Coasters. Gerald Duff

It’s indeed my policy to eat while the dish is still hot, always.”

      A nibble, Waylon thought as he scooped up the last bit of filet from the baking sheet with a spatula, that’s what that little tap on the hand feels like, a nibble from a keeper-sized grouper right before it hits the bait for real and starts to back up into the rocks to eat what it’s caught, down on the bottom in the dark where nothing can bother it.

      “Here it comes,” he announced, balancing the plate on the palm of his hand like a waiter as he returned to the dining room. “The last little bite of the late Mister Grouper.”

7

      They had just started when Bobby Shepard pulled his car up to the football field, both groups—to the right the forty or fifty boys wearing the practice uniforms of the Yellow Jackets and at the other end the eight cheerleaders doing high kicks and stretches to warm up. Even at this distance, he could see the flash of their gold rayon tights beneath the maroon skirts as they moved their legs in unison and clapped their hands in a series of starts and pauses. From across the field, Bobby could see the hands of the eight girls meeting before he could hear the sounds they made on impact. The sight, the delay, the sharp clap.

      Before he killed the engine Bobby made sure he was parked at the middle of the sideline of the field, right at the fifty-yard line marker, not cheating to the left toward the endzone where the cheerleaders were practicing, not like one time last year when he had positioned the car almost at the north forty.

      He hadn’t been there more than a few minutes when one of the girls had noticed him and said something to the other ones as they stood in a circle, holding hands in formation to begin a yell. They had all laughed and squealed and shook themselves about until finally they had moved together in a unit over toward where he was sitting behind the wheel of the Thunderbird, lining themselves up about two yards apart to face directly toward his location.

      The head cheerleader, since graduated, a dark-haired girl named Leah Lafargue—Bobby Shepard knew that from having studied her picture in the Port Arthur Enterprise—had clapped her hands together three times to give the squad its rhythm, and then they had started up that yell, pointed right at him in the driver’s seat of the T-bird.

      Go back, go back,

      Go back to the woods.

      ’Cause you haven’t, you haven’t,

      You haven’t got the goods.

      Bobby hadn’t looked at them while they were yelling it, of course, his head turned sharply away to focus on the football squad at the far end of the field instead, but they knew he was hearing it, all right. And so did the other men parked in their cars to his right, watching the Yellow Jackets practice, and smirking as the Port Arthur cheerleaders made fun of him and the location where he’d chosen to park his car on the sideline.

      He never made that mistake again, not even going back to the afternoon practices for almost a month, and ever since that time careful always to be precisely at the fifty, maybe even three or four yards to the right toward the football squad end of the field. But he couldn’t bring himself to nose the Thunderbird up any further away from the fifty and the portion of the field where the cheerleaders twisted their bodies and flashed their legs and clapped their hands each afternoon of the football season.

      It was always better, he figured, to take the gamble of being on the edge of ridicule than to get so far away from the cheerleaders that he couldn’t see any details of the movements of their bodies and the way their mouths looked when they were barking out their yells in preparation for those Friday nights under the white lights at the Yellow Jacket games.

      Today there was an older woman with them, maybe a sponsor or a teacher or something, and she was talking to the squad before and after each routine they were doing. She had graying hair, Bobby could see out of the corner of his eye as he kept his head turned toward the end of the field where the offense was working on plays from within the ten-yard line, and she was wearing faded sweats, about as revealing as a pile of wet laundry.

      The woman was also interrupting the flow of the practice with her little speeches before and after each yell the squad did, and Bobby found himself becoming more and more irritated with the jumpy starts and stops her instructions seemed to be causing. He missed what he took to be the natural way one set of movements followed another when the girls were on their own out in the green stretch of Bermuda grass covering the field, the laughing they did between routines, the way one or two of them would begin to work on her kicks alone, off to the side, while the others chattered away at each other as they waited for the head cheerleader to decide which yell to do next.

      Damn a stove-up old biddy who won’t let these girls do their stuff, Bobby Shepard told himself and spit dryly at something which seemed to be tickling his lips. Pollen, maybe, or some specks of trash in the air from refinery fall-out. What does she know about how to make those smooth movements that just naturally come to these girls, the kicks that go above their heads with no effort until it looks like they’re doing a vertical split in mid-air, the little flips of their hands with their fingers stuck straight out like feathers at the ends of a bird’s wings, and the quiver of all that flesh so new and tight it acts like the highest grade of extruded latex ever manufactured in the Golden Triangle?

      “Her damned old cherry,” Bobby announced bitterly to the Thunderbird steering column before him, “has done festered and turned to wine.”

      Right then, for instance, as the barking sounds of the assistant coaches rose from the football end of the field urging on the offensive line on the attack from the two-yard line marker, the woman had singled out just one of the girls to work with and told the other seven cheerleaders to relax. That’s what it looked like to Bobby, at least, as he cut his eyes severely to the left to see what was going on. One girl, not the head cheerleader, he could tell by her hair color, a sort of brown, not the near coal black of the curls of Celia Mae Adcock, was standing alone in front of the woman in the faded sweat clothes.

      The other girls were lounging on the ground in a haphazard manner, not lined up in a pattern the way Bobby Shepard liked to see them, and effectively the cheerleading practice had fallen totally to pieces because of the bossiness of the older woman. She now had the girl standing before her going through some sort of individual exercise involving her moving just one arm, then the other, out to the side with a sharp snapping motion, yelling one word each time an arm was extended. The display made no sense to Bobby, and it was clearly not interesting visually.

      You want every one of them doing the same thing at the same time, Bobby felt like climbing out of the Thunderbird and yelling across the the field, so you can see how they’re all alike but different, too. You want variation, he imagined himself yelling out distinctly, each word in a voice like thunder to the old bitch disrupting the cheerleader’s practice session, but you want it in a pattern, God damn it to hell!

      “Why don’t you just go over there and set down in the middle of them, Shepard?” a voice said through the Thunderbird’s window on the passenger’s side. “And look up underneath their dresses? That way you could get a whole lot better beaver shot and save on chiropractor bills, too.”

      “Huh?” Bobby said, snapping his head around to see who had spoken. “What you talking about? I ain’t looking at them girls.”

      “Yeah, and this clunker ain’t a Ford product, neither,” Jess Hardy said, opening the car door and sitting down in the passenger seat. Jess was a big man, so tall he had played center on the basketball team Bobby’s senior year, and he had to sit with his knees almost at chest level to fit in the Thunderbird seat.

      “I’m trying to see what kind of luck the Jackets’re going to have with that option formation inside the ten,” Bobby said in a deliberate tone and pointed toward the football squad end of the field. “They going to need more space to operate that system, it appears to me.”

      “Right,” Jess Hardy said. “And I believe you’re going to need to change your jockey shorts once you get back to the house,