Bama Boy Read online

  BAMA BOY

  Sheri Cobb South

  Chapter One

  August, 1988

  “So, what are your plans for this weekend, Maggie?” I asked. Spinning around on the kitchen bar stool, I shifted the telephone receiver from my right ear to my left and put my hand over my ear to block the sounds of the television blaring in the next room.

  “I’m going to the movies with Brian,” my best friend’s voice came through the receiver. “Do you want to come along? Maybe Brian can find a friend for you, and we could double.”

  “Sorry. I’ve got a date with Anthony.”

  The din from the television drowned out Maggie’s reply, but I got the general idea. Maggie had never liked Anthony, and when he’d asked me to the junior prom last spring, her dislike had blossomed into contempt.

  “Look, Mags, I know how you feel about Anthony, but try to see it my way. He’s the only boy at Elmore High School who recognizes the fact that I’m a girl. The rest of them seem to think I’m just a brain that walks on two legs.”

  “And the only reason Anthony doesn’t is that he can’t imagine anyone being brainier than he is. Tracy, you’re a very attractive girl, and you could do a lot better for yourself. Just last week Greg Saunders said he thought you were cute.”

  I wasn’t impressed. “If Greg thinks I’m so great, why is he dating a girl from Hillcrest High School? It’s always the same story: all the good ones are taken.”

  “So what does that tell you about good old unattached Anthony?”

  I heaved a sigh. “All right, Mags, I’ll admit Anthony isn’t the great love of my life, but going out with him beats sitting at home alone every Saturday night. Say, can you hold on just a minute? Richie’s got the TV about two hundred decibels too loud.” I covered the receiver with my hand and spun around on the bar stool. “Richie! Turn the volume down!”

  There was no answer, and the television remained at its deafening level of sound.

  “Richie, turn down the TV!”

  Still no response. With growing suspicion, I laid the receiver down on the kitchen counter and went into the living room. Not a living creature stirred there, and the front door was standing open. When I stepped out on the front porch, my suspicions were confirmed. The garage door was open and Richie’s bicycle was gone.

  “Richie Brock, when I get my hands on you, I’ll—” Stepping back inside, I closed the door and returned to the telephone, pausing along the way to turn off the blaring television. “Maggie, you should be glad you don’t have a younger brother!”

  “Oh, dear,” Maggie sighed sympathetically. “What’s Richie done now?”

  “Run off to watch the football team practice. What else? This time the little stinker even turned the TV up loud enough that I wouldn’t hear the garage door open. He’s turned into an escape artist even Houdini would envy.”

  “That’s the second time this week, isn’t it?”

  “Third. And I’ll tell you who’s behind it: it’s that new guy they’ve got at quarterback.”

  “Jimbo Maxwell?”

  “That’s him. What kind of a name is Jimbo, anyway?”

  “I don’t think it’s fair to blame him for Richie’s running away,” Maggie disagreed. “After all, most ten-year-old boys can get into plenty of trouble without any help from anyone.”

  Of course Maggie was right. Richie had been football crazy ever since Coach Moore invited him to travel with the team as a ball boy. Actually, the only reason the coach had even thought of Richie was that he played on the pee-wee football team and lived only a few blocks from school. But Richie was firmly convinced that Coach Moore saw in him some great potential that he wanted to nourish. The rest of the family played along; it was easier than arguing with him.

  Yes, Richie had been pretty unbearable already, but he had never run away. At least, not until Jimbo What’s-his-name came to town.

  “Tell me, Maggie, what’s this Jimbo guy like, anyway?”

  “You mean you don’t know? I would have thought Richie would have told you all about him.”

  “Oh, Richie’s full of ‘Jimbo this’ and ‘Jimbo that,’ but since he seems to have Jimbo confused with Superman, it’s hard to make much sense out of it. I thought Brian might have said something about him, since they’re both on the football team.”

  Apparently Brian had said quite a bit. Maggie took a deep breath and launched into a bio that would have made the FBI hang its head in shame. Fifteen minutes later, I knew all there was to know about Jimbo Maxwell. He was born and raised in Alabama, the son of a poor sharecropper. He had moved north to Elmore when his father found a job at TeknoCorp, a local manufacturing plant.

