Beach Music (46 page)

“She tried to hit me. That was intentional,” Otis said, rising and dusting off his pants and pointing his bat menacingly at Jordan. But Jordan paid Otis no attention at all, just received the toss from the catcher, then walked back to the rosin bag, tossed it up and down a couple of times, the dust exploding between his fingers like a dandelion going to seed.

“Throw strikes, new kid,” the coach ordered.

The second pitch was thrown just as hard. It missed Otis’s throat by a millimeter and sent Otis spinning out of control once again, falling backward toward the visiting team’s dugout.

“Otis, you look a bit tense in the batting cage,” Coach Langford said.

“He’s wild as a billy goat, Coach,” Otis shouted.

Jordan said, “I still remind you of a girl?”

“You sure as hell do, Goldilocks.”

The next pitch hit Otis high on the rib cage, making a sound like a watermelon hit by a throwing knife.

I was standing next to Mike in the outfield and said, “Otis could never read the handwriting on the wall.”

“Looks like we found us a damn pitcher,” Mike said.

“The question is: Can he throw it over the plate?” I said.

Otis rose painfully to his feet, roared once, then started out toward the mound, brandishing his bat. The long-haired boy did not appear to be cowed and took several steps forward to meet Otis’ charge. Coach Langford got between them first and kept them separated with his spavined, meaty hands.

“Not smart to make fun of a boy who throws that hard,” Coach Langford said to Otis. “Can you get that ball over the plate, son?”

Jordan turned his blue eyes at that drawling, overweight coach who ran a gas station for a living and brought an irrepressible love of sport and young boys to the task of coaching. Even then, Jordan could take a quick read of anyone, and was as clear-sighted as he was mercurial and moody, and Jordan saw the goodness of the man below that primitive, fascist exterior that is the general rule among the Southern fraternity of coaches. It was the man’s basic and abiding sweetness that Jordan felt as Coach Langford put the ball back into Jordan’s glove and said, “Son, now I’d like to see you strike him out.”

In four pitches, Jordan struck Otis out swinging. There was an audible murmur from the boys in the field as they admired the speed of Jordan’s pitch and the explosive, satisfying pop it made in Benny’s glove.

For Capers, Mike, and myself, the addition of Jordan completed our group in some elemental way. In our junior and senior years of
high school, Jordan was the right halfback in what became known as the Middleton backfield and we lost only two games in those final two years. On the basketball team, Jordan was a tremendous leaper, a scrapper under the boards, and he hit the jump shot from the corner that won the lower state championship game against North Augusta High. His pitching improved every year as he grew into his formidable manhood and his fastball was timed in the high eighties by the end of his senior year when he took his team to the brink of the championship.

But it was Capers who recognized Jordan’s potential that day: Beneath the flowing mane of blond hair, he saw both the attractiveness and the danger in Jordan’s rare smile, rare in its openness and candor, hidden by the rebellious, unhappy boy who seemed at war with the entire adult world. Capers recognized the sexual aura that Jordan wore in his insolent, thin-lipped assurance. Sensing a potential rival, he sought to befriend Jordan before the stranger proved dangerous.

No protest ever arose from me or Mike because we had learned from our early boyhood to follow Capers’ lead in everything. Capers expected it as one of his natural rights in a friendship that had been imbalanced from the beginning. Because Capers grew up in a household that revered politics, he understood the strategies that involved silence and indirection. He would plant an idea in Mike that would cause an argument with me and both of us would turn gratefully to him for relief or intercession. Often, he simply became the tie-breaking vote called to intervene between his bickering friends. His tyranny was encased in velvet and appreciated. Capers admired the horseplay and mischief that Mike and I brought to his straitlaced life; he rarely made any demands of his own and Mike and I never realized that Capers always got his way. We were the instruments of a superior political instinct who was ruthless in the sweetest, most generous way. In the South, the cotillion of Machiavelli is always played as a soft-shoe, in three-quarter time.

But it was Skeeter Spinks who really bonded the friendship of the four of us. Skeeter came out of the lowest echelons of the white South and he came out mean. His time in high school had been a reign of terror for Waterford’s teenage boys because Skeeter liked to
brag that he’d beaten every boy in school at least once. Smart boys especially dreaded his approach, for he took special pleasure in humiliating them. His frame was enormous and he combined an overworked farm boy’s strength with a lifetime of bad manners. He was volatile, thick-necked, and the possessor of a both razor-blade and hair-trigger temper. Skeeter was one of those boys of nightmare that make having a penis during an American childhood almost unendurable.

