North Dallas Forty (39 page)

“So?”

“So, everything you think is so swell and wonderful and unduplicatable about you as a quarterback B.A. has on a tape downtown ready to be pumped into the next guy like he was pulling on headgear.”

“You’re wrong,” Maxwell argued, “dead wrong. You’re just pissed off because you can’t get the starting job. And if you don’t quit goofing off pretty soon you’ll never get it.”

“Probably so,” I said, shaking my head slowly and wondering whatever possessed me to start the argument. “But what can I do? I’m too used to seeing myself on a list—a six-foot-four-inch two-hundred-fifteen-pound flankerback, right alongside the six and seven-eighths helmets and the size thirteen shoes. No, man, I
FEEL
like a piece of equipment. I
know
I’m a piece of equipment.”

We both fell silent.

“Ya know,” Maxwell began, “you just don’t understand. You let things bother you too much. I learned a long time ago, you can’t let things bother you.”

“How do you keep from it?” I knelt down to rub on Billy Wayne, who had come over and was licking the back of my hand.

“It’s easy, man. You just don’t. When I was about six or seven, I don’t remember too clear, my folks took me to the doctor to have my tonsils out. Only they didn’t tell me what was goin’ on ... just that we was goin’ to the doctor. It was a plan they’d worked out with the doctor to keep me from raisin’ too much hell.

“Well, anyway,” Maxwell continued, “I knew somethin’ was up by the way my folks acted in the car, so by the time we got to the doctor’s office, I was scared shitless, but I didn’t let on. You know what I mean?”

I agreed, my mind swimming back twenty-odd years to a small doctor’s office in Michigan.

“But even when they laid me out on the table I never let on I was scared. Even when they put the mask over my face and tol’ me to count backwards from ten, I knew they didn’t think I could make it but I held my breath and counted real fast and got to zero just before everything went black.

“Do you know what I’m sayin’?” he continued. “Let ’em do what they want, I just keep foolin’ ’em.”

“Jesus,” I said, finally. “That’s almost the same thing that happened to me, except I thought they were killing me and I screamed bloody murder from start to finish.”

“They still took your tonsils out, didn’t they?”

I nodded.

“Well, that’s my point. It don’t do no good to fight. What you gotta do is fool ’em. I been foolin’ ’em ever since.”

“Yeah, man,” I protested, “but if you spend all your time pretending you’re something else, that’s what you are—something else.

“That’s what I love about sports, man,” I continued, trying to explain. “There is a basic reality where it is just me and the job to be done, the game and all its skills. And the reward wasn’t what other people thought or how much they paid me but how I felt at the moment I was exhibiting my special skill. How I felt about me. That’s what’s true. That’s what I loved. All the rest is just a matter of opinion.”

Maxwell’s eyes brightened slightly and he nodded his head.

“I know what you’re saying,” he admitted. “I guess that’s why we all start playing in the first place.”

I nodded and smiled, pleased that we had an understanding.

“You still feel that way?” I asked, not really certain of my own answer.

“I dunno anymore, man. Back before we won it all, I used to always feel that way. Hell, there was hardly any other reason to play, you remember that. I used to fight with B.A. all the time, just like you do now. Shit,” he laughed, “I not only wouldn’t call the plays he sent in, I ran the guys that brought ’em in off the field. But, I do know this. B.A. is the winning side, and I may not have the fun that I used to, but I sure win a lot more and that’s good enough for me.

“It’s tougher now; maybe that’s the price of winning,” he conceded. “Now, it’s all sort of mixed up with statistics, incentive money, and how much money I get if I win the division or lead the league. I still play for the thrill, but winning has its responsibilities and it gets a little confusing.”

“You’re totally obsessed with winning,” I pointed out “Don’t you think that’s wrong?”

“No. If you don’t win, what’s the sense of playing?”

“The game man,” I argued. “The game. Not the end, the winning or losing, but the means: the game. That’s the reason—the game, only the game.”

“Well, all I know is what I have to do statistically to keep playing and that’s what I try and do each week. If I enjoy playing, that’s great, but I need those numbers first and have to do whatever is necessary to get ’em.”

“It takes away a lot of the fun.”

