The Time of My Life (26 page)

The eye had always been that way. New York's finest vets couldn't dry it up. My lady attributed it to Pussycat's squalid nativity in some cold Manhattan alley and her early days in a wretched kitty orphanage. After her adoption, she had lived in a seventh-floor apartment for years without being outdoors, breathing nothing bur foul New York air, which might account for her coat's lack of lustre and her peaked demeanor.

But Pussycat adjusted to Dallas quickly. While Isabel pined for Bloomingdale's and subways and Park Avenue and railed against the frightening Texas spaces and weather and incomprehensible accents, Pussycat went exploring. She learned that the concrete patio was great to roll and stretch upon during warm, bright mornings; that the shade under the blackberry bush was perfect during hot afternoons; that the tall grass near the fence was just right for lying like a lioness on the savannah and dreaming; that high wooden fences are made for cats to climb and walk along; that mockingbird music can stir the blood without awakening the lust to kill, even in a cat.

In the house, too, she found her places. Every day for more than three years she leaped from the wing chair in the living room to the small, crowded table beside it without once disturbing the antique lamp, the crystal decanter, the Wedgewood ashtray. There she would sit and spy through the Venetian blinds at the sparrows in the crape myrtle. When the day was cloudy or rainy, she stretched on the chair in Isabel's study, under the warmth of the reading lamp. When not feeling well, she hid under the daybed. She lay on the carpet wherever the brightest spot of sun was during breakfast time. At night, she slept on the foot of our bed.

Cats, I had always heard, are aloof. They accept bed and board from humans, but give little in return. They aren't affectionate and loyal like dogs. They remain on the fringes of human society, alone and arrogant. They function more as ornaments than as companions. And at first, Pussycat was a little standoffish, preferring to stay across the room and study me, trying to figure out how I fitted into this new world that she had come to after so many years when I wasn't in her picture.

Then after a while she loosened up. She learned that if she rubbed herself against my legs I would feed her, just as Isabel did. She discovered that I could be taught to open the door for her when she wanted to go out, that when she would scratch on the window screen I would open the door again and let her in. She would thank me with a polite chirp when I responded quickly to her orders, and scold me when I was slow. She became possessive. Whenever I gave my lady a hug, she would come out from wherever she was and demand a hug, too. We concluded that she was telling us she was no mere pet, she was one of us. “We are three,” she seemed to be saying. When I would stay up later than she thought I should, she would get out of bed and come find me and ask who did I think I was and didn't I know I had a long day ahead of me tomorrow and didn't I think I should get some sleep.

We always spoke to her like an adult, and she responded like an adult. Pussycat and Isabel usually got up earlier than I, and I would awake to their conversation. “Which do you want to do first?” Isabel would ask. “Have breakfast or check the weather?” Pussycat would answer, and either the back door or the refrigerator door would open. When Isabel and I were on the outs and not speaking to each other, we both continued to speak to her, and she to us. Her presence warmed the bleak atmosphere of our estrangement, and we shared feelings of love and anger with her that we were temporarily unable to share with each other.

When we traveled, she nearly always went with us. She visited Austin, San Antonio, South Padre Island, and Fort Davis, was sneaked into hotels and condos under beach towels and sweatshirts, and knew enough not to utter a sound until she was safe in our room, away from the enforcers of No Pets rules. Counting her initial trip from New York, she must have been one of the most widely traveled cats around. She even toured the Texas Capitol with us once, in her cage, and was smuggled into an Italian restaurant in Midland so she wouldn't roast in the sweltering car while we had lunch. And although she never cared much for travel, she preferred it to any violation of her decision that “we are three.”

Once, Isabel and I decided to violate that rule and go to California without Pussycat for a few days. We set out plenty of food and water and took off. Our plan called for me to return after the weekend to go to work, while Isabel remained in California to see her son graduate from Navy boot camp. When I got home, I found the food and water untouched. I called Pussycat, and she staggered from under the daybed, starved and dehydrated, her gummy eyelids almost shut. She hadn't eaten or drunk since we left. I picked her up, and she purred.

