The Franchise

by Peter Gent

  “What the hell?” Ox Wood turned to Taylor when he saw the dead cat fly through the air and knock the full-breasted brunette flat on her face. “Why would anybody do something that sick?”

  “Maybe it’s tax deductible.”

  Two men jumped onto the field and started to run for the Pistols’ bench. One carried a gun in his hand. The dogs had both men in seconds. The gun turned out to be an official Texas Pistols pistol made of purple plastic.

  It was at that point that Taylor Jefferson Rusk began to sidle toward the double row of dogs that led to the locker rooms. He walked slowly with apparent unconcern but in dead earnest and a straight line. He had just reached the dogs when someone in the crowd lit a Roman candle and began launching fireballs at the head linesman. Keeping his head down, protecting his eyes, Taylor speeded up his walk and broke into a jog. Something clanged off his headgear. It was a Grapette bottle, but he didn’t slow up.

  As he ducked through the door into the tunnel, he thought he heard gunfire or firecrackers. He slowed to a walk and was immediately accosted by the network girl.

  “Say”—she pressed what looked like a hearing aid into her ear—“you owe me an interview. Red Kilroy promised that you would talk to us before the game.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Taylor smiled politely and kept moving toward the locker room. “I drove right past you before the game and you never said a thing.”

  “When was that?” She looked puzzled, then suddenly cocked her head and pressed the small earphone farther into her auditory canal. “What? I can’t hear you.”

  Taylor kept moving and she walked along, yelling to the director in the truck.

  “What? I can’t ... oh ... oh, all right.... That’s better.... I got him right here.” She reached over and grabbed Taylor’s arm, as if to prove what she was saying. “No, I don’t know where the crew went.... The sound man got hit in the eye with a hot dime.... What? ... I can’t.... Okay.... Okay, you’re coming back loud and clear. Are you sure there’s a camera? ... I’ll ask him.” She turned to Taylor. “There’s a camera set up in your locker room. Could we do a quick interview right away? They’ve had to stop the game and clear the field of chickens.”

  “Chickens?” Taylor tried to sound unsurprised. “How many chickens?”

  “How many chickens?” She repeated the question into her microphone, then tilted her head, waiting for an answer. She nodded her head several times and listened. She looked back at Taylor. “Lots of chickens.”

  “How long will it take?”

  “Not long. I just have a couple questions.”

  “I mean, how long to clear off the chickens?”

  “How long to clear off the chickens?” she yelled into the microphone. She waited a moment, then her head snapped up. “There’s no reason to use that kind of language. He wanted to know, so I asked you.” She listened but looked up at Taylor and rolled her eyes.

  They were rapidly approaching the locker room.

  “We’re at the Pistols’ dressing room now,” she said into the mike.

  Taylor grimaced.

  “No kidding?” She turned to Taylor, “The dogs have started killing the chickens. They have to cut to something else quick.” She picked up her pace, her heels clicking on the concrete. “I’ll want to ask you about the strike that Terry Dudley mentioned and then of course all about the drug situation.”

  They reached the Pistols’ locker room door.

  “Well, first, it wasn’t a strike at all, the pitch was low and outside.” Taylor opened the door for the broadcaster and let her walk into the dressing room. “And you’ll have to get your own drugs.” He closed the door, continued down the hall and around the corner and ducked into Red Kilroy’s private suite.

  When the network girl looked around, she was alone in the locker room with a camera crew and two boys whose job was to pick up jocks, socks, dirty clothes and old tape.

  It was almost about the same.

  Once inside Red’s private suite, Taylor locked the door from the inside and turned on the television. The game had not ended yet, although the dogs had just about cleaned up the chickens.

  The network girl was on the screen in the empty Pistols’ locker room.

  “I had Taylor Rusk, the Pistols’ sensational quarterback, with me just a moment ago.”

  It sounded to Taylor like something from the Park City High Yearbook.

