The Franchise (35 page)

In the long run that might have been a better alternative for everybody.

W
ENDY RECOGNIZED
T
AYLOR
as soon as he stepped out into the pool area wearing the purple and white rain jacket.

“Randall Ryan Carleton, get down from there,” she said, keeping one eye on Taylor as he approached and the other on her son, who was climbing everything he could reach. “Randall, get down from that table.”

The boy jumped to the ground and skidded on his hands and chest. He bounced up seemingly none the worse for wear, his front covered with sand blown onto the patio from the beach. Randall Ryan Carleton climbed the back of a wooden chaise longue and rode it like a horse. Taylor shuffled around the pool, keeping his chin buried in his rain jacket. The boy faced away from Taylor, riding the chaise longue out to sea. Wendy looked directly at him.

“Hello, Wendy.” Taylor stuck out his hand. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen you.”

“Hello, Taylor.” Wendy took his hand unenthusiastically. “Well, I have been kind of busy with Randall and all....” She looked at the ground and gestured at the boy, who kept his back to them and began spurring the chaise longue with his tiny cowboy boots.

“Where are your folks?”

“Mother’s having her hair done. Lem and Cyrus went over to the owners meeting.” Wendy sat back in the canvas director’s chair.

“I thought I recognized you from up there. Your boy waved at me so I came down.”

Wendy shrugged. “I guess he can choose his own friends.”

“This is the first time I’ve ever seen him,” Taylor said. “You both looked so familiar from up there.” Taylor pointed up toward his window. “It was weird, it was like I had seen him before. He must be the spitting image of you.”

“No, he’s not,” Wendy said, her voice tired. “Randall, this is Mr. Rusk.”

The tiny cowboy continued to spur away from them in hot pursuit of the bank robbers.

“Randall, huh?” Taylor looked at the small boy’s back. “Come here, Randall, and let’s have a look at you and see if you are as pretty as your mother.”

“Or as ugly as your father,” Wendy added.

He reached out and lifted the small boy off the chaise, turned him around and looked him full in the face.

Taylor Rusk almost dropped the boy in shock.

The boy did not recognize Taylor, but Taylor certainly recognized him.

Taylor held the boy for a long time, gazing into his face, waiting for a sense of recognition from the big brown eyes. There was none, and after allowing Taylor to stare at him, Randall wriggled free and ran over to his mother. He stood behind her chair and they both stared up at Taylor. Taylor stared back.

The boy lost interest and remounted the chaise longue horse, continuing the desperate ride.

“Jesus,” Taylor said finally, “this only happens in the movies.”

“And in nightmares.” Wendy brushed blowing sand off her cheek. “Welcome to the nightmare.”

“Welcome to real life. Why didn’t you ...” Taylor began, but cut his words off.

Taylor put his hand on Wendy’s hand and sat beside her. She sat erect in the lounge chair, gripping Taylor’s hand and watching their son play cowboy on a wood-back chair against the gray, hateful sky in another world. Tears streamed down Wendy’s face and she began to shake.

“Well,” she said finally in a cracking voice, “we sure did fool my father into thinking he won.”

Randall Ryan whipped his chaise longue unmercifully in pursuit of bad guys while his mother cried softly and his father stared in shock.

The wind picked up and the clouds turned darker; the relentless ocean slashed and exploded against the breakwater.

Then the hard rain began to fall.

I
N THE PLAYOFF
Bowl against Miami, with less than forty seconds remaining on the scoreboard clock, Taylor Rusk hit Bobby Hendrix on a forty-five-yard zig-out for the winning touchdown. On the same play Simon D’Hanis lunged out to block a stunting end and caught his cleats in the turf. His right leg twisted but the foot didn’t move. His ankle taped, the stress was transferred up and his knee was torn apart.

The team ran down to line up for the extra point. At midfield Simon lay screaming. Simon D’Hanis was flown back to Texas right after the game for surgery at the University hospital.

Bobby Hendrix flew immediately to Houston and rejoined his family at his father-in-law’s house in River Oaks. The VCO deal was in the works and Monday morning he took his physical for the corporate insurance. That afternoon Bobby Hendrix and Gus Savas Finished negotiations with Harrison H. Harrison for a joint drilling operation with Venture Capital Offshore. It called for three to five oil/gas wells in the Gulf plus $250,000 in dry-hole money.

