by Peter Gent
The boy did not move. Taylor clutched him tightly. Faster!
Taylor had exhaled completely, his lungs exhausted; the surface seemed no closer. No matter how hard he kicked, the light seemed farther away. Out of reach, feeling a sharp pain in his chest and tasting blood in his mouth, Taylor kicked and reached out desperately toward the fading light. He kicked one last time. He couldn’t keep the water out of his lungs.
The light faded. All black. Dead.
Bob Travers grabbed Taylor’s hand as it broke the surface, snatching the man and the little boy out of the water like rag dolls, dragging them onto the shallow creek bed.
Prying Randall loose from Taylor’s grip, Bob lay the boy stomach-down along his sinewy arm. The boy’s once-red lips were deep blue, the beautiful soft face in cold sleep. Cradling the boy’s head in his large hand, Bob thumped between the shoulder blades, then pried the tiny blue lips apart. No water ran out.
“He’s still got a heartbeat.” Bob pressed his ear to the boy’s back. “But ... he’s not breathing.”
Taylor was half-conscious, gulping air.
“He’s not breathing!” Bob repeated, using his hands to try to force the lungs to breathe by pumping the little chest.
“He may have swallowed his tongue,” Taylor gasped out.
Bob stuck a big finger into the blue mouth. Finding the tongue in place, he covered the small nose and mouth with his rough cracked lips. Bob tried to force air into the lungs.
The small chest did not rise.
Tommy McNamara came running down the bluff and splashing into the water. Wendy howled from the rock.
Taylor struggled to his knees and forced open the boy’s jaws, looking down his throat. He barely saw the white stone lodged past the soft palate. His finger could not reach it.
“Something’s stuck in his throat,” he said to Bob. “See if you can reach it.”
Bob dug into the boy’s mouth while Taylor looked around wildly. Tommy McNamara stood beside him, his gold ballpoint pen hanging from the neck of his Santa Fe Opera T-shirt.
“I can’t reach it,” Bob said, turning the boy face down and trying to squeeze it out compressing the small cold rib cage with one hand while pressing up against the diaphragm with the other hand.
“Goddam son of a bitch! Come out of there! Goddammit ... Goddammit!” Bob Travers was no longer calm and low-key.
“Stop! You’ll break his ribs.”
“He’s dying! Better broken ribs than dead.”
“Turn him over.”
Bob flopped the blue-faced boy on his back. Taylor’s hand palpated the hollow of the boy’s cold neck, fingers feeling for the cartilage at the soft hollow between the collarbones.
Which was it, now? Above? Below?
He snatched Tommy McNamara’s ballpoint pen, clicked out the point and plunged it into the boy’s slender throat.
Wendy scrambled up just as he drove the hole into their child’s throat. She screamed and lunged for Taylor, but Bob caught her, then Tommy held her away. Taylor pulled the pen out, leaving a neat red round puncture. Wendy kept screaming, but Taylor and Bob heard the whistling hiss. The boy had begun to breathe again. The cold blue color retreated from his face as oxygen filled his lungs and bloodstream. The small chest rose and fell; air passed through the bloody hole in Randall’s throat below the rock, the tiny chip of the limestone land.
Bob’s partner came scrambling down the bluff with the white Ford’s emergency kit.
“Jesus, who made this mess?” With a pair of forceps he pulled a limestone rock from Randall’s throat. “We have to get him to a hospital,” the partner said as Bob wrapped his shirt around the cold little body. “Who stuck this goddam hole in him? Could have severed an artery.”
“Forget it, Toby, you’re second guessing. We don’t do that in this business.” Bob still cradled the boy in his arms. One big hand easily held the large head. The brown eyes flickered open.
“Hi, Bob,” the little boy croaked. “My throat hurts.” Then, he saw his mother sobbing and he began to cry too.
Toby ran splattering across the creek bed in his cowboy boots. Bob walked swiftly behind, clutching the crying boy. Wendy ran alongside Bob, soothing the boy and wiping her own eyes.
Taylor Rusk stood up, wobbly in the shallow creek bed. Tommy helped him to his feet. Taylor took one last look at the dark hole, now a churning mass of sediment, a cloud of death.
