Call Me by My Name (29 page)

I'd gone the whole year without giving up a sack, and I'd forgotten how awful it made you feel. I was cursing so much I was lucky the refs didn't flag me for unsportsmanlike conduct. Refs can forgive some words, but they don't like it when you take the Lord's name in vain, even when you're shouting the insult at yourself.

Still straddling Tater, Truman swatted celebratory fists at the air. Lemuel Weeks, the guard who played next to me, ran over and pushed him out of the way, and then I helped Tater to his feet and pulled the grass and mud from his face mask. If you're playing hard, the words “I'm sorry” should never leave your mouth. But I did tell Tater that I wouldn't let it happen again. And by the look in my eyes he had to know I meant it.

We approached the line for the second play. “I hope you enjoyed your moment in the sunshine, Truman,” I said and glanced up at the black sky dumping rain, “because it'll be the last time you touch him tonight.”

Truman still didn't look at me, but he did speak. “Just shut up and play, Boulet,” he said, pronouncing it “Bullet,” which set off a whistle screaming in my head.

In his pregame speech in a cold stadium locker room, Coach Cadet had said the game tonight would be the one we remembered when we were old men looking back on our lives. But we'd run only one offensive play and already I had lost all awareness of a future or a past, and instead I was living the moment with such clarity and purpose that I felt like a wild beast without a mind to anything but its next meal.

Tater had called for a “strong left 71 option,” which meant the play would develop right behind Lemuel and me on the left side of the line. Byrd was showing a five-man front, with a nose guard, two tackles, and two ends. T-Boy's assignment was to brush past the end and try to tie up the strong safety. Tater would then determine what to do with the ball by how the unblocked end played him. If the end went after the pitchman, who in this case was Jasper, then Tater would tuck the ball and run. But if the end's responsibility was the quarterback, then Tater would pitch the ball to Jasper. In either case, my burden was to make sure Truman didn't disrupt the play by penetrating the line. It had looked easy enough when Coach Valentine drew it up on the grease board in position meetings. But Truman was just a letter
T
in those diagrams, and in the flesh he was way more ball player than I cared to contemplate.

As Tater was calling out signals, I heard one of the linebackers calling out his own for the defense, and Truman shifted from directly in front of me to my right shoulder, shading the gap. Eugene snapped the ball, and I crashed down hard on Truman as he plowed into the space between Lemuel and me. Truman staggered back a step absorbing my helmet, my face mask striking between the seven and the nine on his jersey, then I steered him farther inside until he collapsed against the pile. Tater, meanwhile, had pitched the ball to Jasper for a seventeen-yard gain. As Truman lay under me, eating chunks of sod, I thought I'd educate him on the proper way to say my name. I removed my mouthpiece and smiled at him.

“It's Boulet,” I said, emphasizing the French accent. “My ancestors came to this country from France in the seventeen hundreds.”

He was silent except for a strange wheezing that might've meant he was having trouble breathing.

By the start of the second quarter, Truman's legs were spent and so was his will, and by the fourth, crusts of black blood rimmed his nostrils and his lips were dry and swollen.

“
Boo-lay
,” I said every time I knocked him down.

“Bullet,” he said whenever he got the better of me.

The weather and the field made it a sloppy game, and so did nerves. Most of the guys couldn't loosen up because they couldn't forget how much was at stake. Tater, usually so composed with everything on the line, kept putting too much on his passes and sailing them high. His runs had a schizophrenic quality in how he stacked moves on top of one another and made unnecessary cuts when taking an opponent head-on or blowing past him would've served him better. Going for broke when safe-and-steady was more in order, he threw an interception that Byrd returned for a touchdown. Trying to force other big plays, he fumbled twice. “Settle down, son,” Coach Cadet must've yelled a hundred times from the sideline.

The score was 13–8, Byrd, with less than two minutes left to play when Rubin forced a fumble and we recovered the ball on our own 11-yard line. It likely would be our last possession, and a field goal wouldn't help. We had to get the ball in the end zone.

We tried three straight midrange passes that all went incomplete against Byrd's prevent defense, which had only three linemen rushing and eight others staying back to protect against the pass. Desperate to find an answer, Tater called for a time-out, one of two remaining. He usually consulted with Coach Cadet during time-outs, but now he remained with the offense on the field and gathered us around him.

“Let me ask you something,” he said to Eugene Mistrot. “Are you good enough?”

I flashed to Angie and their encounter with Curly in the park.

The rain started to pick up, and Eugene looked off at a white curtain falling sideways against the lights. “You saying I'm not, Tater?”

“I'm asking if you are.”

“Doggone right I am,” Eugene said.

Now Tater reached across the huddle and hooked Louie Boudreaux's face mask with a finger. “What about you, Louie? Are you good enough?”

“Hell, yeah, I'm good enough.”

Tater asked the same question of seven other players before arriving at me. He stepped across the huddle and got up in my face. I could smell his breath—a cinnamon scent, just like that day in the park years ago when I first felt compelled to protect him. “And you, Rodney? Are you good enough?”

“Ask Truman,” I said without hesitation. “He should be able to tell you, if he can still open his damn mouth. Now call the play already. It's time to end this thing.”

Done with interrogating us, Tater calmly walked over to the head official and told him to give us our last time-out. Then he jogged over to Coach Cadet on the sideline, eyes on Angie as he went. The rest of the cheerleaders were doing a cheer, but she stood without moving and tracked his steps.

He waved. She waved back.

Tater took a squirt from the trainer's water bottle, and Coach gave him the play before pushing him back out on the field.

