North Dallas Forty (27 page)

“Oh ... oh ...” was all she said, but she thrashed violently, gripping me tightly with her fingers and heels. As we ended, I was disconsolate, with a feeling of isolation.

“You know,” I said. I was sitting propped up on several pillows, scratching Charlotte’s head as she rested it on my stomach. “I have this theory. We all get this certain amount of energy each day and if we don’t use it, it drives us crazy. Eats away the prefrontal lobe.” I tapped my forehead.

“If we use too much energy we’re exhausted, burned out. Too little energy use, insanity. We must reach a balance and that balancing mechanism, if you’ll pardon the unscientific terminology, is fucking. Or, if you prefer, doin’ it.”

“I like doin’ it better. It sounds warmer.”

“Okay. Hunting used to be the way energy was balanced. A good hunt was a great combination of muscular and emotional energy. But now hunting just degenerates into butchery, which creates more energy rather than depleting it. Almost all human endeavor is that way. That surplus of energy is the cause of crimes of passion and spectator sports. Now fuck—ah—doin’ it is the natural energy depleter and the savior of human sanity. When everybody gets laid enough, the world will be at peace and I won’t have to play flanker.” I paused momentarily for effect. “So my dear, if you’ll just roll over.”

“Gladly,” Charlotte smiled. “If you think you can do anything with that.” She pointed below my waist.

“How do you feel about a dove hunt instead?”

“How would you get their little legs apart?”

We both lay silently exhausted but too excited to sleep, and after what seemed like several peaceful hours Charlotte sat up cross-legged on the bed.

“Are you happy?” she asked.

“I dunno.”

“What do you mean you don’t know?”

“Just that,” I said, sliding up against the headboard and drawing my knees into a triangle. “I don’t know what being happy is supposed to be. I always figured the secret to living was to find happiness. Do you agree?”

“Sure.”

“Well, what is being happy? Is it freedom from being hungry and thirsty and having a roof over your head?”

“That’s part of it.”

“Then I’m partially happy. What else is there?”

“It’s having somebody to love.”

“I’m wrestling with that.”

“But it’s mostly having somebody that you can make happy,” she continued, moving up to my feet and putting her chin on my knee. “Then their happiness is yours.”

“How do they know they’re happy?”

“Come on, Phillip, people just know.”

“Well, I’ve lowered my sights some in the past years. Happiness would be nice and it’s a swell goal, but all I want right now is to know. To know whether I’m happy or unhappy, it don’t matter which, I just want to know which I am.”

She dropped her eyes and I could see I had hurt her. I searched my mind for a kind thing to say.

“You’ve taken it personal, I’m sorry.”

“Well, what am I supposed to think? You’re in my bed telling me how unhappy you are.” She was on the verge of tears.

“I don’t expect you to understand but my confusion has nothing to do with you. My fear existed long before I met you. You’ve given me the only few minutes of peace I can remember. I feel safe in your bed. That’s more than I can say for mine.” I reached over and wiped a solitary tear from the end of her nose.

“Do you like it here?” she asked.

“Very much.” I tried not to think about the long drive home and the flight to New York. “I could stay here forever. I could stick around and help you cut the balls off everything on the place. No offense to David.”

“If you lived here,” she continued, “it might not help your football career.”

“Some career. Football’s about to give up on me, I think.”

“I don’t mean necessarily to quit playing. I mean to quit thinking and feeling like that. Playing in the game seems the least offensive of all.”

“What would I do? I’d have to do something. You don’t want some crazy dope freak around doing nothing.”

“I might. But there’s a lot to do on a place like this. Run right, this place could make a good profit if we bought momma cows and really turned it into a ranch.”

“Sounds like a lot of work.”

“Well, it’s up to you. I don’t like what football makes you. You’re a very mean man. I know, I just made love to you.”

“Do you really want me to move out here?” It sounded interesting.

“Yes. You don’t even have to work the ranch if you don’t want.” Her voice rose with excitement and her eyes began to sparkle. “I’ve got enough money to last until we learn to do without.”

“Do without what?”

