Fear and What Follows by Parrish Tim;

Author:Parrish, Tim;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2013-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Fall 1974: Skirmishes

I squinted, rum-buzzed, as we entered the stadium. The bank of lights directly across the field glared like truck headlights stacked four high. I blinked and looked lower at the several thousand fans in the stands on the other side, then lower still to the green, white-lined grass where the first two teams collided. For a minute, I missed the days when my daddy had come to watch me play in this very place, missed the Istrouma games we’d watched together, missed playing the game. Then I busily pushed all that away. It was the start of eleventh grade, and those were childish things.

Ahead of Stem and me, Dyer and Sarah turned out of the portal and headed up toward our student section. Cheers and honorary abuse greeted Dyer, a celebrity, the King of Cool. He shot them the bird with one hand while he held Sarah’s with the other. We four together were a puzzle, especially Sarah, pale, redheaded, demure with an edge beneath. Cute but not fine like the girls who hit on Dyer at the parties he’d taken me to over the summer. Stem was the lowbrow, funny follower. And I was the popular, hyper, smart kid. I’d considered our peculiar grouping before, but never in the light of school and the gaze of so many of Dyer’s crew and my friends. Grandiosity and displacement wheeled in me.

A bleacher cleared enough for all of us. Dyer lit a smoke. People called to him from the rowdy throng of white students. Some kids called my name, too, and I slapped hands and raised my waxy paper Coke cup to take a douse of rum from a friend. The clack of helmets and shoulder pads echoed from the field. Dyer traded insults with other badasses and took the attention of girls I wished would just look at me. All the while Sarah sat quietly, almost churchly, as Dyer’s anchor, his security. I wondered if that’s what I was, too, because I was a listener and a follower. I shrugged off the thought, gulped my rum and Coke, and hoped for the bliss of being high.

The football jamboree was a strange, first-week-of-school exhibition of six teams playing three twenty-minute games. This jamboree pitted some mostly white against all black schools for the first time, an unprecedented mixing of fans. A black neighborhood, where one of the schools playing was located, bordered the stadium on two sides, making us the intruders. On the other two sides sat the Governor’s Mansion and an industrial section. Not far away rose the tall, gray State Capitol building, whose beacon shone a beam on Huey Long’s grave.

The first game ended and our Indians charged onto the field in maroon and gray. I knew some of the seniors had been stoned since morning then hooked down speed an hour before kickoff, a combo to dull pain and bring on ferocity. I scanned for the ones I had played with—Mike Coats, my alienated friend; Jason Stanley, my old competitor for quarterback; Virgil; Dufour; Comeaux.

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