Stephen Longacre's Greatest Match Read online

  Rance pushed bullishly through the crowd that had formed at the edge of the court where his son stood with an oddly satisfied look on his face next to a tall, slender, almost impassive Negro youth who, Rance now saw, couldn’t have been more than fifteen. Both were dressed immaculately in tennis whites, creased perfectly, unblemished. Both carried tennis racquets in presses, wore towels around their necks, and looked like the Harvard number-one doubles team, if Harvard permitted Negroes to attend, which, being a Yankee Communist conspiracy against America, it probably did.

  “What the hell is going on here, boy?” Rance demanded.

  Under his tan, his flesh had turned pinkish, as his blood pressure skied. A Y of throbbing veins stood out on his temple, offsetting his gray highlights; two gobs of dried gunk had collected in the corners of his mouth.

  Two men were yelling at Stephen, who appeared not to be noticing, but to be simply waiting for the ruckus to dry up and blow away.

  “Mr. Longacre,” said Jack Tyler, who was the tournament chairman, “we can’t let a nigra boy play. Why, it’s damned un-American.”

  “What are you up to, Stephen, goddamnit!” Rance bellowed.

  “I’m simply trying to play in the match as I promised, in accordance to the rules. If you look at the rules, you’ll see that they specify that players must wear white but not that they must be white.”

  He was right, of course, for the simple reason that the idea of a Negro youth coming to play at the Polk County Country Club was so utterly preposterous that no formal ruling had been necessary. It simply couldn’t, wouldn’t, ever, never happen. That was the way it was. Everybody understood.

  Except Stephen.

  “Stephen, this −”

  “I’m sorry, but I’m absolutely correct. There is no formal law in the rules against someone of another race playing. The rules simply state that as a member in good standing of the club, I may enter the tournament, and I may have as my partner, any person I choose, as long as we both wear white and obey the etiquette of tennis.”

  “Rance, he can’t do this! There’s an unwritten rule, everybody knows about.”

  “I don’t know about it,” said Stephen. “All I know is, I am here, I paid my fee, I found a partner, and here I am. Now, let’s play.”

  “Sam! Mr. Sam, by God, help us out on this one. He can’t bring no colored fellow in on this, can he? He can’t just do it. There’s such a thing as an unwritten law, isn’t there?”

  Sam was thinking: This little bastard! Oh, this little bastard. He has put me in a goddamn fix and a half.

  Sam said, “Well, now, I don’t know that the law would get involved here. I’m not one for the law poking its nose into everyone’s business. This is the sort of thing best adjudicated by the board of directors of your club.”

  “Well, what about something on good order, or disturbing the peace. Bringing this fellow in here sure disturbs our peace. Ain’t that against the law?”

  Sam struggled to find an even narrower line to walk along.

  “Hmmm,” he said, scrunching up his face as if in study, “I’d have to think about that and research the statutes. Certainly, at this point there appears to be no civil law that’s been breached and I don’t know who would −”

  But at that point two uniformed deputies from the town pushed their way through the crowd, and went immediately to the black youth.

  “You under arrest, boy, you come with us,” proclaimed the sergeant, a pugnacious fellow named Buddy Till.

  “On what charge!” Stephen demanded. “You can’t just arrest anybody without −”

  “On a charge of the sheriff done been called, and he is pure-D pissed off. Now, you git out of our way, goddamnit, while we take this fellow off.”

  “Sam −”

  “Well, I −”

  “Hold on!”

  The last comment arrived in a low rumble that everybody understood was Earl Swagger of the Arkansas State Police.

  Earl, carrying his little boy Bob Lee with him, pushed through the crowd. He was not in uniform today, wearing instead jeans and boots, a battered old Stetson and a white, pearl buttoned shirt open at the collar, which set off the mahogany of a skin turned to pottery by fifteen years of Marine duty, the last three in the Pacific.

  “Mr. Earl,” Stephen yelled, “they’re going to arrest William for nothing.”

  “Earl, you stay out of this,” Rance said. “This here’s a town matter.”

  “Yeah, Earl,” said Buddy Till.

