North Dallas Forty (28 page)

After she finished with Seth, Mary Jane wiped her hands on the blanket and returned to the galley to fix steak sandwiches for Clinton Foote and several of the others riding in first class. I loved it all.

“Hello, Mary Jane, how are you?” I tried to be as friendly as possible because I liked Mary Jane and I could tell by her expression she was depressed.

“Not too good,” she said, frowning. “I’ve got to go out with Emmett Hunter tonight. Why me? He brought Joanne with him. You suppose they’re planning a scene?”

“If they are, be sure to call me.” I grinned.

“I wouldn’t go out with the fat motherfucker if I thought I wouldn’t get dropped from the charters.”

“You would.”

“Yeah, I know,” she said. “At least I’ll get good and drunk.”

“Too bad you have to do it,” I said. “I wanted to take you out on the arm of the Statue of Liberty and show you my collection of Richard Nixon pornography.”

I felt slightly responsible, because Joanne was leaving Emmett at loose ends tonight in order to meet me at a party given by a writer friend of hers from Fort Worth.

“Smuggle a lot of whiskey back for us on the return, will you please, Mary Jane?” I asked, indicating myself and the sleeping Maxwell.

“I’ll try.”

On return trips, players were allowed only two beers apiece, while there was an unlimited supply of liquor in the first-class section for the coaches, management, press, and wealthy middle-aged sports groupies. For years Mary Jane had smuggled the tiny bottles back to Maxwell and me. She had almost been fired over it once, telling her supervisor she’d taken the bottles for herself rather than reveal their true destination—the slightly enlarged livers of Seth Maxwell and Phillip Elliott. Now most of the players brought their own bottles, but Maxwell and I had come to depend on Mary Jane. It was a ritual the three of us enjoyed.

“Bourbon for you and Cutty Sark for the King, right?” she finally smiled and started back up the aisle.

The curtain between the sections was open, and by leaning out of my seat, I could see Joanne Remington’s finely turned leg sticking into the aisle of the first-class section.

Joanne had surreptitiously squeezed my shoulder as she made her way to the front after boarding up the ass of the 727. I had turned and momentarily met her gaze, then quickly shifted my eyes to Emmett Hunter, who was behind her. Emmett had his corpulence covered with a brass-buttoned, double-breasted red blazer, an iron-on team patch on the pocket. The patch looked as if it had come from the bottom of a box of cornflakes. The front-office personnel and all the hangers-on that rode in first class wore these patches. I could just see the black maids all over north Dallas swapping techniques on how to attach the ugly little pieces of blue cloth to $150 sport coats.

“Hidy, Emmett. How yew, Joanne? How ya’ll doin’?” I had babbled, sounding like the opening of the “Buck Owens Show.”

“Hello, Phillip. How are you?” Joanne had answered in a soft proper tone. She looked superb in a purple knit mini-dress, her breasts clearly outlined and swinging free against the clinging material. I could hear the blood pounding in my ears.

“Ready to get this here game won,” I blurted out. Blah ... blah ... blah ... I sounded like the complete fool.

They moved on down the aisle. Emmett nodded hello.

After my talk with Mary Jane, I had fallen asleep and was awakened by someone pulling on the lapel of my coat. It was Bill Needham, the team’s business manager, who had been so upset by my ordering the large number of sandwiches and beer in Philadelphia. He was trying to slip an envelope into my inside coat pocket; I grabbed it out of his hand.

“Per diem?” I asked.

Needham nodded, startled by my awakening.

“Trying to slip it in without having to face me, huh.” Needham was a nervous junior executive who caught shit from both sides of the fence. I loved to rag him. “How much this time?” I asked, as I ripped the envelope open to find two five- and two one-dollar bills. “Twelve bucks? For how many meals?” I looked up at Needham expectantly.

“Four,” he said, his voice a whisper.

“Four. Jesus Christ. You guys are amazing. You know there ain’t no way to eat four meals in a hotel in Manhattan for twelve bucks. It is incredible how far you assholes will go to scrounge every nickle out of us. I’ll bet my sweet ass you and Clinton don’t eat on any three bucks a meal.”

“Now wait a minute, you can’t—”

“Fuck you, Needham, leave me alone.”

I closed my eyes and tried to go back to sleep.

