The Franchise (6 page)

Taylor stopped at the telephone and dialed history professor Bertrand Webster. Into his fifth martini, Doc Webster slurred his hello.

“Doc? This is Taylor Rusk.” He spoke loudly and slowly, knowing that at this time of night the professor was half, maybe totally, in the bag. “I can’t make class tomorrow.”

“Well, Taylor”—the professor spoke like he was trying to walk the line for a traffic cop—“I have a test scheduled for tomorrow.” He made
scheduled
sound like it had ten syllables. “Is it important, Taylor? Not some goddam football thing?”

“No, Doc, this has to do with women and sex and probably getting falling-down drunk and crossing a few state lines or international borders, where adventures follow one another like little duckies about to perform immoral acts on sorority girls.”

“Well, then,” Doc said thickly, “you may go, but take notes.”

“Good night, Doc.” Taylor looked at the phone. Simon was hovering next to him. “Doc’s about the only professor I ever had who was worth a shit. Him and that economics professor that Lem junior and the regents tossed out for smoking dope and screwing coeds in his office.”

“Let’s go.” Simon took Taylor’s arm and pulled him out the door, down the stairs and into Simon’s purple and white four-door 1957 Pontiac hardtop.

“It was boys.” Simon started the car.

“What?”

“The economics professor was screwing boy students.” Simon put the car in gear.

“Boys?” Taylor slouched in the seat. Simon nodded. “Well, I told you he was likeable.”

In the apartment the phone began to ring. It rang twenty times, then was silent for ten minutes, then rang twenty times more. A.D. Koster sat in the back bedroom, smoked cigarettes and pretended not to hear. He assumed it was the Cobianco brothers about the rent money he had lost to them betting on baseball games. A.D. was wrong.

The calls were for Taylor Rusk about the onion.

“Y
OU SURE THIS
is what you want to do?” Taylor Rusk asked.

“Yeah, I’m sure. Look for the turnoff and shut up.” Simon D’Hanis was hunched over the steering wheel, squinting into the oncoming headlights. He was hunting for the back alley to the Pi Phi House. The girls would be waiting outside by the dumpster. “I’ve been on my own since ninth grade, living in the Park City coach’s basement or with you and A.D., two weirdo tramp athletes, high school transfers.” Simon spit
transfers
out like a dirty word. “I want more. I’m making my stand. I’m gonna have my
own
family.” Simon looked at Taylor Rusk. “Could you throw out the woman that was carrying your kid? You couldn’t do it.”

“Well, fortunately for me, which does not necessarily mean unfortunately for you, I don’t have to make that decision.” Taylor looked for the alley. “I am just along to add my moral weight to this great event. I’ll live and die a tramp athlete. I like it. It’s how I relate to the world.” Taylor caught sight of the break in the curb line. “Okay, fatso, there’s the alley.”

Simon turned and cut off the lights. His heart hammered and his mouth was dry as he drove in the shadows behind the Pi Phi house.

Taylor saw two figures pick their way toward Simon’s car through the parking lot filled with Cadillac convertibles, Porsches, Jags, the less exotic Triumphs and MGs. A couple of Fords and Chevys. All the Pi Phis had money or at least acted like they did. Buffy was the only Pi Phi Taylor knew.

Just keeping up with Red Kilroy and chasing paper before his NCAA eligibility and the money ran out was all Taylor Rusk was able to maintain. He
needed
that degree. Someday he would
have
to get a
job.
Fit in. Get along. Go along. He wasn’t sure he could do it. He was an athlete. Always. It was going to be difficult, and adding anyone to his life greatly increased the chances of the catastrophic. Especially adding a Pi Phi, they believed absolutely in divine wealth. They deserved it all, expected it to be provided. He never could figure out how Simon did it and still watched all those movies on TV. But then, Simon never did worry much about the catastrophic.

At the Pi Phi house Louise Francine Buffy Martin was crying again. She and Wendy Cy Chandler got in the rear door on the driver’s side. Taylor had gotten out on the passenger side, thinking Buffy would want to sit with Simon. She didn’t. She wanted to sit in back and cry. Wendy tried to comfort her. Simon headed the Pontiac north into the night.