  “I’m certain he’ll be right back.” She pressed her fingers in her ear. “Unofficially we have him passing for over six hundred yards, which is certainly a new Super Bowl record. He ... he ...” Someone was talking into her earphone and confounding her. “... threw for a touchdown eight times.... I mean ... he threw for eight touchdowns, not the same touchdown eight times....” She snorted a giggle. “But of course you know ... well, any ...” She pressed against the earphone again. “What? ... all right....” She looked back into the camera. “Play is resuming with fifty-eight seconds on the clock and we are returning to the field.” She held her smile until the director cut to the midfield action camera.

  Denver still had the ball and was running plays without a huddle. They had no time-outs left. Feathers coated the field and swirled in the air like snow, a blizzard of down and fluff. The players were coated, covered from head to toe with plumage, and occasionally a surviving chicken would dash across the screen.

  “Well, I tell you, Pat,” the announcer said, “it’s been a long time since we’ve seen a game like this.”

  “You can say that again,” the color man replied.

  “There have been others?” Taylor asked the television as he undressed, pulling his jersey over his head. He unsnapped his shoulder pads and the flak jacket he had had custom-made after watching one quarterback play in Houston without a rib cage. He got booed and generally publicly humiliated for his trouble. Near the end of his time, the quarterback was taking twenty-four Xylocaine shots a game in the ribs and finally had his lung punctured. He gurgled a little but that’s all.

  “Well, you’ve got to give this Denver bunch credit,” the television droned. Taylor looked up to see a close-up of Denver’s quarterback picking feathers off his lip. “They haven’t given up.” The camera angle changed to a shot down the line of scrimmage. Half a chicken lay next to the tight end.

  Taylor unlaced his shoes and kicked them off, then rolled down his knee socks and took them off simultaneously with his sweat socks, unbuckled his purple belt, and unzipped his satin pants, stepped out of them and pulled off his sweat-soaked T-shirt and jock.

  Standing naked in the middle of the room, digging his bare feet into Red’s deep plush carpet, he watched the blizzard of pinfeathers and plume continue unabated on the television.

  “It sure looks cold down there, Pat.”

  “Well, maybe that will satisfy Ox,” Taylor looked around the elaborate, elegantly appointed room that Red Kilroy demanded as the head coach. “Red, you always had style and you could always spend other people’s money. I guess that’s what Dick Conly liked about you.” Taylor looked back at the television: the whirling feathers did make it look cold. “Turn up the air-conditioning, maybe Ox could lose a toe.”

  Taylor turned off the television. He didn’t want to know. He didn’t care. It was over. The high-speed ride had taken a large part of his life, gone in a split second.

  “Warp factor eight Mr. Chekov. It has been a long, strange trip,” Taylor continued talking to himself. “I would probably do it again, but I will not do it anymore.”

  The locker room would be chaos for at least two hours after the game ended. The network insisted that the hour-long postgame show originate from the locker room of the winning team, which would add to the length and intensity of the postgame madness. Taylor Jefferson Rusk saw no reason to participate any longer.

  He was finished. He had delivered. It was over. There would be no more.

  The dirty, sweaty, smelly, naked quarterback walked gingerly to the purple refrigerator; his feet were always sore after a g
ame on artificial turf. The softness of Red’s expensive carpeting mitigated the tenderness.

  Opening the door and grabbing a quart bottle of Red’s private stock of well water, Taylor took a long drink. Standing by the open door of the refrigerator, Taylor felt a slight chill. The sweat was drying on his skinned and bruised body. He took another long drink as he closed the door and walked to Red’s closet, grabbing a sweat suit and towels and hobbling over to Red’s big leather swivel chair. As he took a long gulping drink of the cold spring water, a shooting pain blazed behind his eye right through the top of his head.

  “Goddam, goddam, goddam.” He pressed his hand into his eye and fell forward against the desk. “Goddam, goddam.” He had drunk the cold water too fast and was now paying the price. He might also get sick as a dog; he did it all the time. The paralyzing, blinding pain finally passed and he raised his head and leaned back in Red’s chair.

