The Franchise (70 page)

“He hung up.” He put the phone back in its heavy cradle. “I hate people like that.”

“Apparently.” Taylor popped a large brown-spotted B complex tablet in his mouth along with a green mineral tablet. He washed them down with water. “This city is one of the last in Texas that still uses underground aquifer water—water that is actually
good
for you. Every other big town in Texas has already ruined their underground drinking water. You ever taste Dallas or Houston water, Lamar?”

“Never been there.” Lamar’s eyes kept moving around the apartment and he paced. “Never been anywhere but here, Quantico, Camp Pendleton and the Highlands.” Lamar stopped pacing and stared at the wall. He didn’t seem angry, just agitated.

“The water in Houston and Dallas tastes exactly like insecticide. The bugs won’t drink it.”

“Goddam the Houston and Dallas bugs!” Lamar resumed his pacing, stopping occasionally to gaze out the window. His agitation was too obvious to ignore.

“What’s bothering you, Lamar?”

“I went down to find out about my Super Bowl tickets and the woman told me that the Pistols didn’t control the tickets.” Lamar stared out the window. “The commissioner’s office handles Super Bowl ticket disbursement secretly.”

“So they fucked you again on tickets?” Taylor shook his head. “I would think you’d wise up to these people, Lamar. Why would they sell you a ticket for forty dollars when they can get a thousand scalping the same ticket?”

“ ’Cause I’m a
fan
,” Lamar said. “I was one of the first. They promised me tickets to the Super Bowl when I bought that five-thousand-dollar Pistol Dome bond. They said they had too many fans and too few tickets,” Lamar said. “The same bullshit they gave me when they broke their promise about guaranteeing season tickets to people who bought season tickets when you guys just started and were shitty.”

“We just hadn’t gelled yet.” Taylor was anticipating Lamar’s story, knowing what Lamar had done when the Franchise forced him to buy the five-thousand-dollar bond before he could buy a season ticket. “Tell me, what did you do?”

“Nothing. I was so shocked, it was like somebody had slapped me with a dead skunk.”

“Come on. Lamar,” Taylor urged. “Last time you robbed one of Cyrus’s banks for the five grand to buy a Pistol Dome bond. I don’t believe you just stood there.”

Lamar frowned. “Well, I did throw a big marble stand-up ashtray through the glass doors. But that’s all. I was just too shocked, you know what I mean?” Lamar seemed about to cry. “I just can’t believe they fucked me again.”

“Don’t feel like the Lone Ranger, Lamar. Nobody that I know got any tickets. At least not yet. There are a whole lot of tickets missing. You answer my phone for the next few days, you’ll be surprised the people who can’t get tickets.”

That information didn’t seem to ease Lamar’s discomfort. His eyes darted glances at Taylor, then off to the wall or floor.

Taylor watched Lamar Jean and waited. He knew there was more bothering Lamar. Lamar finally burst forth with the news. “I got fired from my job at Security Services. The Major said I was insubordinate and overqualified.”

“May the Major soon be eaten by his attack dog.”

“He won’t give me a recommendation for another job.” Lamar stared at the floor.

“I’ll give you a job.” Taylor walked out of the kitchen. “You can live here in the downstairs bedroom.”

“What’s the job?” Lamar asked.

“All you gotta do is stay here and pretend you’re me. I’m getting the hell out. You answer the phone and keep people from finding me until after the Super Bowl. Tell ’em there aren’t any tickets. If Tiny calls back, use your discretion.” Taylor walked toward the stairs. “I’m going up to pack a few things. I don’t want to talk to anybody but Wendy or Randall. When I finish, I’m moving. I’ll call you from time to time.”

“We can do it,” Lamar said.

And they did.

It worked out fine.

Though there were some rough spots.

R.D. L
OCKE STEPPED
out of the bright Texas sun into the dark of the Pressure Cooker Bar and Dance Hall.

It was eleven-thirty
A.M.
on a January Monday. A live band played, several couples swayed on the dance floor, shadows laughed and drank. Occasional bolts of daylight shot through the place when the door opened; otherwise it seemed like Saturday night. But it was Monday morning, late January. Super Bowl week in Clyde, Texas.

R.D. stepped to the side of the door and crossed his hard, muscular arms across the front of his tank-top shirt. His shoulder muscles bulged as he stood, the heavy, sharp cheekbones and square, solid jaw of his angry face thrust out, waiting for his eyes to become accustomed to the faint light.

