North Dallas Forty (21 page)

Although Maxwell’s upper body took an incredible beating, he had good strong legs and had been a running back in college. Only specific orders from B.A. kept him from running out of the pocket. On occasion he would disregard those orders and turn a certain loss into a good gain. He liked to run and hit.

“You’re the only man I know with an older body than mine,” Maxwell said, looking at the large knot sticking out from the side of my ankle, the vestige of a compound fracture and dislocation.

The doctor told me the knot had developed because I had taken several steps after the injury, but I got the feeling it was just too much trouble to put everything exactly back in place. And besides, as the doctor said, it was functional and would only bother me if I wore Oxfords. To me the ankle seemed minor compared to my back injury and it seldom bothered me, except for occasional jokes about having the head of my dick stuffed in my sock.

I often felt that this brotherhood of mutilation was a very large part of the strange friendship Maxwell and I shared. Each bore his particular pain in front of the other with a stoic humor. When one went down, the other was always among the first to his side, unless he had already gone down, which happened more than once. The intimacy of our doping ritual had begun, with codeine and Demerol, long before marijuana had become the sacrament. At first the pills were used just to bear the pain of shredded and smashed muscles and ligaments. Then later we combined them with alcohol to shorten the long, anxious return trips to Dallas. We would sit, strapped in our seats, packed in ice or wrapped in elastic, in lengthy discussions of the sounds and feelings of excruciating injuries. Enjoying the communion of pain thresholds and recovery times, we developed a bond not unlike a Prussian Saber Club. To mention it at the time would have seemed ridiculous. After all, it was just a day’s work. But as the years wore on in meetings like this, we would sit in naked silence and marvel at each other’s ability to withstand pain and wonder how much longer the misshapen limbs would last. This morning, from the look of us, even money said the end of the day. But somehow, we would make another day, as we had so many days in the past, each taking strength from the other’s agony. It was all we knew how to do.

It was a peculiar, maybe even a homosexual bond, but it was strong, and in a life of continual change, I took my solace in its intransigence.

“An all-time show stopper,” Maxwell said, lying on his back on the uppermost of the bleacherlike sauna seats. He was staring at the ceiling, absently fingering his testicles, a towel spread across his chest.

“Uh-huh,” I said, hoping the story would finally move past the opening expletive.

“Do you know Jerry Drake?” Maxwell swung his chicken legs off the bench and sat on the edge, staring down to where I was stretched out on the floor. The name sounded familiar, but it was Maxwell’s story and best to let him tell it all.

“He owns Big Tex Automotive and Electrical Supply.”

“Oh, yeah.” I nodded.

“Well,” Maxwell lay back down, “it was his YMCA team that I spoke to last night.” He paused to towel the sweat off his face. “I smoked both those joints you gave me on the way over so I was really high and really paranoid. They’d already eaten when I got there so I just got up and told ’em that football wasn’t everything in their lives, that it was just a passing phase, that they should spend more time on other things—”

I burst out laughing. “I’ll bet all those dads loved that.”

“They didn’t seem too pleased. But what the hell, I’m a star. Drake got up and told ’em not to take what I said literally—whatever that meant—and that the YMCA Championship was one of the most important things in their young lives. You know, discipline, will to win, building character—all that.”

“Amazing.”

“Oh yeah.” Maxwell smiled. “And when I first walked in he took me off to the side and asked me not to smoke in front of his boys. I nearly shit. He meant cigarettes.”

Maxwell hobbled out to the showers. I waited on the floor for his return.

“Afterward,” he said, stepping over me. “Afterward, he invites me to his house for a drink. Since the talk took less than an hour, I figured for three hundred dollars, why not? We go to his house and I meet his wife. That’s when I called you. He wanted you to come over and fuck her too.”

“What?” I straightened up in a combination of shock and sexual stirrings.

“I know ... I know,” Maxwell continued, his hands over his head in surrender, his face the picture of mock remorse. “I shouldn’t have done it.” He frowned and bobbed his head. “I know how you feel about group fucking, that’s why you weren’t invited, but shit, she was in great shape for her age.”

“How old?” I asked. I was sitting upright on the floor with my legs pulled up, wrapped in my arms, my chin resting on my knees. I was in a state of semierection.

“About thirty-five.”

“A regular Methuselah.”

