North Dallas Forty (4 page)

Steve Peterson and Brenda had come to the door at the sound of the crash and seemed to be the only others who witnessed the kiss.

“God, I’m getting out of here.” Brenda’s eyes had widened. She ran out the back door to the alley.

Steve Peterson looked at me and shrugged. “She’s from SMU,” he said.

“Hey Phil,” Andy Crawford said. He had regained his feet when he saw me leaning across the bar. “Glad you could make it.” We shook hands.

Claridge headed back toward Andy’s bedroom to get a new shirt.

“Hey, podnah,” Crawford was addressing me, “you got a dolly with you?”

I shook my head.

“Well, I’ll go find you one.” He headed into the mass of people in the living room.

The party had been on for some time, possibly early afternoon, and was still picking up speed. It wouldn’t be as awesome as a postgame party, but it looked interesting enough for a man with a slow time in the forty-yard dash and a glove box full of grass.

Postgame parties were outrageous. Players bottle up a lot of fear and frustration trying to maintain a tone during a week’s practice and a Sunday afternoon. It all comes spilling out after the game. Compound that with amphetamines, taken to maintain a pitch before and during the game. The effect of the speed didn’t end with the gun. Mix liquor and adrenaline with the aforementioned ingredients in a two-hundred-sixty-pound container, multiply it by about twenty and you have a postgame team party. Mix only liquor and fear and you had tonight’s party. The results promised to be awesome.

Postgame parties had another special catalyst—wives. The public displays of mutual disaffection were always intriguing. They constantly renewed my belief in divorce as the only sane American Institution. At times like those, I considered my divorce as my only true success. There were more punches thrown between player and wife than there ever were between player and player. Few football teams could withstand the disharmony that several of my teammates incorporated into their marriages with the utmost of ease. The amount of bodily harm these marriage partners inflicted on each other was amazing. Physical violence was a daily component of their marital give-and-take. The real offenders were the women. They took to violence much quicker than their husbands. The favorite weapons are usually heavy cut-glass articles like vases and ash trays. Makes for a gory wound.

During my short, violent marriage, the wives had attempted several times to organize against the unbridled insanity of postgame parties. They were tired of their husbands acting like animals in public, even if the public was only other teammates.

There was a curious, subtle homosexual bond that united the wives in their battles against the husbands and vice versa. The men shared the dark secrets of locker rooms, training camps, and road games. No matter the cost, these secrets were never to be shared with the wives. The women used baby showers and bridge games as strategy sessions for counterattacks against this chauvinistic secret society. The wives swapped rumors, suspicions, facts, and fantasies for later use on unsuspecting spouses. Favorite times for wifely sapper raids were just before coitus or while packing for a road trip. “Judith Ann said Seth was with her Thursday. So, where were you?”

Like most wives, ours aspired for better, more genteel lives and began to plan the team parties like debutante balls. Power plays would be carried out in full dress.

One Sunday in late October, I had struggled home after a disappointing loss to Baltimore. My wife met me at the door dressed in a bunny suit. The wives had planned a Halloween party. I realized the worst of my day was yet to come.

“Hurry up and put this on.” She held out an identical hollow rabbit for me. (Now, I must explain, so our behavior doesn’t seem aberrant but merely intense, that social status was distributed among the wives according to the husband’s current status with the team. This shaky dependence on their husbands for identity made wives hypersensitive to any deviant behavior. My wife was constantly concerned that I might fuck up, and I did.)

I refused to put on the costume.

After spending the afternoon sweating, bleeding, and baring my soul in a losing cause, I wasn’t going to dress in a fluffy white tail and long pink ears and meet my teammates for a drink.

“You don’t care about me,” she cried. “You don’t care about anybody but yourself. I’m in charge of the refreshments. You have to wear a costume.”

“Oh, for Christ sake, I refuse to go to the Sheraton ballroom looking like the Easter bunny.”

“It’s not Easter. It’s Halloween.” She wiped her nose with a little white paw.

“Look, I’ve already made a fool of myself in front of seventy-six thousand people.” (I had dropped the one pass that might have broken the game open.) “I’m not going to compound it by going out in public looking like Uncle Wiggily. Leave me alone. I’m tired.”