Dick Conly and Suzy Ballard flew to Albuquerque and drove to the Pecos Mountains.

A.D. Koster took a cab from the Orange Bowl to the local yacht club and paid a kid two dollars to row him out to the sixty-five-foot yacht
Momma
. He carried an alligator attache case filled with one-hundred-dollar bills and stayed two hours.

Cyrus Chandler took his wife, Junie, his daughter, Wendy, his grandson, Randall, and Wendy’s husband, Lem Carleton III, to celebrate in New York. They spent a week shopping, seeing plays and dining in a different restaurant every night. Their limousine met them at the airport and took them to the apartment they kept on upper Fifth Avenue off Central Park. The long, sleek Lincoln ferried them to all their engagements and brought them back with an elegance and ease that made New York City quite nice.

They went to art exhibitions and museums. Lem and the women also shopped relentlessly.

Cyrus found it distasteful that Lem enjoyed shopping as much as the women. He preferred staying at the apartment with his grandson, Randall. He played with the boy while the nanny watched.

The last day in town, Cyrus stayed behind with Randall as the others piled into the limousine for a last desperate grasp at the wonderful bazaar that is New York City.

Cyrus left the boy with the nanny and took a short walk down Fifth Avenue to Venture Capital Energy Plaza. Cyrus rode the elevator fifty-seven floors to the executive suite of Venture Capital Offshore. He had a pleasant chat with his longtime friend, college classmate and fellow member of Spur ’39, Harrison H. Harrison. Mr. Harrison was president and CEO of Venture Capital Offshore, a wholly owned subsidiary of Venture Capital America. Mr. Harrison’s father controlled the parent company. Cyrus and Harrison talked briefly about Bobby Hendrix and Gus Savas. It didn’t take much. “Still the same old cockroach,” Harrison said.

Cyrus was back in the apartment, playing with Randall, by the time the shoppers returned.

Lem and the women insisted on modeling and displaying all their purchases. Cyrus held his grandson on his knee and wondered at the jerk that was his son-in-law, who was doing a slow turn in his new full-length mink coat to the squeaks and applause of the women. They flew back to Texas the next day.

Taylor Rusk went back to his apartment and stared at the wail, waiting for Wendy to return from New York City. It was generally agreed in the sporting press that he had made Texas a Super Bowl contender.

Virtually overnight.

Texas Pistols season tickets sold out the first day they went on sale. People camped out in front of the ticket offices for days to be the first in line. The Franchise finally had its fans. Things were changing fast. Too fast.

I
T WOULD BE UNFAIR
to characterize Lamar Jean Lukas as your average fan. Unfair to the average fan and unfair to Lamar Jean. Lamar Jean Lukas had followed the Texas Pistols from the day Cyrus Chandler announced he was bringing the Franchise to town and was signing Red Kilroy and Taylor Rusk from the University. Lamar Jean struggled with the Texas team through that first difficult 4–10 season when Kimball Adams was the quarterback. It was a hard season on Lamar Jean, but the second season at 9–7 was a little better. He was joyous when they won, despondent when they lost. Lamar spent a lot of those first two seasons feeling pretty low. It was tough to go to the gas station on Mondays after a loss. But when the Pistols won, he was a ball of fire. That made the final half of that second season pure joy. Working at greasing a car or changing a tire, he would also be describing and redescribing the game highlights. A great catch by Bobby Hendrix, an awful sack on Taylor Rusk or Kimball Adams and the subsequent retaliation by Ox Wood. A good lead block on a sweep by Simon D’Hanis. And all the time Lamar would say, “When Taylor Rusk is ready, he will take the Pistols to the Super Bowl. Taylor Rusk
is
the Franchise. We’re friends, you know.”

The year Red Kilroy traded away the top three draft choices for the next five years for old veteran players, Lamar argued long and hard in favor of Red. It had not been a popular move with the press and the armchair quarterbacks. But what did those guys know? Lamar Jean Lukas really paid attention. He kept track. He knew.

“These guys got experience. They are proven men,” Lamar said, “not some glamour college kid who ain’t had his back broke yet. You’ll see. Me and Red know what we’re doing. We are getting Taylor some protection, and when we get enough, we are going to the Super Bowl.”

And Lamar was right.