  “Well, technically, it ain’t,” said Earl. “Your boy Stephen showed me the town plat, and, as a matter of fact, your club is in the unincorporated area, which makes it my jurisdiction. We could go to court on it, sure, but I’d win. Stephen was right.”

  “Earl, I been called out here many a night when somebody had too much to drink at the clubhouse,” said the deputy, Buddy Till.

  “I know, Buddy, but that ain’t the law, that’s a courtesy for the richer people. If you’re going to have a law, it’s got to be fair and right.”

  “Damn.” Buddy let William, the Negro boy, go. “Don’t you git in no trouble up here,” he warned. “And you better believe I’m going to be watching you. Say, where you from? You from around here?”

  “No, suh,” said the youth.

  “It’s nobody’s business where he’s from. He’s my guest, and he doesn’t have to answer any questions at all.”

  “Stephen, I’m going to ask you one last time to see the common decency of it, and make every −”

  “I am here to play tennis with my friend William. He has agreed to do so. Let’s play the match.”

  Everyone looked at everyone. Then everyone looked at Sam, who, as the county prosecutor in the absence of a judge, appeared to be the convening legal authority.

  “It’s damned strange,” Sam said. “But as I said, it doesn’t appear to be against any written law.”

  Of course no one − except possibly Stephen − had thought of the effect of this ruling on the tournament. It quickly developed that the team of Winston and Morrison, Stephen and William’s first opponents, refused to take the court against a Negro.

  “You forfeit,” Stephen said.

  “We protest,” they said.

  “Same thing.”

  That taken care of, exactly the same happened to the team of Norton and O’Sullivan, next on the docket. So, in the space of a few seconds, Stephen and his partner had reached the finals.

  That left only the fabulous Jeff St. Sebastian of LSU and his cousin-partner, Bo.

  Suddenly, St. Sebastian himself spoke up. He’d returned from a nice refreshing shower up at the clubhouse. He had a look of bemused pleasure on his face, as if this whole ruckus was absolutely smashing fun.

  “Now, one second,” he said. “I have no objection to playing anybody. But there’s a bigger question here. Mr., ah −”

  “His name’s Longacre,” said his cousin.

  “Mr. Longacre, possibly you mean well. Possibly, you believe in the cause of the Negro. Some folks do. I myself believe that the Negro has made a valuable contribution to our nation. But I wonder about you. Why, if you profess to care, do you insist on humiliating this poor young man? Surely, he’s done you no harm, yet you make a circus exhibit out of him, and if you actually get him onto the court, you’ll expose his weaknesses even more tragically. For what? For your own vanity? That’s not the southern way.”

  “What makes you think he can’t play tennis?” said Stephen.

  “Why, simple facts. The Negro, typically, is not athletically gifted at the sports at which whites excel. They make excellent boxers, given the thickness of their skull, the lack of articulation in the brain, and the size of their hands. They also don’t feel pain to the degree that other races do. You can’t put a man, like this poor young fellow, in a sport that demands speed, reflexes, coordination, and powers of intellect. Tennis isn’t hammering other men with your hands. It’s not violent, brute strength; it’s finesse, practice, wisd
om. You put a boy like this out there, and you’ll only produce another bitter Negro male who’s found he can’t fit into the white world, compete at the white level, and will; therefore, develop a whopping case of the shuffles and the stammers. You’ll ruin him. What is the point of making him so unhappy? I am only thinking of him, which is what you should be doing.”

  “He can handle himself,” was all Stephen could say.

  “William,” asked Jeff, “have you ever played tennis before?”

  “No, suh.”

  “Have you ever held a tennis racquet in your hand?”

  “No, suh.”

  “Do you understand the scoring?”

  “Suh, it ain’t one, two, three, fo’. It’s love, five or fifteen, thirty, forty, game. You win six games fo’ a set and two sets fo’ a match.”

  “What’s deuce?”

  A look of panic flashed through William’s eyes. He looked at Stephen, who said, “I didn’t explain that to him, yet. It’s a tie, William. You don’t say ’tied,’ you say ’deuce,’ that’s all. You have to win two straight points after deuce to take the game. If you only win one, it goes back to deuce.”

