The Franchise (22 page)

His eyes scanned the pages of Red’s football terms. Desperately.

His life was whirling through time out of control. He was the quarterback and had committed the cardinal sin: He had lost it. He had known better than to even consider a Pi Phi. It was too much. He used every ounce of his skill, guile, courage and physical ability to quarterback a team, deal with Red Kilroy, first the NCAA and the University, now the League. It was all he could do, yet he’d added Wendy Cy Chandler. It was burying him.

“Okay, Simon.” Taylor found a term from the playbook glossary and the panic eased. Wendy faded for the moment, though he knew she would return. She always did. “Okay, Simon, this is a tough one.”

The big lineman continued to shake bottles and vials, extracting tablets and capsules. “Yeah, I’m ready. You been fucking around in here forever.”

“Okay, what’s an outside Garterbelt?”

“A pass-rush stunt,” Simon replied. “The defensive end pulls the offensive tackle outside, opening a hole for Sara or Wendy to blitz. A double outside Garterbelt is done on both sides for Sara and Wendy.” Simon perused his bottles.

“And when Martha comes, too, along with the free safety?” Taylor asked.

Simon picked up a bottle and dropped it in the waste can. “A double outside Garterbelt with a Duck in a Sailor Hat.”

Red designated all defensive backs as different fowl.

Taylor closed the book, pushed up to his feet and shuffled out.

He was tired and didn’t lift his legs.

Simon continued through his daily pill ritual.

Taylor had noticed a definite change in the size and shape of Simon’s body during training camp. At a time when most guys lost weight, Simon was putting it on—hard, strong muscle tissue. His shoulders tapered into his head, and his neck had disappeared into the bulging knots of muscle.

Taylor had also noticed a change in Simon’s personality. His mood swings seemed to be much greater, from euphoria to deep depression, but that could be from all the weeks of training-camp confinement. Taylor’s own mood swings were fearful. There were days when he
knew
he couldn’t get out of bed. He was not tired. Just scared and lonely.

Everybody
was getting cabin fever, anxious to break camp and get back to the city. There were arguments and fights. Damage was done.

Early in the next day’s scrimmage, Kimball Adams had Ox Wood at right guard and a rookie from Ohio State at the left. Kimball audibled a quick trap and the rookie missed the call; he pulled full speed the wrong way, hitting Ox Wood pulling full speed the right way. The two men hit head to head directly behind the center. The enormous crash knocked both men out cold.

Ox came around shortly.

The rookie was still out of it when Luther Conly walked him to his seat in the plane. Five months later he came to as a Delta steward trainee in Atlanta.

At that scrimmage Lamar Jean Lukas sat directly behind Buffy Martin D’Hanis. Lamar assumed Buffy was a player’s wife since she was young and pregnant, so he carefully kept his comments to himself. But Lamar Jean thought the Texas Pistols looked only fair, even for an expansion team.

The scrimmage was sloppy. The defense generally outplaying the offense, not unusual early in the year. It was a low scoring scrimmage—generally dull, uninspired play by the offense, with lots of penalties and missed assignments.

Lamar had played a little football in the Marine Corps, but he wasn’t good enough to keep from getting sent into action. If he hadn’t had most of his right calf muscle shot away in a small firefight in Cambodia, Lamar Jean Lukas would have walked out on the field that day and asked for a try-out.

Lamar had seen Taylor Rusk in the Bi-District championship game and the quarterback did it all. He scored every way: pass, run, kick—hell,
fly
, thought Lamar. Park City went on to beat Wichita Falls in the Cotton Bowl for the state championship. Taylor Rusk was the greatest athlete Lamar had ever seen. Taylor Rusk was Lamar’s hero.

That’s why he’d taken a year’s worth of savings and gone to the Texas Pistols ticket office. Lamar Jean Lukas bought a season ticket on the forty-five-yard line. There were plenty of seats to pick from, and Lamar Jean Lukas was one of the first paying customers to support the Franchise. The ticket-office people promised him that buying one of the first season tickets meant he would
always
have first consideration on ticket sales.

What they told him was true.

Until the Pistols began to win.

Lamar sat quietly behind the pregnant woman, studying her reactions, and figured out she was Simon D’Hanis’s wife. Two rows down was an old man with a young blonde in shorts and halter on his arm. Lamar recognized the old man as a United States senior senator and the chairman of the armed-services subcommittee.

