North Dallas Forty (6 page)

“You have fantastic eyes.” It was all I could think to say.

“Tinted contact lenses.” She frowned and cocked a look up at me. “Your style is pretty lame.”

“I don’t get much practice.”

“Ah.” She held up one finger. “A man of status much sought after by the ladies, I assume.”

I nodded. “Who knows? Someday I may be a bubble-gum card.”

“You can read to me from it. But till then what have you got to recommend you?”

“Well,” I paused and thought a moment, “I graduated summa cum laude from a land-grant college and have never to my knowledge fathered any syphilitic children. I have all my own teeth, except for these front ones. They’re always the first to go. I have never beaten up a woman even though my first wife tried to murder me in my sleep—on two separate occasions. How about you?”

Charlotte smiled up at me.

“Well, I’m self-sufficient and only have two fillings in my whole head. In my early teens I considered silicone but now seldom think of it. I consider no sex act repulsive although there are several I would classify as sick. I’m from California and own a Mercedes Benz.”

“Mother!!” I cried, reaching for her. She knocked my hands away.

“I also find professional football players boring egomaniacs.”

I stepped back sheepishly. Then all hell broke loose in the front of the apartment.

“Goddam you. Jo Bob, you don’t own the world.” I recognized the hot-pink shirt and executive tan of Steve Peterson.

Jo Bob had appropriated Peterson’s current fiancée, Janet Gilroy, the reigning Miss Texas. Standing behind her, he was holding her breasts in his large, knobby hands and grinding his naked pelvis into her cute little bottom. The scene was rather erotic but this was not the kind of treatment Miss Texas or Peterson had expected. The shock had reduced Peterson to a confused rage and Janet Gilroy to tears. The girl’s frantic squirming to escape served only to increase Jo Bob’s delightfully carnal movements. I felt the sexual stirrings of constricting blood vessels.

Peterson grabbed one of Jo Bob’s offending hands and tried to yank it from the lovely breast. Jo Bob instantly stopped moving and looked, shocked, at the pink little fingers wrapped around his thick, hairy wrist. He furrowed his brow and raised his eyes to Peterson’s cherubic face, trying to decide who this man was and why he was interfering with the fun. Jo Bob’s eyes fixed on the stockbroker. He gave the girl’s breasts a farewell squeeze, turned them loose, and grabbed the front of Peterson’s hot-pink shirt. The executive tan vanished and the tiny man blanched with fear.

Tightening his grip on the front of Peterson, Jo Bob began slapping him on the top of his prematurely balding blond head. The slaps weren’t too hard, just enough to hurt and humiliate. Simultaneously jerking Peterson up and down by the front of his shirt and slapping him on top of his head, Jo Bob appeared to be dribbling him like a basketball. There was a ripple of nervous laughter. Some people were scared Jo Bob would replace Peterson with one of them.

“Can’t you stop him?” Charlotte said.

“Are you kidding?”

“Yeah. I guess I am.”

“Jo Bob’s not hurting him too bad, although Peterson’s pride’ll be sore for a while. I’m sure he thought he and Jo Bob were good friends, what with him supplying dollies and all.”

“Dollies?” Charlotte frowned. “What an awful word.”

“Not mine,” I said, pointing at the bouncing stockbroker. “His. Poor guy figured that supplying girls and slapping backs would keep him pretty tight with the ballplayers. Shit, we don’t even like each other. Why should we like him?”

“You don’t like each other?” She seemed surprised.

“I don’t think so.”

“That’s strange. Why not?”

“Scared, I guess. At least I am.”

Jo Bob finally turned the crestfallen man loose. He and the thoroughly molested Miss Texas fled out the door.

“What happens now?” Charlotte asked. It seemed like a fair question.

“Nothing, tomorrow he’ll go to his office, one of Dallas’s young financial wizards, like your friend Beaudreau. Exactly like him.” She gave me an indignant stare but said nothing. “He’ll buy and sell shares of America—help determine her economic destiny. He’ll come to the next party, claiming to have been so drunk tonight he barely remembers. He’ll be there sans Miss Texas, but will have another equally pretty fiancée and probably, if he’s smart, one for Jo Bob.”

Jo Bob reeled drunkenly around the room. “Motherfuckers! You’re all motherfuckers!” he screamed. His eyes lit for an agonizing moment on Charlotte. I stiffened, my mind racing to determine a sane, but quixotic position.