“Jesus!” Taylor, gasping for air, gazed into the swirling black green. “Blind fucking luck.” Then he leaned over and vomited bright-red blood into Dead Man Creek.
MEN ON THE MOON
TOMMY MCNAMARA HELD the pen in one hand while he kept the other around Taylor’s waist. Taylor used Tommy’s shoulder for support in walking back up the bluff to the ranch house, stopping several times to cough up blood. Taylor began to shiver. He was scared ... frightened to his soul.
After putting on dry clothes and lying down on the brown couch, Taylor could still taste his own blood; something had broken in his chest when he was underwater. The dry clothes warmed him, the shiver stopped. But he was still scared. Not of the blood; he had done worse damage to himself on purpose. He was scared of some thing.
“Well, I’m retiring this baby from active duty.” Tommy held up the ballpoint pen. “It’s the best day’s work it will ever do.” Tommy hung the gold ballpoint on a finishing nail over the fireplace. “Best day’s work you ever did, too, Taylor.”
“There just aren’t a lot of jobs open for Super Heroes.” Taylor spat up some more blood and smacked his lips, sticking out his tongue, grimacing at the taste of his own vital fluid.
“Mortality, you confronted mortality,” Tommy said. “Hendrix would have said it scared you.”
“I feel like I’m on a roller coaster and the worst part is ahead.” Taylor spat some more of his blood into the bucket Tommy brought from the bunkhouse. “But mortality doesn’t scare me. I can’t think about being mortal, I got this job to do.” Taylor licked blood off his lips. “I’m scared of being out of work and unlucky.”
“The one true god,” Tommy said. “Good luck.”
“It was the odds we beat today, Tommy, and I’m scared of going up against the odds. I don’t know what the real odds are!”
“The odds are always with the house in the Big Casino in the Sky.”
“The real odds aren’t with anybody, and there is no Big Casino.” Taylor watched the wretchedly thin man in the T-shirt and the beltless jeans that hung from his hips. The blue denim had faded almost white in the empty sagging seat. The only extra flesh on Tommy McNamara hung in deep brown bags beneath each eye. His face was cadaverous from lack of food and rest.
“You ever feel like you had your face in the wind for too long?” Taylor asked.
“All the time. I know too much,” Tommy said. “And I’m not too smart. It is all so insanely simple and everybody is so frighteningly stupid. What do I tell them?”
“Don’t tell them anything.” Taylor coughed. “Not anything complicated.”
“It’s like a movie to people,” Tommy said. “They just watch it go by and see how it ends while they build cars and pay their bills. It’s not like real life.”
Taylor shifted on the couch and spat some pink saliva in the bucket. “Real life is pumping gas and hoping to get lucky.”
“Watch your life go by waiting on luck and Jesus.” Tommy stared out the south window. His dark black eyes were bloodshot and painful.
“Why do you care?” Taylor asked. “Why do you waste your time? Finding out which owner knows what gambler? Is it fixed? Isn’t it fixed? It’s all so silly.” Taylor spat again; the saliva had turned a darker pink.
“I do it because it’s real. It happens. Right there in front of millions of people the American soul is laid bare, but all they see is the football game and the marvels of electronics, egomania and greed. My job is better than the car wash.”
“But you can write, you have a craft. Write about something else. Foo
tball is the only thing I know how to do.”
“You know how to think,” Tommy said. “You’ve learned to survive. That’s why you’re on the field and everybody else sits and watches.”
“Not everybody else.” Taylor spat again and thought. “Wendy for instance.”
“A hell of a lot of them,” Tommy said. “Everybody who is not part of the game watches. From some perspective.” Tommy thumped his bony chest. “I have been lots of places in the world, and people know two things about America: Western movies and American football.”
“And I still say why bother?”
“People deserve to know. If they want to know.”
“I’m people. I already know. The people in the stands and watching on television don’t want to know. They watch that shit all week on the job with their union, their bosses, their presidents. They’re not interested.” Taylor was speaking hard, tense and straining, making his throat hurt. “The network knows, but they are delivering millions of buyers and get big bucks for something to happen each week. I can shoot the President and the only person to miss the game will be the President.”
