“Against his will,” said his wife, sitting demurely beside him on the sofa. “But the team didn’t have a very good season that fall.”
“We stunk,” said Mayhew.
“And there was rumbling about maybe getting a new coach.”
“Like Vince Lombardi would have made a difference. We were small but slow. Marshall, Lee-Davis – they all ran right over us.”
“And so when they asked him to take on the play, he thought he had no choice but to step up.”
“I wanted it to be the best damn production Ashland had ever seen,” said Mayhew. “That’s just the way I am. And we had a chance. Right away I saw it. In football one great player can make a team, and it’s the same in the theater. And we had the one great player. The Crenshaw girl. When she was onstage, you couldn’t take your eyes off her. It was just a matter of finding the chemistry. I wanted Sherman, my quarterback, to be Romeo. He was handsome enough, but there wasn’t an ounce of chemistry between our Juliet and Sherman. The truth was, Sherman was an oaf, on and off the field. But we found our chemistry, yes we did. With Tipton.”
“Terrence Tipton,” I said.
“That’s right. I didn’t like him much, one of those sensitive types, you know what I mean. He was too good for the school or the town. Let his hair grow and pouted all the time. Like he knew something the rest of us didn’t. But when he read with her, there were sparks. Undeniable. So I made a mistake and I cast him.”
“In the rehearsals they were quite wonderful,” said Mrs. Mayhew. “The rest of the show, well, they were kids. Do you remember Sherman as Mercutio?”
“It was like the words turned to fudge in his mouth.”
“With the rest you could see the seams. But whenever Romeo and Juliet were onstage, there was magic. It was so touching. Young love.”
“That was the problem,” said Mayhew. “The fools fell in love. And that always screws up everything.”
“Jeremiah.”
He reached out a hand to his wife, gently cupped the back of her neck. “Almost everything,” he said.
“So what went wrong?” I asked again.
“They did.”
“For a while you could see the sparks,” said Mrs. Mayhew. “And then something happened, and they could barely look at each other. Something had gone drastically wrong, and it showed. In every gesture, every word.”
“I took them aside, both of them, and told them to suck it up. To make it work. It’s called acting, I told them. For the good of the play, they had to make it work.”
“They tried,” said Mrs. Mayhew. “Things seemed to get better, until opening night.”
“Worst night of my life,” said Mr. Mayhew.
“Oh, Jeremiah.”
“It was. If I had to do another, it would have killed me. Thankfully, Mrs. Pincer returned in the fall, and I went back to teaching health. But that wasn’t the end of it.”
“He still blames the play,” said Mrs. Mayhew.
“Course I do. First comes the losing season, then that disaster of a play, and next thing you know, they hire a new football coach up from North Carolina and I’m coaching weight football at the junior-high level.”
“Romeo and Juliet,” said Mrs. Mayhew. “I suppose there’s a reason it’s a tragedy.”
“Left with nothing but to teach string beans how to block. Damn,” said Mr. Mayhew. “I always hated that play.”
“God, it was funny,” said Frankie Tipton. “I didn’t want to go, actually. It was our mom made me, but I’m glad she did. Funniest thing I ever saw. I still wake up in the middle of the night laughing about it.”
Frankie Tipton was a hard-lived thirty-five, sitting on a lawn chair atop a cement slab behind his house. He wore jeans and boots, a black T-shirt, a trucker’s hat with a logo that matched the beer in his right hand. He lifted the can, sucked down half, showed me the label. “You want?”
“No thanks,” I said.
“Too early for your kind, I suppose.” I was sitting on a chair beside him. We were both facing the long weeds in his backyard. He turned his head and eyed my suit. “Where’d you say you was from?”
“I didn’t, but I’m from Philadelphia.”
“Ah, sure you are. What kind of trouble is he in now?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s convenient, because I don’t care.”
He took a sip of his beer, looked at it, took a longer draft.
“I never liked the son of a bitch,” he said. “Even when he was a baby. He was sick when he was born, the doctors were running back and forth, Mom was crying on and on. He was grabbing all the attention even then. I could tell right there he was trouble. And I was right, wasn’t I? He killed our mother. The worrying about him after he left, the asking for money. And she always gave it, like a fool. I told her it wouldn’t do no good, but she couldn’t help herself. Every time the phone rang, she was afraid to answer it. Thought it would have been word that he was dead. Too bad it wasn’t.”
“Was this your mom’s house?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s nice.”
“It’s a shithole, but I’ve been fixing it up some, when I can. Putting in a new bathroom upstairs. The kitchen needs something, too.”
“You might want to mow the lawn.”
“Yeah, as soon as I fix the mower, which I got to tell you is not next on my list.”
“So tell me about the play.”
“Well, it all come about because he was in love, he said. Love. It was that skinny little dark-haired girl in the play he was all mooning over. Writing poetry, singing sad songs with that guitar. Love. Like that was ever going anywhere, the way he was. But first things was working out and then they wasn’t. He never said what had happened, but it wasn’t no mystery. And the story was out about the girl and that quarterback and what they was doing backstage.”
“Sherman?”
“That’s the one. Hell, it wasn’t going be the last time he lost a girl, I tell you that. But still, the sadness, it was coming off him in waves. Far as I was concerned, she didn’t have tits enough to get so cut up over, but that might have been the thing he liked, the way he was.”
“You said that twice,” I said.
“What?”
“‘The way he was.’ What do you mean, the way he was?”
He eyed me a bit. “That’s family business, isn’t it? And no damn business of yours.”
“Okay. You were telling about the funny play.”
“Right. So the day of the play, he comes to me and tells me he can’t do it. I didn’t think nothing of it, you know, it was just a stupid play, but Mom was so looking forward to it. So I told him, hell, just drink a few beers and it won’t be no problem. I set him up with a couple six-packs and that was that. I done my brotherly duty.
“So it’s showtime, right, and I’m sitting there next to my mom, and he comes on, and there’s all this applause, and he starts talking this nonsense, and I got to tell you, he didn’t look so good. He didn’t look so good at all. Like they had put green makeup on him. And then, not too far in, there’s the dark-haired girl on this balcony. She’s in this pretty blue dress, and there’s a ladder leading to it. So she’s talking to, like, no one, and he’s talking from behind this bush, and then he starts climbing the ladder. But not so good. Halfway up, his foot slips, and he bangs his head, and everyone starts laughing. Like it’s part of the play. Though it’s not, I can tell. But he keeps climbing. And she says something, something about stumbling, and everyone laughs again. And he says something about love and wings or something stupid like that, and they lean forward to kiss. And they do. And then he stops. And pulls back and wavers. Like a thin stalk in the wind. And then he leans forward over the balcony, and the son of a bitch, he throws up, on her, yes he does, pukes right onto her fancy blue dress.”
“Jesus.”