Knights of the Hill Country (15 page)

Our whole team tumbled over each other in a pile that was just about as rough as the one I was under when I recovered
that fumble, but it was a kind of rough that felt a whole lot better. Once we got up and shook hands with them poor old Sawyer boys, Blaine ripped his helmet off and led us over to the sidelines to salute the fans, and more than that—to just stand there and soak up all the love pouring down. You should've seen the smile on his face. It was about as big as the bottom end of a tractor wheel. He done it. He scored the winning touchdown. His old man couldn't come up with no lectures to ruin that.

He slammed me a hard one on the shoulder pad. “How about it, Hamp,” he yelled in my ear. “Do you see any of 'em?”

“Any of who?” I yelled back. For a second I thought he meant girls, like Sara Reynolds, maybe, but course that wasn't what he had in mind at all.

“College scouts!” he hollered. “College scouts and big-city sports writers.”

I scanned the crowd, but what I seen was even stranger than spotting college scouts or sports writers or even Sara Reynolds. It was my mom.

There she was, right on the front row, smiling and waving to get my attention, calling my name out.

“Well, what do you know,” Blaine said. “Your mom's up there.”

“Yep,” I said. “First time in two years.”

“Who's she with?”

I checked next to her, expecting to see Jim Houck from Lowery, but instead of him there was a big tall guy with gray hair combed back and curling down long behind his ears.

“I don't know,” I said, my voice mostly drowned out by the cheers. “I never seen that one before.”

Right about that time, the rest of the boys on our team and
a bunch of fans swarmed over and lifted me up on their shoulders, parading me around and chanting that old “Hampton, Hampton, Hampton” chant of theirs. I felt about like the king of Oklahoma up there. I figured I ought to grab ahold of Blaine and haul him up with me, but when I looked around, he was traipsing away from the parade off towards the locker room. He wasn't smiling no more.

That night after we showered and drove around town and relived that Sawyer game about as much as we could stand, I headed on back to the house, even though I'd have ruther done just about anything than walk in there and see my mom with her latest man. Funny thing, though, soon as I stepped up on the porch I got a different feeling than usual. Instead of one of them prehistoric old Fleetwood Mac songs leaking out the door, one of
my
favorite songs was playing, and then when I opened the door, the strangest thing yet happened. Before I even got a foot inside, my mom sung out with, “Welcome home, hero!” and went to hopping up and down like her shoes was on fire. I tell you what, it about knocked me right back off the porch into the bushes.

She was over there behind the coffee table next to that
same man I seen her at the game with, but they wasn't in the middle of slow dancing or nothing. And she wasn't waving around no whiskey glass or playing cards or Scrabble or any of the other hundred and fifteen ways she usually had of ignoring me when I come in from someplace. The coffee table was laid out with a big old platter of chicken wings and then there was some tortilla chips and bean dip and a whole big bottle of orange pop. All my favorites.

“What's going on?” I said, still standing in the doorway like maybe I shown up at the wrong place somehow.

“Well, don't look so surprised,” she said. “Can't a mother throw a little celebration for her boy when he plays the best game of football this town's ever seen? Now shut the door and come on over here and give your mom a hug.”

I went ahead and done like she said, but that hug felt a little on the stiff side, the way hugs do, I guess, when you don't get a lot of practice in on them. So far, I still hadn't quite figured out what was going on, but then Mom introduced the man next to her. His name was Tommy Don Coleridge. He'd played him a little football back in the day, and he was the one that thought I had such a good game out there tonight.

So that's it,
I thought.
Mom met her a big football fan, so now she's fixing to be one too.

Tommy Don gave me a big friendly smile and a firm handshake, but not one of them vise-grip handshakes like Jim Houck tried on me. There wasn't nothing for him to prove since he was a pretty big boy hisself, every bit as tall as me, and I'm six foot four. With that long gray hair swept back behind his ears and them happy crinkles around his eyes, he was a far cry from the old hotshot car salesman. I had him figured for a house painter, the way he was dressed—denim
work shirt, faded blue jeans, and old work boots all spattered up with different colors of paint.

