The Franchise (73 page)

“Can I use my rock hammer?”

“We don’t want to contaminate the dig. It will have to be done totally naked and very carefully.” He tossed the shirt onto the carpet.

“This has little similarity to hunting for arrowheads.” Wendy frowned, then reached for the snaps at the back of her blouse. “But then, rock hunts never did blow my skirt up.”

The next morning, in the penthouse living room, Randall was sitting on the floor, watching the television reruns of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?, when the bedroom phone rang.

Taylor answered on the third ring. Wendy stirred but kept her eyes closed, trying to cling to a few more moments of sleep.

The operator told Taylor the time, date and outside temperature and wished him a good day. He had ordered the wake-up call to keep him from lying in bed too long.

Pulling on jeans and a Texas Pistols T-shirt, Taylor padded barefoot on the thick pile carpet into the living room.

Toby was watching Randall watch the early adventures of Scooby, Shaggy, Freddy, Velma and Daphne. Bob was reading a computer magazine called
Systems and Software.
He looked up from the article on recent advances in security systems that accompanied the piece on Major “Pat” Garrett. The Major elaborated on the security precautions and elaborate plans that Security Services, Inc., had designed for the Pistol Dome. “Crowd control will be the major problem of the eighties,” he said.

“These reruns are better than the new shows,” Toby said to Taylor.

“What?” Taylor was still groggy.

“Scooby-Doo,” Toby continued. “These early shows had good stories and plot twists with character development. They were great for kids. Not like the new ones, with nothing but pie fights and car chases. You know?”

Taylor nodded dumbly.

“And now,” Toby continued, “all the superfiends look like Koreans with congenital defects and pear-shaped heads.”

“Uh-huh.” Taylor stared at Toby a moment, then returned to the bedroom. Bob shook his head and continued to read.

Randall never took his eyes from the screen. He rode along with Scooby and friends in the Mystery Machine.

Wendy sat up sleepy-eyed in bed as Taylor drew the curtains and heavy drapes, letting in hazy morning light. Wendy picked up the five-dollar Super Bowl program and began leafing through it. Taylor gazed into the white light, trying to make out the distant form of the Pistol Dome.

“When Albert Speer designed the Nuremberg stadium, you know what he wanted the Nazi fan to feel?” Taylor asked, still searching the fog for the familiar form.

“Nothing.” Wendy glanced at the beer ad on the inside cover of the program. “And I don’t care.”

“That’s right ... you’re right.” Taylor was surprised.

“I know.” She thumbed past the disgustingly maudlin story “The Old Pro and the Kid.” “I know lots of things.”

Taylor finally saw the outline of the dome. “Speer said he wanted the spectator to feel
nothing.
”

“I know.” Wendy looked up. “I just told
you.
”

“I wonder if he succeeded?”

“He did on you. Talk about going numb.” Wendy tossed the Super Bowl program on the floor.

“Whiskey, cars, drugs and jocks,” Wendy said, stretching and yawning. “What else could a person want? Or feel?”

Randall wandered into the room, carrying his
Star Wars
Light Saber. Sitting at his mother’s side, he called room service, ordering everyone pancakes and Pepsi-Cola for breakfast. There was a small circle of scar tissue at the hollow of his throat, a constant reminder of life’s precariousness. The boy hacked his way back through a forest of Imperial Storm Troopers to the living room and the end of
Scooby-Doo.

“Let’s start looking for a house and a preacher,” Taylor said.

Wendy stretched, relaxing catlike, slow, enjoying the release.

“I want to be married by the bell captain.”

Breakfast arrived with a scream and a crash. Randall, with his Light Saber, ambushed the room service waiter.

“EEEyaaaa!”
The boy leaped from the hall closet and slashed the thin Latin man across the legs and buttocks with the whistling plastic sword. The terrified waiter, his escape blocked by the table he was wheeling, tried vainly to dodge the stinging hollow
thonks.

“Where’s the Scooby Snacks, Hairball?” Randall continued to whip the man in short red jacket and black pants.

“Randall! Randall!” Wendy yelled from the bedroom. “Stop dismembering the waiter. And we don’t call people ‘Hairball’!”

The boy’s face fell. He checked his backswing with deep disappointment; it was to have been a head shot.

The waiter pushed the table into the room and, without waiting for Taylor to sign the check, dashed back out the door before Randall resumed his attack.