“It was incredible. I had a hard on a cat couldn’t scratch. He sat at the foot of the bed watching and telling her what to do, pointing and telling her to lick this and suck that. It was like being in surgery. I ate her pussy for a solid hour.”

“Did Drake just watch?” I pressed. Maxwell seemed confused by my question. He eyed me curiously, then continued.

“Oh he crawled in and rubbed against both of us for a while. But most of the time he would sit and watch, or pop amyl nitrite in our noses.

“After we’d fucked for hours, we took a shower and then she got out some of those fake dicks—”

“Dildoes.” I smiled at Seth’s unfamiliarity with the vocabulary of perversion. Maxwell was a master of execution, not abstract theory; he had no need for the jargon except when recounting a particular adventure, at which time I would supply the technical gaps with a knowledge gleaned of much vicarious research and little actual practice.

“Yeah—whatever.” Maxwell was anxious to get on with the story. It was as if the experience hadn’t really happened and he couldn’t really feel it until he recounted it to someone and watched and listened to their reaction. Until he talked about it, it wasn’t real. He did it and I enjoyed it, another aspect of this peculiar symbiotic-parasitic relationship we called friendship.

“Well,” he continued, “one was about this big.” He held his hands a foot apart and then made a circle with his index fingers and thumbs. They just barely touched. “It had all sorts of teeth and bumps on it. The end of the other one looked like a miniature pickax. She went totally crazy when I fucked her with that one.” He smiled and squeezed down his eyes. His voice slipped again into the whiskey rasp. “I give her a real good fuckin’ ... she won’t forget ol’ John Henry for a long time.” He wrapped his fingers around his cock and shook it gently.

“Then,” Maxwell said, his excitement showing, “she sucked me off ’till John Henry was achin’, while Jerry fucked her with the fake dick. God what a night! She passed out with ol’ John Henry in her mouth.” He pointed his penis toward his face, dropped his head, and stared into the solitary eye. “Didn’t she, boy?”

Maxwell pulled John Henry’s foreskin back and inspected the little red, raw patches on the underside of the head.

“Shit. The son of a bitch is really sore.”

“What time did you leave?”

“That is chapter two. Why do I punish myself like this?” A note of exhaustion crept into his voice.

The heat and excitement of the story, combined with the sauna, were a little too much. I got up to go to the showers and cool down. In the shower, I began to feel the effects of my earlier prescriptions; I would make it through another day.

Rufus Brown, the forty-year-old black “clubhouse boy,” walked to the entrance of the showers.

“How’d you get in?”

“Hey, Rufus, how you doin’?”

“Fine, Phil, how’d you get in?”

“Maxwell broke a window in the back. Cover for us, will you?”

“Okay,” he said, frowning. “But if I have to pay for the window you’ll have to give me the money. They don’t give me nothin’ without reason.”

That was certainly true. The team scouts spilled more in liquor than Rufus got in salary, but Clinton Foote, in true general-manager style, bitched at him for every extra dime he needed to run the clubhouse. Last year, after winning the division, we voted Rufus a $2,100 share of the purse, but Clinton overruled it and reduced it to $500 because “the vote was not unanimous and we can’t give that colored boy a larger share than the office personnel.”

“Okay, Rufus,” I said. “Thanks.”

“Sure.” He smiled and returned to the locker room to finish picking up yesterday’s dirty socks and jockstraps. I picked up some Q-TIPS and tried to force a breathing canal through my omnidirectional nose. I got a lot of blood from the left nostril and a clear, watery fluid from the right. My left ear had been plugged for several days and ached violently when I worked my jaw. As a result, I hadn’t eaten much in the past few days. The speed was activating my mind, but the stiffness continued returning to my legs and back; the codeine seemed to be working slower or not at all. The skin on my lower back and left hip burned, referred pain from the nerves and muscles crushed by the linebacker’s knee in the back. I rubbed my hip absently, noticing the alternating areas of deadness and extreme sensitivity.

“It was about midnight,” Maxwell said, diving right back into the story as soon as I opened the door to the sauna. He was obviously feeling his medication, too. “When his wife passed out, we went to the kitchen to get a beer and he made a phone call to some doctor’s wife in Lakewood. She told us to come on over. The doc was out of town. Jerry said she was a nymphomaniac and was in therapy. Her husband didn’t care who she fucked as long as he met them.” His lips curled into a wicked sneer and he fell into the obscene rasp. “She made an exception in my case ... me bein’ a star and all.”

