by Peter Gent
“Well,” Red said, “I’ll just keep this list and make the deals.” Red got to his feet and walked to the door, the list dangling at his side. “I’m pretty good. You don’t recruit high school kids for twenty years without learning how to be eating Momma’s chicken-fried steak and be lying through the cream gravy to her boy.” Red began to laugh at his own words. He laughed harder and hurried out to find an assistant coach to tell.
Cyrus Chandler sat alone in the office and listened to the retreating giggles of the head coach. He buzzed A.D. Roster’s office, looking for someone who would tell him what he wanted to hear.
A.D. was out but would oblige the moment he returned.
THE LAST OF LUTHER CONLY
DICK CONLY WENT home and found his sixteen-year-old son, Luther, in the closed garage. The soft-faced boy was sprawled across the backseat of his mother’s brown Rolls-Royce Corniche. The engine was running and the boy was dead.
Inside the house, on his freshly made bed, there was a note: “I’m sorry, Dad. I can’t figure out why. Luke.”
The newspaper called it a tragic accident. Cyrus Chandler saw to that. It was his newspaper.
“It was the least I could do,” Cyrus told his wife, Junie.
“It was also the most,” Wendy said. She stood in the open doorway with Lem Three. “You didn’t even go to the funeral.” Wendy walked into the living room. Her parents sat in the Pit and were drinking martinis. Wendy and Lem were dressed for the funeral. “Your absence was conspicuous.”
“Now, Wendy ...” Lem Three tried to quiet his wife from several steps behind her and was having luck commensurate with his comparative mobility.
“His family needs him.” Wendy was angry. “And you keep him at your side so Red Kilroy wouldn’t outsmart you. He is a brilliant man. Why did he have to become general manager of your goddam football team? He was busy enough cleaning up all your other business deals—”
“Now, Wendy,” Junie Chandler interrupted without much enthusiasm. She really didn’t know what Wendy was mad about. “I won’t allow you to use that tone of voice to your father.”
“Is he the only one that gets to use this voice?” Wendy shot back. Cyrus watched his daughter’s face with passionless eyes. He took a cigarette from the silver case on the round marble table. He lit the cigarette with a lighter in the shape of a gold goose.
“Well ...” Junie was trying to reply to Wendy, “well ...”
Wendy glanced from her mother to her father. Her unsteady, confused mother and her calculating, confused father.
“Well,” Junie finally said, “well, yes, your father can talk like that because he is a man. Right, honey?” She nudged her husband. Cyrus closed his eyes slowly and nodded.
“Lem?” Junie continued, “Isn’t that right?”
Lem stammered slightly.
“Don’t answer, Lem,” Wendy said.
“Wendy. Wendy,” Cyrus said in low, soothing, loving tones. “You are letting this get all out of proportion. I didn’t force Dick Conly to do anything he didn’t want to and I’m certainly not responsible for the death of a boy who was known to be on drugs. He smoked marijuana in his bedroom. Dick told me. He did it for over a year. He was addicted to marijuana and I personally plan”—Cyrus had just thought this up, hoping to placate his daughter—“I plan to start a fund to go after all the dealers of drugs and pornography and I am going to endow the fund in that dead boy’s name. What do you think about that?”
“I think it sucks. You don’t even know the kid’s name.”
“I do too,” Cyrus shot back angrily. She had spurned his gift.
“Well?” Wendy kept her hands on her hips and looked at her father.
“Well what?”
“The kid. Dick Conly’s, the one who killed himself in his mother’s Rolls. What is his name?”
“I know it,” Cyrus protested. “I know it ... it’s ... I know it ... don’t tell me.” Cyrus held up his hands and a frown dug in along his brow. “It’s ah ... Richard ... Dick junior!” Cyrus smiled at the logic of his guess.
Wendy stared at her father. The guess had been wrong. Things were worse.
“Luther, sir,” Lem said quietly. “Luther James Conly was his name.” He nodded and smiled wanly.
“Oh, yes, sure,” Cyrus grabbed the sides of his head with both hands. “How stupid. Sure. Yeah. Luther.”
“You were his godfather,” Wendy sneered.
“I was?” Cyrus was startled. “I mean, I was. I know I was.”