The interstate was almost finished, but suburbs didn’t yet sprawl all the way from the Rio Grande to the Red River, and they got out in the country pretty quickly. After about an hour Taylor looked into the backseat and thought Wendy Chandler glared at him, although he couldn’t be sure in the bewitching light. He stole more glances with only moonlight to help him. All he saw were two shadow shapes.

Buffy sobbed all the way to the Red River.

Taylor slouched in the seat and tried to sleep. It gave him a stiff neck that nagged him for the next forty-eight hours. His nose still hurt when he frowned, and he was frowning plenty.

Wendy Cy Chandler calmed Buffy and talked up the positive side of elopement: “It cuts through all the bullshit.” Taylor wondered what bullshit and how Wendy knew.

At daybreak in Hugo, Oklahoma, they found a justice of the peace at a cafe. He waived the blood test and married them right there at the table. He also served them breakfast. All for fifteen dollars.

Buffy stopped sobbing when the food arrived.

The honeymoon seemed to start when Simon and Buffy began making out in the cafe over coffee. Wendy Chandler relaxed and Taylor saw her for the first time.

It was as if she had been able to keep him from
really
seeing her until she was ready. That was what he had seen inside the moonlit car—the warning not to see.

The justice of the peace went to get more biscuits; the friendly middle-aged man with six kids also ran the self-serve gas station next door. The door to the kitchen banged shut. Wendy Cy Chandler took one long last look at Buffy and Simon, then turned to Taylor.

“They are each other’s problem now.” She managed a weak smile.

“I guess that’s what it’s all about.” Taylor slouched as he always did and kept his head low. Furniture was not designed for people six feet five inches tall. He leaned with his elbows on the table and peered over the lip of his coffee cup at Wendy. She was smaller than he had thought. Her presence had seemed much larger in that dark car under that huge moon and sky. In a lighted empty cafe, sharply defined against the blue-and-white-checked wallpaper and tablecloths, chairs and tables, salt and pepper shakers and of course Buffy and Simon, Wendy seemed small and pale. Her dishwater hair was pinned up in a hurried twist, wisps floated weightlessly out from her face. Her skin was transparent. She almost wasn’t there. At five-foot-three and one hundred pounds there was a certain amount of will involved in being seen. Wendy Chandler was of strong will, like her grandfather, Amos, and she had willed herself to be delicate and beautiful.

She was.

Her eyes were the palest blue as she fixed them on Taylor. She looked like a porcelain figure in faded jeans, a red and yellow plaid flannel shirt and squaw boots. She sat cross-legged in the chair; her spidery fingers rested on her knees—a finespun, perfect miniature.

Taylor kept his head below her eyeline and smiled at her.

“Look what I found.” The JP came out of the kitchen, clutching a large industrial mayonnaise jar full of a light-purple fluid. “Mustang grape wine—made it myself. We’ll toast the bride and groom. Ought to be plenty good.” He had a fistful of water glasses. One for everyone but himself. “I just make it for the hell of it. I haven’t had a drink since the big war,” he explained. “I almost killed an MP in Oakland.” He placed the glasses and poured. “I was a twenty-one-year-old Marine back from eighteen months in the South Pacific. I promised the good Lord if he’d let the MP live I’d never touch another drop. Now I don’t drink and I drive a Jap car. Kinda makes you wonder.... Maybe I should have kept drinking and let the MP die. What do you think?”

“I don’t think,” Taylor said. “I react.”

“Me too,” the justice of the peace said. “It’s how I damn near killed the MP.”

“Well,” Wendy announced, “if I’m having a drink before eight in the morning, I’m sure as hell going to take out my contacts first. Last time I passed out and welded them right to my eyes.”

She leaned forward, her slender fingers working quickly, deftly. She popped out the contacts and tossed them onto her tongue, kept them in her mouth while searching her purse for her lens case and glasses. She found her gold-rimmed glasses, put them on and looked at Taylor again. Her eyes were an even paler blue. It took Taylor a long time to realize the contacts were tinted.

They all had two big glassfuls of mustang grape wine, toasting the bride and groom. The JP made them eat more biscuits and drink coffee before he would let them leave.

They all felt great. It was spring and they were young. Taylor paid the bill as the others walked out into the day.

“Have a nice day.” The JP’s shirt hiked up, exposing a pistol butt.

Taylor nodded, pushed the screen door open and stepped outside.

