Knights of the Hill Country Read online

  “Well, Hampton,” he said, smiling his sweet fake smile. “In case you haven't noticed, we have quite a few Native American students here in our school, and I'm sure they don't appreciate your insinuation, so maybe in the future you'll think twice before making your smart remarks.”

  I could feel myself turning red as the inside of a thermometer on that one. I wasn't trying to make any kind of smart remark or insinuation, either one. But what could I do? It took me a good week to figure out the question, I couldn't no more come up with an answer to shoot off to Mr. Foudy right there on the spot than I could've recited the Gettysburg Address backwards while holding a lit match.

  So the rest of the period, I set there and stewed. I figured the class only laughed 'cause they wasn't used to me talking out much, but Mr. Foudy should've known better. It wasn't right for him to get any of my Native American friends in the class to thinking I was trying to make fun of them when it was really just the opposite. I was still stewing on it when Sara walked up to me after class.

  “Hampton,” she said, tugging on my sleeve. “I just wanted you to know I understood what you meant.”

  “You did?” I looked down into them eyes, and, boy howdy, that was it for me right there.

  “And I agree with you,” she said.

  “You do?”

  “Yes.”

  “Really?”

  That was the best I could come up with to say, so she finally just said she'd see me later and walked off. But the way she looked at me, it was like she seen something in me nobody else did. I wasn't sure what it was she seen, but it felt good, like stepping out on the porch on a summer morning and it's already warm. A whole new day waiting on you. Course, that wasn't something I could tell her. I could bowl over a hundred blockers and plow down quarterback after quarterback, but I couldn't hardly say two words to this little five-foot-four-inch-tall girl.

  Today in class wasn't any different. The whole time Mr. Foudy was going on about the Civil War, I was trying out imaginary conversations with Sara that I was pretty sure would never really happen. It wasn't till he called on us to circle up our desks and get into our study groups that he caught my attention.

  For my money, study groups was one of the all-time great inventions in teaching. For one reason: me and Sara was assigned to the same one. Time after time, we gathered up with my buddy Darnell and the world's worst drum majorette, Lana Pitt, and every time, I told myself I was going to come up with the perfect thing to say to Sara. Something clever and flirty but not mushy. Only every time, my head wouldn't do nothing but turn into a big chunk of petrified wood. Today was going to be different, though, I told myself. Today was the day.

  We had us a fifty-item worksheet on the Civil War, and I pretended to try to look up the answers while everybody else really found them. But I couldn't think of one single clever-and-flirty-but-not-mushy thing to say. Problem was, Darnell and Lana was making too much racket arguing. Darnell didn't see how nobody with an ounce of brains could fight for the Confederates, and Lana said she had ancestors that was on the South's side and they was fighting for a way of life and old-fashioned family values.

  Darnell turned over to me. “Can you believe this girl, Hamp? You explain it to her. I'm wore out.”

  “I don't know that much about it,” I said, looking down. Last thing I wanted to do was get balled up in a controversy. As good a fighter as I was on the football field, I hated an argument in civilian life. Darnell was my best friend after Blaine and he was black, so I wasn't about to take the South's side, but I didn't want to hurt Lana's feelings neither. Besides, I didn't know but what Sara might have some relatives from the South somewheres along the line too.

  Darnell threw up his hands. “How about you, Sara? You're smart. Let me ask you. Was slavery wrong?”

  “Of course,” she said.

  “Well, then, let me ask you another thing. What reason could anybody have for fighting on a side that wants to own slaves?”

  Sara was quiet for a moment, her long eyelashes shading down over her eyes. “Well,” she said finally, “I guess a lot of folks want to be part of a side so much they just go along with what their side says is right.”

  “Even when it's really wrong,” Darnell threw in.

  “That's just it,” Sara said. “Some people don't know who they really are themselves, so how are they going to know what they think is right or wrong?”