The television was on in the boss’s office at the Exxon station, and the noon news was showing film of the lines of season ticket buyers in front of the Texas Pistols office.

“Hey, Lamar,” the boss asked, “how come you ain’t down, waiting in line?”

“Because,” Lamar grunted, struggling with a double-rim truck tire, “I already got my season ticket. I went down and bought one the first day they come to town.” He grunted, sweated and struggled with tire and rims. “Now I get preferential treatment.” With a mighty heave he broke the tire free and pried it from the metal.

“There.” He puffed a little. “They already sent me my season tickets in the mail, ’cause I was one of the first fans. I been with ’em since the beginning and I’m gonna be with ’em at the Super Bowl. I told you Red and I were right about trading off them draft choices and getting us some experience.”

“Did Red call you before he made the trades?” the boss teased.

“You know what I mean,” Lamar shot back. He wiped the sweat off his forehead with his shirt sleeve. “You were all pissin’ and moanin’ about how Red done screwed up the whole thing and I told you he was right back then. And I’m the kind of guy who tells you I tol’ ya so. And I tol’ ya so.”

“Okay, Lamar,” the boss said, “so you told us. Big deal.”

“It
is
a big deal,” Lamar said. “You’re sittin’ there watching television pictures of people waiting to buy tickets. That is a big deal.”

It became a bigger deal when Lamar Jean didn’t get his ticket to the Super Bowl.

Lamar Jean Lukas had only two real passions. The Texas Pistols and target shooting. He was on the base shooting team in the Marines before he got sent to Vietnam for slugging a captain.

Lamar was an old fan. The old fans were working people, lower-class blacks and whites. The new fans were more middle class and went more for the spectacle, the chance to identify with some approved mass movement. They knew less about the game and many went drunk. Lamar Jean Lukas didn’t like the new fans. He called them Nazi fans.

“Where were all those Nazi assholes when Kimball Adams was calling signals? The stadium was almost empty that first year.” Lamar was telling all this to his boss while he tightened the spark plugs on a white Chevrolet. He tightened the final plug and came out from under the hood. “There.” He slapped the fender. “American cars since 1968 have become real junk. Detroit would be Fat City if they were still making 1958-through-1968 cars.”

“I been working on ’em forty years,” the boss said. “I watched ’em change. If they made ’em good, where would you and I be?” He was sitting in his office, still watching the television. “I fixed enough of ’em that I made enough money to hire you and buy me this TV set.” He paused and then growled, “Now goddam Exxon is fucking me on my gas allotment, raising the cost on my lease. They’re trying to get my TV set.”

“They want you to have your TV set, boss.” Lamar grinned. “Don’t you know that yet? They want to keep tuned in on your brain waves so they can control you.”

“Boy,” the boss said, “you are crazy.”

The boss sneered as a Datsun pulled up to the gas pump. The driver waited patiently, then honked his horn. Both men ignored the Japanese car.

“I’m going target shooting.” Lamar went back to wash his hands.

The boss turned and glared at the driver of the Jap car, who finally got the message and drove off.

General Motors, the IMF, the networks and Exxon be damned; the boss would go broke before he would work on a Jap car.

W
HEN
S
IMON
D’H
ANIS
came to in the recovery room, Buffy was standing over his bed. She smiled at him and brushed his hair back from his thick brow ridge.

“How do you feel, honey?” She smiled her chubby smile. She hadn’t lost the weight from their first child, Dianna, before she’d gotten pregnant with the second, another girl they named Donna Mae. Donna Mae was born in August of the second season. During the third season their sex life was almost nonexistent, but now, somehow, she was nearly five months pregnant with the third child. But she hadn’t told Simon yet and he hadn’t noticed. She decided to wait until after he was out of the hospital. She wondered if she would ever lose the weight, and if she did, whether Simon would treat her better. Something had changed him, made him hard, cold.

Buffy had watched him while he slept, his right leg swathed in thick wraps and elevated by a series of slings and sandbags. His face was unlined and peaceful. He looked like the Simon she remembered from college, the man who watched television movies and memorized old actors’ names. She remembered when they married in Oklahoma; the biggest problem was dragging him away from the old Harry Carey movie on television. Now, as he regained consciousness, the lines began to reappear on his face. Some invisible force was drawing a mask of fear and anger on the face of a child.