“I'll tell you what,” Tommy Don said. “That game you played out there tonight was the best I've seen in high school football. And I've seen some pretty good games.”

Mom put her hand up on his shoulder. “Tommy Don used to play right here in Kennisaw, and now he's moved back to town for a while, and it was the funniest thing.” She let out one of her little girly giggles. “There I was working at the store and just happened to look up and here he came strolling in big as you please right up to the counter where I was working.”

Same old story. That dollar store might just as well have been a professional dating service, the way my mom worked it. Right then, I even felt a little bad for Tommy Don Coleridge. Six months tops before she'd dump him like she done all the others.

Thing was, though, you couldn't feel sorry for Tommy Don for long. He was just too confident and comfortable with his-self for that. Instead of Mom shooing me off to the back room like usual, we all set down to the coffee-table snacks, and he went to telling stories and cracking jokes that made you feel like you known him for ten years instead of ten minutes. Football talk wasn't the half of it neither. Once we got that out of the way, it was fishing and rock climbing, scuba diving and flying. Then Italy and museums, books, paintings, and concerts. He'd seen Fleetwood Mac three times live. I thought Mom was fixing to faint dead away into the bean dip when she heard that one.

But Tommy Don didn't do all the talking. No sir. He had a way of keeping everyone included in the conversation,
asking the kind of questions you wanted to answer instead of cringing over. No one was left out with Tommy Don around. By the time he finally said he'd better get moving along, that old room done felt like something it hadn't really been since the first day we moved in—a family room.

Later, when I was laying in bed, I just about couldn't stop grinning. This was one of the best days I could remember. First, I got out there and played the game of my life, and now maybe my mom had finally found her someone decent that she could get back to being her old self around. Someone she could stick with. And I figured if she could do it, I could find me a someone like that too. Matter of fact, if I hadn't done blown it, I might've found her already.

For a long time, football was about the only thing in my life that seemed like anything could come of it. Now the whole world was a great big garden fixing to bloom right up to my eyebrows. And that feeling lasted clean through all my dreams that night and through the morning before it finally come unraveled the next afternoon.

Saturday afternoons Blaine and me was allowed in the Rusty Nail Tavern out on Route Thirty-three so we could watch the college games in there with the grown men. There wasn't nothing fancy about the Nail and that's a fact. A couple of raggedy beer-stained pool tables, a dartboard, and posters of beer girls in bikinis up on the walls. Everything was pretty dingy except for the big-screen TV. They spent them some tall dollars on that bad boy.

You couldn't help but feel like you was riding high, setting in there with the men in their flannel shirts and fishing caps. Norman the bartender even let us split a pitcher of beer, but I didn't drink no more than a sip, so Blaine got the most of it. That day, after our win over Sawyer, the whole place was about as rowdy as a box full of wild dogs. Beer bottles
rattling, smoke swirling around under the ceiling fans, the TV cranked up high, and men's voices cranked up higher than that. Several of them old boys was waving copies of the morning sports page around, quoting off their favorite lines and making up some of their own. Boy howdy. A stranger walking in would've thought someone just won a world championship, a Cadillac, and a date with Miss America all at the same time.

The only one that wasn't about fit to sail over the roof was Blaine. Problem was, none of them sports pages from the big city papers or even the
Kennisaw Sun
gave him the kind of credit he figured he deserved. We'd got together that morning to pick us up some copies of the Oklahoma City and Tulsa papers and set down at Sweet's Café to read them out loud to each other over a couple big stacks of blueberry pancakes. Now, I ain't going to get to bragging over the stories them papers done on me, but let me just say they was pretty durn good. Blaine, though, wasn't none too happy over how they shortchanged him.

“Can you believe these fools?” he said, slamming the sports page down on the tabletop so hard the saltshaker just about jumped over the syrup. “They hardly even mentioned me, and this one here got my name spelled wrong.”

“What do you mean?” I said. “They wrote up the whole thing about you throwing that long bomb and diving over the goal line for the game winner. See, it's right here.”

“Yeah, but there oughta be more than that. Guy wins the damn game, you oughta have a whole article on him the way they got them extra ones on you.”

