Making Love (29 page)

“Jane, what's happenin'?”—his thirst for news exquisitely vague and undefined.
 

“Me. Good morning.”
 

“Wonder if I should ring the kid and see if everythin's okay.”
 

He had the phone pressed on him, then realized that he'd forgotten the number, and although secure in his knowledge that the cousin lived in Vineland, recalled that New Jersey was divided into obscure townships without which Directory refused to proceed.
 

“It's on the table,” Conlon called.
 

“Don't I get a chance to brush my teeth?” Sonny complained, smiling. Paradise was no longer an abstract concept with an entryway guarded by men of the cloth, but right here in Gramercy Park.
And
he had landed there on his feet, in an end zone of recurring, unceasing touch-downs. Even if he had fumbled, so what? This time he recovered them! Singlehandedly he dealt the formerly haughty, Lombardi-ruled Green Bay Packers their worst defeat. Sonny Jackson: 120—the Packers: 0. Confetti in his hair, leis and medals around his neck, a nation on its feet cheering, Sonny squeezed some Colgate on his brush and saluted himself with a white smile, the man who'd humbled Lombardi, more than a match for Norse gods.
 

“Hello, Zanzibar,” he greeted the mirror. He refrained from pounding his chest although it was hairy enough to attempt without embarrassment. He hadn't had a hangover for a week and he felt really terrific and was not discouraged by the diminished size of his pecker. His single foray into humor during a referee's time-out for a measurement (he hadn't made the first down) came after a seventy-minute performance with Jane when he said: “This isn't an automatic, you know,”—causing her to unlock her toes from the headboard and fall backward, reeling with laughter. It was beautiful, she thought, so mindless.
 

A straight up-and-down man, his feet usually encased in subdued Brilon hose, Sonny had received something of an education in the business of exotic positioning. He preferred to regard her inventiveness as amateurish experimentation, rather than the rewards of pragmatism. Certainly his exposure to hookers left few doubts in his mind, since they assumed one of two positions—either/or. In the field of the cheerleader, the nonprofessional zealot, the rabid halfback fuckers, he had been taken on cane rocking chairs (a fad inspired by J. F. K.), automobile strap hangers, kneeling without prayer, hammocks (the hydramatic of humping), standing, stooping, the flanker reverse. But Jane, long-toed with prehensile skills, had by comparison made the others seem mere converts in the company of a fanatic. He loved it, every second of it. Like Magellan, he had circled her breasts, a seemingly endless voyage, until he discovered the principles of sexual circumnavigation, moving from Atlantic to Pacific without changing course, only the movement of his head. Never plagued by neck cricks, he developed one. Was ever injury so well rewarded, he wondered.
 

Small regrets always accompany great moments of happiness, and Sonny, jogging on his mind to rebuild wind, saw before his eyes his sweat suit rolled into a ball in the corner of his third dresser drawer under the fourteen boxes of handkerchiefs and almost the same number of ties he had accumulated over too many Christmases to remember. Unsullied and still boxed, they made him think that his friends and acquaintances believed he was plagued by secret colds and that out of the limelight, in the privacy of his rooms, his principal activities were blowing his nose and practicing half-windsors.
 

“Want to do some running?” he asked the girls.
 

“Why?” Conlon was genuinely curious.
 

“I don't know. Work up a sweat maybe.”
 

“I'll run with you,” Jane volunteered. It seemed a reasonable activity, safer than his chronic horse selections.
 

Two horses he had backed in the past ten days had had to be destroyed. A witness at scores of dopings, he had once bet two thousand dollars on a pony running at Atlantic City and seen the gelding finish nine lengths ahead of the field—riderless. Ever optimistic, he put his trust in the law of averages, which like the Holy Roman Empire was neither law nor an average but a figment of gamblers' imaginations. Occasionally the trusty Ycaza, the buoyant Cordero, the faithful Atkinson booted home a three-to-five winner and Sonny, with twenty dollars on the nose, collected short money. Today he was solidly behind Del Insko at Yonkers, a peerless handler of trotters, short on excitement but long on prices.
 

