North Dallas Forty (36 page)

“Schmidt,” he said, matter-of-factly, “you’re out.”

Marion Konklin, a backup guard who doubled at center only in practice, lumbered onto the field.

Schmidt stared at Maxwell with pure animal hatred. Maxwell turned his back and stepped into the huddle already forming around Konklin. The veteran center turned and walked rapidly to the sidelines, throwing his helmet into a crowd of his teammates. The row of players lining the sidelines opened up slightly to dodge the helmet and let Schmidt pass, then closed as the furious man disappeared.

“All right, goddammit,” Maxwell ordered. “This time we go. I wanted you out here, Konklin. Don’t lemme down. You know what to do on a draw delay trap?”

It was third and fifteen.

“I’m not sure.”

Several players coughed and moved uneasily.

“Just set for pass. Then fire out and get the middle linebacker. It’s no sweat,” Maxwell reassured the frightened substitute.

The whistle blew, signaling time back in.

“All right. Red right draw delay trap on two. Got it Marion? On two.”

Maxwell stepped up behind Konklin and patted him reassuringly on the hip. The terrified center nearly leaped into New York’s secondary. Maxwell shouted out the defensive alignment, set the line, and stood scanning the linebackers and deep backs. The middle linebacker moved up into the line showing blitz. I watched Maxwell as he considered an audible against the blitz. Konklin’s legs started shaking slightly. Maxwell decided against the audible. Konklin would certainly miss it. Maxwell was gambling the linebacker was faking.

By the time Maxwell called the second hut, Konklin’s legs were shaking noticeably. He slammed the ball up into Maxwell’s hands and shot into the middle linebacker. He forgot about waiting to show pass set. It couldn’t have worked better if it had been executed correctly. The straight power block caught the linebacker guessing. He had been expecting a pass or at least a pass set. The block caught him totally unprepared and he went right over backward with Konklin on top of him. Crawford carried for fourteen and the first down.

“That’s a start. That’s a start,” Maxwell chattered confidently, clapping his hands and smiling broadly. He slipped into a heavy Texas drawl. “We’re gonna run an’ tho’ this ball rat down their throats.”

The huddle formed around Konklin, who was smiling broadly as everyone congratulated him. The energy was returning.

“All right. All right.” Maxwell knelt back into the huddle. “Fire draw forty-one Y zig out on two. Now come on, you guys. I didn’t leave them sand hills jest to come to the big city an’ git beat.” The huddle broke with a low grunt.

Maxwell hit Delma going out of bounds on the New York thirty-five. They had two men on him when he caught the ball.

The sound waves from fifty thousand diaphragms blew through our bodies. It was innervating. My stomach started to churn violently. I needed to evacuate; the pressure was intense. I farted and felt better.

“Who the hell did that?”

“Goddam.”

The huddle started to break up as players fanned at the air in front of their faces and scowled with disgust.

“All right, you guys. Get back in here,” Maxwell ordered. “Jesus, who did that?” He looked around the huddle. I looked accusingly at Crawford next to me. “Okay,” Maxwell began again. “Red right freeze protection. Wing out at six yards. You linemen on the strongside cut block to get their hands down.”

I took long strides heading for Ely’s outside shoulder forcing him back. On my fourth step I made a rounded cut with no fake and drove hard for the sideline. The ball was in the air when I looked back. I grabbed it and put it away quickly. I planted my right foot, dropped my shoulder, and turned upfield. Ely drilled me in the chest with his headgear and knocked me flat on my back at the twenty-five. The back of my head slammed into the ground, making my nose burn and my eyes water. The roof of my mouth hurt.

“All right. All right. Green right pitch twenty-nine wing T pull. On two.”

My heart jumped and my mouth went dry at the call. I would have to crack back on Whitman, the outside linebacker on the right-hand side. Crawford would try to get outside of my block with the help of the strongside tackle.

Whitman moved toward the sideline in a low crouch, stringing the play out and watching Andy and the leading tackle. At the last second he felt me coming back down the line at him. I dove headlong as he turned. He tried to jump the block and his knees caught me in the forehead and the side of the neck. We went down in a jumble of arms and legs, my shoulder went numb, and a hot burn shot up my neck and into the back of my head. The play gained eight yards.

“All right. All right. Here we go.” Maxwell looked up at me. I was shrugging my shoulders and rolling my neck, trying to ease the sting. “You okay?” he asked.