  Darnell and Lana both said something back to that, but I didn't listen. I was still mulling over what Sara just said. It seemed like the wisest thing I'd ever heard someone my own age come up with. Talk about hitting home. Man. Last year, it wouldn't have meant nothing to me. I knew exactly who I was then. I was a Kennisaw Knight. But now that my Knights days was numbered, I could've stood to have that saying of hers etched in fancy writing on a wood-frame mirror and hung up over my bedroom dresser so I could look at it every morning before school.

  Darnell and Lana was still jabbering when something unexpected happened. Mr. Foudy announced that class was almost over, and if we wasn't done with our worksheets, we'd have to finish up after school. That's when it come. The perfect idea. Only I wasn't the one to think of it.

  “How about this,” Sara said. “We could get together sometime this evening and if we split the questions up even between us, we could get done in thirty minutes.”

  There it was, just that easy. I'd been working so hard on coming up with my clever-flirty deal that I done completely overlooked something as simple as getting together to study after school. It really was perfect. I could see how it'd be. Me and Sara setting side by side on the sofa, only without none of the pressure I had the few measly times my friends fixed me up with girls they thought was right for me. It wouldn't just be the two of us struggling around to make conversation neither. We'd have Darnell and Lana and the good old Civil War worksheet to take up the slack.

  Problem was, Darnell had to watch his younger brothers and sisters after football practice, and Lana had dance over at Miss Nikomos's studio. “I'm in modern dance,” she said, looking at me like I was supposed to be impressed by that.

  I turned over to Sara and said, “Sounds good to me,” so fast I even surprised myself.

  Darnell raised his eyebrows. Lana scrunched her nose up.

  “Okay,” Sara said. “Good. We can either meet at your house or mine somewhere around 7:30. Either way works fine for me.”

  I pictured my living room. Mom and Jim Houck and Fleet-wood Mac. “I can come over to your house, I guess.”

  “Okay, then.”

  “Okay.”

  The bell rang and I sprinted out of class as fast as I could. So far, I hadn't said nothing too stupid to mess things up, and I wanted to keep it that way.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Now, if you never been a teenage boy, you might think the first thing I done was run and tell my best friend how great it was about going over to Sara Reynolds's house, but everybody else knows better. I wouldn't no more have told Blaine about me and Sara than I'd have stuck my nose down a garbage disposal.

  At lunch, we took our regular table up by the north door of the cafeteria. It was meat loaf day. Blaine rocked back in his chair, going on and on with one of his funny stories about a prank he played on some little unsuspecting sophomore. The story was a long one with a couple extra curlicues added in here and there for special effects, but I kept fading out of it, thinking instead about how it'd be over at Sara's later on.

  The way I pictured it, the two of us would be setting there on the couch, leaning in close so we could read each other's Civil War worksheets. Our hands would touch every time we went to turn a page in the history book. For good measure, I had us down in a basement that Sara's folks converted into a TV room or something. Seemed like a lot of my friends had stories about girls and places like that. I never knew so many people even had converted basements.

  Down on the imaginary couch, I was confident and smooth as old James Bond hisself. I knew just what to say. I pulled
back that hair of hers and stared into her soulful-sad brown eyes and told her there wasn't no one else anywheres in the world like her.

  “Hampton,” she'd tell me. “I've had a crush on you since all the way back in junior high.”

  “What if your parents come downstairs?” I'd ask.

  “Oh, they never come down,” she'd say with a playful little glint in her eyes.

  We wouldn't need no more words then. She'd know me, and I'd know her, and there wouldn't be no holding back anymore.

  Just then, Darnell laid his lunch tray down on the table. “So, Hamp,” he said. “Looks like you have yourself a date with Sara Reynolds tonight.”

  If he'd set my hair on fire, it couldn't have been any worse than saying that right in front of Blaine.

  “A date?” Blaine rocked forward with a thud. “With who?”

  Usually, he didn't like his stories interrupted, but this news was too big to pass up.

  “It's not a date,” I said. “It's just some history homework we gotta finish up.”

  He shook his head at me like I was just a real pitiful specimen. “Surely you can get someone better to copy your homework off of than Bush Girl.”