“You’re always tired when I’m around. But you’re never too tired to go out drinking and screwing those little whores that hang around Rock City.” She pulled nervously at one pink ear. “I want to do things that other people do.”

“We’re not like other people. Can’t we discuss this some other time?”

“You never want to do anything I like.” She was starting to sweat. The bunny suit was getting hot. “You never wanted to get married. Did you?” This was a word game we had started playing shortly after her marriage-inducing pregnancy ended in miscarriage. I would deny the accusation immediately. My denial wouldn’t stop the argument or even slow it, but it served as a landmark while our anger broke new trails.

Looking back now, I realize the importance of the little procedures in maintaining a relationship. You can obliterate the emotions in a marriage and it will plod on into eternity. But if you tamper with the rhythm, it’ll tumble around your ears.

Maybe I was just tired or distracted, or maybe I meant to do it. Whatever my reasons, that day I denied too slowly.

Her eyes widened when the right moment for pledging fidelity had passed. They turned wild as the second stretched into eternity.

“No. No. Of course, I wanted to get married.” It was too late.

“You son of a bitch,” she screamed. “I’ll show you.” She ran into the kitchen and began rummaging through drawers. It was to be a suicide attempt, her fourth in as many weeks. Her first fraudulent attempt had been with a knife. It left no marks. Subsequent headlong rushes to the big sleep had involved less deadly implements. Her last attempt had been with a potato peeler.

I walked upstairs. I was tired. It had been such an easy pass.

“You bastard,” she screamed, as I reached the top of the stairs. “You don’t even care. Goddam you, I hope you die.” I hoped I did too ... and soon. The ball had been right on my fingertips. I stumbled or something. It just seemed to float away. I couldn’t hold it.

I washed my face and pissed to the sound of breaking glass and slamming doors. It irritated my wife much more when I ignored her, but I didn’t want to fight with her. She was a hell of a scratcher.

When I returned downstairs, Tony Bennett was singing about the heart he had left in San Francisco.

It had been our song in college.

She was sitting on tine living room floor looking through an album of our wedding pictures. Her face was tearstained and red. One of the pink ears was bent double. She looked up at me.

“I love you.” A teardrop trickled down a fake whisker and hung, bobbing, on the end.

I laughed. I couldn’t help it.

The laugh was the final insult. Tearing off her costume and grabbing mine from the table, she ran onto the patio and threw them in a pile. She soaked them with charcoal starter and set them afire. Chest heaving and eyes blazing, clothed only in her bra and panties, she watched the bunny suits go up in smoke.

I was going mad.

The fire seemed to burn everything out and shortly we were on our way to the party, casually dressed and observing a shaky armistice.

“Are you all right?” I had been driving about ten minutes.

There was no answer. “Look, I’m sorry. I was tired and depressed.”

“You’re always tired and depressed. You just come home and stare at television. And whenever B.A. does something you don’t like, you don’t come home at all. Well, I’m sick of it. I want to be tired and depressed sometime.”

She leaned against the passenger door and pulled her neck down into the fur collar of her coat. I couldn’t blame her for being disappointed. She wanted to join a country club and I wanted to watch television.

“I want to have a baby.”

“We can’t afford a baby, you know that.”

“Why not? You make plenty of money.”

“Sixteen thousand dollars isn’t plenty of money, particularly when we have a three-hundred-dollar-a-month house payment and a maid. After today, I may be out of work.” Jesus, it had been right in my hands. The defensive back had fallen down. Son of a bitch!

“All you do is worry about your precious football.”

“It’s our precious football, unless you’d like to get another job.” I had been all alone, nothing but open field. Goddammit! How did I miss that fucking ball?

“I might as well if I can’t have a baby. Staying home is really boring.” She had held a job as a nurse’s aide for three days. Our closet was full of pink-and-white-striped aprons.

“We wouldn’t be worrying about money if you hadn’t quit your job with Brooks.”

