Free Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger by Lee Smith

No. 4, it’s the main thing going on. Everybody in town comes to the games — old people, teen agers, little kids, women holding tiny wrapped-up babies in their arms. We took Debbi to her first game when she was not but four months old, wearing a little purple outfit that Mrs. Francine Butler had knitted for her. People bring whistles and cow-bells, streamers to throw, and balloons to let loose at the right moment. Purple and gold. Those are the colors for the Gretna Golden Wave. But it’s the men that get into it most, all these men that either used to play football themselves or don’t have enough to do since they got laid off. Billy said they even used to come to all the practices, walking up and down the field real serious in their windbreakers, following every play. I guess it made them remember when they were young too, and strong, and ran down the field like the wind. But Billy said they just about drove the coach crazy, giving him so much advice. Then of course they’d go to all the away games too, following the bus.
    Anyway, I stood there holding that man’s change, looking out at the field where Billy was jumping all around and high-fiving everybody, and he seemed to me like more than a person, like a different kind of thing entirely, like one of those gods and goddesses in Greek mythology. Billy was larger than life. I halfway expected him to leap up off the earth and take his place among the constellations too.
    Well, he didn’t of course. He graduated and started driving acoal truck for Parker Mining Company right away. He had to. He had to take care of his mother, who had asthma, since his daddy’d got killed in the mine years before, when Billy was a little kid. He can’t hardly remember his daddy at all. All he can remember is that his daddy had red hair and whistled. He could whistle any song in the world. Then he’d say, “Why, just a minute there, son! What’s that I see?” and pluck a quarter right out of the air behind your ear. Nobody ever figured out how he did it. Billy doesn’t really remember him being drunk, though that’s all his mother remembered. She was sour as a persimmon by the time she died. Warned Billy off of liquor every day.
    For a while, that took, and it might of took for good if Anne Patrick Poe hadn’t broke his heart. Everybody knew she would. Anne Patrick Poe was the most stuck-up girl in our school, probably the most stuck-up girl in the state. You had to call her by all three names, Anne Patrick Poe. She was Miss Gretna High, Homecoming Queen, and Miss Claytor Lake. She had college written all over her. That is until Billy got her pregnant.
    I remember seeing her in the littlest red two-piece bathing suit at the class picnic out at the lake right before graduation. She stood knee deep in the water squealing while Billy splashed her, stomach as flat as a board. I sat up under a canopy with Miss Parsons, the home ec teacher, and Becky Brannon, my best friend, and watched them. Becky sighed. “Aren’t they the cutest couple?” she asked, and I said yes. Obviously they were, they’d even been voted Cutest Couple for the yearbook, though secretly I didn’t think she was good enough for Billy Sims. I thought she was too self-centered, which was true. I saw how she’d tease him, and toss that ponytail over her shoulder and flirt with other boys such as Coy Eubanks, toying with Billy’s affections. I had never spokento her, not once. I spoke to Billy eight times that year, though he didn’t know my name. Why should he? It’s a big consolidated high school. Five of those times, he was buying hot dogs from me after games. He always got chili and mustard. The other times were in math, where I got an A and he got a D. Luckily he didn’t remember that later, when we got together.
    Billy was not a student. But he was a charmer, and the teachers loved him in spite of his grades. Everybody loved him. He has this happy-go-lucky wide-open face with freckles thrown across it