“What’s fun?”

We fell silent while I continued to pat on Billy Wayne and think about what Seth had just said. Finally, I stood up and began to organize myself to leave.

“I guess it’s whose opinion is the most important to you,” I said. “I don’t know whether it’s really my keen judgment I respect or if I’m swayed by the fact that I’m the only one who thinks I’m any good.”

Maxwell seemed no longer interested and called Billy Wayne to his side and they resumed their play. I picked up my coat and threw it over my shoulder.

“See you tomorrow or Tuesday,” I called, heading for the door.

“Right,” he answered without looking up. He was holding Billy Wayne’s curly black head and looking into his brown eyes. He was whispering something to the dog but it was too soft for me to hear.

The wind was picking up as I walked slowly to the car, my head tilted back, searching vainly for the supernova I knew I would never see. If I can just get to zero before everything goes black.

The house looked dark and uninviting as I stopped the Riviera at the front curb. I let the engine idle and listened to Mick Jagger grind through “Jig-saw Puzzle.”

I thought of the incredible confusion I had come through in just seven short days. My career had moved out of peril into an area of relative security and possible success. I always felt I had the ability to be a great receiver and now it could be working out. B.A. would have difficulty denying my performance today. The day seemed almost surreal. My legs and back still hurt, but I had a new energy, a force, that helped me endure and overcome the debilitating effects of constant pain. Amazingly I no longer worried about the pain, I accepted it.

I knew that all the good somehow started with Charlotte, a change she had made, a shift in perspective. All the ingredients were there and she helped me sort them out. Since we met I was somehow different, less myself, but more myself. My stomach turned over warmly as I thought about her and I became at once excited and optimistic. There was something magical about her. Even away from her I felt her presence in my thinking, in my feelings about living. Yet, I could not recall her face, could not conjure an image of her in my mind. I knew all her adjectives, I knew she was beautiful and desirable but I could not picture her. Instead I saw only her name in block sans serif type and it gave me chills. Instantly, irreconcilable and confusing thoughts made perfect sense.

The smell of her remained constantly in my head, although I have no idea where it came from, my nose being less than sensitive. I wanted to bury my face in the hollow of her neck and hide in her long hair.

“... And me I wait so patiently

With my woman on the floor

Just trying’ to work this jigsaw puzzle

Before it rains anymore... .”

W
HEN THE PHONE RANG
at 10
A.M.
I thought I was still in New York and let it ring several times before I even opened my eyes.

“Coach Quinlan would like to see you in his office at eleven this morning.” It was Ruth, B.A.’s secretary.

“Is this a recording?” I asked sleepily.

“What?”

“Nothing, Ruth, tell him I’ll be there as soon as I get my heart started.”

“What?”

“Never mind, Ruth. I’ll be there.” I hung up and made a mental note to have the phone ripped out and melted down for sunglass frames.

I had some difficulty getting out of bed. My shoulder had stiffened during the night and coupled with my other aches and pains made sitting upright a test of concentration and desire. My knee had filled with fluid and I had trouble straightening it. Finally I got to my feet by rolling off the mattress and onto the floor.

I shuffled into the bathroom amazed, as I was every Monday, by how much pain I was feeling. By the time I had soaked sufficiently, being careful to keep my knee elevated and out of the hot water to avoid further swelling, cleared my sinuses of dried blood and mucus, and otherwise effected enough of a recovery to walk upright, it was a quarter to eleven. I made the twenty-minute drive in fifteen and was standing anxiously at the reception desk at eleven exactly. B.A. made me wait another twenty minutes and, after thumbing through the only magazine,
A Guide to High School Coaches in Idaho
, I struck up a conversation with the new receptionist, a pretty, proper, black girl (not too dark).

“How are you?” I said, cleverly using my standard opening.

“Fine,” she said, keeping her face buried in the book she was reading,
Mandingo
, the story of a slave-breeding farm in the 1800s.

“Have you gotten to the part where the master boils the high-yellow buck down to soup and bones for screwing his wife?”

There was no answer. I am strangely encouraged by people who ignore or discount me. I plunged right on with the lopsided conversation. I had difficulty disguising my eagerness. “How about the scene where the master catches his daughter in carnal knowledge of a Kikuyu in a cornfield and cuts the cheek of his ass off with a hoe? ... Wait a minute, that was another book.”