“Whatever is not worth suffering for,” she continued. “That’s my whole idea. We start off with everything we’ve learned to desire as twentieth-century children. All the perverse wants and needs that haunt this generation.”

“Amazing.”

“I mean it.” She was becoming insistent. “I have plenty of money and you have a measure of success. Instead of starting with a one-room flat and slowly growing apart in pursuit of life in the seventies, we start with everything and whittle it down to each other. That’s how we would live in this insane world.”

“You mean start at the top and work our way to the bottom?”

“Sort of. And along the way if either of us wants out, out they go.”

I was astonished by her logic. “I can’t help but think I’m gonna have some real warm feelings for you before this is all over.”

“Me too.” Her arms wrapped around my waist and she snuggled her face into my chest.

T
HE MORNING WAS COOL
and crisp. The dew wet my boots as I walked to the car. The late fall sun was reassuringly warm as I guided the Buick through the front pasture toward the gate. Charlotte had looked beautiful on the kitchen steps, waving and telling me to come right back. I fought a melancholy premonition that told me not to leave but to stay there forever, raising cattle and watching the sun come up. First, though, I would have to deal with New York, Seth Maxwell, B.A., Clinton Foote, Conrad Hunter, fear, and me. Then I would stay there forever. I knew it the moment I stepped out the door, that was where I wanted to be. The new Brangus steer stared at me through the corral fence as I drove away.

The gate was open. As I drove through, a black fist shot out of the cottage window.

“Be cool, brother,” David’s voice rang out.

If I only could.

I waved and honked. What could I yell back? Power to the people?

I honked again as I turned onto the blacktop and sped toward the
Look
Magazine All American City.

The boarding gate was crowded with family, well wishers, and press people. Most of the team were milling around in the embarkation lounge drinking coffee and soft drinks served by brightly uniformed Braniff ground hostesses.

I had stopped by the house to change clothes and pick up some luggage, including my portable record player. I sat the record player down and looked around to see who else had arrived.

Art Hartman sat propped in the corner of the lounge. His head hung down on his chest and a gray 100X Resistol with a Fort Worth crease covered his eyes.

“Art?” I said, standing directly in front of him and bending down to try and look under the brim of his hundred-dollar hat.

“Uh.” His body shook slightly from the effort of the grunt but he made no move to look up.

“Art?”

“Yeah ... yeah.” He raised his head slightly and pushed the hat back with his thumb. He was unshaven and peered up at me with one horribly bloodshot eye.

“God,” I said. “What happened to you?”

“I spent a week with Maxwell, last night,” he moaned, trying to sit straight up. He kept sliding back into a slump.

“We went out for a beer and met these two gals,” he continued, smacking his lips and running his tongue along the insides of his cheeks as though his mouth were full of peanut butter. “They turned out to be married to guys that worked the night shift at Texas Instruments. Christ! What a night. Look at this.” He pushed back the brim of his hat to reveal a scab the size of a postage stamp on his forehead.

“A fight?”

“Fight—” he snorted out a painful laugh, wincing at the throbbing in the skull. “She bit me.”

“What’d you do? Try to rape her?”

“Me?” he exclaimed. “She raped me. God almighty, she couldn’t get enough. She made so much noise her kids woke up.”

“Jesus, Art, that’s really second-rate.”

“Don’t I know it. You should see my back. I told Julia I’d been in a fight. I don’t know if she believed me or not.”

“What happened to Seth?”

“We left the gals about midnight and he took me to a country-and-western place down on Industrial. The next thing I knew it was three in the morning and he’d gone with the car. I had to get a cab home.” He slid back down in the chair with a pitiful groan and pulled the hat back over his sacred forehead and eyes.

“Welcome to the NFL, Art,” I said, and turned toward the girl with the beehive black hair and purple culottes who was serving soft drinks. I took a Coke and was walking to an unoccupied chair near the boarding door when “Scoop” Zolin stopped me for an interview.

Zolin worked for the morning paper and our team was his beat. His real name was Seymour Zolinzowsky and he was the worst reporter I had ever met. Maxwell and I had given him the name Scoop several years back, during the first year he traveled with us, because he was notorious for getting drunk before the game and missing the first three quarters.