The plane bounced into Kennedy and taxied to a deserted freight hangar where three chartered buses waited. Everybody jumped up as soon as the plane touched down and stood in the aisle jammed like cattle. I woke Maxwell, helped him down the ramp and to the back of the last bus in line. There he lapsed again into unconsciousness.

Everyone in my bus watched as Joanne climbed onto the bus in front. I couldn’t help but smile at the remarks and heavy breathing. Emmett had boarded in front of her and Scoop Zolin was behind her. Scoop put his hand on Joanne’s neatly outlined buttocks apparently to help her into the bus. (I don’t really profess to understand the motivations for any of Scoop’s actions.) Joanne turned around and slapped the shit out of him. Our bus rocked with laughter.

“Goddam,” Tony Douglas exhaled, “I’d eat a mile of her shit just to get within an inch of her asshole.” The frustration the big linebacker was building would probably cost some New York receiver his looks, or his knee cartilage, or both.

The bus crawled into the gray, grimy city amid cries and insults directed at the driver.

“Goddam, bussy!” Jo Bob screamed. The main antagonist, he was extremely vocal and obscene. B.A., Clinton, and Conrad Hunter had taken another bus. “We got from Dallas to New York faster’n you’re gettin’ us from the fucking airport into this goddam city. You better get your New York ass in gear.”

Buddy Wilks, the team statistician, kicking expert, former-all-pro running back, and all-around flunky, glared back at Jo Bob. Buddy had been in a bad mood ever since the team had laughed him down on Wednesday when he tried to cover the kicking material.

“Fuck you, Buddy,” Jo Bob shot back. “And suck that guy sittin’ next to you.”

Everyone laughed. Bill Needham, the business manager, who was sharing the seat with Wilks, was the constant object of much ridicule. No one seemed to know what Needham did except hand out per diem, arrange for buses to meet the planes, and make room assignments at the hotels. And since the buses were often late and the per diem was never enough, Needham caught a lot of shit.

“Goddam you, Needham, if the rooms are fucked up this week, I’m comin’ down to sleep with you. And it’ll be your night in the barrel,” Jo Bob yelled and laughed while Needham squirmed uncomfortably in his seat.

As we crossed into Manhattan, Maxwell woke for the second time and stretched and looked out the window at the dingy skyline.

“This time I’m gonna whip ’er,” Maxwell grunted, his voice in the characteristic whiskey rasp he uses when describing or anticipating some unusual sensual experience.

“Who?” I asked.

“Her,” he replied, pointing out the window at the gray-black buildings outlined against the dirty brown sky. Various clouds of earth-colored smoke boiled up from around the buildings and slowly mingled in the sickly sky. I felt as if I were going underground.

“She’s beat me too many times in the last five years,” he rasped, digging in his coat pocket and coming out with a cigarette. “Beat me to my knees, but not this time.”

He pointed to the Empire State Building.

“See that?” he asked. “When I leave this here town, she’s gonna be all mine. I’m gonna fuck her to dust.”

“If anybody could to it, Seth ...”

“You want part of it?” he continued, his gesture taking in all of Manhattan and parts of several other boroughs. “Which part?” His eyes were starting to glow, his spirits were rising; the city was having a visible effect on him.

“I don’t know, man.” I hesitated. “I’m sort of a country boy.”

“Bullshit,” he raved, “just name it, what do you want? Downtown ... the Upper East Side is all mine ... the Village ... That’s it—you can have the Village.”

“Now you’re talkin’, pardner,” I said. “Give me that Washington Square and all those sixteen-year-old girls trying to support a habit.”

“You got it,” Maxwell said, jumping to his feet and yelling to the front of the bus. “Take this man to Washington Square.” He winced with pain, deep ravines digging in around his eyes. He grabbed his head with both hands and eased back into his seat and closed his eyes.

“Headache,” was all he said.

He didn’t open his eyes again until we reached the hotel. It was 7
P.M.
eastern standard time.

The room keys were spread out on a table in the lobby. While I tried to edge through the crowd, Maxwell went to the desk to check for messages. We met by the elevator and exchanged prizes.

“Here’s a message for you,” he said. “I’ll meet you in the room.” I handed him my record player and records.

I went back across the lobby to the tobacco counter and bought a couple of long thin cigars. I liked to smoke cigars on the road, they relaxed me. The cigars turned out to be so old and dry I had to suck on one for several minutes before it would hold together long enough to light. I bought a
Times
, sat on a brown leather sofa, and read the message from Joanne. It instructed me to meet her at an address on Sutton Place at 9:30. She had signed the note “J.”