Colored by the lights from the bandstand, cigarette smoke wreathed up into big clouds. The stand was caged off with chicken wire to protect the band from the audience. When someone out there in the vast dark didn’t like the music, the service, his date or his wife, he would launch a beer bottle. Just about anything could cause a massive mad launch of missiles at the bandstand.

Red saw R.D. as soon as he entered the Pressure Cooker; the slash of daylight had pulled his eyes to the door. Red waited, watching R.D. adjust his eyes to the dark. The coach admired the man’s physique: a natural athlete, mean, tough. Red regretted trading him off.

As the defensive back looked in his direction, the coach lit his team logo lighter and held it over his head. His eyes taking in the whole place, the black man glided slowly, carefully, toward the small corner table.

R.D. Locke sat down and Red Kilroy shook his hand.

“You got the stuff?” Red asked.

R.D. nodded. “You got the money?”

Red nodded.

“What about the job?”

“It’s yours in July.” Red took a thick envelope from his inside pocket and pushed it across the small table.

R.D. took a thick sheaf of pages from his back pocket and tossed it to the coach. The pages were covered with arrows and lines and
X
’s and
O
’s. It was a game plan, offense and defense. R.D. took the envelope from the coach and stuck it in his pocket.

“You going to count it?”

“Eventually.” The muscular black man looked around the bar and dance hall at the chicken-wire-barricaded bandstand, the couples shuffling around on the scuffed floor, the strained and infrequent laughter. “Everybody’s tryin’ too hard in here. It’s a dangerous place.”

“That’s why I picked it. Nobody’s going to tell anybody they saw us at the Pressure Cooker before noon on Super Monday. How do they explain what
they
were doing here?” Red was pleased with himself.

“Well, I don’t dance and it’s too wet to plow.” Denver defensive back R.D. Locke stood, towering over the table, then turned and walked for the door. Red looked at the incredible body as the man weaved through the table maze. Slide, step, glide. He moved like a cat.

Red shook his head.
I wish I looked like that when I was forty
, he thought.

R.D. Locke was forty-one but had lied about his age when he first came into the League. Never mentioned the Army years. Or Vietnam. Just walked on. At six foot three, 225 pounds, a 4.6 in the forty-yard dash, and a nickname of “The Hit Man,” who was going to quibble whether he was twenty-one or twenty-four years old?

Red Kilroy signaled the waitress for another drink.

“The boss says you gotta buy two drinks to sit and watch the housewives dance,” said the red-eyed waitress in the white western shirt and black slacks. “Take my word for it.” She wiped the table. “Just buy two drinks; the bartender only puts in half a shot anyway.” She exchanged the dirty ashtray for a clean one.

The band started playing.

Glass broke somewhere in the dark vastness of the dance hall.

          
The news is out all over town

          
That you been seen runnin’ round ...

The things a man will do to win a football game.
Light exploded the dark as people came and went. The things people do. The things we will do to win or just to pretend we’re winning. Ain’t no second place. Ain’t no second act. Ain’t no second chance.

          
... You’ll cry and cry

          
and try to sleep ...

Red smoked a cigarette, drank his watery Scotch and watched the housewives, the unemployed, the con artists, the night shift workers, the bored, the lonely, the mean.

It was straight up noon at the Pressure Cooker, and Red Kilroy was surrounded by losers.

          
Your cheeeaaating heart willll tail on yew ...

T
AYLOR WAS UP IN
the Penthouse suite, listening to records as E. Fudd, garment salesman, when Red Kilroy called.

“How did you know I was in here?” Taylor asked. “I’m down on the ninth floor with the rest of the team.”

“I told the desk clerk to look for famous cartoon characters. Are you alone?”

“Just me and Elmer.”

“I’ll be right up. If anybody calls or comes before I get there, get rid of them,” Red hissed into the phone. “This is urgent. I don’t care if all your cartoon friends want to come over. That suite better be empty when I arrive. Just you and me.”

“And Elmer,” Taylor added. “Come on, say it. It’ll confuse whoever is listening.”

“And Elmer,” Red said sullenly. “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

“Bwing some cawwots, okay, Wed? Wed? What about the cawwots?”

The phone clicked dead at the coach’s end.

