North Dallas Forty

by Peter Gent

  We made love for a long time. The mescaline turned it to a pornographic hallucination. My whole body had sight. When we finished I didn’t know what was real and what was imagined.

  The fire had burned down to embers. I crawled to the hearth and threw more wood onto the coals. I felt calm and peaceful. Charlotte was curled up on her side staring into the fire; her eyes seemed sightless. I lay back next to her.

  As I floated I dreamed I was following a cattle truck on the highway. The cattle were jammed in and crashing against each other and the sides of the trailer as the driver weaved through the traffic trying to make the packing plant a few minutes sooner.

  I wondered if these dumb beasts knew where they were headed, where this man with his hairy, tattooed arm hanging out the cab window was hurrying them. They couldn’t know. Maybe they felt anxious, sensed something strange, but how could they know that in a short time, a very short time, they would face a sweat-soaked black man, who, while talking in low soothing tones, would, with the precision of a sculptor, strike them down with a single blow between the eyes. As I pulled around the truck a pair of brown eyes looked out from between the wooden slats. The eyes were mine and I was on the truck watching Charlotte ride by in my car. She was crying. B.A. was driving and Maxwell was in the back waving and holding up a can of beer. I jerked awake.

  My head was throbbing. The wall clock said it was almost 5 A.M. I tried to clear the buzzing from my thoughts. The aches and pains were slowly creeping back as the old reality returned.

  Charlotte was curled on her side clinging to my arm. Her smooth face was peaceful and expressionless in sleep. I stared at her for a long time wondering what she thought of me. Did she know me at all? What did she want from me? Nothing, I hoped. There was nothing to give. I looked around the room. It all seemed unreal, like a fantastic dream. The fire was dead and the room was cold. There was no trace of the excitement and energy I had felt last night. Had I actually been close to this woman? Did I have feelings for her? Or was I just high? Out of my mind and wishing for people and emotions that didn’t exist.

  I am a man who has learned that survival is the reason of life and that fear and hatred are the emotions. What you cannot overcome by hatred you must fear. And every day it is getting harder to hate and easier to fear. I wrapped the quilt around Charlotte; she moaned and stirred. She didn’t look frightening and I certainly didn’t hate her. I found a tablet and wrote a note saying I would call.

  I left the note next to her, picked David’s keys off the table, made my way down the hall through the kitchen, and stepped outside.

  The predawn silence was only slightly broken by the intermittent noises of the morning birds. I stood beside my car and stared at the purple-pink glow that was to be Thursday, countless things below the horizon waiting to happen. Well let them come, Wednesday had been one for the book.

  Thursday

  IT STILL WASN’T LIGHT when I reached south Dallas and found a truck stop.

  I ordered breakfast and bought a paper from the rack. Browsing the jukebox, I selected Jerry Lee Lewis’s “She Even Woke Me Up to Say Goodbye.” I particularly like Jerry Lee’s first line. “Mornin’s come ... and Lord ... my mind is achin’ ...” I drank six cups of coffee and read the paper. A government scientist was found murdered in a downtown hotel, a situation that had homosexual overtones. A young housewife was found dead with her throat slashed. She had been sexually assaulted. It was the third such case in as many weeks. A city councilman had been connected with Mafia figures in a stock scandal. I read the entertainment section, checking movie and television listings. I seldom read the sports.

  The three scrambled eggs, hash-brown potatoes, a side order of ham, and two greasy slices of Texas toast were enough to get me moving again.

  I went rather awkwardly to the car; the sun and the Dallas air turned the purple-pink daybreak to a fluorescent orange. The morning smelled like diesel fuel.

  If I was speeding I didn’t know it and wasn’t aware of the squad car until it turned on its siren. The siren scared the shit out of me and I pulled over, digging for my wallet at the same time. By the time the officer reached the car, I was holding my driver’s license out the window. He ignored it.

  “Step out of the car, please,” he said, his eyes hidden behind wire aviator sunglasses.