I crumpled the note, thought fleetingly about eating it, then threw it in the silent butler at the end of the couch. It took three shots. I read the sports section of the
Times
and then caught the elevator to the eleventh floor.

Maxwell was lying in his shorts on one of the tiny twin beds. I nodded hello and threw the newspaper across his chest.

“They refer to you as a riverboat gambler,” I said, “and to me as a lanky member of the receiving corps. I got an immediate mental image of a penis in a tin hat—don’t ask me why.”

I fell into bed, traditionally the one nearest the door. It was a deal we had; I answered the door and Maxwell got the phone.

“What you got planned?” I asked Maxwell, who was fingering himself through the fly of his shorts.

“Waitin’ on a call from Hoot.”

Hoot was an old friend of Maxwell’s, who had moved to New York’s Lower East Side about four years ago. Nobody seemed to know what Hoot did, but he always had a nice apartment and plenty of money. I thought he was a gangster and Maxwell had him pegged as a male prostitute, screwing rich old ladies from midtown.

“Hey, man,” I asked, remembering. “What in God’s name did you do to Hartman?”

“I took him honky-tonkin’.”

“Well, he sure looked honky-tonked out at the airport.”

Maxwell laughed a short raspy laugh.

“I tol’ him quarterbackin’ wasn’t all that simple. I don’t think that boy’s gonna make it. I’ll kill him with pussy and Cutty.”

“Well,” I announced, “I’ve got a party to go to—I guess I’ll go to the bathroom and throw up.” I got up, accompanied by my ever-present groan, and walked bent over into the bathroom.

It was an old-fashioned affair with white and black ceramic tiles and a cast-iron shower-tub combination. The plane ride always upset my system, besides making my joints and muscles stiff from all that sitting; a hot shower usually got me turned around, but not always.

The steam was billowing from behind the curtain; I stepped carefully into the tub. I have an inordinate fear of dying naked in a hotel bathroom, probably because I spend so much time in them feeling miserable.

“I think we’re the only ones on this floor,” Maxwell said, his voice coming closer. “Everybody I rode up with got off on nine.” The curtain pulled back and he handed me a joint.

“Thanks.” I handed it back after a long drag. “I needed that. Did Scoop see you yet?”

“What does that little cocksucker want?”

“I dunno, I just told him I wouldn’t say anything he could print except ‘no comment.’ ”

“That asshole wrote that the three biggest losers of all time were Joe Kuharich, Charles DeGaulle, and me.”

“I didn’t think DeGaulle was all that bad.”

“Fuck you, second string. It’ll be a cold day when I signal for you from the bench.”

“Seth, Seth, let’s not let personalities enter into this. You need me for the good of the team.”

“It’s too fucking hot in here.”

The door closed and I was left alone with the hot water pounding on my neck, sending chills but not much relief through my body. I decided if I moved out to Charlotte’s farm we would have to spend more time sleeping and less time philosophizing.

When I came back into the bedroom Maxwell was hanging up the phone.

“Hoot?”

“Yeah, he’s sending a limousine for me. Wanna go?”

“No, thanks, I got something else going.”

“Sutton Place?” He had read the message.

“Yeah.”

“Be careful, man,” Maxwell cautioned. “Money’s a dangerous thing for a country boy like you to go rubbing up against.”

“I’ll wear thick underwear.” I absently picked some caked blood and big-city air from my nose. I lit another joint and offered it to Seth. He declined.

“The limo’s s’posed to be here at nine.” He opened his suitcase and fished out his playbook. “Might as well study a few things till then.”

“Don’t forget the wing square out and go,” I reminded him.

“Yeah,” he nodded. “Gill oughta do a helluva job on that one.”

“Don’t you wish.”

The taxi ride took me through Central Park. I was sure it was the long way but I enjoyed the park. It was strange to watch the horse-drawn cabs clopping along while the automobiles careened wildly around them. You wouldn’t see any horses in downtown Dallas.

It was 9:40 when the cab arrived at Sutton Place. I was met at the door by a uniformed doorman who asked my name.

“No. No autographs please,” I said, holding up my hands and backing away. The joints I had smoked, plus the cold night air, had effected my recovery. I felt fine.

“I just want your name, buddy,” he said, creasing his face and holding up a clipboard, “if your name ain’t on this list you don’t get in.”