Call Me by My Name (14 page)

On the bus ride home I was once again seated next to him. Somewhere on the interstate south of Grand Coteau, a car passed in the lane on the side of the bus with a young woman breast-feeding her child in the passenger seat. The car's interior light was on, making her hard to miss.

“Hey look!” Marco Miller shouted, “That lady's got her boob out.”

In an instant we all moved to the left side, upsetting the balance and making it feel as if we were going to tip over. The baby must've been around six months old, and the woman had her breast poking through a flap in her bra. It was the first time I'd ever seen a mother and child this way, and I found it exciting and repulsive both at once. This seemed an act for animals, not people. True, people were animals, or so Dead Eye Dud had taught us. But I couldn't believe we were
that
kind of animal. I had to fight off a gag impulse, even as I was awed by the heavy engorged breast and the nipple the color of an Allegheny plum.

The coaches hollered for us to get back to our seats, and when I returned to mine I realized that Tater was the only player on our side who hadn't rushed over for a look. He was sitting forward with his head on his arms, and he was sobbing into his pads.

I understood who the woman in the wheelchair was.

I never took him for a liar, but he really did have a talent for keeping secrets. How else could he have gone so long without telling me his mother was alive? Angie and I discussed the subject that night when we got home. She'd worked out all the answers in her head, and she presented one in the form of a question: “If Pops tried to kill Mama and then killed himself, would you want to talk about it?”

“That wouldn't happen.”

“But just saying it did.”

“Then I would talk to you about it.”

“Anybody else?”

She had me. “No.”

I was as frustrated as I'd ever been. I knew I couldn't approach Tater for a thorough personal accounting without expecting to be laughed at or challenged to a fight. I supposed I could've asked Angie to get the story out of him, but it would've been underhanded, and I didn't do things that way. Having no other option, I decided to talk to Coach Cadet. I needed to clean out my locker the next morning, anyway.

I put my personal effects in paper shopping bags, then walked to his office. He was watching film; I could hear the projector through the door. I knocked, and he hollered for me to come in.

When he saw who it was, he put down his clicker and had me turn on the ceiling light.

“That lady in the wheelchair when we played Lafayette High?” I said. “That was Tater Henry's mother, Coach.”

The coils in his chair squeaked as he leaned back and brought his arms over his head. “Sit down,” he said.

“All the time I've known him I believed she was dead.”

He was quiet as he sat appraising me. I could tell he was trying to figure out what I was after.

“Her name is Alma Henry,” he said. “She is indeed his mother. She lives in a government-run facility over on the north end.”

“She lives in town?”

“It's a place for poor people who can't afford the medical attention they need. Chateau Something. The lady Tater lives with . . . his aunt? The two of them go and see her every Sunday after church for lunch. Alma has only partial eyesight. Tater told me the aunt made the arrangements to have her travel in a van to see him play against Lafayette. It was Tater's first start and he wanted his mom to be there. You can appreciate that, can't you, Rodney?”

“Yes, sir. But I thought his father killed her. That's what I always believed.”

“Do you have private things you don't like to talk about?”

“I'm sure I do, but she's his mother, Coach.”

He picked a rubber band off the desk and began to roll it around with his index fingers. “He came to me a few days before the game and asked if I would mind if she was there. It's hard to read Tater sometimes, but I think he was worried his teammates would fix on her and make a big deal of it. ‘Your daddy tried to murder your mama?' ‘He blew the side of her face off with a shotgun?' Things like that. Definitely not the kind of distraction anybody would want before a game with the best football team in the state.” He kept rolling the band. “Anyway, I'm glad she could make it. He was a warrior that night, and I'm sure it did a world of good for them both.”

“He had a twin, he told me.”

“I don't know anything about that. I thought it was just him.”

“She died when they were born.”

He shook his head. “News to me.”

I got up to leave. I went to flip off the light, and I heard the coils in his chair squeak again. “You said it was a girl?”

“Yes, sir. He told me her name was Rosalie.”

A metal filing cabinet stood against the wall. He opened a drawer and pulled out a manila folder.
TATUM HENRY
was written across the tab in orange ink. Coach Cadet kept one of these files for every player on the team. I saw familiar papers inside, mostly questionnaires and consent and medical forms our parents had been required to fill out before we could go out for the team.

Coach leaned back in the chair. “She died, you say? Rosalie?”

“Yes, sir. And he lived, and I guess . . . Well, I wondered if it had something to do with why Tater seemed so secretive sometimes. Like there was a connection between what he lost and who he was, if that makes sense.”

Coach glanced up from the papers. “R-o-s-a-l-i-e?” He wrote the name on the side of the form.

“I don't know how to spell it.”

“There well could've been a twin. I don't have any reason to believe that story isn't true. But this questionnaire was filled out and signed by the aunt. And it says right here there's a brother.” He pointed to the place on the page, and now he began to mumble to himself. “Robert Battier. Are you kidding me?” He said it this way:
Batch-yay.
“Could've been a half brother, I suppose, which would explain the different last names.”

“You've lost me, Coach.”