  Fantastic, I thought, a brand-new lid of grass in the glove compartment. I followed the officer back between the cars, where we stood while the early morning traffic whizzed by. He studied my license, comparing my face with the photograph. It was an old license and the hair length threw him off.

  “When were you born?” he asked stiffly, his right hand resting on the butt of a chromium .45 automatic that hung at his side.

  “Are you gonna do my chart?” I asked, irritated by his posture.

  He pulled down his sunglasses and looked over them at me.

  “August 12, 1942. I’m a Leo.”

  “You were clocked going sixty miles an hour in a forty-five-mile zone, Bertrand.”

  Bertrand Phillip Elliott is my full Christian name, but I am not quick to admit it.

  “I didn’t know. I’m sorry,” I said, trying to appear remorseful but not cowardly.

  The officer looked me over from head to foot. I was slightly disheveled. He tried to peer past me into the car.

  “You been drinkin’?”

  “No,” I shook my head. “I wish I had.” I rubbed my eyes and scratched my head. “I been drivin’ all night from New Orleans. I had to go down there for a boys’ club football banquet.”

  The policeman pulled off his glasses and squinted at me, then at my license again. A slow smile broke across his face.

  “Well, Phil,” he said, handing me back my license, “don’t be drivin’ when you’re too tired to pay attention. We need you out there.”

  “I’m sorry, I’ll be more careful next time.” I would be too.

  “You guys gonna do all right in New York?”

  I nodded, putting my license back in my wallet.

  “Let’s get to the Superbowl this year, huh? I promised my wife I’d take her if we went.” He smiled widely. “Would you be able to get me any tickets?”

  “Sure. Just call me about ten days before the game, I’ll get you a couple.” I reached out and shook his hand. “Thanks.”

  “That’s okay,” he said. “You be careful drivin’ now; I hate to see people splattered all over the highway. Makes me feel like I’m not doin’ my job. If you had an accident now I’d take it real personal.”

  By the time I reached north Dallas and the practice field, the sun was up, the ground haze turning it into an orange Day-Glo ball. Maxwell’s convertible, the top down and the seats wet with dew, was already in the lot. It wasn’t much past eight.

  The front door to the clubhouse was locked. I walked around to the back and found a broken window. I looked inside. Asleep on a meeting-room couch was last year’s Top Pro Athlete and winner of the Atlanta Minutemen’s Outstanding American Award.

  I clumsily climbed through the window. The noise woke Maxwell. He sat bolt upright.

  “Who is it?” he mumbled, rubbing his eyes.

  “The tooth fairy.” I dangled from the window, my feet searching for the floor.

  “Fuck you,” he said and fell back on the couch.

  I dusted myself off and looked at the exhausted man.

  “Shit, I hope I don’t look that bad.”

  Maxwell lifted his arm from across his face, squeezing open a reddish-blue eye against the light.

  “You do.” He replaced the arm.

  “I was afraid so. I have been on a long journey to the dark recesses of my psyche.”

  “Recess was always my favorite time,” Maxwell said without moving.

  “Come on, let’s us bust into the ol’ medicine cabinet.” I stepped into the hall and headed for the training room. “First aid is the best aid ... physician heal thyself ... a stitch in ...” I stopped at the sauna to switch it on, then conti
nued to the training room. When Seth stumbled, moaning, into the room, I was already at work on the drawer with a pair of tape scissors.

  “The trainers are really gonna be pissed,” he said, with an uncharacteristic urgency.

  “They won’t do anything to you.” I jammed the scissors into the catch.

  “What do you mean me?” Maxwell cried. “You’re the one that’s doin’ it.”

  “Yeah. But, you’ll share in the take and that makes you an accomplice. If they turn me in, they got to turn you in, and they won’t do that.”

  The drawer slid open with a crack.

  “Goddam,” Maxwell groaned. “You broke it.”

  “Not so’s you could notice. The trainers’ll know, but they won’t say anything. Look at this stuff.” I rummaged through the drawer. “As ol’ MJ says, only take what you need, not what you want, loose translation.”