  “I ain't copying off her,” I said. “And don't call her Bush Girl.”

  “Uh-huh, so you do like her.”

  I looked down at what was left of my meat loaf, but I could feel Blaine staring at the top of my head. “Sure, I like her. She's nice. But that don't mean—”

  Blaine slapped the table so hard the silverware rattled. “No way. I ain't gonna let you get hooked up with some little bushy-headed geek like that.”

  “She ain't a geek,” I said.

  “No, you're right. She don't even qualify as a geek. She's just a pure nobody.”

  “Hey now,” Darnell cut in. “Everybody's somebody. Besides, what's the big deal? Hamp's too backwards to try anything with her anyways.” He gave me a playful punch in the shoulder the way guys always done when they was putting me down on how bad I was with girls.

  “I never said I was gonna try nothing with her,” I told him. “All we're gonna do is finish up a history worksheet. So let's just drop it, okay?”

  Blaine wasn't about to let it loose, though. Not for a second. He had to go on and lay out a whole sermon on how he couldn't let his best friend and the best defensive player on the best football team in the state start tagging around with an inferior product like Sara Reynolds. “Hampton,” he said, “don't you know we're like the damn royalty at this school? You gotta step up and act like it, son. I'll tell you what, I'll get Rachel to hook you up with one of her friends.”

  “I don't need you doing that,” I said. Rachel Calloway was Blaine's girlfriend and probably the best-looking girl in our high school, which was saying something at our school with all the good-lookers we had around. Most of them was Rachel's friends too, but I didn't have the least thing in common with a one of them, as far as I could see. Besides, truth was, they about scared me to death.

  “How about Kim Hunt?” Darnell suggested.

  “No, we tried her already,” Blaine said. “Hampton spilled a bowl of chili on her.”

  “Hey,” I said. “I tripped and she just happened to be setting right there.”

  “Wait a minute.” Blaine snapped his fingers and grinned a jackpot-winner grin. “I got the perfect candidate. Misty Koonce.”

  I about choked on my meat loaf over that one. If Rachel Calloway was Kennisaw's top beauty queen, then Misty was first runner-up.

  “Misty Koonce?” Darnell said. “I thought she was dating some guy from over in Lowery.”

  “That's right,” I said. “She never dates guys from our school. I think it's like a rule she has.”

  “She dumped that Lowery guy,” Blaine said. “Yes sir, this is perfect. I guarantee, this Saturday night, Hamp, it's gonna be me and Rachel and you and Misty Koonce on a double date.”

  “I don't know,” I said. “Misty Koonce?”

  Blaine leaned back in his chair, real satisfied with hisself. “It's as good as done.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  After football practice, I had just enough time to heat me up a couple of leftover hamburger patties and some macaroni before making the long walk over to Sara's. Mom was either still working at the dollar store or out somewheres with Jim Houck, the hotshot car dealer. She didn't leave a note, so I didn't know for sure. I wasn't even sure if she'd gave old Jim his walking papers yet. That was her usual routine. Dump the guy before he had a chance to dump her like my father done. Sure, she'd put on a good act for a while, but an act's all it was. Sometimes I wondered what would happen if she ever run across a real good guy, someone just right for her, if she'd even be able to tell the difference.

  I sure wasn't someone to judge on that score, though. The more I studied on what Blaine said at lunch, the more confused I got about which girl I ought to go out with. Maybe he was right. Maybe Sara wasn't the one for me. To hear Blaine tell it, you'd think I was letting him and the whole football team down just by liking her. And anyone would have to be crazy to turn down a date with Misty Koonce.

  Misty was blond and popular and cute in that official way girls was supposed to be cute. You sure didn't have to guess about how much her body had filled out neither. Wasn't a guy at our school that hadn't spent a good chunk of time running pictures of Misty through his head, especially if he ever seen her out at Lake Hawkshaw leaning up against Buddy Shiff's bass boat in that little macramé-looking bikini.