“I didn’t know until we got to the church,” Lem said, smiling.
Wendy turned around and hit Lem right above the ear with her black beaded bag. It had her pistol in it. Lem hit the floor cold, cutting his chin.
Wendy didn’t even stay around to watch Lem bleed on the parquet. She left the front door open.
Junie fretted and Cyrus said nothing until Wendy’s car started and the sounds of her driving rapidly away died in the distance.
“She’ll get over it,” Cyrus told Junie, who was on her knees beside the still-unconscious and bleeding Lem. A servant called an ambulance. “He’ll be all right. They have people to take care of this sort of thing.” Cyrus got up out of the Pit and retired to his bedroom. Junie waited by Lem’s side until the ambulance arrived and carted him off to the hospital. Junie called Lem’s mother and told her. They both agreed to keep it quiet.
The story was all over Park City by nine the next morning. The mailman inquired of the butler at Cyrus Chandler’s house whether it was a shooting, stabbing or just another beating. The butler pleaded ignorance, having been off that day, but according to the maid it was a pistol-whipping. The mailman liked that story and that’s the one he carried.
HORSESHOES AND HAND GRENADES
THE DAY THEY buried Luther Conly, Taylor Rusk was ushered to an unfortunate seat in the church balcony that looked directly down into the casket containing the handsome, dead sixteen-year-old boy. Taylor kept his eyes closed throughout the ceremony as the young people around him broke down, confronting death in their midst. The young girls started first, some already sobbing when they arrived in the hot, crowded balcony. Some were jolted by the sight of Luther James Conly in a three-piece suit, looking the same and terribly different. It seemed he could open his eyes and lift his head off of that small silk pillow and step out of that casket. Almost. That got the last ones crying: the horror and nothingness of almost.
Taylor closed his eyes and thought about offensive adjustments against various zone defenses and Kimball Adams’s instructions on keys to those defenses. Taylor kept his eyes closed and reran pass-defense adjustments until the service ended, the balcony emptied and the body was closed in the casket and wheeled to the hearse. He stayed until after the procession had left for the cemetery with the dead boy.
Sixteen, almost seventeen.
“Only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades,” Kimball Adams always said about almost.
Taylor drove out to Doc Webster’s ranch. Wendy drove up after dark. The meeting was accidental. They had both gone to Doc’s ranch for refuge after the funeral.
“I would have married you,” Taylor said, “if you’d insisted. But you didn’t. You listened to my side and then you disappeared. It was our relationship choreographed by you.”
“If all I was going to get was somebody who would back down from my father and make me like it, I would rather have Lem; he’s bred to it.”
“Well, you got Lem. We are all players in your game. You wanted me as a husband to hit your father over the head,” Taylor argued. “Why should I let you use me?”
“You were ...” Wendy said, “you were something special.”
“I still am,” Taylor smiled wryly. “Just because you have changed, doesn’t mean I have.”
Taylor stood on the porch and watched Wendy’s taillights disappear over Coon Ridge. He rocked in the chair until dawn, then went swimming in Panther Hole.
Returning up the bluff, he could hear the Kinky-Headed Boy’s stereo.
Well, I’m sittin’ down in San Antone
waitin’ on an eight o’clock train my
woman left me here last night
and things ain’t been quite the same.
Up from Panther Hole, chilled, refreshed but still confused, Taylor rubbed his hair vigorously, shaking out the water. The morning sun dried him.
As he passed the bunkhouse, Tommy McNamara, the Kinky-Headed Boy, stepped out the screen door. His eyes looked red and tired; he’d been working all night on his book.
I gotta get back to Dallas to tie up a few loose ends
work a week, make a hundred dollar
ahhh and hit the road again.
“You two get back together?” McNamara rubbed his eyes, holding his thick glasses in one hand. He was a small man, compared to Taylor. He had a pleasant, open face that always seemed happy no matter how care-worn his eyes. His big, sad brown eyes. He put his glasses back on and magnified the sadness in his eyes.
“Almost.” Taylor pulled on his shirt and watched the tired young man looking for answers and solutions to insane questions.
Tommy McNamara looked up. “Almost?”
