by Tim Tharp
“What's going on?” I said, still standing in the doorway like maybe I shown up at the wrong place somehow.
“Well, don't look so surprised,” she said. “Can't a mother throw a little celebration for her boy when he plays the best game of football this town's ever seen? Now shut the door and come on over here and give your mom a hug.”
I went ahead and done like she said, but that hug felt a little on the stiff side, the way hugs do, I guess, when you don't get a lot of practice in on them. So far, I still hadn't quite figured out what was going on, but then Mom introduced the man next to her. His name was Tommy Don Coleridge. He'd played him a little football back in the day, and he was the one that thought I had such a good game out there tonight.
So that's it, I thought. Mom met her a big football fan, so now she's fixing to be one too.
Tommy Don gave me a big friendly smile and a firm handshake, but not one of them vise-grip handshakes like Jim Houck tried on me. There wasn't nothing for him to prove since he was a pretty big boy hisself, every bit as tall as me, and I'm six foot four. With that long gray hair swept back behind his ears and them happy crinkles around his eyes, he was a far cry from the old hotshot car salesman. I had him figured for a house painter, the way he was dressed—denim work shirt, faded blue jeans, and old work boots all spattered up with different colors of paint.
“I'll tell you what,” Tommy Don said. “That game you played out there tonight was the best I've seen in high school football. And I've seen some pretty good games.”
Mom put her hand up on his shoulder. “Tommy Don used to play right here in Kennisaw, and now he's moved back to town for a while, and it was the funniest thing.” She let out one of her little girly giggles. “There I was working at the store and just happened to look up and here he came strolling in big as you please right up to the counter where I was working.”
Same old story. That dollar store might just as well have been a professional dating service, the way my mom worked it. Right then, I even felt a little bad for Tommy Don Coleridge. Six months tops before she'd dump him like she done all the others.
Thing was, though, you couldn't feel sorry for Tommy Don for long. He was just too confident and comfortable with his-self for that. Instead of Mom shooing me off to the back room like usual, we all set down to the coffee-table snacks, and he went to telling stories and cracking jokes that made you feel like you known him for ten years instead of ten minutes. Football talk wasn't the half of it neither. Once we got that out of the way, it was fishing and rock climbing, scuba diving and flying. Then Italy and museums, books, paintings, and concerts. He'd seen Fleetwood Mac three times live. I thought Mom was fixing to faint dead away into the bean dip when she heard that one.
But Tommy Don didn't do all the talking. No sir. He had a way of keeping everyone included in the conversation, asking the kind of questions you wanted to answer instead of cringing over. No one was left out with Tommy Don around. By the time he finally said he'd better get moving along, that old room done felt like something it hadn't really been since the first day we moved in—a family room.
Later, when I was laying in bed, I just about couldn't stop grinning. This was one of the best days I could remember. First, I got out there and played the game of my life, and now maybe my mom had finally found her someone decent that she could get back to being her old self around. Someone she could stick with. And I figured if she could do it, I could find me a someone like that too. Matter of fact, if I hadn't done blown it, I might've found her already.
For a long time, football was about the only thing in my life that seemed like anything could come of it. Now the whole world was a great big garden fixing to bloom right up to my eyebrows. And that feeling lasted clean through all my dreams that night and through the morning before it finally come unraveled the next afternoon.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Saturday afternoons Blaine and me was allowed in the Rusty Nail Tavern out on Route Thirty-three so we could watch the college games in there with the grown men. There wasn't nothing fancy about the Nail and that's a fact. A couple of raggedy beer-stained pool tables, a dartboard, and posters of beer girls in bikinis up on the walls. Everything was pretty dingy except for the big-screen TV. They spent them some tall dollars on that bad boy.
You couldn't help but feel like you was riding high, setting in there with the men in their flannel shirts and fishing caps. Norman the bartender even let us split a pitcher of beer, but I didn't drink no more than a sip, so Blaine got the most of it. That day, after our win over Sawyer, the whole place was about as rowdy as a box full of wild dogs. Beer bottles rattling, smoke swirling around under the ceiling fans, the TV cranked up high, and men's voices cranked up higher than that. Several of them old boys was waving copies of the morning sports page around, quoting off their favorite lines and making up some of their own. Boy howdy. A stranger walking in would've thought someone just won a world championship, a Cadillac, and a date with Miss America all at the same time.
The only one that wasn't about fit to sail over the roof was Blaine. Problem was, none of them sports pages from the big city papers or even the Kennisaw Sun gave him the kind of credit he figured he deserved. We'd got together that morning to pick us up some copies of the Oklahoma City and Tulsa papers and set down at Sweet's Café to read them out loud to each other over a couple big stacks of blueberry pancakes. Now, I ain't going to get to bragging over the stories them papers done on me, but let me just say they was pretty durn good. Blaine, though, wasn't none too happy over how they shortchanged him.
“Can you believe these fools?” he said, slamming the sports page down on the tabletop so hard the saltshaker just about jumped over the syrup. “They hardly even mentioned me, and this one here got my name spelled wrong.”