  “What would a sharecropper be doing at TeknoCorp?” I interrupted at this point.

  “Assembly line work, I guess,” Maggie answered. “Since they got that big government contract, TeknoCorp’s been hiring everybody and their grandma. They’re going to be making some part for the space shuttle. I read about it in the newspaper. Now, where was I?”

  “Poor sharecropper who moves north to find work,” I prompted.

  “Oh, yeah. Well, according to Brian, Jimbo is a nice guy and a great quarterback, but he’s sort of a hick. His idea of a wild weekend is taking a girl to the Sears store on Saturday night to watch TV! And until he moved to Elmore, he’d never even lived in a house with indoor plumbing.”

  “And that’s Richie’s idol?” I asked incredulously. “He must be the laughingstock of the whole team!”

  “He would be, if it wasn’t for one minor detail: they become a different team as soon as he steps onto the field.”

  “That’s what Richie said, but I thought he was exaggerating.”

  “I’ve never seen him play, but according to Brian, he’s the best Elmore High School has ever had. The only trouble is, he’ll have to keep up a ‘C’ average in all his classes to play, and the guys on the team are afraid he’ll never make it.”

  “I wish him luck. Heaven knows our football team needs all the help it can get! But does he have to lure my little brother away like the Pied Piper of Hamelin? I’m supposed to be watching Richie until Mom gets home from work. He’s my responsibility!”

  “Well, look at it this way: school starts next week, so he won’t be your responsibility anymore. If you ask me, you’ve wasted your opportunity. If you’d spent a little of your time this summer hanging around the practice field wearing shorts, you might be dating one of the football players by now, instead of wasting all your weekends on Anthony.”

  “We’re not talking about Anthony! We’re talking about Richie!”

  “So what are you going to do about him?”

  I glanced at the clock. Mom wouldn’t get home from work for thirty more minutes. I could go to school and get Richie, or I could wait it out, hoping Mom would come home early and catch the little criminal red-handed. On the other hand, if Richie got in trouble for sneaking away, I would get in trouble too, for not watching him closely enough. The old double-whammy.

  “I guess I’d better go to school and get him,” I said at last.

  “Good! Do me a favor, will you?”

  “What?”

  “Wear shorts!”

  I hung up the phone and thought about Anthony. When he’d asked me to the prom, I had accepted gladly. He was just the sort of boy I had always pictured myself falling in love with: he was blond and handsome and intelligent, and most of all, he was going places. You’d never find Anthony working at TeknoCorp on an assembly line. He might own the place someday, but he’d never work on an assembly line there. I had jumped at the chance to go out with Anthony, and congratulated myself on landing a prize. But as spring turned to summer, Anthony’s fatal flaw emerged: he thought I’d landed a prize, too. I continued to go out w
ith him, but it just wasn’t the same.

  I went upstairs to get my car keys. As I crossed the bedroom, I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the large mirror over my dresser, and paused to study it for a moment. My shoulder-length hair was clean and shiny, but it was an in-between color too dark to be blonde and too light to be brown, and nothing could coax it into anything resembling a curl. My complexion was good, though, and my eyes were by far my best feature. They were a little too big for the rest of my face, and were the dark blue color of sapphires. Not exactly the face that launched a thousand ships, but not half bad, either.

  Obeying a sudden impulse, I jerked open a dresser drawer and dug out a pair of shorts.

  Chapter Two

  As it turned out, the football team and my legs were destined to remain forever strangers. I had just finished tucking a white T-shirt into my plaid cotton shorts when I heard the sound of a car in the driveway.

  “Oh, no!” I groaned. “Mom’s home early! What am I going to tell her?”

  Crossing the room to the window, I looked down into the driveway and saw that the vehicle I’d heard was not the family minivan, but an ancient pickup truck which had apparently been red in a previous life, but was now faded to a flat, dull orange. I had never seen the truck before, but the cargo it carried was all too familiar: in its bed lay Richie’s black and silver bicycle.