“Almost.”
The Kinky-Headed Boy frowned vacantly, lost inside his own head. “Well ... what the hell.” He turned and walked into the bunkhouse. Taylor started for the back entrance to the house.
The stereo continued in the bunkhouse. Driving, cocky guitars, fiddles, steel and wire and electricity, fingers and picks, flutes and drums—the new country music. The soaring rhythms denied the sadness of the song. The singer continued to whine in false bravado.
So I don’t want you to think you’re the first one
to leave this old boy out here on his own
’cause this ain’t gonna be the first time
this old cowboy spent the night alone....
No, this ain’t gonna be the first time
this old cowboy spent the night alone.
DICK AND RED BUILD THE FRANCHISE
DICK CONLY RETURNED to work at the Franchise the Monday following his son’s funeral. He no longer wanted the spring vacation Luther wasn’t there to have with him. Dick never worked harder or better, saying work was the best tonic. How much more he drank was hard to quantify, since he already drank so much. But Dick Conly was a consummate general manager. He quickly built a contender.
Dick went right to work on Red Kilroy’s plan to trade draft choices for proven veterans and sign college players in their undergraduate years. He drove hard bargains and made good deals. He swapped away eighteen draft choices for twelve tried-and-proven veterans. He conferred frequently with Red, seldom with Cyrus.
Red and Dick worked some magic themselves and Conly allowed Red to gradually increase his power. The GM no longer wanted to have anything, with the single exception of Suzy Ballard. Dick made Suzy his assistant and she convinced him to hire A.D. Koster after Red cut him.
The second season, the Texas Pistols went nine and seven with Kimball and Taylor alternating at quarterback the first seven games. As the pass protection began to improve, they became a true team offensively, and Taylor Rusk became the starting quarterback for the last seven games. Texas was 7–0 with Taylor at quarterback. He was sacked only six times.
It was all part of the plan, though exactly whose was debated for years.
Taylor never doubted his ability, and his confidence was contagious. They were beaten five times by better teams and beat themselves twice against inferior opponents. They were never outcoached. Red covered details and gathered intelligence from the network of Red’s boys throughout football, from junior high to the New York pros. The diligent, plodding head coach spent his life building his network, and it was paying big dividends. His people were in place from coast to coast and from the Canadian league to the Mexican border.
Dick Conly the Ingenious created fail-safe schemes. And now they had the personnel. They were on schedule.
Kimball Adams retired to become a travel agent and New York’s quarterback coach. After the last game of the season Red got him the coaching job. They stayed in touch—bits and pieces, rumors, gossip, game plans. Kimball stayed drunk, but his New York travel agency did well, mainly handling Las Vegas junkets. Kimball had played drunk and the alcohol didn’t dim his motor skills as a coach, only his pronunciation. And his perception of life.
The Cobianco brothers began to use Kimball’s travel agency for casino junkets to Vegas, Atlantic City and the Bahamas.
“The less you get beat up in the front end of your career, the more years you get at the back end,” Kimball Adams had told Taylor that first night at the Leadville Bar and Post Office.
Kimball got beat up at both ends and in the middle. And it wasn’t over yet.
“All we need now,” Red told Conly, “is seasoning and tempering from the heat of battle. The hotter the better.”
“Then let’s stoke the fire, Coach. I want a white-hot flame and a football team that can stand a holocaust.”
Training camp the third season was thermonuclear, and the Texas Pistols were welded into a winning team. It was hellfire. It worked.
THE PLAYOFF BOWL
RED KILROY GAZED out the team-plane window and watched the flat coastal plain of Florida rushing up at him. Ahead he could see the guidance lights directing them to a long shimmering strip of cement. When the big plane bumped down, Red took a small adrenaline rush and toasted himself silently. He had done what he said he could do and had brought a third-year expansion franchise to the Playoff Bowl. The trades had worked out perfectly and Taylor Rusk had been a phenomenon.
During the week before the Playoff Game, Red felt like the time was right to speak again to Cyrus about ownership percentage. Cyrus had turned him down before, but Red wasn’t planning on giving up. Ever.
