North Dallas Forty (22 page)

“Probably not, unless they hurt somebody.”

“Some woman got kicked in the head.”

“That could mean trouble, unless she was a fan. Then she’d probably like it.”

We both laughed.

The door to the sauna opened and Art Hartman, our number two quarterback, stepped inside.

“Hey, guys,” Art grimaced against the heat. “Foot guys, how hot is it in here?”

“How ya doin’, Art?” Maxwell greeted him.

“Tired as shit,” Hartman answered, gingerly stepping over me and reaching up to shake hands with Maxwell. “The kid kept me up half the night. How ’bout yourself?”

“Never felt better.”

Art Hartman was in his second year, having graduated as the top NCAA passer from Maryland. He was Seth’s heir apparent, physically outstripping Maxwell in every department and seemingly needing only seasoning to become a top NFL quarterback.

“Did you guys hear about Claridge?” Hartman asked, sitting his six-foot-four frame on the bottom bench and pulling absently on his cock.

“Yeah,” I answered, “how did you know?”

“Saw John this morning at the office. He said he was there.”

Art Hartman and John Wilson, the strong safety, both lived in Lake Highlands, a nice middle-class suburb, and both worked for the same real estate agent. Hartman had made over twenty-six thousand dollars the previous spring on two industrial property deals. During the season he went to the office every morning before practice and every afternoon after.

“Anybody get arrested?” Maxwell asked.

“No. I don’t think so.” Art scratched his head. “But Wilson got his ass in a crack. His wife spent half the night at our house. She found lipstick on his shorts, can you believe that?”

“I didn’t think he wore shorts.”

“How you feelin’, Seth?” Hartman looked back up at Seth, who was still on his back with his arm over his face.

“I tol’ you once, kid, I feel fine,” Maxwell replied without moving. “But all you young strong studs are beginnin’ to make me feel my age.”

“Which is sixty-one this morning,” I piped in.

“You’ll still be around long after I’m gone, chief,” Hartman said, smiling.

“An’ don’t you ever forget it, kid.” Maxwell sat up and smiled down at him.

There were those who were of the opinion that Hartman should have replaced Maxwell the start of the year and most certainly the next year. I didn’t necessarily agree. I had a lot of confidence in Maxwell’s head but it was hard to argue with Hartman’s physical ability. He could throw farther, run faster, hit harder, and he never got hurt. He was the prototype of a professional football quarterback. Big, strong, and good-looking, his wife was his college sweetheart, his child came seven months after the wedding and weighed in at ten pounds. He had a three-bedroom brick home, two cars, and he belonged to the Society of Christian Athletes and the Oakridge Methodist Church. B.A. belonged to the Oakridge Methodist Church.

“How many times is that for Claridge?” Maxwell asked.

“Three or four, I think,” Hartman interjected, being specific. “If you’re counting totally naked. Partially naked I don’t know.” He smiled and shrugged.

“What else happened?” I asked Hartman.

“I dunno, I had to leave the office to show some property to a customer.”

“Goddam, man,” Maxwell responded. “What time do you get to the office?”

“Around six.”

“Jeeeeesus,” Maxwell and I said in unison. Maxwell fell back on the bench. “Mr. Businessman,” he said.

Seth and I had both had enough heat and headed for the showers for a final cool-down.

“How’s an old man like me s’posed to keep up with a kid like Hartman?” Maxwell asked.

“Just like everything else, man,” I offered. “You gotta cheat.”

Maxwell looked up from picking at an ingrown hair on his chest.

We finished our showers and stepped outside to dry off. Maxwell climbed onto the scales. The pointer moved to 217.

“Fuck,” he moaned, shaking his head. “Explain that, will ya? I gained two pounds in the sauna.”

I didn’t even try.

Somebody changed the radio station and “the good music sound” of KBOX-FM filled the room. The equipment man must be back in his cage; he always played KBOX because it was B.A.’s favorite station. B.A. wasn’t in the locker rooms ten minutes a day, but anytime he walked through and KBOX wasn’t wafting around the lockers he went to the equipment man and demanded the reason. I spent a lot of time sneaking around the cage, changing the radio dial. It was great fun watching B.A. ask the sweating man why the team wasn’t listening to good music. The equipment manager would nervously shift from foot to foot, shaking his head and saying it had been none of his doing.