  “Who the fuck is MJ?”

  “Mick Jagger.”

  “That little fairy.”

  “He always speaks highly of you.” I held up two pill vials. “Dexamyl and Compazine. Spansules. That’ll do it.”

  I poured out four pills of each kind into my hand. I passed two of each to Maxwell and kept the remaining four. I swallowed two. Maxwell took all four of his at once. I shook several Codeine Number Four out of the white plastic bottle, took two, and put the rest in my pocket.

  Ten minutes later we were both under cold pounding showers, waiting for the sauna to heat up and the drugs to start doing battle in our shattered brains.

  “Last night was an all-time show stopper,” Maxwell said.

  If one was to believe the descriptive phrases used by Maxwell in the course of a fuck story, not since the Marquis de Sade has anyone touched him, either as a practitioner or raconteur.

  Once during training camp, Maxwell and I rented a house near the practice field. Our first exhibition game was against San Francisco, and after the game we returned directly to camp. After bed check we sneaked out and met two girls at the house. It had been a tough hot game and, although I had only played the first half, I was exhausted. My companion was peculiarly cooperative. Although refusing to remove her panties, she did a commendable job of fellatio, pulling her mouth away at the crucial moment to take the spray in her face and hair. It was bizarre and pleasing and I was soon sleeping peacefully. Sometime later, I awoke with a throbbing pain in my right arm. The bed was rocking and bouncing violently. Maxwell was screwing the daylights out of my bedmate. They were both lying on my arm and my hand had gone to sleep. The girl’s panties were shredded and lying across my chest. The bed was soaked with blood. It seems she was in the middle of a rather abundant menstrual period. Seeing that I was awake, Maxwell leaned over and whispered in my ear.

  “I tol’ her,” his voice was a rasp, “that I’d wade in the Red River anytime, jus’ wouldn’t drink from it.”

  I extracted my arm and crawled to the other twin bed and fell back to sleep. It was only one of several instances that pointed to Maxwell’s insatiable desire and incredible stamina.

  “An all-timer,” Maxwell groaned.

  The nice thing about Seth as a teller of pornography, an art he had perfected to its quintessence, was that the listener only had to make infrequent one-syllable guttural responses to keep a conversation going for several hours.

  “An all-timer,” he repeated, shaking his head and walking from the showers to the sauna, grabbing a handful of towels on the way.

  The water felt good beating on the back of my neck, which was beginning to stiffen from the aftereffects of the mescaline and the general strain of the night.

  Leaving the showers. I detoured to the equipment manager’s cage, tuned his FM intercom to the Fort Worth country music station, then joined Maxwell in the sauna. The sound of “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” convinced me that my life had a soundtrack.

  Maxwell jumped up and left the smothering heat, returning seconds later with two cans of Coors.

  “The trainers had a six-pack in their refrigerator. It seemed like a good idea.”

  I was already despairing that the Dexamyl and Compazine had fallen through the big, black holes burned in my brain. I was willing to try anything to change the way I felt. The beer tasted cold but not particularly good. I rubbed my neck vigorously, trying to relieve the tightness that was sending hammering pains into my head.

  “Why do I punish my body like this?” Maxwell asked, his fingers lightly tracing the thin white surgical scars that made a road map of his torso. Two long zippers, starting behind and coming up over the point of his right elbow, ended at his forearm. He had a white puckered hole on the back of his left hand, the result of playing half a season with an unrepaired break. A calcium sheath had formed around the fractured bones and the breaks never healed. Periodically, the unmended hand would abscess and swell to the size of a volley ball. The team physician would puncture him like a bloated cow and pus would shoot all over the room. The white puckered scar was where he stuck the knife. Three other red welts commemorated two shoulder dislocations and a compound fracture of his collarbone.

  Although Maxwell’s upper body took an incredible beating, he had good strong legs and had been a running back in college. Only specific orders from B.A. kept him from running out of the pocket. On occasion he would disregard those orders and turn a certain loss into a good gain. He liked to run and hit.

