Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream (42 page)

"It was stupid not to let MacArthur finish off those rice eaters. Push 'em back."

In the front seat was Jerrod's father, Evert. On a wing and a
prayer after quitting college he had scrounged up enough
money to buy a dump truck in Crane. Starting with that one
truck he had built himself'a company that specialized in oil field
construction-building roads and drill sites. In the good times
the company had grossed $6 million a year, with yards in Crane
and Odessa and Kermit. Evert had bought it house for his
family over in University Gardens with ceilings as tall as in a
cathedral and a pool out back and a beautifully appointed living room that had elegant figurines in the shape of elephants.
But then the hard times of the bust had come and the gross of
the business had been cut in half. He had closed one of the
yards and was trying to get rid of that house with the ceilings
as tall as a cathedral's if he could somehow find it buyer for it.

Jerrod's brother Jaxon was also in the front seat, with a shotgun hanging out the window. He was fourteen and he was still
feeling the physical and psychological effects of a football injury two years earlier. It had come daring kickoff practice in
the seventh grade. A couple of kids had hit him high and a couple had hit him low. The right femur snapped. As a result
of extensive surgery, his right leg had a steel plate in it with
eight bolt holes. It had stopped growing. Because of that, his
left leg needed surgery so that it would not become longer than
the right one. He had been on crutches for about a year, and
sometimes he cried because he wasn't able to play football.
Given the chance, he would eagerly suit up again. Like thousands of other kids in Odessa, he wanted a piece of the dream.

"I don't know what America's thinking was," said Jerrod as
the pickup edged its way to a little butte rising out of the stubble
and the rock. "You go to war. We popped the atom bomb. That
should have been it. No more discussion. We're on top and
stayin' on top."

The wind was getting colder, hut.jerrod seemed impervious
to it. His jacket remained unzipped, and he stared off to it point
that only he could see.

He thought about going to Australia.

"It's like the world's last frontier, like America was the last
frontier," he said as the pickup got back out on the lonely highway and dissolved into the burnished hues of it red and purple
sunset, past the buttes, past the endless fields of mesquite and
thorns, past the ghostly dance floor of Girvin, on its way home.

Whenever ,Jerrod talked about the possibilities of life he
dwelled not on what he saw, but on what he didn't. He couldn't
help but feel how strange it was to be growing up in this country now, in this place that didn't seem like a land of opportunity
at all but a land of failed dreams. How could he feel otherwise
when he had seen what had happened to his father, how helpless his dad had been as all that work, all that sweat, all that gofor-it, take-a-chance fearlessness, had fallen victim to a crash in
oil prices engineered by a bunch of people halfway across the
earth? How could he feel otherwise when all he heard, all he
read about, was how smart the ,Japanese were and how dumb
Americans were? He could never do what his father had done,
go out on his own after high school, start his own business, will
himself into becoming an enormous success. It was like a fairy
tale, something that just didn't happen anymore.

To think about it at all, about taking that terrifying plunge
off the ramp of high school, scared him to death. But as long
as he was in high school, doing what he was doing, he felt insulated. He felt safe.

Winchell described Jerrod as being "kind of emotional." Unlike most Odessans, he wasn't afraid to express his fears and
vulnerabilities. But like many kids who lived here, anger raged
within him, and he liked to cultivate an image of fearless
toughness.

During lunch break from school he drove his jet black pickup, which looked liked something out of Road Warrior with its
mile-high tires, at breakneck speeds through alleys and over
curbs on the way to some fast-food Mexican place to wolf down
food so quickly it was impossible to have tasted it. The sounds
of Van Halen howled over the cassette player with the upbeat
lilt of a dying wolf and his girlfriend of the moment sat next to
him and giggled, "I love the way you drive."

He talked of how honored he was when the bat handed down
by a group of senior players to the junior most likely to use it
in a fight one night had been given to him. He talked of the
time he and a kid from Andrews had gone at it over at B.S., a
vacant spot over by the loop that kids used to hang out at to
drink beer until the cops had finally busted it up. Someone had
turned on one of those big flashlights and in the glare Jerrod
could hear his friends yelling "Kick 'im! Kick 'im! Kick 'im! Kill
im!" as he got it on with this fucker from Andrews who had
pissed the shit out of him earlier that night. By the time jerrod
got off, the kid from Andrews was bleeding from his nose and
lip and around the eye.

"We got two things in Odessa," Jerrod said once. "Oil and
football. And oil's gone. But we still got football, so fuck the rest
of you."

He went to school and he behaved well in class, because outside of his Saturday night fighting he was polite and quiet. But
school posed virtually no challenges his senior year. He was taking mostly electives, and he breezed through them with ease.
Then came the real work.