“Dwat you. Wed ... Wats ... Wats ... Wats ...” He wondered if someone was listening. And if so, who? Why?

“There are no secrets,” Dick Conly always said, “just shit you don’t know yet. The two-hour head start. The news is always bad and you laugh because you haven’t heard the news.”

The news was that Bobby Hendrix had fallen out of a plane and was smashed flat on the Tulum Mayan ruins.

That’s the news.
It’s always bad.

Tommy McNamara and his five-part series on the mob and the League.
That
was news. The fingerless, earless, bloody-raw Kinky-Headed Boy hanging from a bunkhouse beam, his Santa Fe Opera T-shirt knotted at his neck.
That’s
the bad news nobody heard.

Taylor Rusk planned to stay hidden in E. Fudd’s penthouse suite until the game.

Come Super Sunday, Taylor Rusk planned to hit and run. He planned to win by seventeen. Or more.

Red Kilroy buying the Denver game plans from R.D. Locke for a future job in Detroit and an undisclosed amount of cash didn’t hurt.

“He’s promised two goal-line pass interference calls,” Red whispered. They were out on the suite’s small patio. The afternoon air was hot. “He promises to fall down the first time he sees you keep both your backs in. So the first time you call full protection, run Speedo at him on a straight outside fly.”

Taylor nodded, looking through the Xeroxed pages of the Denver Super Bowl game plans. He read the scouting report on himself.

... doesn’t like to get hurt ... doesn’t like pain
.... The two phrases stood out.

“I’m supposed to
like
pain?” Taylor asked.

“Don’t worry about it,” Red replied quickly. “It’s a psychological ploy to try and get those guys to hurt you.”

“Then what?” Taylor argued. “I fool them by saying how much I enjoyed my ruptured spleen? I want hot routes back in the game plan. I want a dump-off man on every play. If a lineman misses a new audible call, I want a sting man to go to.”

“Jesus, Taylor, that really complicates the offense,” Red argued.

“I don’t want them to have
one free shot.”
Taylor held up his index finger. “
Not one.
They got at least two guys in that defensive line who could break my ribs with a hand slap, reach in and jerk out my heart just to psyche me.” Taylor looked at his coach.

“They’d love a chance to get armpit-deep in my guts and play handball with my major organs. Okay, Wed? What about it, Wed?”

“Will you stop with the Elmer Fudd? All right, but we won’t need hot routes if you read the defenses right.”

“I’m not worrying about me fucking up and missing a defense, I’m worried about R.D. Locke fucking up and missing a defense.” Taylor looked at the head coach. “Or have you forgotten exactly why you traded him to Denver in the first place?”

“I was going to trade him anyway,” Red protested. “It just happened that he shot at you just as we were working the noodles out with Denver.”

“Was his thirty-eight one of those noodles? Did you get compensation in caliber or muzzle velocity?”

“What we
got
is this here Denver game plan,” Red said. “Now, you study it tonight and tomorrow. Give it to me at practice tomorrow afternoon. I’ll make one more copy at the practice field. I’m going to call all our defenses Sunday.”

“Margene know about that?” Taylor watched Red walk to the suite door. “Say, Red? You really going to get Locke a job?”

“I take care of my boys, Taylor. I have always taken care of my boys.”

“Oh, yeah. You have them all over the League.”

“I got them all over the world.” The coach stepped out the door into the hallway. He turned, looked back at Taylor Rusk, his quarterback for these many years of college and professional ball. “I got them all over the world.”

“I’m not one of your boys.”

“I’ve known that since you played at the University, Elmer.” The Texas Pistols head coach pulled the door closed and left Taylor alone with the stolen Denver Super Bowl game plan.

“Dwat!” Taylor flipped the stereo back on.

“Elmer Fudd wins Super Bowl,” Taylor said aloud, picking up the Xeroxed pages. “Daffy Duck coach of the year.”

Taylor looked out the window toward the sunbaked Pistol Dome hunched over Clyde, Texas, within pouncing distance of the city.

Red Kilroy’s plan to call his own defenses from the sideline was unwelcome news to the Pistols’ defense, because on game day Red Kilroy was always a raving lunatic. On the sidelines he was completely out of control. He would froth at the mouth, talk in tongues, go for whole quarters without pronouncing one identifiable word. In Taylor’s sophomore year at the University, the whole game against Michigan, Red called him “Bobby.”