“Amazing.” It was all I could think to say.

“It was the same shit all over again. Although Drake did eat her pussy after I’d fucked her.”

“Puke,” I said. “Do you think the guy’s a football fan or what?”

“I dunno, man. But she was great-lookin’—in her twenties.”

“Please,” I said, holding up my hands, “no more.”

“Lemme tell you the weird part.” He was pleading.

“Weird part?” I yelled. “Weird part?”

Maxwell just raised his eyebrows and shrugged, holding his open palms out in front, in a gesture of noncommitment.

“Anyway,” Maxwell proceeded, “after we’d fucked me and John Henry ’bout to death, she opens the drawer by her bed and shows me a syringe full of morphine—”

“Morphine?”

“That’s what she said.” Maxwell’s face was blank. “She said her husband left it for her. It scared the shit outta me. Man, she was perverted. I left a little later.”

“What makes you think she was perverted?” I asked, smiling slightly, clasping my hands behind my head and leaning back against the hot cedar wall. “Maybe she’s just precocious.”

“Whatever.” Maxwell lay back down and after a few minutes silence he began to hum the verses of “The Mansion You Stole.”

The door jerked open and Eddie Rand, the trainer, stuck his head inside, glaring down at me on the floor.

“Okay,” he yelled, “who did it?”

I immediately pointed at Maxwell.

“He did,” I said.

“That right, Seth?” Rand asked, his tone softening noticeably.

“Do what?” Maxwell asked calmly, making no outward movement, his eyes fixed on the ceiling.

“The medicine cabinet,” Rand answered. “If B.A. finds out, it’s somebody’s ass.”

“Don’t tell him then,” I said. “Give the kid a break, man. I was there. I saw it all. The man was desperate. Think of it as an emergency.”

“I suppose you just stood there and watched?” Rand shot back.

“He held me down and massaged my throat to make me swallow ’em.” I was lying on my back on the floor, my hands behind my head. “But I don’t hold a grudge, so why should you?”

“No more of that shit,” Rand said, feebly. “You guys understand?”

“Sure, Eddie, you bet,” I said, rolling onto my side and turning my back to the angry man in white duck pants. “I suppose you’re gonna be pissed about the beer, too.”

“You cocksuckers,” Rand screamed. “You took my beer?”

His crepe-soled foot kicked me hard in the ass. The door slammed shut.

“Goddam,” I said, rubbing the bruised cheek, “that hurt.”

“What did you do last night?”

I jumped at the sound of Maxwell’s voice; I had fallen asleep.

“Huh?”

“What did you do last night?” he asked again. He was on his back pushing his toes against the wall, making the whole room shake. The tiny time pills were going off like time bombs.

I moaned, turning over to sit up. “Nothing. Got pulled over and raped by a girls’ basketball team from Corsicana. You know, the usual Wednesday night shit.”

Actually, the evening had slipped from my mind and I was having difficulty recalling the details. It seemed years ago.

“I was really high. Took a shitpot full of Harvey’s Grade A cactus and got a good look at the real me. I’m a real asshole, as near as I can tell.” I sighed and tried to relax, realizing that what I had just said was mainly truth.

“You better cut that shit out, man,” Maxwell warned. “It can fuck up your mind. You’re getting a little too far out.”

“Oh, Christ,” I said. The evening began to trickle back. “I forgot. Crawford and Claridge had another fight.”

“With each other?”

“No. Everybody else. Claridge took his clothes off again, this time on stage at Rock City. Then he and Crawford beat up their dates. When the fight started, I grabbed Bob Beaudreau’s girl and split.”

“Same old Fightin’ Phil Elliott,” Maxwell said, a slight touch of disgust edging his voice. The nickname was a reference to a game in the distant past when a fight had broken out and our bench had emptied into the field to join in the fray. The following Tuesday, viewing the game films, the camera panned the deserted bench, where only two figures remained: standing at the sidelines shaking his fist toward the field was B.A. and huddled near the phone table, wrapped in a parka, was me.

“I wonder if they got arrested?” I had been so intent on escaping with Charlotte, I hadn’t fully considered my teammates’ possible fate.