In the summer of 1962, Skeeter had chosen me as his special project for the season. The advent of school integration had aroused Skeeter’s virulent hatred of black people and Skeeter’s daddy personally blamed my father, Judge McCall, for the coming of integration to Waterford. As a rising ninth-grader, I was a little too young for Skeeter to beat senseless, but I could never pass by without Skeeter putting me into a headlock and playfully humiliating me in front of a crowd of girls. He had taken to slapping me lightly and playfully in the face, but as the summer wore on there was a slight but constant escalation in the vigor of the slaps. I tried to avoid all the places where Skeeter hung out, but Skeeter noticed this and part of his pleasure was crossing the streets to find the places where I went to avoid him.

During Pony League that summer, I had nowhere to hide because Skeeter never missed a baseball game. I had just reached the height of six feet and the weight of one hundred fifty pounds, and I was gangly and not yet comfortable with my size. I felt soft and comic, like a Great Dane puppy, but Skeeter decided my size was a new threat coming up through the ranks. He had been out of high school for a year and working as an auto mechanic at the Chevrolet dealership when he heard that I had referred to him as that “zitfaced jerk-off.”

It was true. I was guilty of sullying Skeeter’s reputation with those exact words, but I had said it among friends, never dreaming it would get back to Skeeter. Walking one day with Capers, Mike, and Jordan, I was talking about a terrific game we had just lost to Summerville 1–0. We were replaying every pitch of the game when two carloads of last year’s football linemen screeched to a halt and Skeeter and five of his friends jumped out and faced us. We were still
wearing our gloves and sweating from the game. Jordan was carrying a thirty-four-inch Louisville Slugger that I had broken with a foul tip and Jordan had repaired with masking tape.

Skeeter went right to work and slapped me across the mouth with a swift backhand that sent me to my knees, tasting blood in my mouth.

“I heard a rumor you called me something bad, McCall,” Skeeter crowed. “I wanted to see if you had the guts to call me that to my face.”

“Jack told me he thought you were a prince among men and a credit to the white race,” Mike said, trying to help me rise.

“Shut up, Jew boy,” Skeeter ordered.

“Get lost, Skeeter,” Capers said. “We weren’t bothering anyone.”

“Button your lip, pretty boy, before I tear both your lips off and feed ’em to the crabs for dinner,” Skeeter said and rabbit-punched me on the back of the neck and sent me sprawling to the ground again.

That’s when Jordan hit the bat against the sidewalk, just to let Skeeter know there was a new kid in town.

“Hey, booger-face,” Jordan said. “You look like the Clearasil poster child. You got any cheeks beneath those pimples?”

Mike closed his eyes sadly and later would admit that he thought that Jordan had just uttered his last words on earth and that Skeeter, with his IQ of an Ice Age vegetarian, would think up new and gruesome ways for the California boy to die a grisly death.

“He called you booger-face,” Henry Outlaw, the punt snapper on the football team, said.

“Henry picked right up on that,” Mike said.

“Shut up, Hess,” Henry said, “or I’ll cut your butt and eat it raw.”

“I ain’t believing I heard that right,” Skeeter said, moving slowly toward Jordan, who simply held the bat more tightly. “Could you repeat it, pretty please?”

“No, penis-breath,” Jordan said. “I won’t repeat it you ugly, Dumbo-eared, gapped-tooth, hyena-faced redneck. And don’t take another step toward me, or you’ll be shitting out the splinters of this bat all night long.”

“O-o-o-h,” Skeeter’s crowd said in mock terror as Skeeter laughed out loud and pretended to shrink back.

“You some of that Marine shit they get in at Pollock Island every year?”

“Yep, I’m some of that Marine shit,” Jordan said. “But I happen to be Marine shit that’s carrying a baseball bat.”

“I’m gonna take that bat away from you, then kick your ass all over this town,” Skeeter said and his voice was a hiss, something mean of spirit and snakelike. “Then I’m gonna shave your head bald.”

“The bat’s your first problem, dick-head,” Jordan said.

“Don’t piss him off any worse than he already is,” I said quietly to Jordan.

Henry Outlaw said, “This shitbird’s dead meat, McCall.”

“You ain’t got enough guts to hit me with that bat,” Skeeter boasted.

“You better pray that’s true,” Jordan said and then surprised everyone by smiling at Skeeter.