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

“All right. All right. Here we go. Red right freeze. Wing out and go. You guys cut block just like the out but tie ’em up an’ gimme some more time.”

Just before the snap Ely moved up close to the line and played me tight, bumping me as I sprinted off the line. He covered the out move I had beaten him on earlier. I took three hard strides to the sideline, looking back for the ball, then planted hard and turned upfield past him.

“Son of a bitch!” he yelled when he realized Maxwell’s pump was a fake and his interception had dissolved.

I caught the ball on the five and ran it into the end zone. Dallas 21–New York 20.

Our defense kept New York bottled up inside their own twenty and after a long punt by Bobby Joe Putnam we took over on our own thirty-five. There were less than two minutes to play.

An I formation tackle slant was good for three yards and we were huddling up for the second and seven situation when Billy Gill raced in from the sidelines. He slapped me on the shoulder and delivered a play to Seth.

B.A. waved me to his side when I reached the bench. He put his arm around me, keeping his eyes on the field as our huddle broke and the team lined up to run the play. It was a draw delay trap. The fullback made it to the line of scrimmage.

It was third and ten.

“Tell him to roll weakside and hit Delma on a sideline. Or run with it himself.”

I turned and raced to the already forming huddle.

I repeated the order, leaning into the huddle.

“Okay,” Maxwell nodded. “Green left. Roll right Y sideline at twelve. Okay, Delma?”

“You get it there, Bubba, and I’ll catch it.”

The Giants rolled up into a zone against Delma. He dodged the cornerman’s cut block and curled out to the sideline in front of the deep covering safety. Maxwell dropped the ball right in the hole to him. Delma dodged the fast-closing deep man and was cutting across the grain heading down the middle for the end zone. The middle linebacker made a desperate dive and hooked his arm. The ball popped free. Lewis, the Giant free safety, scooped up the crazily bouncing ball and returned it to our twenty. Gogolak kicked his third field goal of the day with fifteen seconds to play.

New York 23–Dallas 21

The locker room was almost deserted. The equipment man was finishing packing the soiled and bloody uniforms into the blue trunks and was making a last-minute check of the lockers. He found Jo Bob’s headgear. “Goddam Williams,” he grumbled. “He’d ferget his ass if he wasn’t always on it.”

An aged black stadium custodian swept the used tape and gauze, the disposable syringes and needles, and the discarded paper cups and drink cans into a pile in the center of the room.

The last sportswriter had just left after listening to B.A. “reluctantly” place the blame on several players, most notably Delma Huddle and Alan Claridge.

The last bus to the airport was outside the stadium, its exhaust blowing white in the cold New York twilight. The first bus was well on its way to Kennedy.

The trainer had just given me a muscle-relaxant shot, had rubbed down and rewrapped my legs, and had strapped my arm to my chest. The taping gave protective support to the shoulder that had collided with Whitman.

I heard the sound of running water in the shower room. I pulled my coat on over my shoulders and walked back to investigate. Seth Maxwell was sitting in a steel folding chair, his head on his chest and a steady stream of water pounding on the back of his neck. His ankles were still taped. Every now and then he rotated his right arm at the shoulder and flexed his fingers. I watched him silently for several minutes. Finally I broke in.

“Hey, man, the last bus goes in about twenty minutes.”

“Okay, okay,” he responded instantly. “Throw me some tape cutters.”

I borrowed cutters from the trainers and tossed them to Maxwell. He quickly sliced off the tape and slammed the water-soaked bandages against the shower floor.

“Cocksucker. Cocksucker,” he shouted, punctuating the epithets by whacking the tape on the wet tile. “Cocksucker!”

“Shit,” I said, smiling and trying to adjust my taped shoulder comfortably. “The way it went today, I’m surprised you hit the floor.”

I ducked aside and the tape cutters clanged on the wall behind my head.

“That’s more like it,” I said, wincing slightly. Dodging the cutters had made my shoulder throb. I pushed up on my tightly bound forearm. “Come on, get dressed and let’s find someplace to get high.”

The trainers were taking their showers when we left the locker room. In the tunnel, the equipment man was loading the trunks into the back of an air-freight van for transport to Kennedy, where an orange Braniff 727 with a galley full of dry chicken sandwiches and eighty warm beers sat waiting.