“We got the park downstairs,” he said, moving to the window. He looked for runners and decided that the district was short on athletes.
 

“I don't mind a little gallop myself,” said Conlon. She couldn't face an afternoon movie again. A date the night before with an old enemy of Mel's, also married, had ended disastrously, diminishing her self-confidence when he begged off, pleading a recent hernia. She'd never been so low and she saw herself as a drudge in a Dickens novel, waiting hopefully for a David Copperfield to rescue her from the galley.
 

“This is your last weekend unemployed,” Sonny advised Jane, “so I want you to enjoy it.”
 

“What if I don't need the money?”
 

“You still got to do somethin' with your time.” He chucked her under the chin. “An' anyway, you do need it. I don't want to see you runnin' your capital into the ground. Take the advice of somebody that knows what it feels like to cover punt returns in Canada.”
 

It was evident that he continued to grieve. No watches, Mustangs, testimonials, or plaques had ever been awarded to Sonny Jackson. His name would never grace a Spaulding football, and as far as Wilson was concerned he was dead, or as good, since he headed their shit list—or got close enough to the top for it not to matter when, having taken employment and a week's expenses, he went on a three-day drunk at a Sporting Goods convention in Atlanta, blowing his advance and socking a leading buyer. He had been ejected from Hyatt House with instructions never to return after four naked girls were found locked in his room at a buyers' party that never materialized. Having mastered a sales pitch, he then lost interest, because tragic forces went to work on him in the Polaris Lounge, which like his brain performed a revolution every hour. A group had recognized him, jeered, cawed, at the world's leading exponent of fumblitis. He would have preferred to die young, tragically; even to sit in a wheel-chair next to Roy Campanella, the crowd cheering, cursing fate, a victim of unfulfilled promise who could still get around, slap his name on pizza parlors. But he had emerged, his courage boundless, despite a lack of faith in himself. He was in love!
 

The sweat suit imprisoned in the drawer, he made do with jeans and a flannel shirt, trotting infinite laps around the short track of Gramercy Park. Short laps, the story of his life. The girls cheered him, kept count, roared as he began number sixty-five. Running, he thought he could endure forever. A few people stopped to watch, then moved on, convinced that madness was just beside them. But he was no madman; this was Sonny Jackson, working up a sweat, removing the poisons from his system.
Health in action, America take note
, he wanted to shout.
 

In the evening, charley-horsed and numb as a tinker's dray, he could barely keep his balance, stand on his feet, as crowds of searching singles swarmed into Joiners. Never a clock watcher, he suspiciously eyed the second hand on his Timex, mumbling Jane's name to himself, liberation just beyond him. He picked up a face in the mob, a short squat man, hair meticulously parted to the left, the signature of a duck's ass below the crown and glued like linoleum. A variety of cigars loomed in the man's pocket like a trout-fisherman's flies, and Sonny made his way through the crush, his heart nervously racing. Snub nose, square teeth, the unique power of the small man emanating from him like whore's scent, he bulled solidly in the crowd.
 

“Pudge ... Pudge Denison.”
 

“Holy she-it, Sonny. Let's have a little skin, man. Wonderful seeing you, Sonny.” Sonny's former employer, the owner of the Birmingham Colonials, embraced his old back.
 

“If this ain't fate,” Sonny said, unable to control his anxiety, “you're jus' the man I wanted to see.”
 

“Whatchu doin' heah, Sonny?”
 

“I work here, got a piece of it.” He kicked the floor raising sawdust. “Turnin' sawdust into gold. It's not bad, Pudge. Are you in town for a while?”
 

“We at the ‘Mericana for the football draft.”
 

“That's terrific, Pudge.”
 

“Shaw has changed. Remember how we used to make them notes on bits of paper an' git the names all mussed up—specially them polack kids. All done now on computers, no she-it. Little itty-bitty card with holes in it. Even tells us whether the kid's an ass man.” He chortled. Sonny handed him a shot of Wild Turkey with a side of branch water. “Fuckin' an' football, still man main interests.”
 

