—how boring it was and that will be that.”

“And what about Pops? What will you tell him?”

“He won't ask,” she said. “But if he does, I'll tell him it's none of his business.”

She sprayed repellant all over her body, then gave me the bottle to cover her backside. I'd never seen her drink before, and I struggled now with the sight of her holding a Schlitz Tall Boy. Something about her manner smacked of the provocateur, the young rebel wanting to upset the status quo.

“Pops would blow his top if you talked to him like that,” I said.

She laughed and slurped her beer. “Then I should make sure to do it.”

We arranged the quilts around the fire and lay on them with our hands folded behind our heads and stared off at so many stars clotting the sky, it seemed they were one star. We really got after the beer, and we listened to the radio until midnight when KSLO went off the air. It was the only station in town, and we were so far out in the sticks that finding a replacement with good reception wasn't easy. Tater worked the dial until he found a channel out of Lafayette playing “Layla” by Derek and the Dominos, and he jumped to his feet and reached for Angie's hand, which she surrendered without hesitation.

They danced around the fire like a pair of drunk, hungry cannibals gearing up for a late-night repast—yeah, one that basically amounted to each other. In the hot firelight you could see how beautiful they both were. Tater wore hiking boots, jean cutoffs, and a light T-shirt adorned with an Indian warbonnet and the word
WARRIORS
across the chest. Angie had rolled her white shorts up to the points of her hips, and her halter top, as I'd warned her in a whisper earlier, “just isn't working hard enough to keep you from spilling out.” Bare feet stamping the grass, she moved without her usual grace, and instead demonstrated that at the core of every smart, pretty girl was a hellion needing only beer and a campfire to set her free.

“Don't you wish I'd brought Regina with me?” Angie asked me when the song ended. She fell to the ground in a swoon and lay panting against me. “My brother is in love with Regina Perrault,” she said. Her eyes were closed, and I wasn't sure if she was making a general statement of fact or edifying Tater on the subject.

“This explains why the more he drinks, the more he mumbles her name,” he said.

“I don't understand genetics,” Angie said. “Whenever I see an attractive girl—Regina is definitely that—I check out her brothers to see what they're like. I do this because I have such a handsome, desirable twin, and I have this fantasy about the two of us double-dating. Anyway, Regina's brother, Carl, is a year ahead of us, and he's just not in her league in the cute department.”

“I like Carl,” I said. “Good dude.”

She wasn't listening. “Because if Rodney ever does pursue Regina, I thought it might be interesting if there was a male equivalent in the Perrault family
pour moi
. We could keep the twin thing going in perpetuity and have a large wedding ceremony—you know, a two-for-the-price-of-one kind of deal, and save Pops some money. Then Rodney and I could have dinner together every Sunday and stuff like that.”

“And wear the same clothes,” Tater said. “All four of you.”

“No more beer for me,” I announced. “No more for you either,” I said to Angie.

“I don't think I could hold Carl's hand, let alone kiss him,” she replied, then threw an arm across my chest and fell asleep.

I slept too. And when I awoke, hours later, she and Tater were sitting on a quilt a few feet away from me, closer to the fire. Head wildly tumbling from the beer and tequila, I had a hard time comprehending what they were doing, which was so extraordinary I wondered if I was dreaming.

Tater's legs were crossed under him, and Angie, positioned behind him, was removing leeches from his body. Fat, black, and glistening, the leeches counted in the dozens, and blood smudged Tater's skin where they had latched on. As she picked each one off, she flicked it in the fire, making sparks shoot up. The leeches had anchored to the exposed areas of his body, and suddenly it occurred to me that if he had them, I likely had them too. I stood and frantically started brushing my arms and face with my hands. I ran in place, the way we did at football practice, knees pumping high, feet light on the turf. Angie and Tater let me continue for a while before stopping me with laughs. This was the same moment I saw the sun topping the trees and coloring the dirt road that ran on the side of the fields.

“How long did I sleep?” I asked.

Angie was working on his upper torso now, her face screwed up in disgust. “Four hours maybe. Five at most.”

I saw fresh wood on the fire, the blaze stronger than when I fell off.

I felt poisoned, like I'd substituted the Schlitz with rat killer. “Where'd your little friends come from?” I asked, then lay back and covered my face with my hands.

“We went swimming in the pond,” Angie said.

She meant the watering hole where the cows went to drink. Now it was my turn to laugh, despite the load of pain it dropped on my cranium. “The cows do more than just drink in there. At least we have trees to hide behind when we need to do those things.”

“Oh, God,” she said. “We walked right in it, spent a long time in it.”

“That explains why the bottom was so soft,” Tater said.

“Where are your leeches?” I said to her, asking a question that I immediately knew I'd never pose to another human being for as long as I lived.

“Tater was a gentleman,” she answered. “He insisted on taking mine off first, then I went to work on his.”

She finished and stood up, and I noticed that she'd wrapped a towel around her middle and knotted it at her waist. Still, a thin trickle of blood ran from her inner thigh past her knee. I wondered if it was the result of a leech's damage or the beginning of her menstrual cycle. I glanced at Tater. He was checking his legs for more leeches. Hoping to avoid his attention, I held my gaze on the blood on Angie's leg. She looked down, quickly toweled it off, then fled for the bathroom tree.

I checked her toiletries to see if she'd come prepared, but there was only facial tissue. I knew her well enough to know that she was as “regular as clockwork,” as I'd heard her say to Mama. It seemed unlikely that she didn't know her period was coming.

When she returned to the fire, she was holding the towel in a bundle in her arms. “I'd better go,” she said. “Pops will want the car. And I need a bath in the worst way.”

“You'll miss breakfast,” Tater said. “We always scramble eggs.”

“I don't want to get in trouble.”

I stayed on the quilt. Tater gave her a hug good-bye.

She left with a maelstrom of dust in her wake.

The baseball season ended in Baker on August 7, when we lost in a regional tournament to the hardest-throwing pitcher in the state. Only Tater, with a pair of singles, was able to hit him. It was my worst day all summer. I grounded out twice and struck out my next time up. After the strikeout, I threw my helmet from the batter's box to the dugout in a fit of frustration, and Coach Arnaud pulled me from the game.