Lucius Shepard
Doyle Mixon and I were hanging out beneath the bleachers at the Crescent Creek High football field, passing a joint, zoning on the katydids and the soft Indian summer air, when a school bus carrying the Taunton Warriors pulled up at the curb. Doyle was holding in a toke, his eyes closed and face lifted to the sky; with his long sideburns, he looked like a hillbilly saint at prayer. When he caught sight of the team piling off the bus, he tried to suppress a chuckle and coughed up smoke. The cause of his amusement — Taunton had three monstrously fat linemen, and as their uniforms were purple with black stripes and numerals, they resembled giant plums with feet.
One lineman waddled over, his pod-brothers following close behind. “You guys got a problem?” he asked.
Doyle was too stoned to straighten out and he kind of laughed when he said, “We’re fine, dog.”
Standing in a row, staring down at us, they made a bulging purple fence that sealed us off from the rest of the world. Their hair had been buzzed down to stubble, and their faces were three lumpy helpings of sunburned vanilla pudding. Tiny round heads poked up between their shoulder pads. They might have been some weird fatboy rap act like that old MTV guy, Bubba Sparxxx.
“What’s so fucking funny?” a second one asked, and Doyle and I both said, “Nothing,” at about the same time.
“We got a couple of stoners, is what we got,” the first one said, showing Doyle a fist the size of a Monster Burger. “Want to trip on this, freak?”
I kept my mouth shut, but Doyle, I guess he figured we were safe on neutral ground or else he simply didn’t give a damn. “You guys,” he said. “If beer farts were people, they’d look like you guys. All bloated and purple and shit.”
The third lineman hadn’t said a thing — for all I knew, he might not have possessed the power of speech; but he could hear well enough. He yanked Doyle upright and slammed an elbow into the side of his jaw. All three of them went to beating on us. It couldn’t have been more than ten seconds before their coach dragged them off us; but they had done a job in that short time. Doyle’s eyelid was cut and his lip was bleeding. They hadn’t gotten me nearly as bad, but my cheekbone ached and my shirt was ripped.
The coach, Coach Cunliffe, was a dumpy little guy with a torso shaped like a frog’s and a weak comb-over hidden beneath a purple cap. “Son-of-a-buck!” he kept saying, and pounded on their chests. They didn’t even quiver when he hit them. One said something I was too groggy to catch and the coach calmed down all of a sudden. He took a stand over us, his hands on hips, and said, “You boys intend to make a report about this, I expect we got something to report on ourselves. Don’t we?”
Doyle was busy nursing his eye, and I didn’t have a clue what Cunliffe was going on about.
“I was to search your pockets, what you reckon I’d find?” Cunliffe asked. “Think it might be an illegal substance?”
“You lay a hand on me,” Doyle said, “I’ll tell the cops you grabbed my johnson.”
Cunliffe whipped out a cell phone. “No need for me to search. I’ll just call down to the sheriff and get him on the case. How about that?” When neither of us responded, he pocketed the phone. “Well, then. Supposing we call it even, all right?”
Doyle muttered something.
“Is that a no?” Cunliffe reached for his phone again.
“Naw, man. Just keep these fuckwits out of my face.”
The fuckwits surged forward. Cunliffe spread his arms to restrain them. “You’re number twenty-two for the Pirates,” he said to Doyle. “I remember you from last year. Cornerback, right?” He gave us both the eye. “You boys down here doing a little scouting?”
Doyle spat redly, and I said, “Uh-huh.”
“That’s gonna help!” one of the linemen said, and his buds laughed thickly.
Cunliffe shushed them and locked onto Doyle. “You played some damn good ball against us last year, Twenty-two. You figger marijuana’s gonna enhance your performance next month?”
“Not as much as the juice made these assholes’ nuts fall off,” said Doyle.
The linemen rumbled — Cunliffe pushed them toward the field, and they moved away through the purpling air. “Better get that eye took care of,” he said. “Get it all healed up by next month. My boys are like sharks once they get the smell of blood.”
“Those are some fat goddamn sharks,” Doyle said.
The towns of Taunton, Crescent Creek, and Edenburg are laid out in a triangle in the northeast corner of Culliver County, none more than fifteen miles apart. My mama calls the area “the Bermuda Triangle of South Carolina,” because of the weird things that happened there, ghosts and mysterious lights in the sky and such. Now I’ve done some traveling, I understand weirdness is a vein that cuts all through the world, but I cling to the belief that it cuts deeper than normal through Culliver County, and I do so in large part because of the chain of events whose first link was forged that evening in Crescent Creek.
Doyle and I hadn’t gone to the game to scout Taunton — we knew we had no chance against them. Only ninety-six boys at Edenburg High were eligible for football. Most of our team were the sons of tobacco farmers, many of whom couldn’t make half the practices because of responsibilities at home. Taunton, on the other hand, drew its student body from a population of factory workers, and they were a machine. Every year they went to the regional finals, and they’d come close to winning State on a couple of occasions. It was considered a moral victory if we held them to thirty points or under, something we hadn’t managed to do for the better part of a decade. So what we were up to, Doyle and I, was looking for two girls we’d met at a party in Crescent Creek the week before. We were only halfheartedly looking — I had a girlfriend, and Doyle was unofficially engaged — and after what the linemen had done to us, with our clothes bloody and faces bruised, we decided to go drinking instead.
We picked up a couple of twelve-packs at Snade’s Corners, a general store out on State Road 271 where they never checked ID, and drove along a dead-end dirt road to Warnoch’s Pond, a scummy eye of water set among scrub pine and brush, with a leafless live oak that clawed up from the bank beside it like a skeletal three-fingered hand. There was a considerable patch of bare ground between the pond and the brush, littered with flattened beer cans and condom wrappers and busted bottles with sun-bleached labels. Half a dozen stained, chewed-up sofas and easy chairs lined the bank. The black sofa on the far left was a new addition, I thought — at least it looked in better shape than the others.
The pond was where a lot of Edenburg girls, not to mention girls from Taunton and Crescent Creek, lost their cherry, but it was too early for couples to be showing up, and we had the place to ourselves. We sat on the black sofa and drank Blue Ribbon and talked about women and football and getting the hell out of Edenburg, the things we always talked about, the only things there were to talk about if you were a teenager in that region, except maybe for tobacco and TV. Doyle fumed over the fight for a time, swearing vengeance, but didn’t dwell on it — we’d had our butts kicked before. I told him that big as those linemen were, vengeance might require an elephant gun.
“I hate they kill us every year,” Doyle said. “I’d like to win one, you know.”
I cracked a beer and chugged down half. “Not gonna happen.”
“What the hell do you care? Only reason you play so’s you can get a better class of woman.”
I belched. “You know I’d lay me down and die for the ol’ scarlet and silver.”