Pussycat was a good purrer. While people at the emergency animal clinic injected liquids into her, she purred, and when I took her to her regular vet for further treatment, she purred. She seemed to have a lot of confidence in her vet, as old ladies often have in young doctors. When she got cancer last fall and Isabel went to visit her after her surgery, she purred, and when she came home wearing a bandage that looked like a diaper, she purred. It was while she was wearing that bandage that she took to climbing into my lap every day during my after-work bourbon, and purring. She was seeking assurance, I think, that I still loved her, despite the ugly bandage that prevented her washing herself in important places. I stroked her and talked to her, and she purred.

After the bandage came off, she had a new, svelte figure. She was as chirpy as a Highland Park woman with a new tummy-tuck. She purred then, of course, and was still purring six months later when her new, final decline began.

Then one night—suddenly, it seemed—we knew the end had come. She staggered to her little box slowly and with great difficulty. While sitting on her chair under the reading lamp, she had a convulsion and, after it had passed, stared about her as if blind. We left the lamp on for her when we went to bed, but during the night she joined us in her usual place, somehow gathering the strength to jump upon the bed and reaffirm one last time that “we are three.”

The next morning, we took her to the vet, and he confirmed what we already knew. She was purring when he gently pushed the needle into her leg and stopped her heart. “Put to sleep” is the way it's said, but we dug a hole and buried her.

Pussycat was just an animal, my mind insists, but I miss her. Sometimes I think I hear her scratch at the window screen or jump from the table where she used to drink from the fishbowl. Sometimes she appears in my dreams, still purring.

June, 1982

Me and Jack Pardee

F
OLKS
WHO
LIVE
in North Texas, surrounded as they are by Mustang Mania, the Mean Green, the Dallas Cowboys, the UTA Mavericks, the gridiron prep schools of Highland Park and Piano and the Killer Frogs of TCU, lean toward arrogance when they talk about football. “They think they know everything. Mention six-man football to them, though, and they look at you like you've just escaped from Terrill and started explaining the Book of Revelation. They never heard of six-man football and therefore don't believe there's any such thing.

But if you've never seen a six-man football game, you ain't been nowhere and you ain't seen nothing. Compared to a Class B high school six-man contest in which a championship is at stake, the Cowboys' two-minute drill is about as exciting as haircuts.

I'm going to tell you about two of the greatest six-man football teams that ever put on shoulder pads and one of the classic six-man games of the golden past. I and Jack Pardee played in it.

Pardee's name sometimes crops up in reminiscences of great games of long ago, but mine never does. Six-man football careers are brief and their fame is fleeting, but Pardee happened to get a couple breaks that I didn't. He made All-America on an eleven-man team coached by Bear Bryant at Texas A&M and spent a lot of years in the pros, playing and coaching, and I….

Well, more about Pardee later. I'd better explain a few fundamentals of the six-man game and its cultural context so that big-city know-nothings can understand the significance of what they've missed.

Six-man football is played by high schools so small that they don't have enough boys to play eleven-man. A six-man team consists of a center, two ends, and three backs, and the rules of the game differ a bit from those of plain old football. For instance, a six-man football field is eighty yards long and forty wide, as opposed to the one-hundred-yard-by-fifty-yard pasture that ordinary teams play on. A six-man team must gain fifteen yards for a first down, not ten. And the quarterback can't just take the ball and run with it. He's got to throw a pass or hand off to one of the other backs or one of the ends. If the quarterback is going to run with the ball, he's got to hand it to somebody and then that guy hands it back to him. Only then can he cross the line of scrimmage. Also, any man on the team is eligible to receive a pass. Oh, and another thing. In regular football, a team receives one point for kicking the ball through the goal posts after a touchdown and two points for running or passing the extra point over, right? But in six-man it's the opposite—one point for running or passing, two for kicking.