  All I could think was that Richie had been hit by a car on his way home from football practice. I was down the stairs and out the door in a flash, horrible pictures of Richie’s lifeless body filling my head. As I reached the truck, its passenger door opened and out hopped the corpse, apparently in perfect health.

  “Tracy! Tracy!” he yelled.

  “Richie! Are you okay?”

  Richie looked at me like I was crazy. “Of course I’m okay! Why shouldn’t I be okay?”

  I didn’t know whether to kiss him or strangle him. “Believe it or not, I was worried about you! I don’t know why I bothered!”

  “Y’all make me glad I’m an only child! Should I go now, or do you need a referee?”

  The driver of the truck swung himself out of the cab as he spoke, and I turned to look at the stranger who had brought Richie home. He was long and lanky, with the slightly sunburned look of one who spends a lot of time outdoors. His ragged cut-off jeans had seen better days, and his sweaty T-shirt was so faded it was impossible to guess what its original color had been. He wore a yellow cap with a CAT heavy equipment logo on the front, and when he removed the cap and tossed it into the truck, I saw that his light brown hair was damp with perspiration. His blue eyes held a hint of a smile, and when he spoke, it was with a drawl so thick I was sure he must have chewed up every vowel before he spit it out. I had never seen this boy before, but I knew exactly who he was.

  “You’ve got to be Jimbo Maxwell,” I said.

  His eyebrows rose. “I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.”

  “You haven’t. I mean, we’ve never met. I’m Tracy Brock, Richie’s sister. He’s told me a lot about you.”

  “Uh-oh. All of it bad, I’ll bet,” he said, playfully tousling Richie’s hair.

  On the contrary, Richie had described Jimbo in such glowing terms that I was certain I would despise him on sight if we ever met. But now, looking into his smiling eyes, I found myself warming to him.

  “Doesn’t Jimbo have a neat truck?” Richie piped up, climbing onto the back bumper and scrambling over the tailgate.

  “Uh, yeah,” I agreed, “neat” being a relative term.

  “Fifty-six Chevy,” Jimbo said proudly, kicking its tire affectionately. “I sold a heifer to pay for this truck.”

  I thought he would have done better to forget the truck and ride the heifer instead, but I was too polite to say so.

  “Richie tells me you moved to Elmore from Alabama,” I said.

  “Yeah, we moved north back in July, at the start of the TeknoCorp project. I’ve been in Elmore about six weeks now.”

  “How do you like it?”

  “It’s pretty nice, I guess.”

  “But you want to go back to Alabama?”

  “Well, Dad’s job at TeknoCorp won’t last forever. A year maybe, two at the most. Then we’ll be goin’ back, unless they give Dad a job somewhere else.”

  “Does he have to travel much?”

  “Sometimes. This is the first time he’s been able to take me and Mom with him, though.”

  It was even worse than Maggie had said. Apparently Jimbo’s father was an itinerant laborer who left his family to fend for themselves while he traveled from place to place looking for work, leaving Jimbo the man of the house at age seventeen. I thought it was a shame that someone with such nice eyes should have such a hard life.

  “Look, Jimbo, I was just thinking,” I heard myself saying. “My family moved to this house in the middle of my eighth-grade year. It was only a local move, nothing like yours, but I still remember what it was like, going to an unfamiliar school full of strangers. If there’s anything I can do, I’d—I’d be glad to help,” I said, suddenly shy.

  Jimbo grinned, revealing a perfect pair of dimples. “Thanks. You know, Tracy, you’re not bad, for a Yankee.”

  “You’d better watch it with that Yankee talk,” I said, smiling back at him. “Remember, you’re in enemy territory.”

  “Yeah, I reckon I am, at least for the time bein’.”

  “We’re not so bad. You might even learn to like us.”

  Jimbo’s grin broadened as he climbed back into his truck. “Hey, from where I stand right now, Elmore’s lookin’ better all the time!”