“What do you mean?” I said. “They wrote up the whole thing about you throwing that long bomb and diving over the goal line for the game winner. See, it's right here.”
“Yeah, but there oughta be more than that. Guy wins the damn game, you oughta have a whole article on him the way they got them extra ones on you.”
“Aw,” I said. “It ain't that big a deal. They just wrote me up a little bit more 'cause they'd done built up on who was better, me or James Thunderhorse.”
“Buncha yokels.” Blaine looked down at the paper, shaking his head at it like it was the pitifulest thing he ever seen. “I just hope there was some college scouts out there. Anyone who really understands football's gonna know who saved our undefeated season for us.”
So you can bet Blaine wasn't joining in when the Rusty Nail boys started flashing their newspapers around, and it didn't get no better when J. M. Pierce set down at our table and asked me whuther I heard from Coach Huff yet today.
I told him I was out all morning and hadn't heard from nobody, and he just looked at me and said, “Man alive, son, you mean to say you don't know OU and OSU both called him this morning wanting game film on you?”
Blaine perked up at that. “Who said?”
“He said. Coach Huff hisself. I talked to him not more'n an hour ago.”
“Well,” I said, “if they wanted game film, then I'm sure they didn't want it just on me.”
J. M. gaped at me like I was crazy. “Who else would they want it for?”
“The whole team probably.” I glanced over at Blaine, but he turned away.
“I tell you what, Hamp,” Carl Avery put in over my shoulder. “Don't pay no attention to them OSU boys. You go on up to OU. That's where you need to be. At the top of the top.”
“That's right,” J. M. said. “After that game last night you can write your own ticket to any program you want to go to.”
That got the others to flapping their lips, agreeing with Carl. And that was all right. It's good to have folks on your side like that, but then J. M. had to go and clap Blaine on the shoulder and say, “You know what, son? You better be good to Hampton. Maybe he'll put in a word for you with some of them OU scouts when the
time comes.”
Blaine flinched away from J. M.'s hand a little, like maybe it was infected with the chicken pox or something, but he didn't say anything back. He just locked his jaws and stared into the side of his beer mug.
“Hey now,” I said. “Blaine ain't got nothing to worry about.” It was weird. All the sudden my voice sounded like it belonged to somebody else. I wasn't used to talking up in a group of men that way. Blaine usually did most of the talking for both of us. “In case none of y'all noticed,” I went on, “Blaine's the one scored the winning points last night.”
“Yeah,” Carl said. “After you put him down there on the one-yard line.”
A couple of the others chimed in with how they hadn't never seen nothing like the way I handled James Thunder-horse down there at the goal line, and J. M. said, “Besides, it don't matter if we noticed who scored that touchdown. The real question is, did the scouts notice?”
That got a couple of laughs and a hoot out of Carl, so I set right up straight and said, “I'll tell y'all what, if it wasn't for Blaine, old James Thunderhorse would've probably tore me up worse than an alligator gar on a minnow. Blaine taught me everything about football I know. I wouldn't even be playing on this team if it wasn't for him.”
“Maybe they oughta train him to be a coach, then,” Carl said, “ 'cause he sure ain't fast enough for a running back.”
Some more laughs come on that one, and J. M. gave Blaine's shoulder a nudge. “Hey, maybe Oral Roberts University will call up, wanting game film on you.”
“Now, Jim,” Carl said. “You know Oral Roberts ain't got a football team.”
“I know, but they might want him for the glee club. Haw!”
The whole room went to guffawing over that, but still Blaine set there without a word, just white-knuckle squeezing on that beer mug so hard you would've thought it was fixing to bust right in his hand.
“Now wait a minute.” I tried to get as much force into my voice this time as I could. “Them colleges better keep in mind that me and Blaine's a team. Always have been since I moved here. And I ain't about to go off to no school that don't see that. 'Cause I tell you what, the two of us are un-stoppable. Anywhere, anytime. Ain't that right, Blaine?”
“Sure,” he said, still not looking up. “That's right.”
“Damn right, that's right,” I said.
“Just do me this one favor.” Blaine finally raised his head and looked me straight in the eye. “Tell your mom not to drag that fool she was with last night out to any more of our games. He don't belong there.”
That just about knocked me out of my chair. Maybe Blaine didn't warm up too good to the idea of me trying to take up for him, but that wasn't no call to turn around and snap out something about my mother.
“Who you talking about?” I said when I got my tongue to working again.
Blaine's eyes narrowed to little slits. “You know who I'm talking about.”
“Your mom was out with someone at the game?” Carl asked. He sounded jealous. There was a time when he tried getting Mom to go out with him, but for all the men she dated, she never did include no married ones in there.
“You must be talking about Tommy Don Coleridge,” Norman the bartender said. “I seen him out there with her. I didn't even know he was back in town.”
“He's back, all right,” J. M. said. “I heard he come back broke and had to move in with his old man.”
“That figures,” Norman said.
“Wasn't he a Buddhist for a while?” Carl asked, but no one jumped in to verify that one.
“He always was a crazy bastard,” Norman said. “I'm surprised he's even still alive.”