What kind of a guy could survive in this world if he gives up? Red thought as the team plane taxied to the terminal. If you give up even for a minute, you are lost. You can’t ever grab on again. It’s the fast track. He wanted an ownership position with the Franchise that he was building or he might just quit building.
The plane interior was beginning to heat up.
The players were beginning to stir back in the tourist section.
Suzy Ballard, Dick Conly’s assistant, handed the head coach his hat.
“Thank you, my dear,” Red said, trying to sound old and feeble. He didn’t want to offer the slightest attraction to the girl. He knew her by her eyes, the same way he sometimes picked defensive backs and linebackers. A crazed, angry glisten, a sense of focus, as if Suzy saw into you, searching for soft, hollow, blood-gorged organs. The vitals. Those eyes often meant great linebackers and defensive backs, but Red Kilroy had never witnessed anything positive about them in women.
The team plane jostled across the hot Florida airstrip. The Texas Pistols had arrived to meet Miami in the Playoff Bowl.
Red considered the advantages of Dick Conly as an ally. There was a growing distance between Conly and Cyrus Chandler. If Red could lever that gap into an alliance between Red and Conly, maybe they could both demand ownership positions with options. They were running the club. Cyrus didn’t know his ass from a thigh pad.
Will Conly be a good ally? Red wondered as the plane pulled up to the terminal. He looked over at Conly and saw Suzy Ballard watching.
What is she up to? thought Red. What in God’s name is she up to?
Red Kilroy was the first person to consider that Suzy Ballard had a plan of her own.
It was cold in Florida the whole week before the game. The wind blew and it rained a lot. The team didn’t practice much. Since there was no second place, the Playoff Bowl was meaningless. The League had organized charity Bowl Games between the second-place teams from each division. It all seemed pretty imaginary. Red Kilroy told them that it was good practice for the Super Bowl, but it wasn’t the Super Bowl and there was no sense confusing it.
Winners got $3,000, losers got $1,800. Everybody got a free room p
lus twenty dollars a day. Twenty dollars didn’t go very far so it was easy not to confuse it with the Super Bowl. When Bobby Hendrix complained to the Union about the players being forced to play the charity games, Terry Dudley, the director, told him it was good for the players’ image.
Taylor and Bobby were sharing a third-floor room. Rain had canceled that afternoon’s practice. Hendrix dialed the phone as Taylor walked to the window. The rain had since stopped, but it was still windy and cloudy. Threatening weather. Red never practiced during threatening weather in Texas because he always watched the complete practice from his metal tower, which stood above the practice field like a lightning rod.
“I don’t believe in God,” Red said, “but why give the son of a bitch a free shot? He may not believe in me either. You never know: God might think he’s Vince Lombardi.”
Taylor looked out the hotel window down at the abandoned swimming pool. Rows of empty wooden chairs waited for greasy, fat, old people to come stretch out in the promised Florida sun, bake themselves juicy-brown and talk through their noses about New York and New Jersey.
Hendrix lay on his bed in his underwear, talking on the phone to his wife, Ginny. The first season, Ginny had moved the whole family to her daddy’s Houston place in River Oaks. They had lived there ever since, with Bobby joining them in the off-season.
Ginny Savas had been born and raised in wealthy River Oaks and met Bobby when he came to play scholarship football for Rice. Ginny Hendrix’s father, Gus Savas, a Houston wildcatter with a River Oaks mansion, was the son of Savas Savas, which in Greek means Sam Sam, a name given by some immigration bureaucrat who was baffled by the number of letters in Pouloupodopoulus.
Ginny was Gus Savas’s only child, and Gus doted on her. After her mother died, she often accompanied her father to the elaborate parties of the oil-rich. The parties were dazzling and fascinating, always interesting, sometimes scary. There were always a few European counts and chinless ladies doddering about in jewels by Cartier. There were sleek, handsome South Americans and Mexicans, the wickedly exciting sheiks and shahs and princes. Ginny Savas watched the antics of her friends and neighbors with fear and delight. She saw power and what it did and she was afraid of it. She knew she would never marry among her friends and she didn’t. She refused to debut in Houston society. She married Bobby Hendrix their senior year at Rice. They moved to Cleveland, where he caught passes and she raised children. She liked Cleveland.