  As he drove away, I caught a glimpse of an Alabama license plate bearing the letters J-I-M-B-O. I was a little surprised, because I knew from experience that vanity license plates were expensive. When I’d wanted one for my car last year, Dad had vetoed the idea as a waste of money. I wouldn’t have thought Jimbo had that kind of money to waste. Oh well, I shrugged, following Richie back into the house, with the kind of life he’d lived, Jimbo deserved a few luxuries. The poor guy.

  Chapter Three

  Maybe it was because poor Jimbo provided such a contrast, but when I met Anthony at the door the following night, it was as if I was seeing him for the very first time. He might as well have had “Most Likely to Succeed” stamped on his forehead. He was nearly as tall as Jimbo, but unlike Richie’s hero, his hair was neatly combed. His clothes were just as immaculate—his pants pressed, his oxford shirt starched, and his collar buttoned down. Anthony wouldn’t have been caught dead wearing a sweaty T-shirt and a CAT hat.

  “Is something wrong?” Anthony asked, sensing my appraisal.

  “No, I would say everything is just right,” I answered.

  We went to a movie first, and then to the local burger joint. Over a cheeseburger and fries, I brought up the subject of my meeting with Jimbo.

  “Anthony, do you remember me telling you about Elmore’s new quarterback, Jimbo Maxwell?”

  “The guy who’s leading your brother into a life of crime? I’ll say I remember! My ears are still burning.”

  I had to smile a little. When I had mentioned Jimbo before, I hadn’t been exactly complimentary. “I guess he isn’t so bad, after all. I know I blamed him for Richie’s running away, but I met him yesterday, and I think I may have misjudged him.”

  “Don’t ask me; I never met the guy. From what I hear, he’s a good ol’ boy from Mississippi, and he’s got grits where his brains should be.”

  “He’s not from Mississippi; he’s from Alabama. And his grades might not be so hot, but I don’t think he’s at all stupid. He just needs—polish.” A brilliant idea began to dawn. “Anthony, that’s it!”

  “What’s it?”

  “Jimbo doesn’t know it yet, but he’s in for a severe case of culture shock when school starts next week. But look at you! You belong to all the right clubs, you know all the right people, you wear all the right clothes. Maybe you could—”

  Anthony held up a res
training hand. “You can forget it!”

  “You didn’t let me finish,” I protested. “Jimbo needs help with his grades, and the right tutor could serve as a sort of role model for him. Who knows? You might even be able to get rid of that awful drawl of his!”

  “Tell me something, Tracy,” Anthony said, toying with his straw. “Why are you so concerned about this guy? Is he another one of your charitable projects, or have you fallen for our unwashed hero?”

  “Of course not!” I said impatiently. “I just feel sorry for him, that’s all. I thought maybe I could help him in some way.”

  “Fine. Help him all you want, but leave me out of it.”

  “I don’t tutor anymore, and you know why!”

  “Smart move,” Anthony said, nodding his approval. “Every time you tutor, it leads to disaster.”

  As much as I hated to admit it, he had a valid point. Last fall I had tutored Patricia Martin, and I had been thrilled for her when she’d made the A/B Honor Roll. Unfortunately, she’d quit school two weeks later and run off with some guy to get married. And then in the spring there had been Russ Johnson, who had made a pass at me in the middle of his fourth session. Luckily, Dad had been upstairs, and he threw Russ out on his ear, along with a few well-chosen words and a mean left hook.

  “But neither of those things was my fault,” I told Anthony. “I didn’t tell Patricia to elope, and I never encouraged Russ Johnson! I did my best to help them. Don’t you ever want to help people less fortunate than yourself?”

  “When you’re on one of your missions of mercy, I can’t think of anyone less fortunate than myself—unless, of course, it’s your intended victim. Tracy, when are you going to learn that you can’t just go through life picking up strays?”

  “Jimbo isn’t a stray! He’s a poor, unfortunate boy who’s had a miserable life. Would you believe, he’d never even lived in a house with indoor plumbing until he moved to Elmore.”

  “Cry me a river,” muttered Anthony, unimpressed.