Wendy entered the large living room, tying her blue floor-length robe. She had already brushed her hair and teeth and rinsed her face with cold water. She sat quickly and began soaking her pancakes in honey from a jar shaped like an anthropomorphic bear.

Randall pointed at Toby with his Light Saber. “Me and Shaggy are going on a mission.”

“That right, Shaggy?” Bob Travers’s eyes were still on his computer magazine.

“We’re gonna go look for clues.” Toby’s mirthless voice and set jaw convinced Taylor that he took playing Shaggy seriously.

Wendy smoothed the boy’s thick hair with her fingers. Randall twisted away, irritated.

“Stop it, Momma.” He purposely messed his hair again.

Randall grabbed two pancakes and a canned Pepsi. Rolling the pancakes up, he put one in his shirt pocket and handed the other to Toby. “Here’s the supplies, Shaggy. You all be Freddy and Velma and Daphne.”

“I’ll be Daphne.” Taylor also rolled his pancake, dipping one end in a pool of maple syrup and eating it like a tortilla. Wendy ate her pancakes properly with an efficient but delicate dispatch.

“Momma, you be Velma and Bob can be Freddy.”

Bob grunted and kept reading. Wendy nodded.

“You guys pretend that me and Shaggy are out looking for clues to help find the Abdominal Snowman.”

“The Abdominal Snowman?” Taylor dipped his pancake in the honey on Wendy’s plate.

“He’s a fierce aminal,” the boy replied.

“An-i-mal,
” Wendy corrected automatically.

“Come on, Shag, let’s go.” Randall ignored his mother and crept down the foyer to the door, then the hallway beyond. Toby followed obediently, eating his plain pancake like an empty burrito. The door slammed.

Taylor ate slowly while his mind automatically worked through another version of the coming game. He, too, was looking for clues. Keys. What ifs. He was gathering himself for the task. Not yet Super Sunday and already sixteen points behind, the quarterback withdrew into his mind and imagination to play the game over and over. Taylor played Sunday’s game from each position, all possible conditions, in every down and yardage situation against all of Denver’s defenses. On Super Sunday nothing could happen during the game that Taylor hadn’t already confronted in his imagination.

He imagined, therefore he could. He could do what it took to win by more than sixteen points.

He began, as always, by suspending disbelief.

“What is the town’s most popular misfit thinking about?” Finished with breakfast, Wendy licked honey from her fingers. “You’re frowning.”

“Sorry, I was thinking about the game.” Taylor smiled automatically, his eyes not quite reaching focus. “Fine-tuning my manic depression.”

“Will you speed up or slow down by Sunday?”

“I never know.” Taylor’s eyes darkened. “That’s what makes the horserace.” He picked up the game plan sheets. Randall had added
X’
s and
O’
s where he chose. This time he had used purple crayon. “I think we’ll have a big element of surprise early in the game. They won’t expect us to start the game playing like we’re sixteen points behind. We’ll start fast and speed up.” Taylor began to feel the rush, the building of emotion. “Denver’ll be expecting our regular offense with a few new wrinkles, but we are going to play the
whole game like a two-minute drill.
We’ll gamble big
all day.
Gamble on third and fourth down. We’ll line up without a huddle. Run when they expect pass, pass when they expect run. Onside kicks, fake punts and field goals. Sixteen points is a hell of a lot to make up. The defense has to force turnovers. We have to knock them down early, then pound them, blow them out. We have to find the big gun and shoot it over and over and over.”

T
HE COMMISSIONER’S ANNUAL
Super Bowl Party was held in the Pistol Dome on the Insiders’ Level. Circling the stadium, the Insiders’ luxury skyboxes opened off a wide hallway covered in white wallpaper and purple carpet leading to the south end zone and the Insiders’ Restaurant, where the wealthy, influential, beautiful or just plain lucky drank and dined with a fine view of the field.

At the party there were League officials, team owners, staff media types, wives, celebrities, groupies, prostitutes, politicians, Senator Thompson, the mayor of Clyde, country singers, movie stars and several Latin American air force colonels.

The commissioner’s five thousand closest friends gouged huge divots of caviar. Using everything from breadsticks to bare fingers, they quickly devoured a scale model Pistol Dome over six feet high.