“What's better? They're the greatest.”
 

“Some of the fun's gone now,” Pudge said dramatically, then spat out the cigar tip he'd bitten. “Boys now're technicians. Down to a science.”
 

“Remember when I busted out of camp and coach Greer missed me on the bed check?”
 

“'Course I do.” He cackled. “We wuz tiltin' ow heads back at the Tutweiler with a pair of them Auburn girls. Jellyrollin' on our brain.”
 

“What a time! Coach was mad as hell. Couldn't do a thing when he found out I was with you.”
 

“I paid you fine. Cost me a hundred for the pleasure of you company, Sonny. Worf ever cent of it too. Nevah knew a man attracted as much pussy as you, Son. Snakin' round bahs, they couldn't deny you nofin' and little me tailin' along with my peckah hard as a hambone.”
 

“What a team we were, Pudge.”
 

“What made you give up the game? Nevah understood.”
 

“Slowed up, got a little old.” He paused, sipped his bourbon, and smiled at Pudge, although he didn't feel like smiling. “I was through,” he said grimly.
 

“Ball kep slippin' outa you hands. Always said you carried it too far out in fronta you.”
 

“It give me mobility.”
 

“Tuck it into you gut, I recall advisin'.”
 

“When I did, I couldn't move. I became a setup. I wanna come back, Pudge.”
 

He was astounded. “As a player?”
 

“No, as a coach or a scout. I know backs. I know when a boy's got it.”
 

“A coach?” Shock still registered on the round baby face.
 

“Backfield coach or a scout. I know I can do it. It's in my bones.”
 

“Bears thinkin' on, Sonny.”
 

“I'd work my tail off, Pudge.”
 

“Shaw you would, Son.” His eyes twinkled hungrily as a miniskirt passed by. “Still gettin' you shaha gash?”
 

“Gettin' it? Fightin' it off. I'm dangerous walkin' around.”
 

“Like pickin' out nits with a fine comb.”
 

“This is my town, Pudge. Name your pleasure. Color, size, measurements.”
 

“You still one beautiful man, Sonny.”
 

“I want you walkin' away with a smile on your face.”
 

“This evenin' I'm straight. Got a pair lined up for me back at the hotel. But I'll be wantin' to drop some lead tomorrow as well.” He looked at his watch, backed off from another round. “Evah heah anythin' from Joy-Sue?”
 

“Naw, we split up years ago. I got the boy, thank God.”
 

“Fine woman, Joy-Sue. Weah'd it go wrong?”
 

Sonny frowned, troubled by the question. He shook his head disconsolately. The reasons evaded him.
 

“Where, huh?”
 

“Stacked like a battleship, she was. Tits comin' at a man like daggahs. An' legs ... wal, Son, if the truth be tole, I dreamed ‘bout ‘em mo often than I care to admit, draped round the backa ma neck, and yohs truly shovin' the ramrod in up to the hilt. Mind, I nevah touched her.”
 

“I'd forgive you if you did. Why not? She was one of those women nothin' could satisfy. Sex, love, a kid, a house. First time she run off to Norfolk. We was playin' in DC. When I caught up with her she was in a navy bar, drunk. Laid ten sailors in one day, she told me.” He stopped, looked at the floor and kicked some sawdust with the tip of his shoe. “Crazy thing happened when I walked into the bar to pick her up; all these sailors, kids, come toward me holdin' bits of paper and stubs of pencils. They lined up for autographs, an' she had her head slumped down on the bar screamin' motherfucker at me, like I done some-thin' wrong. Last I seen of her was in New Orleans. She dumped me there. Who knows what happened after that? Maybe she's dead. Do us all a favor. Human nature, it stinks.”
 

“Friends, tha's all ‘at counts.”
 

“You said it, Pudge. Here's my number. You can get me at either one.” He pressed a scrap of paper on him.
 

“Ring you tomow.”
 

They shook hands, and Sonny released the small fat hand reluctantly, his body refusing to lose even for an instant what it had momentarily regained.