“He wants the Hail Mary,” he said as he stepped back in the huddle. “But I'm not sure.”

We stared at him, waiting for permission to speak.

“Speak up,” he said. “It's now or never. What do we do?”

Everybody chimed in at once. The Bigfeet were split on what to call, but Louie and the other skill guys wanted the pass. I waited until they'd all had their say before adding my own: “I think our only chance is for you to run it.”

Tater looked up.

“Everybody's expecting the Hail Mary. But the ball's slippery and the field's a giant mud pie. Truman's been rushing to my left, sprinting hard, trying to get around the corner. Let him fly by me again, then cut it upfield between Lemuel and me. You'll be in space in no time. From there it's up to you.”

He still seemed unsure. I extended my hand across the huddle, blood dripping from the torn knuckles. He took it in his.

“You can do it, Tater,” I said.

At the line we calculated our splits and I lowered my left hand onto the icy sod for the last time that night. The rain ticked against the back of my helmet and dripped into my earholes. Tater's voice sounded hoarse and faraway as he called for the snap. And on the second
hut
I came backpedaling out of my stance, low in my haunches for optimum punching power, showing pass to seduce Truman. He did what I'd hoped he would. He shot the gap between T-Boy and me, and I made no effort to slow him down. He flew past me with the same laugh I'd heard to start the game, and he ran himself right out of the play. “
Boo-lay
,” I said, even with my mouthpiece still in. I knew he was done.

Lemuel had the Mike linebacker tied up, and Tater raced past them into open field. He was face-to-face now with defensive players who had no one blocking them. Cutting hard from a tight pivot, he made a cornerback miss low at his shoestrings, then he stiff-armed the free safety and powered past him. Next up was the Willie linebacker, who catapulted his body in Tater's direction and would've ended the game on the spot had I not arrived in time. I picked him off in flight, ramming my helmet into the knob at his crotch. Suddenly the field was a lot less crowded. I shook off the burn in my neck and went chasing after Tater, in case he needed me. But he didn't need me.

He moved from the left side to the middle of the field, water clapping at his feet with each step. I slogged behind him as close as I could but rapidly lost ground as he began to accelerate.

He juked out yet another would-be tackler who stumbled and slid into a clutch of photographers on the sideline. He juked one more, whose bellyflop shot a geyser in the air.

“Go,” I heard myself saying. “Go, Tater. Go.”

But his beautiful run ended. He was crossing Byrd's 20-yard-line when his right knee buckled and he started to fall. He might've been dropping from a great height, the way he pitched backward with his arms akimbo, and the ball coming loose in the moment before his body struck the ground. Did he intentionally fumble to keep the play alive? It was a question that would come up later when Byrd's coaches argued that by purposely fumbling the ball Tater had committed a penalty that should've nullified the play and ended the game.

“Rodney,” Tater called out, which suggested he knew I was trailing him and would be there to gather up the ball.
“Rodney . . .”

The football was spinning round and round in the mud, devouring time like one of those clocks in the movies that shows how fast a life goes by. I reached down and sucked it up in stride, my weight driving me forward. I tried to hold the ball against my chest, but it fought against me. I bobbled it, nearly lost it. Bobbled it again.

I glimpsed his face as he was trying to get off the ground, and I remembered the look—it was the one from weeks before at Eunice.

What now?
I thought.
Do I turn back to help him? Would he want that?

Byrd's fastest defensive players closed on me from behind. I had only ten yards to travel but the distance seemed to build with every stride. The first of them leaped on my back, the second tomahawked the ball. I hung on somehow.

Three of them clung to my back, and then Truman Millicent made it four. He hit me as hard as I'd ever been hit, and yet I kept my feet and carried him and the others into the end zone. The ref raised his arms to signal the touchdown, and I heard the crowd above the rain. I could've dropped to the ground now, but I didn't. I could've fallen over and had them fall with me. But I didn't.

Angie was first out on the field. Then came Coach Cadet, sloshing in the mud. More and more of them ran to Tater. I saw Miss Nettie and Alma, both wearing rain ponchos, the one pushing the other, the wheelchair carving tracks. And my own parents in parkas climbing down a stadium wall, Pops running not to Tater but to Angie, trying to intercept her, to spare her.

I thought Tater would want to know we'd scored and won the game, so I went to him with the ball. Somebody had already removed his helmet. I knelt beside him as a last hard tremor racked his body and a bubbling filled his mouth.

Answering an old call, I covered his body with mine and tried to shield him from the rain.

It took days for the Caddo Parish coroner to finally issue a statement attributing the cause of death to hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. We'd never heard of it; none of us had. But apparently young athletes around the country died from it every year, stricken when they'd seemed perfectly healthy, their lives ended when moments before they'd happily been engaged in playing ball.

I didn't completely understand the term until I looked it up in a medical book that Coach Cadet kept in his office. Thickened heart muscle, arrhythmia, sudden death—these were some of the words I read. Until then I'd thought Tater had pneumonia or the flu. Coach Cadet wrote the words out on a slip of paper and added Tater's name above them. He slid the paper across the surface of his desk. I folded it in half and put it in my wallet.

There had always been those who tried to dull the glory of Tater's blaze—the white guys who objected to his existence or his beauty, and the black one, his own brother, who couldn't abide his dreams and choices. But I never doubted that he would live forever. He was too important a person in the world to do otherwise. That it was his heart's fault seemed a joke to me. His heart, of all things. God, that was the best part of him.

“Pronounce it again for me, Coach.”

“I can't, Rodney. I just can't.” And now more sobbing, his face in his hands, the loud protestation of his office chair as he fell back in anguish.