He got to football practice, where the demands and pressures
were ceaseless the second he stepped on the field. Nothing he
did went unnoticed. If he did something well, he received
praise. If he did something wrong, it was pointed out in painstaking detail. And if it wasn't detected during practice, it was
discovered afterward, when the coaches retired to their office
to watch videos of the day's workout on the elaborate video machine that had been donated by the booster club.

jerrod had (lone everything it took to become a starter for
the Permian football team. He knew he had to because of the
physical liability of being only five nine. He threw up regularly
during the off-season workouts. He worked tirelessly in the
weight room, his red cheeks bulging and his body vibrating. He
religiously studied his blocking assignments for each game, because he was not about to make a careless mental error. He got
up twice a week around six-forty-five to be at the early morning
practice before school had even started. On Saturday mornings, he got up to listen to the five coaches tear the team apart
during the critique of the game on film.

He routinely pushed himself beyond what he thought possible because he knew if he didn't, he wouldn't make it. In return there was a fantastic, visceral payoff-a single season of
his life in which he became a prince, ogled at, treasured, bathed
in the unimaginable glory of Friday night. It was he who described being a Permian football player as like being a gladiator,
like walking into the Roman Colosseum with all those thousands in the stands yelling yay or nay, all wishing they could be
you down there on that field.

All he thought about, all he dreamed about, was playing for
Permian. Although he anguished over the future and worried
about this country that seemed so impossibly hard to grow up
in now, lie tried to block it out of his mind. "If I had thought
about it, I wouldn't have played very well," he said.

The house with the cathedral ceilings wasn't his home. The
locker room was. "That is our place," he said. "There's days we
come tip here before the sun comes up and we don't come home until it comes down. It's ours, it's like our home. I've
spent more time up there.... I've eaten more food up there
than I have in my own dining room."

There were days when he didn't know if he could take it anymore, days during the off-season when it was time to do the
dreaded mat exercises in the hot, sweaty weight room, those
endless Hips and somersaults at full speed. "I threw up whether
I ate anything at lunch or not. There were days I didn't eat, it
didn't do any good." But the image of Friday night always kept
him going.

"I just think this is what I wanted to do, so let's go. Friday
night, it's gonna be great, it's gonna be beautiful."

Beating the Rebels, said Jerrod McDougal, was the most important thing in his life. When Permian lost, it became the biggest disappointment in his life. "There was no doubt in my
mind we were going to win that game," he said. "There was no
doubt in anyone's mind in Odessa." He said he felt heartbroken, as if someone painfully close to him had died, and he said
he had no idea what he would do if Permian didn't make the
playoffs and the season suddenly ended in a few days. What
would life without football be like? He knew he would be lost,
just like his senior friends before him had been lost. He would
feel as if it was no longer possible to keep balance anymore, as
hopeless as if he was trying to ride a seesaw by himself. All
during the season he had worried about it. "It's gonna suck,"
he said right before the Lee game, "but hopefully I can keep
busy. The only way to make it decent is if we win State. For
the seniors, it will be the fulfillment of a dream. But even then
it won't lessen the pain." And now it had become an absolute mess.

His mother, Dale, felt the same way, for football had become
as important to her as it had to her son. She went to every practice, and on Thursday nights she always invited a bunch of the
players over for lasagna. She had sobbed after the loss to Lee
just as hard as Jerrod had, for she feared the season's ending
every bit as much as he did.

She blamed Coach Gaines for the pain she and her son were
going through, and she simply couldn't face him anymore. "I
told my husband, I'm sure he needs a friendly face right now.
Unfortunately, I can't bring myself to do it," she said as she
watched practice several days after the Lee game, her face filled
with apprehension at the thought that the team might not make
it to the playoffs.

"I'll be okay. I'll get over it," she said. "I thought he was a
better coach than that and he got scared."

Like many others in town, she wasn't sure if Gaines had what
it took to be head coach at a place like Permian, to withstand all
the pressure, to win all the games that were requisite to survive.
"It may have cost Jerrod what we consider a state championship
team," she said in the soft afternoon light of the practice field,
"but it may have cost Gary a career."

But there was a way for Gaines to salvage the season. There
was a way to turn those who hated him into good, loyal believers again, to get all this incomprehensible pressure off him. He
alone held the power to set his life, and thousands of others'
lives, on the right track again.

It just depended on what his instincts told him as he lifted his
wan, depleted face to the ceiling of a truck stop off the interstate past midnight and silently decided where he would rather
place his fate: heads or tails.

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