The phone rang. She picked it up, listened a moment, and then replaced the receiver.

“You can go in now.” She never looked up.

As I walked down the hallway toward B.A.’s office, I noticed all the other offices were either empty or had their doors closed. I encountered no one in the halls and on reaching my destination had decided, as many Hollywood Indian scouts did just before they took an arrow in the throat, that it was just too quiet. Ruth solemnly opened the door to the head coach’s inner sanctum and I fell among a war party of pinstriped Apaches.

B.A. sat regally at one end of his oval desk. Arranged around the desk and in various parts of the large room were an alarming number of club and league officials. There was an empty seat opposite B.A. and he motioned for me to take it. As I moved slowly toward him I looked into the several faces that just stared blankly, and grimly, back at me. I seated myself. I recognized all of the assembly with the exception of a stocky man with close-cropped, thinning hair. He appeared to be in his midforties and, in contrast to the other men, was dressed quite gaudily in an ill-fitting brown-and-yellow-checked wool sport coat.

In an effort to assess what was happening, I studied the faces at the desk. The head coach was flanked by Conrad Hunter on his right and Clinton Foote on his left. In the awkward silence, I could hear the distinctive tapping of Clinton’s foot. He was loaded on amphetamines for a long day. On Foote’s left sat Ray March, who was in charge of internal affairs and security for the league. March was a ten-year veteran of the FBI. All were also ex-FBI agents. Their primary responsibilities consisted of surveillance of player personnel and investigations of improper conduct.

B.A. shuffled noisily and awkwardly through several stacks of paper arrayed on his desk. Finally he selected one and held it out with both hands, studying it intently. His face was deeply furrowed and he licked his lips several times before trying to speak.

“Phil,” he said, his eyes riveted to the paper, “where were you last Tuesday until approximately eight
A.M.
Wednesday morning?” He never raised his eyes.

“What?” I would be an outstanding witness.

“On Tuesday night of this past week,” B.A. repeated. The paper was still in his hands but his eyes wandered absently down to the table top. He still hadn’t looked at me. “Where were you?”

I continued to survey the room, noticing the conspicuous absence of Emmett Hunter. His place had been taken by a fellow named O’Malley, the team attorney and long-time family friend of the Hunters. He was an odious, fat, red-faced man, who always appeared to be holding his breath. His round cheeks, pink from alcohol-shattered blood vessels, and his heavy eyebrows all but concealed his eyes.

“I don’t remember where I was,” I said, half-truthfully, though I was pretty sure. One thing for certain, they knew where I had been and they weren’t happy about it. “Why do you want to know?”

“Answer the question,” Clinton Foote interjected with a glare, exercising the general manager’s universal preemptive rights. I hoped the trainers hadn’t given him a big Dexamyl Spansule; it would make him difficult, if not impossible, to deal with.

“What’s this all about?” I asked, looking from face to face. “What am I supposed to have done?”

“You better answer, young fella.” Ray March sounded like my high school principal when he discovered I had written
fuck
on the door to the girls’ washroom. I grinned at the comparison, further heightening the tension.

“You obviously have the answers,” I said. “Why else would I be here?”

“They want to hear your side before they make any decisions,” B.A. offered. He had attempted compassion and impartiality. He landed somewhere near irony.

“Yeah,” I observed, “that’s why we’re all here looking so grim.”

“You’d best answer.” Clinton Foote tried to make cooperation sound like a wise business decision. The thumping of his foot was deafening. I knew I was in big trouble.

I lowered my eyes to the table and shook my head, taking the only remaining refuge—insentience. The room was silent.

“Mr. Rindquist.” Clinton Foote finally broke the silence.

The stocky stranger moved quickly across the room and took a standing position directly behind B.A. From where I sat the two men appeared in tandem, B.A.’s perfectly tanned and manicured head centered in Rindquist’s overhanging, slightly untidy belly. Rindquist had a craggy, corrugated face and thick, heavy hands. His narrow, furtive eyes barely revealed their color, light magenta. He was a violent-looking man.