“Seth,” I veiled across the room, “find Jo Bob something to do with his hands.”

Maxwell, grateful to escape Beaudreau’s grasp, grabbed Jo Bob by the arm and they headed outside to the pool. Beaudreau, shaken from his communion with eminence, walked back toward the dining room, grinning fatly. Bob Beaudreau was flatulent and puslike. I would ask Charlotte Caulder sometime how she had hooked up with him. Right now I didn’t want to talk to him, so I excused myself.

“Don’t leave early,” I pleaded with Charlotte, and moved out toward the pool, nodding at Beaudreau as we passed.

“Good game, man.” Beaudreau slapped me on the shoulder; I didn’t break stride.

He called after me, “We need you and Gill out wide—instead of that fucking spook.”

He was referring to Delma Huddle and I should have turned around and jammed my fist down his throat. I didn’t.

I reached the pool and looked around for Maxwell. A hand closed tightly on the back of my neck. Pain shot into my head and shoulders and down both arms. I continued to stand upright, but was paralyzed.

“Hey motherfucker, when did you start givin’ orders?”

“Goddammit, Jo Bob, let go of my neck.” I tried for the right mixture of anger and mollification.

Jo Bob squeezed harder.

“Turn loose, Jo Bob,” I cried.

“Come on, Jo Bob.” It was Maxwell.

The grip eased into a rough massaging motion, and finally he turned me loose.

“Jesus Christ. That hurt.” I rubbed my neck and rolled my head. The pain had brought tears to my eyes. I closed them tightly.

“Jo Bob don’t seem to like you,” Maxwell said, as we watched the giant step into his undershorts and walk back inside.

“Who does?” I asked, distracted by the peculiar popping noises my neck was making.

“He thinks you’re a smart ass.”

“Who doesn’t?” I rubbed my neck thoughtfully and considered the outcome had Jo Bob refused to turn loose. In a fight with Jo Bob I would have stood a slightly better chance than Peterson and Miss Texas combined. I recalled my rookie year when Jo Bob and Meadows had held me down and taped my head. I had refused a hazing and they had covered my head with five rolls of one-inch tape. It took almost an hour and two cans of adhesive solvent to free me. I lost my sideburns, eyebrows, eyelashes, several great hanks of head hair, and almost all my pride.

“And,” Maxwell continued, listing my popular faults, “he thinks you smoke marijuana, and he’s pretty certain you’re queer.”

“And he thinks Crawford and Claridge are the Katzenjammer Kids, right?” Before I’d finished the sentence I was sorry I’d said it.

“What?” Maxwell had never considered their behavior peculiar.

“Nothing.”

“What about Crawford and Claridge?”

“Nothing, forget it.” That seemed to satisfy Maxwell, and we stood quietly watching the people moving around us. They were all drunk on something.

“That Beaudreau is a cocksucker.” Maxwell was angry. “He wanted me to come see him the first of the week. He has a letter stock to sell. Shit.”

“I’d like to grudge-fuck his girl,” I said. “That’d teach his ass.”

Maxwell suggested going to the other side of the pool “to inhale a little more of that killer weed. Maybe I’ll be able to relax.”

“I’ll have to go to the car. I’ll meet you at the cabanas.” I pointed across the pool.

I wondered what it was I liked about Maxwell. Admittedly, he was the most selfish man I had ever met. He looked at everything and everyone as pieces in his great game of chance. He had told me once, after an evening of copious doping and drinking, that he maintained our friendship “against the advice of a lotta people” only because he had not yet figured out what I wanted out of life. I didn’t seem to have any goals. At the time I didn’t know I was supposed to have any. I still don’t have them, but he doesn’t know that.

Our friendship was based on a mutual respect and envy of each other’s particular football skills and would end when either of us left the game. Competition needs an arena or it just degenerates into unbridled hatred.

“You think you’re something special, don’t you?” he had said without much conviction. “All them books an’ shit you read. Well, somebody had to write those books and you ain’t no different for readin’ ’em.” He had glared at me as though he was angry about something.

Since that time I’ve tried to maintain an outward show of direction during all my chaos. Confusion is not dangerous in itself but can be fatal if interpreted as a lack of destiny. Fortunately, I am suffering from a form of incompetence that is not easily recognizable. It adds to my inscrutability.