  “You’re the only man I know with an older body than mine,” Maxwell said, looking at the large knot sticking out from the side of my ankle, the vestige of a compound fracture and dislocation.

  The doctor told me the knot had developed because I had taken several steps after the injury, but I got the feeling it was just too much trouble to put everything exactly back in place. And besides, as the doctor said, it was functional and would only bother me if I wore Oxfords. To me the ankle seemed minor compared to my back injury and it seldom bothered me, except for occasional jokes about having the head of my dick stuffed in my sock.

  I often felt that this brotherhood of mutilation was a very large part of the strange friendship Maxwell and I shared. Each bore his particular pain in front of the other with a stoic humor. When one went down, the other was always among the first to his side, unless he had already gone down, which happened more than once. The intimacy of our doping ritual had begun, with codeine and Demerol, long before marijuana had become the sacrament. At first the pills were used just to bear the pain of shredded and smashed muscles and ligaments. Then later we combined them with alcohol to shorten the long, anxious return trips to Dallas. We would sit, strapped in our seats, packed in ice or wrapped in elastic, in lengthy discussions of the sounds and feelings of excruciating injuries. Enjoying the communion of pain thresholds and recovery times, we developed a bond not unlike a Prussian Saber Club. To mention it at the time would have seemed ridiculous. After all, it was just a day’s work. But as the years wore on in meetings like this, we would sit in naked silence and marvel at each other’s ability to withstand pain and wonder how much longer the misshapen limbs would last. This morning, from the look of us, even money said the end of the day. But somehow, we would make another day, as we had so many days in the past, each taking strength from the other’s agony. It was all we knew how to do.

  It was a peculiar, maybe even a homosexual bond, but it was strong, and in a life of continual change, I took my solace in its intransigence.

  “An all-time show stopper,” Maxwell said, lying on his back on the uppermost of the bleacherlike sauna seats. He was staring at the ceiling, absently fingering his testicles, a towel spread across his chest.

  “Uh-huh,” I said, hoping the story would finally move past the opening expletive.

  “Do you know Jerry Drake?” Maxwell swung his chicken legs off the bench and sat on the edge, staring down to where I was stretched out on the floor. The name sounded familiar, but it was Maxwell’s story and best to let him tell it all.

  “He owns Big Tex Automotive and Electrical Supply.
”

  “Oh, yeah.” I nodded.

  “Well,” Maxwell lay back down, “it was his YMCA team that I spoke to last night.” He paused to towel the sweat off his face. “I smoked both those joints you gave me on the way over so I was really high and really paranoid. They’d already eaten when I got there so I just got up and told ’em that football wasn’t everything in their lives, that it was just a passing phase, that they should spend more time on other things—”

  I burst out laughing. “I’ll bet all those dads loved that.”

  “They didn’t seem too pleased. But what the hell, I’m a star. Drake got up and told ’em not to take what I said literally—whatever that meant—and that the YMCA Championship was one of the most important things in their young lives. You know, discipline, will to win, building character—all that.”

  “Amazing.”

  “Oh yeah.” Maxwell smiled. “And when I first walked in he took me off to the side and asked me not to smoke in front of his boys. I nearly shit. He meant cigarettes.”

  Maxwell hobbled out to the showers. I waited on the floor for his return.

  “Afterward,” he said, stepping over me. “Afterward, he invites me to his house for a drink. Since the talk took less than an hour, I figured for three hundred dollars, why not? We go to his house and I meet his wife. That’s when I called you. He wanted you to come over and fuck her too.”

  “What?” I straightened up in a combination of shock and sexual stirrings.

  “I know ... I know,” Maxwell continued, his hands over his head in surrender, his face the picture of mock remorse. “I shouldn’t have done it.” He frowned and bobbed his head. “I know how you feel about group fucking, that’s why you weren’t invited, but shit, she was in great shape for her age.”