“Robert Battier,” he said, louder this time. “Tater's brother.”

“Don't know him.”

“Robert Battier might've been the best football player J. S. Clark ever produced. He was several years ahead of you boys, would've long since been gone by the time of integration. He carried them to the semifinals for the black schools, then got busted for drugs and kicked off the team.” He waved the paper between us. “I don't read these things, and I definitely never knew he and Tater were related. This is a shock. An absolute, unmitigated shock. Of course without him, Clark went on to lose the championship. And Robert sat in the parish prison for a good, long while before they let him out.”

“Why haven't I ever heard of him?”

“Because he went to Clark, son, and nobody who's white cared what went on over there. The newspaper didn't even cover them.”

He returned the document to the file and started playing with the rubber band again. “Crazy turd. It's coming back to me now. Robert goes missing the week before the biggest game in the school's history, and the principal finally calls the cops to help find him. They find him, all right. He's holed up in a vacant house, and so high on marijuana he can't even tell them his name.”
Merry-ja-wanna
, Coach said it. “What a waste of a human life. They say he was smooth.”

“Smooth, Coach?”

He seemed to be trying to remember something else. “That's right,” he said. “And everybody called him that.”

The next weekend Angie got word that she'd won a blue ribbon for an oil painting she'd entered in the Yambilee's arts-and-crafts competition. It was a large canvas done in oils showing Mama's dresses thrown on top of a chair. Up close it looked like a jumbled abstract, but as you stepped back you could make out the colors, patterns, and textures of the outfits, and a picture revealed itself. Angie called it
All Kinds
and Pops made a frame for it out of scrap boards he kept under the house. The prize was for her age group, but she'd also been named first runner-up for Best in Show.

Angie had been reluctant to enter the competition. “It's incendiary,” she'd said of her painting. “I hope people don't think I'm a communist.”

I thought I understood what she was trying to say in the picture, but Mama and Pops didn't seem to.
All Kinds
to them simply meant all kinds of dresses.

“I wish I had the energy to pick up more,” Mama said.

“Me? I wish we could afford help,” Pops said. He winked at Angie. “See there, baby? You really got us thinking. That's what art can do.”

The weekend turned out to be a time of recognition and honor for me as well. My first year as a starter on the football team had begun with a long string of defeats but ended on a positive note when the league's coaches named me first-team all-district in a unanimous vote. I received the news in a phone call from Coach Cadet.

“You keep working hard and putting the time in, and you'll be one of the all-time greats before it's over,” he said.

Tater had played in only two games, but they were enough to earn him a spot among the league's honorable mentions. The quarterbacks who were named to the first and second teams had both received scholarships to play major-college ball. While it was true that their passing and rushing totals for the season were twice as high as Tater's, it was also true that they'd played in eight more games.

On Saturday, Pops let Angie and me borrow the Cameo, and we drove straight to the Yambilee grounds for a look at her painting. It was on display in the Yamatorium, a cavernous World War II–era Quonset hut with a metal bas-relief over the front door showing a sweet potato with a happy face. The festival featured various competitions along with the art show, including the Yambilee Queen beauty pageant and contests for the best-looking yams. There was also a category for most unique yam, which honored the potato that best resembled an animal or human being. One recent winner bore an uncanny likeness to Richard Nixon, and a picture of it ran in the local paper alongside a photo of the president.

We found
All Kinds
hanging from a Peg-Board right as you entered the building. Two ribbons hung from its weathered cypress frame, a blue one and a red one. Next to it was the painting that had won Best in Show—a brightly colored acrylic depicting sweet potatoes spilling from a crate.

Angie posed with
All Kinds
, and I snapped some pictures with the family Instamatic. Then I stood in front, and she aimed the camera at me, chest blown up big in a demonstration of pride.

Next we gave the camera to a man we knew from church, and he photographed us standing on either side of the picture.

“You should've won two blues,” I said. “Yours is way better than the one with the potatoes.”

“Art is so subjective,” she said.

“But it's clear to me, Ang. Clear as day. The one of the potatoes is propaganda. Yours is profound and challenging. It's unfair you didn't win, and anybody with a pair of eyes can see it.”

“The most beautiful thing in the world to one person is sometimes the least appealing to another,” she declared. Then she glanced at me and shrugged. “To be honest, I don't like finishing second to those potatoes either. But I didn't paint
All Kinds
for everybody else. I painted it for me.”

The Yambilee also had a fair with amusement rides like bumper cars and a Ferris wheel and carnival games where you basically depleted your life savings trying to win a stuffed animal. I played a lot of Skee-Ball after Angie and I first left the Yamatorium, but it was the ring toss that obsessed me. This was the game where for a dollar you threw three small rings at sticks standing up on a platform. The goal was to get the rings to fall over the top of the sticks and to slide down to the bottom, making you a winner. But all of my rings, which really were plastic napkin holders, bounced off the finials decorating the canes and clattered to the ground. I'd already gone through twelve bucks when Angie pulled me away, and as we spun into the midway I nearly bumped into Tater.