  It was a sure thing if I had me a girl like Misty on my arm, my buddies would have to stop giving me a hard time about being backwards in the sex department. I didn't know how the hell they got so educated on the subject anyways. They was my age. I'd grown up with most of them. How did they turn into sex encyclopedias all the sudden? Course, I couldn't ask them about it outright. You never admit you don't know anything about a subject like that even if it's the most obvious thing in the world you don't.

  Misty or Sara. Sara or Misty. Them two girls kept rolling around in my head like dice in a leather cup. On the one hand, Misty was just the type you'd think a football player ought to go out with. While on the other hand, Sara, well, she was just Sara. If there was a high school book of how things was supposed to be, the way I felt about her wasn't likely to be listed. And you could bet old T. Roy Strong never dated someone folks called Bush Girl neither.

  The whole long walk over to Sara's house, I run these ideas through my head back and forth and every which ways, but I still didn't have it sorted out by the time I stepped up on her porch. Even after I rung the doorbell, I felt about like jumping over the banister and sprinting down the street for home. Then she opened the door and shined them soulful-sad brown eyes out at me, and I remembered why she was different from Misty Koonce.

  “Hey,” she said, brushing her hair back from her face.

  “Hey.” I looked down at the green welcome mat and told myself to forget what anybody else said about the subject of girls. “Hope I'm not late.”

  “No, you're right on time. Come on in.”

  Soon as I stepped through her door, things was different from what I was used to with my regular friends. For one, it smelled like rocks in there. And they did—they used rocks for decorations. Had them on little tables and shelves all the way from the front hall to all over the living room. Big black rocks, little gray ones, red ones and white ones and every kind of shape you'd ever want in a rock. They looked good and they smelled good, clean and hard.

  Sara caught me admiring them. “My parents are geologists,” she said.

  And she took me right in to talk to them too, instead of steering me off to another room the way a lot of kids will do, like their parents have some kind of disease that'd strike you down with a deadly case of boredom if you hung around them too much.

  Sara, she just leaned up against the side of the sofa next to her mother as comfortable as could be and even introduced her parents by their first names like I was fixing to be one of their
buddies. Made me feel like someone worth knowing.

  Mr. Reynolds—I couldn't call him Mark even if he was introduced that way—was parked in a wheelchair next to the sofa and had him a guitar cradled on his lap. He didn't look like no one else in Kennisaw, and not just 'cause of the wheelchair neither. He had a little ponytail and a goatee and wore a black beret. I'd never seen anyone wearing a beret outside of TV. Course, I'd noticed him rolling around town before, but I never knew he was Sara's dad. It's funny, but even in a town of 9,500 people like Kennisaw, there can be whole different circles of folks. Whole different worlds, almost.

  Mrs. Reynolds—who Sara introduced as Nancy—looked about like she could've been Sara's big sister. Wore the same kind of comfortable baggy clothes, and there wasn't no mistaking where Sara got all her hair from. Her mom couldn't have been more friendly to me neither, just like Mr. Reynolds was. You'd think it never even crossed their minds to suspect how much time I'd done spent conjuring up pictures of their daughter on a converted-basement sofa with her sweatshirt and jeans tossed off on the floor.

  What I figured was they must've been keeping track of my football-playing in the Kennisaw Sun. I didn't know why else they'd bother being so nice to someone they didn't even know. That part wasn't different from just about every other adult I run into around town. Always beating me over the head with football questions. How bad was the Knights going to whip Sawyer or Okalah or Kiowa Bluff? Who did I want to play college ball for, OU or OSU? Was I planning on playing in Dallas and winning me as many Super Bowl rings as T. Roy Strong? It got pretty old, if you want to know the truth.

  So I wasn't surprised when Mrs. Reynolds come out and said how Sara'd told her I was on the football team.

  “Yes, ma'am, I play linebacker,” I said, getting ready for the same old questions.

  “That's nice,” she said with a smile. “How's the team doing?”

  “Uh,” I said. I sure wasn't ready for that one. Everyone in Kennisaw knew the Knights was working on their fifth undefeated season in a row. I thought they did, anyways.