Just across the Texas line they stopped at the Armadillo Ranch and Gift Shop. Simon and Buffy walked in back by a scroungy lonely buffalo in a wire pen. Taylor went into the gift shop and bought Wendy a Picasso print silk scarf. “A gift for the maid of honor,” he said.

They walked out to the caliche parking lot. Wendy leaned against the post supporting the red and white sign offering free looks at the forlorn buffalo. She held the scarf up and the North Texas warm spring wind rippled bright Picasso colors. It reminded Taylor of watching the heat rise at a morning workout.

Taylor struggled to think of things to say, but Wendy, her face turned to the late morning sun, beat him to it. “My father intends to buy you. Did you know that?”

“Who’s your father?” Taylor feigned ignorance. He didn’t know why.

“Cyrus Chandler. He’s going to get the new football franchise and he intends to buy you first. He says you won the Heisman Trophy, whatever that is, and you are good local box office.” She looked flatly at Taylor, watching him intently through the round gold-rimmed glasses. The print scarf flapped in the wind.

“And?” Taylor turned into the sun and closed his eyes. He let the sun soak his face.

“And,” Wendy said, “how do you feel about it?”

“Don’t know yet. I haven’t heard his price. Besides, he doesn’t have that franchise yet. The League isn’t anxious to share.”

“They will be after Dick Conly finishes with them.” Wendy smiled. “Well, how do you feel about being owned?”

“Just like any old dog, I guess. It ain’t the being owned; it’s the owner that matters.”

“Does Daddy pay well?”

“For me he should,” Taylor said, “if the Franchise takes me in the first round. They all want to sign their number-one pick or they look stupid. After the third round it’s like being taken prisoner. I’ve got a guy negotiating for me. I’ve never been injured. I’ll do all right and your daddy’ll do terrific. Quarterbacks have been known to play ten or fifteen years, depending on the line and the system. Owners can play forever; it’s their ball. Which I guess means it will eventually be yours. Do you want it?”

Wendy smiled. “Do you stay in the bargain?”

“Only if we use my balls,” Taylor replied, “and I get to keep them both.”

“What if Daddy and Dick Conly get them first?”

“Lots of folks have tried.” Taylor tried to look back into Wendy’s pale blue eyes, but the sun’s afterimage blurred the vision. “They may well have succeeded. It gets to where you can’t keep track of the rules. Fortunately for me, the University doesn’t follow the rules, and six hundred dollars shows up in my mailbox on the first of each month with no return address. Does that mean they’ve got me?”

“They
pay you
to play for the University?” Wendy was surprised. “You don’t think that’s immoral, an insult to your integrity?”

“Immoral? No. I have discovered that what most people consider to be their moral code turns out to merely be their budget. I’d be insulted only if the cash fails to arrive: Only a fool would put up with all the shit for nothing. Amateur sports ends as soon as you pay the coach, and his morals are limited strictly by
his budget.
I know a basketball player who finds money in his street shoes after every game.”

“But ...”

“Look, for four years the University used me like a rent-a-car. Criminal Conspiracy 101 should be a phys-ed class. I’ve been a professional since high school, and I want to end up with more than mythical titles and a few thousand from the University slush fund. If you want to protect your daddy’s investment, I guess you better go ahead and search me.” Taylor held his arms out. “Make sure Red Kilroy or the Park City coach didn’t get something you want.”

“No, thanks.” Wendy’s expression changed to disapproval.

“No, really, frisk me for scars, soft spots, unexplained lumps, sores, swelling, missing parts. Stigmata. Report to Cyrus that I am a fine specimen who demands only a continuing illusion that sports is a rite of passage and big bucks to convince me I’m getting close to the top.” Taylor looked over at Wendy and enjoyed her puzzlement. “I want to be an athlete, which is not always compatible with being a football player.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means your daddy can learn to like me as a tax exemption.”

“
My
daddy’s favorite exemption happens to be me.”

Taylor still faced the sun.

“You have a boyfriend?”

“I’m engaged.”

“In what? I didn’t see any ring.”

“We’re going to Neiman’s to get it next week.” Wendy’s tone changed. She was irritated. “We were going to get the ring tomorrow, but Lem is going to be at the Tower tonight. He’s been tapped by Spur.”

“Spur?” Taylor picked up a limestone pebble and bounced it off the billboard.

“You don’t know Spur?” Wendy couldn’t believe Taylor Rusk was that simple. “You’ve never heard of it?”