“I sure could use me a Cutty and water,” Maxwell rasped, his hands thrust deep in the pockets of his brown cashmere coat. His hair was slicked back and still slightly wet from his shower. Little beads of perspiration dotted his forehead.

“I mentioned it to Mary Jane on the way up. I’m sure she’ll have us something.”

The leather trench coat started slipping off my taped shoulder. I tried to pull it back on with my free hand but the twisting motion sent hot pains into my head. Maxwell noticed my struggle, grabbed the coat and reseated it on my shoulder.

As we reached the exit to the parking lot Maxwell went past and started up the ramp to the stadium seats. I followed, after making sure the bus was still waiting.

“We don’t have much time,” I called, as Maxwell disappeared into the stadium.

The covered seats were in such deep shadows that I had to stop for a moment to let my eyes adjust before I located Maxwell. He was sitting on the aisle four rows in front of me.

“You got a joint?” he asked.

There was a determination, a destructiveness, in his voice. He kept his eyes fixed on the field, almost totally lost in darkness. It looked cold and barren in the gray city dusk.

“Yeah, I think so. But we’ll have to hurry.” My caution drew a look of distaste.

“Sometimes I wonder about your manhood,” he said.

The insult puzzled me, but I avoided his eyes and dug in my pocket for a joint. As long as I played well I was seldom upset by a loss. I looked at winning or losing as someone else’s benefit, distantly removed from my daily struggles for existence. Maxwell took losses to heart, regardless of his personal performance.

I lit the joint and inhaled deeply; it made my shoulder hurt. I leaned over and passed to Maxwell, at the same time looking around the stadium for the police I knew were hiding behind every pillar. Maxwell pushed his cowboy hat down over his eyes, propped his feet on the seat in front, took a long, loud drag, and passed back to me. We smoked the whole joint in silence. Finally Maxwell stood up and flicked the glowing roach away.

“Well,” he said, starting back down the ramp to the waiting bus, “she whipped me again.”

Mary Jane had reserved the same seats for us and had filled the seat-back pouches with tiny bottles of Cutty Sark and Jack Daniels. It took over an hour to get clearance out of New York and during the wait we consumed eight bottles apiece. I took two more codeine pills and Maxwell took one. The combination of codeine, marijuana, booze, and the heavy drone of the jet engines put Maxwell to sleep and me into a trance.

A short but furious pillow fight erupted between some members of the defense and several men who hadn’t played in the course of the afternoon. As the tiny airline pillows sailed back and forth, it looked like a Michigan snow storm. A heavy-throated, official-sounding voice quoted some obscure FAA regulation over the intercom and brought the fight to a halt, although every now and then a white square would hum through the air and land with a thump.

Some players were up and moving around. Distinctive bulges and flashes of white under their clothing identified the wounded. My shoulder had become numb and I sat pleasantly stoned.

Alan Claridge, stitched up and sedated, arrived semiconscious by ambulance just before we taxied into line for takeoff. The doctor suggested placing him in the first-class section where he would have more room but his constant gagging and spitting blood disgusted Conrad Hunter’s wife. He was carried back to the tourist section, both his eyes swollen shut. There were seventeen stitches in his lip.

I recalled B.A.’s postgame locker room press conference. “Undoubtedly,” he had said, standing by the wooden taping tables, “the two fumbles by Claridge and Huddle were costly. Nevertheless, that’s no excuse for our all-around sloppy play.”

B.A. would probably place Claridge on injured waivers for the remainder of the season, making certain to state it had no bearing on his performance against New York. He was merely a damaged part being replaced. And he was right, that was what was so infuriating. He was always right, analytically, scientifically, technically, and psychocybernetically right. Football was technology and he was a master technician.

Andy Crawford sat across the aisle in his undershorts, ice packed on his right thigh to keep down the swelling of a bruise. He had been leg-whipped, just above the knee, in the first half. The Novocain had worn off John Wilson’s hip, making it so painful he couldn’t sit. He spent the entire flight in the aisle, watching Jo Bob and Tony Douglas play gin. Jo Bob set down his cards and, with great pain, made his way toward me and the bathroom beyond. As he passed he smiled weakly and congratulated my play. It was always surprising how sedate and friendly Jo Bob was after a game. I am sure it is the same principle that recommends masturbating circus lions to exhaustion before setting foot in their cages. The postgame Jo Bob was as calm and affable as the Dreyfus Lion after a couple of good whackoffs.