  Taylor Rusk spent the next two and one-half hours alone and quiet. For the first time since high school, he enjoyed the day’s victory without thought of tomorrow. Because it was not by the next game that he would be judged, it was this game. His last.

  Today.

  Not tomorrow.

  He did not have to pay the horrible price of living in the future. He rushed nothing into the past; he relished the moment, the memory of today. He no longer dismissed his greatness or dwelled on his mistakes, for there was nothing to prepare for. No future; he could think about the joy of the game just finished, the game just created. Something from nothing—and he was no longer required to destroy the masterpiece in order to keep it from interfering with the next masterpiece. He was keeping this one. This one was the last.

  “I am here now. Finally.” He smiled and drank the water. “Price paid and the privilege earned.”

  He sat there sipping water and easing his nervous system off the adrenaline overload. The familiar depression set in. the automatic fright, the built-in system that made certain he would be able to confront the horror of the void the next time and the next. The specter of the dreamless sleep, the melancholy that warned of relaxing, dropping too far, leaving him without the quickness of resource to create and recreate, spinning gold from straw, pulling elephants from headgear. Life in gear, the engine running, the clutch engaged. He had built his engine for speed. The fast track. No time for warm-up or tune-up, just hit the accelerator, pop the clutch, blow out the carbon and run and run and run.

  Taylor Rusk had spent years developing the system that was his body and its component parts. Just as he knew how fast to run it without blowing up, he knew how slow to idle without shutting down completely, maybe never to start again. He wasn’t even sure he had a starter: He had never shut completely down before. He had no idea what would happen.

  There was only one way to find out.

  And there in Red Kilroy’s plush suite in the Pistol Dome, in a confusion of joy, melancholy, excitement, fear and exhaustion, Taylor Rusk, for the first time since he had left Two Oaks, shut himself down completely.

  He felt it drain from him, the force, the hydraulics slipping away, losing the prime, certain he could never pump it up again. He fought panic as the pressure drained, then he felt peace. After the damage of a lifetime riding the clutch, waiting for the flag to drop, he let go completely, fully, shut down cold.

  Taylor Jefferson Rusk leaned back and smiled, took himself down off the cross and put himself up on blocks.

  THE TAILGATE PARTY

  THE COLORADO FANS HAD decided to go inside the Pistol Dome forty-five minutes before kickoff. They filled several large military canteens with vodka and orange juice on a one-to-one basis: one bottle of vodka for every orange.

  The man wanted his black cowboy hat returned, but Lamar said there was a state law against wearing hats inside domed stadiums. The man was disappointed; the fantasy of himself in the big black hat was a sustaining motive during the long drive down, but he reluctantly agreed that it would be unwieldy anyplace else but on his head. Lamar assured him that once he entered the dome, his head was the one place he would not be allowed to place his huge black hat.

  The wife wanted to lock the Winnebago, but Lamar suggested they leave the van open and he would just sit right there and protect it and would not have to go off in search of a bathroom.

  The Denver fans exchanged hesitant glances.

  “... but if you all would feel better locking her up, that’s fine with me.” Lamar began to remove the big lumberjack shirt they had loaned him, making certain they saw his SSI badge and got the full effect of the man in uniform.

  “Oh, come on, honey,” the man said. “If we can’t trust Bobby Ray, here, who can we trust?”

  “It’s a fair question, ma’am,” said Lamar Jean Lukas, a.k.a. Bobby Ray Collins. “If you can’t trust the law, who can you trust?”

  The answer was nobody.

  Lamar would let them learn that on their own. Besides, he wasn’t going to steal anything, and if everything went according to plan, the Winnebago would be safe and sound.

  Lamar watched the Colorado people weave toward the stadium and listened to the cacophony of the growing traffic jam that eventually turned the access roads, side streets and a large portion of the freeway into a parking lot.

  Lamar Jean Lukas lay back on the chaise and studied the Insiders’ lot, deciding on a simple plan of action.