  “Yes, suh.”

  “He doesn’t even know what deuce is,” said Bo, disgustedly.

  “There you have it,” said Jeff. “I say these two should be disqualified on humanitarian grounds, so as not to humiliate and destroy the ego of the Negro boy. He needs tender treatment and love, not immersion in humiliation. The poor guy doesn’t even understand the mechanics of the game.”

  “See there,” said Rance. “Young Mr. St. Sebastian said a mouthful. If you don’t give a damn about your family, your town, your club, and your race, Stephen, and if you’re so hellfire intent on uplifting the Negro, why you doing this to poor William?”

  “I already explained this to him,” said Stephen. “I’ll put it to him again. William, do you want to play? Some of these white people will laugh at you, and it may hurt your feelings. Can you get through that?”

  “Yes, suh,” said William.

  “Okay,” said Stephen.

  “I’ll try and be merciful,” said St. Sebastian.

  • • •

  The first set was over in a blinking of an eye. St. Sebastian hammered four hard first serves, and only Stephen got a racquet on one of them, but not even enough to get it back in play. On his two chances, poor William whiffed entirely at one, doubling over the crowd in laughter.

  It only got worse, until finally, Stephen ran off three points on his second service game, two off Bo, but then Jeff nailed a stinger down the line and that game was lost, too. William, when he got to his first shot, hit the ball out of the park, again driving the crowd into hysterics. The second time, he undercompensated and hit weakly into the net. He never really figured it out, spraying shots all over Arkansas. The first set went at love.

  “All right,” said Jeff, “do you want to quit now? It seems stupid to go on.”

  “Oh, let’s play it out,” said Stephen.

  “Of course,” said Jeff. “I’m not doing anything for the next ten minutes anyhow.”

  Stephen went up to William.

  “Don’t you see, you don’t have to hit it so hard. To control the ball, you just meet it. Let the racquet strings supply the power. Try and hit it early with an upward arc, and follow through high. You’ve got to be relaxed, like basketball. If you tighten up, you don’t have a chance.”

  “Yes, suh,” said William.

  “Okay,” said Stephen, “we’ll give it our all.”

  “By the way,” said William, “that boy Jeff? If he gon’ hit to your left, he bounces the ball three times. If he gon’ hit to your right, he bounces it four times. And that fat boy, Bo? He got the willies. You patty cake it to him and he be too nervous and git all in a twist. He can’t hit nothing.”

  “Ah, are you sure?”

  “Sure as life. Been studyin’.”

  It was Jeff’s serve, and he bounced the ball three times. Stephen cocked his racquet a quarter-turn to get into his backhand and was already gliding to the left when Jeff’s serve, flat, hard, and accurate, rocketed off the centerline. Stephen turned a quarter-turn, dropped his shoulder, hit through, and felt the wonderful buzz of the sweet spot, and he jacked a shot down the alley, a clean winner.

  “Oh, nice shot, old man,” called Jeff. “Well hit.”

  “Thank you,” said Stephen.

  He again bounced the ball three times on the serve to William, who was still awkward with the racquet. But, with his anticipation, he blocked it back into a dead zone between Jeff and Bo, and neither could reach it.

  “Good show!” called Jeff.

  Four bounces: forehand side. The ball was a blur. Stephen’s return was even more blurred as he teed off. The best part was that he nailed the placid Bo in the middle of the forehead, and the ball bounced off into the crowd.

  “Oh, bad luck!” cried Jeff.

  After some minutes of rubbing and stroking, the application of ice, and the ministrations of several junior leaguers oohing and ahhhing over him, though primarily to get Jeff’s attention, Bo was manly enough to get up, but he had a red welt over the left eye.

  “You’ll be fine,” said Jeff.

  “I’m really sorry,” said Stephen. “I couldn’t have aimed it there in a hundred years.”

  Tight-lipped and in love with the heroic image of himself, Bo signaled that he could play on.

  Jeff double-faulted to lose the opening game.

  “Well, fellows,” said Jeff, “nicely done. It won’t be a love match after all. How sporting.”