I have to admit, on Maxwell’s behalf, that I have never met a more inspiring and competent individual on a playing field. He is a flawless, confident quarterback who plays the game with his whole being, holding nothing back, ready to sacrifice life and limb, yours and his, to win. Opponents fear him; his teammates worship him. He shames his lineman to tears over missed blocks, and distracts linebackers with reprisals for late hits. Two years ago in the snow in Pittsburgh, he threw two touchdowns in the fourth period to win by a single point. That night he checked into the hospital with a fractured jaw. There wasn’t a pass he couldn’t throw, a team he couldn’t beat, a pain he couldn’t endure, or a woman he couldn’t fuck, given the right time and combination of pieces. That was how he lived. Time took care of itself; he collected the pieces.

I was one of the pieces.

I knew friendlier players, but most had families and lived in three-bedroom ranch houses in Richardson. Incredibly dull, they spent every spare minute studying the stock market or the real estate business. They ignored their wives and filled them with kids to keep them busy; they paid three hundred dollars a month for brick veneer, central heat, and air, and bought a nine-passenger station wagon to cart the whole mess to Highland Shopping Center.

“You only play ball a short time,” they would tell me. “You gotta cash in while your name means something.” I always wondered about that something.

When they were through playing and became full-time stockbrokers or insurance agents, they suddenly realized they had always been brokers or agents. Intent on getting ready to live, they never noticed where they were. So tenaciously middle class, they had torpidly worked their way through their days of majesty on toward the American Dream.

No, whatever Maxwell was, he was certainly the most unique, and in a world striving for similitude, there has to be value in that. So while he was busy manipulating me, I was busy manipulating him. It was a good match.

I retrieved a couple of joints from the glove box and returned to the pool.

As I approached the cabanas I could see the red glow of Maxwell’s cigarette. It was a good safe place to turn on. The fear of getting busted was always present, though the blanket amnesty for contemporary folk heroes provided a certain protection for most crimes, as long as we were slightly discreet and never forgot who had the pocketbook. The real dangers were nondoping teammates, who might easily turn me in “for my own good” or “for the good of the team,” and for corrupting Maxwell. So we tried with as much solicitude as is possible to keep our doping a relative secret. It had become our private ritual. I enjoyed it and so did he.

“Look at those people,” Maxwell said, pointing toward the party.

“What about them?”

“They’re all crazy.”

“So what? You is too.”

“Yeah, but I know it.”

“I might argue that point with you.”

“They all think,” Maxwell said, gesturing at the crowd dancing madly inside and outside the apartment, “that all this is normal.”

“You mean it ain’t?” I tried to sound shocked.

“Life is just one big ball game,” he said, ignoring me. “Superstars knowing exactly what we’re doin’ and where we’re goin’.”

“Well,” I said confidently. “I dunno about you, but this superstar here is right on course. Life is just one big driver’s test to this kid.”

Maxwell frowned with disgust. “I dunno.” He sighed, looking across the glittering water of the pool. “Sometimes I think I know exactly what I want and head for it. But I don’t know by the time I reach it. After I’ve worked my ass off, I don’t seem to care much about it. It’s like it’s all changed or moved ... or I don’t know maybe ...” He was groping for the thought.

“The problem, man,” I suggested, with the tone of having made a major intellectual breakthrough, “is that life is dodging you.”

Maxwell gave me a full-face look of disgust. We were silent. Some faceless girl flew out the door of the apartment and landed, fully clothed, in the pool. Jo Bob followed her through the door and stood at the edge of the pool. He was laughing and wearing only his undershorts.

“That’s why they love football, man,” I said, nodding toward Andy’s apartment. “Easy to understand. Win or lose. Simple. Direct. Not nearly so confusing as their lives. Have you noticed that nothing is quite so aggravating to a football fan as a tie?”

Jo Bob helped the girl from the pool, picked her up, held her over his head and dropped her into the pool again. A small crowd had gathered, watching approvingly. Jo Bob called the swimming pool a motherfucker.

“Why do people think we’re so clever?” I asked Maxwell, who was staring unseeing into the deep end of the pool. “We make our living getting hit in the head.”

The girl hit the water for the third time. The crowd laughed politely and began to wander back inside. I scanned the sky for the cause of a peculiar yellow flash I was sure I had just seen.