He would usually stumble into the press box about midway through the third quarter, pick up the play-by-play sheet, and begin to write his story. That year he won three national awards for outstanding sports journalism. A doper and drinker of huge proportions, Scoop was great fun but caused me much trouble. Often after a night with Scoop I would read the paper a couple of days later to find a full-page article of things I had babbled while in the throes of alcohol and cannabis hallucinations. If I didn’t say anything interesting he would often make up quotes and attribute them to me.

“Leave me alone, Scoop,” I said, as he approached. “I got enough troubles.”

“The word around sports circles is that your legs are gone and you’re over the hill,” Scoop said, smiling, not put off in the least by my rebuff. “Do you care to comment?”

“Leave me alone, Scoop,” I said, backing away.

“When questioned about his fading glory and rumors of ill health Elliott rebuffed this reporter with threats of physical violence and a warning to leave him alone, or else.”

“I didn’t say
or else
.”

“A little journalistic license. How many times I gotta tell you. I don’t let the facts interfere with my style.”

“Scoop, give me a break. What did I ever do to you?”

“Listen, man, I’m building you into a legend. Nobody gets the press coverage you get, except maybe Maxwell. I’m turning you into a personality.”

“Yeah, with all the warmth, wit, and charm of a Lee Harvey Oswald. Jesus, Scoop, B.A. is still mad at me over that last article.”

“Which article?”

“The one where you had me saying Larry Wilson was the ugliest man in football.”

“Oh yeah, sorry about that. I took a funny little pill some Delta stewardess gave me before I wrote that one. But goddam, that was a great picture of you they used with the story.”

“Jesus Christ. I have nothing further to say ever, and you can quote me.”

“Okay. Okay, you don’t have to get salty about it.” He looked around the lounge. “Where’s Maxwell?”

I shrugged and walked toward the gate. The plane was ready for boarding.

I closed my eyes, my mind freed by the white sound of the three 727 engines. I was sitting in the last seat of the tourist section. I like flying. It seems to be the only time I can really relax. At thirty thousand feet and surrounded by screaming jet engines and gasoline, I figure I can’t be held responsible for anything that happens.

Maxwell sat sleeping next to me, smelling not unlike my grandfather in the terminal stages of alcoholism. Mumbling something about a girl who swallowed his cock, he had stumbled aboard just before takeoff, had fallen into the inside seat, and had gone to sleep against the bulkhead. Somehow, on Sunday, Maxwell would be as marvelous as was necessary to win.

Once Maxwell had told me that the only time he had any respect for himself was when he was on the field. When he was off the field, he was the biggest whore around, because he would do anything for anybody to get back on the field.

“Ah, but we’re all whores, aren’t we?” he had said, looking right at me. “I guess I should take some satisfaction in being the best.”

I looked at the sleeping man, curled up, his back to me and his face buried in the tiny airline pillow. His sport coat was thrown carelessly over his shoulders. I pulled a plaid blanket from the overhead storage rack and covered him.

I lay back with my eyes closed and thought about how glad I was I had met Charlotte Caulder.

“Hi, Phil.” Mary Jane Woodley, stewardess, stood in the aisle.

Last year on the drunken return from winning the division playoff, I had watched Mary Jane jack off Maxwell in the very same seats we occupied now.

Someone had donated twenty-five cases of cheap champagne for the victory flight and everyone got incredibly fucked up. Mary Jane and Maxwell were quite reserved compared to others. One guy was traded and another waived outright for the things they said and did in alcohol and amphetamine frenzies to Conrad Hunter and Clinton Foote.

It had been an amazing flight. Maxwell and I smoked several joints in the toilet and then drank ten or so tiny bottles of liquor apiece. Maxwell finally cornered Mary Jane in the galley and asked her to suck him off as indication of the friendship they had built up over the years she had been flying our charters. She said no, but he had already unzipped his fly and the shiny head of his stiff penis was peeking out from between the tails of his shirt. Mary Jane finally gave in and guided him to the seat, covered his lap with a blanket and brought him to climax with her thin white hands. She even bent down a couple of times to suck. It was all quite poignant.