  Who could say when, exactly, it started to happen. William never really seemed comfortable with the racquet in his hand, but it was amazing how quickly some other thing occurred, and that was that his imagination seized the center of the game. He had uncanny powers of anticipation when the ball was in play in his zone, and he always seemed to be there to block it back. He looked like the crudest thing in the world of tennis, a big, spindly-awkward black teenager, all elbows and knees, without any strokes at all. He had no grace, no fluidity, no poetry. He took no backswing whatsoever, but more than anything, simply placed the racquet in the way of the ball in a stiff-wristed thrust and kept the ball in play. He never hit winners. He just blocked the ball back, deep, to the open court, and though Jeff could get his shots back, he could not get any mustard or clever placement on them.

  The court helped, too. The soft red clay seemed to suck the power from the ball, squirting it high and fat, giving William that extra second to get to it and punch it back. The Negro boy soon picked up the extra gift of the skid; he learned how to race for a shot, then jam his tennis shoe into the sandlike surface, brace himself against its friction, and come back under control to bop the ball back in play.

  At the same time, the fraudulence of Bo was soon in evidence. That portly young man had never really come back mentally from his beaning, and the subtle brilliance of William, his awareness of this weakness, was such that he hit most of his shots Bo’s way. Bo just deconstructed shamefully before everybody’s eyes.

  Meanwhile, Stephen got loose and fluid, and the shock on the faces of the audience propelled his adrenaline to even more powerful levels. A look at his father, steaming like a piston engine about to blow, thrilled him to no end. When the pathetic Bo popped an ineffectual lob his way at the net, he put it away with piledriver force, bouncing the white ball seven rows deep in the bleachers, and he caught a look at his father’s incredible agony, as if the poor man were waiting for that final coronary thrombosis to send him earthward, led by the blue pulsing Y in his temple next to his gray highlights.

  William and Stephen actually won the second set, 6-4, to the incredulity of the crowd.

  “Lucky nigger!” someone yelled.

  “He’s too goddamn tall,” someone else yelled.

  “It ain’t right, goddamnit,” yelled a third.

  Rance turned to Connie.

  “That boy’s going to st
art a riot,” he said.

  “Yes,” said Connie, “but he is doing something. Have you ever seen him so committed in his life? He’s trying, and that’s a first.”

  “Earl won’t let there be any trouble,” said Sam.

  And indeed, Earl stood and fixed the dentist who’d yelled “nigger” with one of his hard stares, and that man immediately sat down.

  But suddenly, as Earl looked up, someone ran out from the crowd. Earl saw him go too late, and by the time he headed out there, he knew he’d never make it.

  The man ran right past Stephen, who was stunned to see him go at poor William, who stood frozen as the fellow approached, all lathered up.

  He ran as if he were on a killing frenzy, a berserker hell bent on mayhem and blood, a Confederate legend like the last man at Pickett’s Charge, and when he reached William, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a gun and thrust it right at William.

  Earl knew he wouldn’t make it and heard the crowd gasp as the gun steadied for the shot. But then it continued upward and toward the mouth of the shooter, who bent and took a bite out of it.

  It was chocolate.

  Earl knocked it away and kicked it off the court and grabbed the shooter.

  He hammer locked him and bent him to his knee, to the rising torrent of boos and hisses.

  He twisted him around and saw that it was not a man at all; it was that damned Jimmy Pye.

  “You goddamned fool, Jimmy!” screamed Earl, but Jimmy, though not strong enough to resist Earl, was nevertheless laughing in operatic triumph. It seemed the town boys had heard what was going on out at the country club and had come on out to add their bit of intimidation to the ceremony, and Jimmy, as head miscreant and champion athlete of the county, had led the way.

  “I ought to lock you up, boy! You have committed a crime now. You have made a public nuisance of yourself, and you could do a month in jail.”

  “Mr. Earl, I’se just hoo-dooing the nigra. Boo! boy, them ha’ants a-gonna git you, you come back.”

  Stephen, for his part, looked at Jimmy as Earl led the boy off the court. Jimmy was his own age, a cracker hero of sorts, just the kind of boy who could have been his friend, if he weren’t so wild and stupid and vain and evil. He certainly had spirit.