It seemed unnatural that Jordan was not the tiniest bit cowed or intimidated by Skeeter. The fight was obviously a mismatch, a pure case of a full-grown man picking a fight with a boy. Jordan simply held on to the bat and stared Skeeter down as Jordan awaited the coming charge, balanced and composed. None of the boys on the street that day knew that Jordan Elliott had spent a lifetime being torn up by a full-grown Marine. Though he feared that Marine with all his heart, he did not fear young hoodlums and punks.

Skeeter removed his tee shirt, sweat-stained and fouled with oil, and threw it at one of his friends. He spit on his hands and rubbed them together and stood facing Jordan, bare-chested, his muscles deeply defined and cruel in their elegant arrangement.

“Jesus,” Henry Outlaw said in pure admiration of that honed, keenly developed body.

“Tell your friend about me,” Skeeter said, beginning to make feints toward Jordan. “He’s fairly new in town and don’t realize he’s about to die.”

Mike said, “Jordan, I’d like to introduce you to our real good friend, Skeeter Spinks. We’re all real proud of Skeeter. He’s our town bully.”

Capers and I laughed and for a moment it looked as if Skeeter was considering changing his line of attack.

“Me first, Skeeter,” Jordan said, getting Skeeter’s attention back to the business at hand. “Skeeter? You’re named for that little bitty insect that sucks blood out of babies’ asses? The guy we used to be afraid of in California was a surfer named Turk. We California boys don’t worry too much about dopes named after insects.”

“Oh God,” Henry Outlaw said. “This boy’s asking for it so bad.”

“It’d take a real chicken-shit to hit a man with a baseball bat instead of using his fists,” Skeeter growled.

“Yeh,” Jordan said. “It’s a shame you aren’t fighting a real brave son of a bitch.”

“Use your fists,” Skeeter ordered. “Fight like a man.”

“I’d be glad to Skeeter,” Jordan said. “But we’re not the same size. And we’re not the same age. You’re bigger than me. Just like you’re bigger than Jack. So what this baseball bat does is even up the fight a little bit.”

“My guess is that you ain’t got the guts to use that thing,” Skeeter said, charging Jordan suddenly and without warning.

That night, as Skeeter Spinks lay in the intensive care unit of the hospital, all of Waterford knew that Skeeter had guessed wrong.

Later, the town would learn about Jordan’s extraordinary sense of balance and his unflappable poise. His movements were lightning fast and that day I saw Jordan react with the speed of an Eastern diamondback when Skeeter made his ill-advised charge. What was also clear was that Jordan had been ready for the fight the moment he tapped the bat on the cement. And once he had primed himself, he glowed with a concentration that was nearly a state of prayer. What we had witnessed was not simply courage, but a form of recklessness that came from deep within Jordan’s spirit. He almost killed Skeeter Spinks with that baseball bat.

Jordan stepped aside and avoided Skeeter’s first headlong rush. Skeeter’s plan was a good one and he tried to sweep Jordan off his feet the same way he had brought down small halfbacks who slashed off tackles during high school games. The plan fell apart when Jordan
avoided the tackle and brought the bat down solidly against the back of Skeeter’s head. That first blow caused a concussion to the rear of his brain. The sound was like a hand ax cleaving through a chicken carcass. Instead of staying down, Skeeter staggered to his feet, humiliated and furious, and made another, though far less certain dive for Jordan, whose faith in wielding the bat had not been misplaced. The second swing of the bat broke three of Skeeter’s ribs and one of the splintered bones punctured his right lung. That’s why he was vomiting blood when the ambulance arrived.

Skeeter still did not get the point and made one last fruitless lunge toward Jordan, who stood his ground with that same chilling, imperturbable air of calm. That’s when Jordan broke Skeeter’s jaw. The broken jaw ended Skeeter’s career as the town bully. Never again did he provoke the nightmare of a young Waterford boy and there wasn’t a single young boy in town who didn’t know Jordan Elliott’s name the next day. No arrest was made and there were never any legal repercussions against Jordan.

I was later to discover that love and pain were synonymous in the life of Jordan Elliott. As our friendship grew closer and Jordan witnessed on several occasions my humiliation at the sight of my father’s drunken ravings, he told me about the time he had run away during seventh grade. His mother had hunted the surfing beaches of Southern California until she found him out in the Pacific looking toward Asia for the next wave to ride. It was soon after that Mrs. Elliott forced Jordan into the psychiatric office of a Captain Jacob Brill. Over and over again, Jordan repeated this story to me, word for word.