Terry Dudley, the Union director, and two of the network guys from Cozumel stood in a corner, talking and nibbling an oversize goose liver football with anchovy laces; the commissioner’s autograph was made from pimientos.

Monique led the Pistolettes through a nicely erotic routine. The girls also served as hostesses, pushing free drinks for the remainder of the evening while entertainment included two different country and western bands, the Texas Championship Square Dance Team, the Billy Joe Hardesty All-American Youth Choir performing “Songs for the Apocalypse” and a jazz band from Prairie View A & M.

Suzy Ballard Chandler sat at the head table with the Commissioner and Nick O. Brown, the Denver owner, an oil man and real estate developer whose wife went down instantly with a migraine at the sight of the fresh young widow stuffed into her low-cut purple evening dress.

The Cobianco brothers had a table near the dance floor. A.D. Koster and Captain Monique joined them. The statuesque Pistolette sat next to Don Cobianco, leaving A.D. uncomfortably near Tiny Walton.

The Commissioner’s Annual Super Bowl Party was a ritual of cheap thrills. Payoff night from the League. Greed, gluttony, drunkenness, sloth, curiosity, a tab of half a million dollars, but it was not enough. The customers were never satisfied.

Wendy steered Taylor away from Terry Dudley to avoid an incident over the Union pension board’s refusal to pay claims to Bobby Hendrix’s and Simon D’Hanis’s survivors. Since carrying the documents to the Houston Union meeting and extracting a promise from Terry to help the Hendrix and D’Hanis cases, Taylor had called the Union headquarters a dozen times without satisfaction.

“It was their body-fat tests, Taylor,” Dudley said the last time the quarterback had called. “They were full of chemicals. You know how the public is about that stuff. It wouldn’t look good for the Union.”

“What do I tell Ginny? What about Simon’s kid?” Taylor argued.

“Blame it on the League.”

Strangely unnoticed in the rapacious scramble, Wendy led Taylor easily through the crowded, curving hallway, winding through the hoggish mass of people.

“I’d like to have urinalysis done on this bunch,” Taylor whispered. “I’ll bet some are legally dead.”

Bob Travers walked about four steps behind, slightly to Wendy’s left, traveling in her difficult wake, moving at a steady glide, projecting her path, quickly setting his course through the mass of groundlings and stinkards. He studied parties and learned how people moved, clumped, huddled.

Bob studied the crowd. Half the people were crazy, drunk on alcohol or ego or cheap thrills; the others watched in stone-sober disapproval and envy. Bob Travers hated parties. People went to parties to forget themselves—a very dangerous thing.

Wendy stopped at the back entrance to her skybox, digging through her small glittering diamond-studded purse for the key. She unlocked the door and Taylor followed her inside quickly. From the loud, smoky, oppressive atmosphere of the Insiders’ Restaurant and the commissioner’s party, it was a startling leap into the quiet of Wendy’s personal luxury skybox.

Walls covered in a brown burlap fabric matched brown carpeting, which cushioned their walk into the trilevel luxury box. Twelve wood-and-leather swivel chairs were arranged on the two lower levels. The back level contained a wet bar, a leather-topped table with eight heavy captain’s chairs and a color television stuck on the wall for quick views of instant replays of the network broadcasts. Facing the playing field below, the top half of the glass wall slid open. The skybox was heated and air-conditioned.

Taylor gaped at the too-green gridiron. He had never been in a skybox. The isolation, the height, the angle, made everything look odd, unreal. Or too real. “It looks like a giant doormat. We must look like mice on a billiard table.”

“No, that’s silly.” Wendy walked behind the wet bar in the back. “Now, how about a drink, Mickey?”

“I’d like a piece of cheese.” Taylor stared at the plastic playing field. “That thing is too clean for man’s work. Man’s work is a dirty, bloody business.”

“What?” Wendy was pouring Dr Pepper into two long-stemmed crystal glasses.

“Something Ox said when we moved in here. He loved playing outside. Men fought wars outside; real football was
played
outside. Ox said you had to beat the other side, the weather
and
the field. He’s proud that he lost two toes to frostbite in Minnesota.”

“He’s crazy.”

“No, he’s the perfect offensive lineman. He avoids the spotlight, shuns awards and publicity, never thinks about winning or losing ... just plays recklessly, sacrificing his body to protect mine, hoping to wake from the delusions of daily life. He’s been one hell of an offensive guard for twenty years.”