These rules, plus the scarcity of bodies on the field, make for a wide-open game and high scores. The Valentine Pirates used to get beat sometimes by scores in excess of 100 to 0. So did the Presidio Blue Devils. In six-man, you see, speed is worth more than size, weight, or meanness. If a team has a good passer, one fast back, and one guy who can throw a block every now and then, it's got the potential for greatness. A team with a bunch of slow, mean gorillas won't win anything because the ball will be fifty yards down the field before they can lumber across the line of scrimmage. Unless some of those gorillas are both big and speedy, in which case skinny little tacklers will have a mite of a problem.

In Texas, most six-man teams are in the central and western regions, where many towns are tiny and too far apart to consolidate their little schools into one big school and haul their kids to it. The town where I spent my years of athletic glory is Fort Davis. It's in the Davis Mountains, far west of the Pecos, and not big. Population is estimated at eight hundred to one thousand, depending on whom you ask. High school enrollment during those Eisenhower years of my tenure was forty to forty-five, depending on how many of my schoolmates got married, joined the army, or went to work for the highway department during the summer and didn't come back. There were seven in my graduating class. One year there were four, and two of those were twins.

We were the Fort Davis Indians, and our opponents were scattered from the Permian Basin to the outskirts of El Paso, almost into Mexico. To play Tornillo or Fort Hancock or Forsan or Sterling City meant leaving home early in the morning, riding about two hundred miles across one of the most Godawful landscapes this side of the moon, playing the game, having a chicken-fried steak and a glass of tea at the local cafe, riding back home, and falling into bed just as the birds started singing.

We Indians were the class act of our district. We rode to our out-of-town games in Cadillacs. The ranchers who owned the cars would bring them to town all festooned in green-and-gold crepe paper streamers, pick up a load of football players, and barrel off down the highway at 80 m.p.h., telling yarns about their own football days along the way. Kids and other fans would follow in the school bus, way behind. When the Cadillac caravan would arrive in the town of the enemy, the ranchers would drive us up and down the main street, honking their horns and daring the locals on the sidewalk to bet against us.

Fans of the Marathon Mustangs, Barstow Bears, Sierra Blanca Vaqueros, Pyote Panthers and our other opponents liked to come to Fort Davis because they lived in brown desert, and we had beautiful mountains to look at when the game got boring. The players liked to come because we were the only town besides Marathon that had grass on its football field. The other towns had bulldozed the mesquite off a patch of desert, painted some white lines, and called it a field. Whenever a runner was tackled, he would raise a cloud of dust, then the wind would blow the cloud into our faces and lodge sand between our teeth. Some of those fields contained dozens of rocks about the size of your fist. When a player fell on a rock, it was considered good etiquette to pick it up and toss it off the field, being careful not to bean a fan. This wasn't easy, because all the male fans—cowboys, oilfield workers, farmers, railroad men, deputy sheriffs—always stood or crouched along the sidelines, leaning onto the field and screaming their opinions of our ancestry and athletic ability out to us. Their wives sat in their cars, parked a few yards beyond the sidelines, watching the action through the windshields and honking the horns when the home team did something good. A visiting player assigned to carry the ball down the home team's sideline ran in fear for his life, for the fans were likely to trip him or throw a handful of dirt into his face. Community pride was at stake in every contest, you see, and some citizens didn't care how their boys won, just so they did, by God.

Another thing that made us Indians such a class act was our band. Marathon—our archrival—was the only other town with a band, and we liked to travel to bandless towns and show off. When we played Marathon, the rivalry between the bands was as intense as the game, each of us trying to show the enemy musicians that we could play tougher tunes and march more like the Aggies than they could.

It was difficult for such a small school as Fort Davis to field both a football team and a band, of course, so some of us had to do double duty. I, for instance, was the band's leading cornet player. Our quarterback, Van Kountz, was the lead baritone horn player, and Dick Hartnett, who also was on the football team, was the bass drummer. At halftime we would come off the field or the bench, pick up our instruments, and march out with the band, still wearing our football uniforms. This made for a pretty weird looking band, I guess, but it was better than anybody else had. Besides, Marathon had some jerseys and cleats in its band, too.