Dick Conly, dressed in a Texas Pistols T-shirt and white shorts, his spindly legs glowing red from too much sun and his face flushed from too much alcohol, sat down beside the small, wrinkled senator.

“Is this little honey taking good care of you?” Conly asked the senator. He rubbed his hand too vigorously on the girl’s naked back.

“So far so good,” the senator laughed. “But it’s early yet. We have to see if she lives up to her potential.”

“Potential has ruined more lives than I’d care to count.” Conly sipped from a white plastic cup with the crossed purple pistols on the side. “Potential,” Conly repeated, continuing to rub the girl’s bare shoulders. “You make certain the senator goes back to Washington happy, you hear? He’s one of the Franchise directors, and in DC he’s got to keep the government on an even keel and off our back. Right, Senator?”

The senator nodded.

Lamar studied the forces of the American way as the first fan.

Taylor Rusk had been alternating offensive series with Kimball Adams. Taylor threw the only two scoring passes. One was to Speedo Smith against a weak-side blitz using the new sting adjustment. As Taylor backed out after taking the snap, he saw the weak-side linebacker crashing toward him, so the quarterback just flipped the ball over the line. Speedo Smith had keyed on the blitz, adjusted his route from a zig out to a quick slant and the ball hit him in the chest. He split the seam between the two safety men and raced sixty yards to the end zone with the defensive backs running a poor chase ten yards behind.

Taylor connected on the same adjustment with Bobby Hendrix from about twenty-five yards out. The safety dragged Bobby down from behind, but the skinny redhead fell into the end zone.

The only other player to score was a running back from Central Michigan. Danny Lewis had only fair speed but incredible balance and the ability to bounce away from tacklers, wriggling free, continuing forward. Margene Brinkley, the middle linebacker who had begun to run the defense, said hitting Danny Lewis was like trying to tackle silk.

Lewis’s secret was simple: “I’m scared to death out there. Fear is a hell of a motivator when you add to it the ability that goddam football has for attracting a crowd of snarling maniac speed freaks.”

Every time Taylor called a play to Danny Lewis, the running back would blanch and look down at the ground. As soon as Lewis’s hands touched the ball, he would start screaming and running.

As the defense pursued him, Lewis’s screams increased the closer and the bigger the man.

Late in the scrimmage Kimball Adams was at quarterback and called a quick pitch to Danny Lewis. Kimball tossed him the ball and Lewis headed for the sideline, screaming, bouncing, wiggling and twisting. He turned the corner, shaking off tacklers, using his free hand to keep himself off the ground after being hit by defensive backs.

The screaming never stopped until Danny Lewis crossed the goal line fifty-five yards later, where he dropped the ball and continued out the back of the end zone.

Not counting the ten yards of the end zone or the additional twenty yards to the track, where Lewis finally stopped and looked back for pursuit, it was the longest run from scrimmage that day.

It was also how he ended up with the nickname Screaming Danny Lewis and won himself the halfback job.

Taylor Rusk rolled on the ground, laughing so hard he ruptured a blood vessel in his eye and knocked over one of the assistant coaches.

Something inside snapped, and it felt good to laugh spasms of maniacal laughter. Taylor hadn’t laughed since Wendy married Three. He couldn’t recall laughter before Wendy. They had certainly laughed together.

Taylor lay flat out on his back, arms stretched out. He laughed both sadness and relief into the clear blue hill-country sky.

Wendy was in the gray Mercedes stretch-parked in the near end zone. The passenger compartment was secreted behind mirrored glass.

Taylor had been stunned when the German limo arrived, though he shook it off. He always played well hurt, but he worried about playing confused and unhappy, continually losing at life. The white lines changed all that, as usual. It was a different world inside those lines. It was his world; he blazed the trails. He didn’t get left behind and lost. In there he got what he wanted and hunted for more. Outside those lines he had been careful about his wants. At least until Wendy Chandler.

Lem Carleton III had been drinking with the senator and Dick Conly throughout the afternoon; now he staggered to the Mercedes and rapped on a darkened window. There was no response. Lem Three, assistant PR man, cupped his hands and tried to peer through the shaded glass. Off balance, leaning down, Three lurched forward, banged his head on the window and fell sideways into the end line. White clouds exploded out of the grass. Three pulled himself to a sitting position, his face and chest covered with chalk. Regaining his feet, Lem tried the door. It was locked. Three stood there looking at himself in the mirrored window, a chalk-whiteface clown in his base makeup. The limo pulled away, leaving Three alone in the end zone.