Everything was flying by me so fast, I couldn't hardly grab ahold of any of it, but I knew what they was saying didn't sound the first thing like the man I met yesterday.
“He seemed all right to me,” I said, shooting a quick glance towards Blaine. He just set there, turning his beer mug in a little circle on the table, a look in his eyes like he had more on his mind than he was coming out with right now.
“Don't let Tommy Don Coleridge fool you,” Haywood Ritter said from the next table over. With that white walrus mustache and them wild bushy eyebrows, Haywood was the oldest one in the room, and he was the most respected out of any of them too. Not 'cause of his age but 'cause he was the cousin of T. Roy Strong. “I wouldn't trust Tommy Don any farther than I can spit,” he said.
“Maybe he's changed since you knew him,” I said, but old Haywood shook his head.
“People don't change.”
“That's right,” Blaine added for good measure. “Once you're a loser, you're always a loser.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
On the ride home from the Rusty Nail, I didn't have nothing to say to Blaine till we turned down Mission Road, and then I just had to come right out and ask it. “Why'd you say that about my mom back there?”
Blaine kept on staring ahead. “I didn't say it about your mom. I said it about that jerk she was with. You needed to know what kind of company she's keeping.”
“You didn't have to say nothing in front of everybody like that.” I looked out the side window at the row of run-down gray houses. “Besides, I ain't got no say over who she goes out with.”
“Well, maybe it's about time you did. It might be better for you and everyone else.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I'm talking about how your mom goes running around with different men. You think other people don't notice that? Why do you think we never hardly spent any time over at your place all these years? My folks wasn't exactly crazy about us hanging around our house all the time, you know. They just didn't want me hanging around at your house, with what was going on with your mom and all her dates.”
That got my face to burning hotter than a teakettle right there. I mean, it was one thing for me to question my mom's way with men, but I sure didn't like the idea of other folks doing it. “Who my mom goes out with ain't nobody else's business.”
“Well, you oughta make it your business. You know, them colleges look at more than just your football. They look at your overall reputation too. They don't want no one shining a bad light on their school.”
“You saying I'm shining a bad light somehow?”
“I'm talking about that Tommy Don Clapsaddle character.”
“It's Coleridge.”
“Whatever. My dad told me all about him. He's bad news.”
“What's supposed to be so bad about him?”
Blaine reached over and turned the radio off. “One thing is he used to play football here but turned traitor, took sides against his own team, and sold 'em out quicker than Benedict Arnold sold out to the redcoats. Ended up, he got kicked off the team and then just went totally downhill after that. My dad said he was the only hippie ever to come out of Kennisaw. Probably even sold drugs and everything else. Never did amount to any good, and now he's back sponging off his old man for a place to stay. That's about as pitiful as you can get, if you ask me. He'll probably start hitting your mom up for money. So if you don't think any of that's your business, then you ain't got the sense God gave a dog.”
“How's your dad supposed to know all that?”
“How do you think? He grew up here. He knows. Just like them old boys over at the Nail. You heard what they had to say.”
Blaine pulled Citronella up to the curb in front of my house. For a moment, I set there staring at the dashboard before finally opening the door.
“Hey, I'm just trying to shoot straight with you,” he said.
“Okay.” I didn't look at him.
“We gotta watch out for each other, don't we?”
I didn't say nothing.
“Don't we?”
“Yeah,” I said finally. “That's right. We gotta watch out for each other.”
Inside in the living room, I set down on our old brown couch without even turning the light on. The dim gray in there fit the way I felt good enough. It was tough t
o swallow the idea that the whole time last night with Tommy Don Coleridge was completely phony, but what else was I supposed to think after what Blaine and the Rusty Nail boys said?
Just about then's when I noticed a slip of paper on the coffee table. I picked it up, and for a good long while I just set there staring at the writing on the front. It was a check for a hundred dollars my mom made out to Tommy Don Coleridge. I dropped it down on the table and sank back in them couch cushions. Blaine was right, I thought. Tommy Don didn't waste no time hitting my mom up for money.
Seemed like she must've dropped her guard this time, somehow shook loose of that same old airtight routine she'd stuck to when it come to men. Right after my dad left, she shut herself up in her room every day after work, and I didn't even know what it was she did in there hour after hour. Then one evening, a man in a cowboy hat was setting at the kitchen table. A cowboy hat and jeans and shiny black boots. Turned out he was a welder, but he dipped snuff and talked about rodeos and riding bulls, and next thing you know, there Mom was, decked out in her own western jeans and boots and hat. For six months. Then the cowboy was gone and so was the cowboy outfits.
Next come the greenskeeper/biker, and she dressed in leathers till she threw the biker and the leathers out on the garbage heap, and then the highway patrolman and the long-haul trucker and on and on. It was just about like my real mom never come out of that back room. But this time with Tommy Don, I could've swore it was different. She seemed like her old self again—as much as I could remember what that was, anyways. I sure didn't want to see what would happen if the tables got turned, and it was Mom that got thrown over. After the way Dad done her, she probably couldn't have took it again.