Toweling off, I heard the front door slam and stuck my head into the locker room. It was Thomas Richardson. He was standing by the bulletin board. He saw me and waved.

“Did it get rough last night?” he asked.

“Is a pig’s ass pork?”

“I figured it would.” He reached into his coat pocket, pulled out a sheet of paper, and pinned it to the board.

I walked down to read the paper.

MODERN MAN NO LONGER FEELS, HE MERELY REACTS. CREATIVITY HAS BEEN REPLACED BY CONFORMITY. LIFE HAS LOST ITS SPONTANEITY: WE ARE BEING MANIPULATED BY OUR MACHINES. THE INDIVIDUAL IS DEAD.

“Goddam. Who put that up there?” Maxwell stood behind me, drying his hair.

“Richardson.”

“He is one crazy son of a bitch, all right.”

“Don’t you feel like you’re being manipulated by a machine, Seth?” I asked, turning to face him.

“You bet, podnah,” he replied, grinning and grabbing his cock and waving it at me. “This here machine, right here.” He winced as his fingers rubbed against the wounds of the previous night’s encounter. “I’m sorry, John Henry,” he said, looking down. “I shore do treat you poorly.”

I turned back and reread the paper the angry black man had stuck to the bulletin board just below Clinton Foote’s notice that everybody had to wear coats and ties. I stared at the two pieces of paper for a long time, then turned back to Maxwell, who was digging in the crack of his ass with the towel.

“Can you think of anybody you ever loved?” I asked.

“Huh?” Maxwell was leaning to the side with one leg slightly raised to allow him better access to his rectum. “Goddam, I think I got piles.” His eyes suddenly clicked to mine. “What did you say?”

“Loved somebody?” I asked again. “You know. Really loved. Not counting Martha and Duane.”

Martha and Duane were Maxwell’s parents. Maxwell being from west Texas, and raised a Baptist, he would automatically list his parents and two sisters as loved ones, unless I first ruled them out. He hardly liked them.

“How ’bout Billy Charlene and Norma Jean?”

I shook my head.

“Okay,” he said. “Cherry Lane Rodent?”

“Cherry Lane? Sounds like a subdivision.”

“You might call her that,” Maxwell offered. “My first piece of pussy. She took a boy to the sand hills and brought home a man.” He straightened up slightly and threw his shoulders back.

“Did you love her?”

“No. Shit no. That was a joke. I can’t think of anybody.” He paused. “I used to think I loved my first wife, but I even doubt that now. No. I can’t say I ever loved anybody.”

“Me either.”

I left Maxwell at the bulletin board, still reading and drying his hair.

There were a few pieces of mail in the top of my locker. A pencil-scrawled envelope was mixed in among the bills and nasty letters from the credit card companies.

Dear Phil Elliott

You are my favorit player and Dallas is my favorit teem. I think you are the best player in the hole world. Would you plese send me Billy Gill’s autograph and pitcher.

Your friend

David Gerald Walker

ps—my sister says hi.

“Little Commie motherfucker,” I said, putting the letter into Gill’s locker.

My bare back squeaked and pulled against the blue cushion as the trainer worked my leg, trying to stretch out the troublesome right hamstring. Rand was standing at the foot of the wooden rubbing table, holding my ankle and knee and pushing the injured leg straight up and back into my chest. He increased the pressure until I signaled that the pain was no longer bearable. Then he replaced the leg flat on the table and kneaded the damaged muscle, after which he repeated the process, trying each time to increase the flexion. The whole thing hurt like hell.

“Uuuuuhnnn ... fuck, Eddie,” I moaned. “The son of a bitch is really sore.”

The trainer dug his fingers into the torn tissues at the point where the leg and buttocks joined.

“You’ve got scar tissue in there like that,” Rand said, holding up a clenched fist. “And scar tissue just don’t stretch. Every time that leg stretches too far and you feel that sharp sting, it’s tearing some more. Working your leg like this at least will keep it loose.”

“Anything else I can do?”

“Just keep it warm, do these stretching exercises, and keep taking your pills,” he said, taking hold of my leg again. “Now tell me if this hurts too much.”

“Ahhhh,” I groaned. “Motherfucker.”