Tommy shook his head. “The spectator should understand the cost of the juice ... the cost to produce this spectacle.”
“They understand. They pay part of that cost, and not just for after-shave. The fan knows what part of himself he’s surrendering and for how long and what feeling he gets in return. That’s the spectacle. I watch them, so for that matter I’m a spectator too.” Taylor leaned back and tried to relax. He was angry at Tommy. “Don’t get news as entertainment confused with news about entertainment. That’s as different as going to church and discussing religion.”
“I wrote my articles for you to read just like I write for a fan. I only supply my half of the story; the reader supplies the other.”
“Old news.” Taylor spat in the bucket just for the hell of it.
“But news, and not old to lots of people. Wendy, to use your example.”
“You don’t have to risk winding up in the trunk of your car just to get that news to me. You see what good it did Bobby Hendrix.”
“I didn’t do it for you, I did it for me. But it’s there for anyone who wants it!” Tommy’s bony face twisted into a painful grimace. “Bobby Hendrix didn’t tell me anything. It’s not my fault!” Frustration filled his eyes with tears. “Goddam you, Taylor, I didn’t kill him!” Tommy wiped his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” Taylor spat, “it wasn’t your fault. I shouldn’t have said that about Bobby.”
Tommy’s eyes were sore; he was tired and unhappy. “Being casual conspirators operating on half truths will put you and Wendy ...”
“It all seems so unreal,” Taylor said. “The whole goddam mess is incomprehensible.”
“When I was a kid,” Tommy said, “I used to spend Saturdays with my grandfather. I loved my grandfather. He was big and happy, knew how to carve wood ... make things. Told me stories about West Texas and how he was on a trail drive once.” Tommy smiled at the memory, then rubbed the smile away. He kept looking out the stone ranch house window like a man expecting unwelcome company. “But every Saturday afternoon at four o’clock ... I remember it was four o’clock because that was how I learned to tell time. I learned by hating a specific hour. I hated four o’clock on Saturday.”
Taylor laughed and it quickly degenerated into a cough; he alternately laughed and coughed and spat bright red again.
“Wrestling. From Fort Worth at four o’clock,” Tommy said. “It didn’t matter what we were doing; no matter how much fun we were having, Grandpa would get out that old pocket watch, and if it was close to four o’clock, we stopped and went to the house, turned on the television and watched masked men and midgets and women and Indians and fags wrestle each other in some television studio in Fort Worth.”
Taylor stifled his laughter and coughing.
“I never could get my grandfather to believe wrestling was fake.” Tommy shook his kinky head. “He loved it. I tried everything I could think of to discredit wrestling. Old Grandpa always believed it was real. It sure fucked up a lot of Saturday afternoons. To this day I’m still not crazy about four o’clock.”
Taylor was working his jaws and licking his lips. “Is that why you’re going to all this trouble? It seems like a fairly straightforward case of overcompensation.” He looked down into the red-splattered bucket.
“If you try and take over the Franchise”—Tommy looked to the red-cast ridge—“I’m going to write about it. And I want to be close to it.”
“I don’t want to be close to it. Where’d you pick up that rumor?”
“I never get tired of listening and I never reveal my sources,” Tommy said. “And I don’t get tired of writing. Maybe I can help.”
“I’m tired of it all and I’m coughing blood,” Taylor replied. “Who’s Deep Threat? And how good is he?”
“I can’t say. It’s a truth you don’t need.” Tommy turned back to watch the sunset. “You know, it’s funny,” he said. “My grandfather always believed wrestling from Fort Worth, but you couldn’t convince him that men walked on the moon. He believed wrestling and died convinced the Apollo missions were television fakery. But God! How that old man loved Wahoo MacDaniel.”
JUNKIES AND PREACHERS
“HE’S GONNA SIGN everything over to that goddam Billy Joe Hardesty and his electric church,” Suzy Ballard Chandler told A.D. Koster. They were in the kitchen of the Hot Springs Ranch headquarters. It was ten P.M. Cyrus Chandler had doddered and drooled off to bed about eight-thirty. Suzy had the wetback woman tend Cyrus and give him his Lasix and Valium, which he took dutifully without question.