“I didn’t quit. I was fired.” I had worked two off-seasons for Brooks Harris “usin’ the ol’ name to make contacts and tell the folks our good news about real estate.” There was one problem, “inability to close” Brooks had called it. I just didn’t seem to be able to make that demand that would “push the customer from confusion to conviction to close.” All the customer’s reasons for refusing to buy seemed perfectly rational to me. Dammit, I know I didn’t take my eyes off it. B.A. could bench me.

“Darlene Meadows said O.W.’s thinking about taking that job and ...” she turned to face me, “... Judith Maxwell told me she thought you and Seth were smoking marijuana again. Are you?”

“No, we aren’t.” Maxwell and I had both tried to get our wives to turn on with us. They were horrified and screamed of brain damage and perversion. Seth and I had been under close scrutiny since. I must have been off balance when I made my break. It was right in my hands.

We were the only people not in costume at the party. I said we had come as a famous flankerback and his wife. It didn’t help. My wife left me and sat with Darlene Meadows, who had come as Scarlett O’Hara, and Judith Ann Maxwell, who appeared to be Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Judith Ann was Seth’s third wife. I sat at the bar and thought about how much I would like to screw Darlene Meadows. O.W. Meadows had come as the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan; several of the black players left in frightened indignation. Judith Ann had dressed Seth in a solid-black gunfighter’s rig. He seemed a little embarrassed by it but rode it out to the bitter end. Maxwell even had a mock shootout with Jo Bob Williams, who, crisscrossed with bandoliers, had come as Pancho Villa. Both of them fell in a writhing heap on the dance floor. Shortly after midnight, Alan Claridge arrived in drag and claimed he was the real Gloria Steinem. The party broke up about forty-five minutes later. All the men had gotten hopelessly drunk.

During the ride home, I slept in the back seat of the car. I awoke when I felt the car stop. My wife shut off the engine, leaned over the seat and punched me in the nose.

“Lousy drunk son of a bitch.” She slammed the car door and I could hear her high heels clicking up the sidewalk to our house. My nose began to bleed.

Thinking about wives brought me down and I headed back to Andy’s bedroom to smoke a joint. The bedroom was off limits to all but a select few, of which I considered myself a member, quite without any encouragement from Crawford.

I immediately sat down on the bed and lit a joint, inhaling deeply, letting it seep through me.

“Better than booze,” I thought, to assuage my conscience.

The bed was unmade. On the bedside table was a half-eaten peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a bowl that in the distant past had contained soup. The red bedspread matched the carpeting and wallpaper. The sheets and pillowcases were silk. There was a small Sony color television lying on one of the pillows. On the other pillow was a vibrator and a set of Vise Grips.

At the foot of the bed lay three checkbooks, all on different banks, and a stack of bills months old. Andy frequently mentioned that he handled his finances so badly he would often be overdrawn a couple of thousand dollars, a figure not far from my overdrafts.

Bankers were amazing. They would lend any amount of money, and as long as the debtor remained on the active playing list, renewals were always forthcoming. It was hard to believe they were just football fans.

On the dresser, stuck in the corner of a jewel box, were five telegrams. Each bore a different date, one for each of our five previous games.

The message and signature were the same on all.
SOCK IT TO ’EM
, signed Susan B.

Susan Brinkerman was Andy Crawford’s girl. Currently studying to be a portrait painter, she had been a cheerleader at SMU and maintained, in the face of a rapidly disintegrating universe, a nineteenth-century morality with options. She still fucked, but seldom admitted it, even to her partner. Postcoitus was fraught with remorse. The result was the standard amount of guilt with the heavy advantage of more orgasms. Andy loved her for it and made a great show of trying to respect her chastity but they usually lost control about twice a week and went “all the way.” The next day was reserved for penitence and the throes of self-chastisement.

Susan wasn’t coming to tonight’s party. It was the mutually agreed upon night for Andy to sow his wild oats. They planned to get married after he got it all out of his system.

The roach was burning my fingers, so I crushed it out and ate it. I lay down across the bed, my eyes fixed on the ceiling. I tried to relax. Sometimes, grass worked like a perfect tranquilizer and I would just float. Tonight, I couldn’t keep my mind still. My thoughts raced from yesterday’s game to B.A. to tomorrow. I was desperate to regain the starting position. I couldn’t stop thinking about it.