  The exit from the lot ran along the dome wall. When a car exited the lot, the driver was required to insert a special plastic card in the automatic gate opener. The theory was that having to use the card not only to get in but to get out doubly protected the wealthy and privileged. They could enjoy the game relieved of the constant worry that roving car-theft rings of Negroes, Mexicans, Cubans or Haitian boat people would make off with their limousines the moment their drivers went to piss or snort cocaine.

  Paranoia was highly marketable.

  When a car stopped at the exit gate and the driver opened his window to insert the card, the right side of the vehicle was no more than a foot from the dome wall, making it impossible to open the doors on that side. If at that moment for any reason anyone wanted to leave the car, they would have to use the doors on the left side—either the driver’s or rear passenger door.

  And that led them toward Lamar.

  After the game kickoff Lamar moved the card table to the back, just beneath the awning that shaded the entire side of the van.

  Facing the Insiders’ lot exit, he put a green and white webbed lawn chair by the table. He picked up the purple duffel bag with the cheap silkscreen on the side and stepped inside the Winnebago. Sitting in the booth, which folded down into an exceptionally uncomfortable bed, he placed the bag on a red table. Outside, people continued to arrive, walking from cars long abandoned.

  Opening the bag, Lamar removed the surgical gloves, pulled them on, then checked the contents he had so carefully prepared earlier at Taylor’s apartment.

  The Super Bowl ticket from Tiny Walton lay elegantly oversize on top. The ducat was beautifully printed in four colors with the section row and seat numbers on the bottom. A schematic line drawing of the stadium was printed on the reverse side. Lamar turned the ticket over in his hands, cherishing the feel of it, studying the design, remembering all that it would have meant to him all those years ago when he first became a Texas season ticket holder. One of the very first and very few. The heavy coated paper made the colors shine, and Lamar considered the ticket a minor work of art.

  “I’ll be damned,” he said softly when he checked the numbers at the bottom against the schematic on the back. “Fifty-yard-line seats. Fifty-goddam-yard-line seats for a cheap thug killer.”

  Removing the gin bottles filled with the fifty-fifty mix of kerosene and gasoline, he carefully unwrapped the stolen toweling. He tore the towel into strips, which he would use as wicks for the Molotov cocktails in the gin bottles.

  Then he lifted out the rubber sleeves filled with the homemade napalm. Using gaffer’s tape, he attached
to the inner tubing the homemade fuses of gun and aluminum powder. Beneath each of these homemade fire packets Lamar slipped a cherry bomb, fastening it with tape so that the bomb would explode after the homemade fuse had ignited the gelatinous mixture of soap paste, gasoline and kerosene, hopefully blowing the burning gel over a wider area—about the size of a stretch limousine.

  Rummaging through the drawers, he found several T-shirts, which he tied off at the neck and sleeves, putting one bomb in each with the fuse exposed through a small hole punched in each shirt.

  He kept one tube of napalm separate with no fuse.

  He checked his pistol and the speed loaders, then checked the small .22 rifle.

  The railroad flares were his final backup in case none of his homemade fuses or wicks worked and the timing was off on the cherry bombs.

  Near the end of the third quarter Lamar refilled his bag and stepped out of the van, walked back to the card table and placed the heavy bag beside the green and white webbed chair.

  He sat and studied the grade at the Insiders’ lot exit; it had a slight downslope toward the dome wall, which meant if he failed to hit the target with his Molotov cocktails, he should try and throw short, allowing the flaming liquid to flow down under the car. Then he took the single unfused sleeve of homemade napalm and walked over to the gate, laying it against the fence. The black rubber blended perfectly into the asphalt.

  Back at the table, while he waited and watched the elevator door, he taped the Super Bowl ticket to one of the gin bottles. It seemed like the best way to return it to Tiny.

  Lamar was startled by a couple of false alarms as the end of the game drew near and people began to exit the elevator that fed into the Insiders’ lot.

  When the Cobianco brothers and Tiny did step out into the gathering night, Lamar Jean Lukas was calm and ready to perform. He remained remarkably collected as he set out the contents of the bag and prepared for Tiny and the Cobianco brothers’ limousine to try to get out of the Insiders’ lot.