“I thought the idea was to keep Cyrus away from people,” A.D. said. “How does he spend so much time with Billy Joe Hardesty?”
“Billy Joe’s got his own plane.”
“Jesus.” A.D. whistled softly. “An air force.”
“He flies in without warning. The preacher smells blood. I never should have let ’em marry us on television. Billy Joe brings a video tape of the ceremony and a video tape player. He had titles made up. ‘The Son of Amos Chandler Meets the Son of God.’ It did something to Cyrus to see it on television. I can’t control him around Billy Joe.”
“Tell Billy Joe Hardesty that you’ll shoot his Bible-believin’ ass off if he ever sets foot here again,” A.D. said. “If he shows up, have the son of a bitch arrested.”
Suzy laughed bitterly. “He’s already got a taped sermon on how Sister Susan is keeping Brother Cyrus prisoner, is not allowing him to keep his pledge and is endangering his immortal soul. He showed it to me while Cyrus took a nap.”
A.D. whistled. “He outsmarted you! I’ll be damned.”
Suzy’s eyes flared and she punched the Texas Pistols general manager twice on the ear. A.D.’s head snapped from side to side. His ear went numb, then began to ring.
“Goddam, Suzy.” He ducked into his shoulder. “Knock it off.”
“That’s what I’m tryin’ to do!” Suzy bounced two hard shots off A.D.’s biceps, but he kept his chin buried and his hands up and she knew she wouldn’t get another clean shot at his head.
She hit him two right roundhouses in the ribs and back, breaking blood vessels in the triceps.
“Smart preacher, you say?” She gave him a parting jab. “This guy has lawyers and time on the satellite. He isn’t a virgin in getting money out of old people.” Suzy gnawed at her thumbnail. “You know what I mean?”
“Yeah,” he replied and relaxed, dropping his guard.
When she saw the opening, Suzy hit A.D. in the jaw, knocking him loose of his chair.
They stayed in the kitchen all night, trying to figure out what to do about Billy Joe Hardesty. A.D. was black and blue by the next morning; Cyrus Chandler got out of bed singing:
This story has a moral
Like a song must have an end
Junkies and preachers ...
A man don’t need for friends.
&nb
sp; He had no idea how long he had been at the hot springs.
GOOD GUYS AND BAD GUYS
TAYLOR RETURNED TO HIS apartment to pick up his mail and some clothes.
The answering service had several messages.
“Red Kilroy has called twice. He said it was urgent,” the girl said. “The league commissioner’s office called. And Speedo Smith. I was so sorry to hear about Bobby Hendrix. How’s Ginny?” She knew all about Taylor’s life and he had never seen her.
Taylor called Speedo first.
“I’ll pick up my momma and fall by your crib,” Speedo said. “A.D. just renegotiated my contract, gave me a big bump every year for three years and a fifty-five-thousand-dollar bonus. I got me a fine fur, a little toot and some new wheels. They got more money than even Dudley says they got, and he says they got a lot.”
Taylor dialed Red Kilroy’s private number in his soundproofed windowless office in the basement of his house.
“Can’t talk on the phone,” Red said. There was no need to remind the head coach where he was or who he was working for and against. “Call me back in an hour from a pay phone.” Red had every known security device, and Dobermans patrolling his fenced yard. He was one of Major Jack “Pat” Garrett’s first clients.
“I can’t, Red, I got people coming over.”
“Okay, okay,” Red said. The sound of a film projector rattled in the background. “I’ll be here all week long. Day and night. Until Saturday. I promised the old lady I’d take her to the movies that night. Can you believe she’s making me go look at more film? Sunday the coaches come over and we set plans for the rookies’ mini-camp.” Red paused. The sound of the projector changed as the coach began running the film backward to review something he thought he saw. “You call from a secure phone later and come over,” Red continued. “When you get here, don’t get out of the car—just honk. I don’t want my dogs eating my quarterback. Get here quick. We have a lot to plan.”