Red Kilroy decided that day he needed to get himself a fullback. He knew right where to look—Canada. Toronto. The player was Amos Burns. Red told Dick Conly to go get him Amos Burns.

“I’ve got a good contact in Toronto, Knuckles Nelson,” Red said. “He’ll help us.”

“Why should he?” Conly was skeptical.

“He wants to coach in the League ... someday.”

“Someday ducks will tap dance,” Conly said. “I’ll call Knuckles.”

On the far sideline Luther was packing away footballs and equipment. Dick was suddenly sad, inexplicably unhappy. “I need a drink.” The general manager searched for the ice chest.

“Here.” The head coach handed him a half pint of 101-proof Old Crow.

Taking a deep gulp, Conly watched his son proudly and fearfully. In this sweet, slender boy, all knees and elbows, the general manager saw his own mortal dilemma: he loved Luther with an intensity that could consume him. He took another long swallow.

Dick avoided losing by the simple mental gymnastic of never wanting to have. He enjoyed and loved his wife and girls, but Luther he had
wanted
.

He had never expected to want, to have. It was the problem he couldn’t resolve, and as he proudly watched Luther, he kept a football field between them.

“Hey, boy,” he called out gruffly. “I’ll catch you later tonight. I have to call Canada and shaft Toronto out of a blocking back.”

Luther kept his head down, working feverishly. He waved “Okay” and mumbled, “Yeah, sure.” He would never comprehend that his father was frightened of him.

It turned out that it wasn’t Toronto that got the shaft but a college All-American named Jimmy Jackson, who graduated the following year. In return for Amos Burns, Dick Conly promised Toronto that Texas would grab All-American Jackson next year in the draft.

“We just won’t offer him any money,” Conly told Knuckles Nelson. “The only other place he can go is Canada. You guys draft him. Put Amos Burns on the next plane. Jimmy Jackson is your meat.”

And that’s how All-American Jimmy Jackson ended up playing professional football in the Canadian league for twenty thousand dollars. He had no idea how it happened.

Amos Burns did several years of good journeyman’s work as a blocking fullback for the Texas Pistols. Amos really blocked the three girls—Martha, Sara, and Wendy, the Duck in the Sailor Hat, the Garterbelt outside or inside, single or double, the Chicken Lips, the strong safety. Amos Burns hit them and they stayed hit. Sometimes for days.

After the scrimmage Red gave the team the night off with no curfew.

Kimball Adams and Ox Wood took A.D. Koster and headed for the Old Leadville Bar and Post Office. The yellow school bus hauled about forty players back to the Crystal Palace.

Simon D’Hanis checked into a local motel with his pregnant wife, Buffy. Simon was hyperventilating a little when he grabbed his toilet kit and headed out of the dorm room.

Bobby Hendrix wrote a long letter to his wife, Ginny, and his four boys.

Bobby Hendrix told his wife to tell her father they could move on a Venture Capital Offshore drilling deal with H. Harrison when they sold the property in Cleveland and resituated themselves in Texas. The VCO oil-well investment would be the biggest investment Bobby Hendrix had ever made. It was certainly the biggest gamble. Bobby Hendrix rubbed his cramped, sore hands before folding and sealing the letter. The freckled, aching, stiff fingers did fold the letter, but Bobby was out of saliva.

Taylor Rusk took a nap.

Speedo Smith and Screaming Danny Lewis climbed a small mountain behind the practice field and drank beer and wine and smoked dope.

Red Kilroy worked on some new offensive wrinkles. All night the TWX clattered people’s fates back and forth across the country.

The blonde in the shorts and halter lived up to her potential and sent Senator Thompson flying back to the nation’s capital happily deluded about his sexual prowess. Cyrus Chandler’s helicopter picked the senator up in the parking lot and took him to the airport. Cyrus picked up with the blonde where the senator left off.

Suzy Ballard got off late at the Sonic Drive-In, and when she arrived at the dormitory, A.D. Koster had gone off with Kimball Adams and Ox Wood. Two zeuglodons and a garden variety, common-as-cowshit rat.