“Hey, Bubba.” A white grin framed by the purple-blackface of Delma Huddle loomed over me. “That ain’t gonna make you no faster.” He laughed his peculiar high-pitched giggle. His laughter subsided and he watched the trainer manipulating my leg, “Hamstring still botherin’ you?”

“Sore as shit. But, if I ever get well, I’ll make you a star.”

Delma was a perennial All-Pro even though B.A. and Clinton Foote had attempted several times to squelch his nomination. They hoped to correct his “severe attitude problems and outrageous contract demands.”

Early last season, B.A. had benched Huddle in favor of Donnie Daniels, the number one draft choice from Georgia Tech. After four consecutive losses B.A. suddenly noticed “a vastly improved performance level in practice sessions” and reinstated Delma.

According to B.A., Daniels had replaced Huddle because “Daniels is statistically the finest receiver in our camp.” Daniels never left the bench again. He had believed what B.A. had said about him and was totally devastated by the demotion. He had often stopped me on the practice field to get my feelings on what he had done that had so suddenly snatched him from the road to glory. I tried to explain the political and economic ramifications behind the episode, but a twenty-two-year-old white All American from Georgia Tech just isn’t ready for that kind of sports trust reality.

Daniels grew more and more bitter until finally, at the end of the season, he publicly demanded to be traded. He was immediately sent to Pittsburgh as a warning to others about statements critical to the organization. The condition of the trade required that Daniels make the forty-man roster before Pittsburgh would have to fulfill their end of the agreement.

I met Daniels for a drink right after the trade had been announced. He seemed like the only survivor of a ten-car collision who was trying to explain how it had happened. Several times during the course of our conversation he had stopped to stare off into his disastrous past, thinking of all those glories that he had only tasted slightly.

Last August, Daniels’s name showed up in six-point type on the waiver list, and Pittsburgh wasn’t required to honor their end of the conditional trade.

Huddle, on the other hand, set a club record for yards per reception and was again named to the All-Pro team.

Huddle slapped me on my bare shoulder and walked over to the tape counter. With every muscle of his six-foot frame perfectly defined, he rippled when he walked. He grabbed a handful of chewable vitamin C tablets, and as he caught sight of a neat row of syringes lined along the top of the tape counter he shuddered. Thursday was the day for B-12 shots.

“No shots for me, Bubba,” Huddle volunteered, nervously eyeing the syringes of cherry-red fluid.

Delma Huddle was the finest athlete I had ever met and I was constantly amazed by the ease with which he performed. With the possible exception of Thomas Richardson, no one else on the team had such an abundance of talent. The effortlessness with which Delma played often drew criticism and B.A. constantly considered Huddle a loafer.

Even though we were both wide receivers and therefore competitors, I conceded early in Huddle’s first year that there was no contest. It was the only time in a profession of blind confidence and self-deception that I wasn’t able to find, or create, a competitor’s weakness on which to capitalize. The color of my skin was the only point in my favor.

Because Delma Huddle was indispensable to our offense, B.A. and Clinton Foote created elaborate schemes to convince him and the paying public that he wasn’t. The enormity of Huddle’s talent made most of the schemes obvious to everyone but sportswriters and fans, and they served only to irritate Delma. It was another example of B.A. and Clinton’s technique to keep a player mentally off balance, and thus controllable, by means of strategically placed lies and half-truths. It is a difficult tactic to defend yourself against. If you never hear the truth how do you make any of these simple day-to-day decisions necessary to minimal physical and emotional survival? If any one thing can be false, it all can be false, and how do you tell the difference? Delma Huddle survived by never maintaining any continuous train of thought from one situation to another. Knowing that part of every situation was untrue or unreal, he saw no sense in trying to internalize any of it. As a person he had a definite sameness, but no continuity. Any interacting relationship had to begin and end in the same physical meeting to enjoy any hope of communication. He never carried over any assumptions. Experience rolled off him like water. Delma resisted acculturation as alien and untrue and survived on animal instincts. He was succeeding as a professional athlete.

“Hey, Bubba, did you hear Uncle Billy this morning?” Huddle asked, popping a vitamin C tablet in his mouth and crunching it up noisily. He walked to the table and picked up my unoccupied foot and began massaging it.

“No. But please don’t stop. I think I love you.”

“Claridge’s mother sent a letter to the contest.”