“Aw,” I said. “It ain't that big a deal. They just wrote me up a little bit more 'cause they'd done built up on who was better, me or James Thunderhorse.”

“Buncha yokels.” Blaine looked down at the paper, shaking his head at it like it was the pitifulest thing he ever seen. “I just hope there was some college scouts out there. Anyone who really understands football's gonna know who saved our undefeated season for us.”

So you can bet Blaine wasn't joining in when the Rusty Nail boys started flashing their newspapers around, and it didn't get no better when J. M. Pierce set down at our table and asked me whuther I heard from Coach Huff yet today.

I told him I was out all morning and hadn't heard from nobody, and he just looked at me and said, “Man alive, son, you mean to say you don't know OU and OSU both called him this morning wanting game film on you?”

Blaine perked up at that. “Who said?”

“
He
said. Coach Huff hisself. I talked to him not more'n an hour ago.”

“Well,” I said, “if they wanted game film, then I'm sure they didn't want it just on me.”

J. M. gaped at me like I was crazy. “Who else would they want it for?”

“The whole team probably.” I glanced over at Blaine, but he turned away.

“I tell you what, Hamp,” Carl Avery put in over my shoulder. “Don't pay no attention to them OSU boys. You go on up to OU. That's where you need to be. At the top of the top.”

“That's right,” J. M. said. “After that game last night you can write your own ticket to any program you want to go to.”

That got the others to flapping their lips, agreeing with Carl. And that was all right. It's good to have folks on your side like that, but then J. M. had to go and clap Blaine on the shoulder and say, “You know what, son? You better be good
to Hampton. Maybe he'll put in a word for you with some of them OU scouts when the time comes.”

Blaine flinched away from J. M.'s hand a little, like maybe it was infected with the chicken pox or something, but he didn't say anything back. He just locked his jaws and stared into the side of his beer mug.

“Hey now,” I said. “Blaine ain't got nothing to worry about.” It was weird. All the sudden my voice sounded like it belonged to somebody else. I wasn't used to talking up in a group of men that way. Blaine usually did most of the talking for both of us. “In case none of y'all noticed,” I went on, “Blaine's the one scored the winning points last night.”

“Yeah,” Carl said. “After you put him down there on the one-yard line.”

A couple of the others chimed in with how they hadn't never seen nothing like the way I handled James Thunder-horse down there at the goal line, and J. M. said, “Besides, it don't matter if we noticed who scored that touchdown. The real question is, did the
scouts
notice?”

That got a couple of laughs and a hoot out of Carl, so I set right up straight and said, “I'll tell y'all what, if it wasn't for Blaine, old James Thunderhorse would've probably tore me up worse than an alligator gar on a minnow. Blaine taught me everything about football I know. I wouldn't even be playing on this team if it wasn't for him.”

“Maybe they oughta train him to be a coach, then,” Carl said, “ 'cause he sure ain't fast enough for a running back.”

Some more laughs come on that one, and J. M. gave Blaine's shoulder a nudge. “Hey, maybe Oral Roberts University will call up, wanting game film on you.”

“Now, Jim,” Carl said. “You know Oral Roberts ain't got a football team.”

“I know, but they might want him for the glee club. Haw!”

The whole room went to guffawing over that, but still Blaine set there without a word, just white-knuckle squeezing on that beer mug so hard you would've thought it was fixing to bust right in his hand.

“Now wait a minute.” I tried to get as much force into my voice this time as I could. “Them colleges better keep in mind that me and Blaine's a team. Always have been since I moved here. And I ain't about to go off to no school that don't see that. 'Cause I tell you what, the two of us are un-stoppable. Anywhere, anytime. Ain't that right, Blaine?”

“Sure,” he said, still not looking up. “That's right.”

“Damn right, that's right,” I said.

“Just do me this one favor.” Blaine finally raised his head and looked me straight in the eye. “Tell your mom not to drag that fool she was with last night out to any more of our games. He don't belong there.”

That just about knocked me out of my chair. Maybe Blaine didn't warm up too good to the idea of me trying to take up for him, but that wasn't no call to turn around and snap out something about my mother.