Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream (3 page)

After tonight, Boobie knew the fans would be hack in his
corner extolling him once again, the young kids who were
counting off the years until their own sun-kissed moment excitedly whispering to one another as he walked down the street or
through the mall. There he is! That's Boobie! There he is! The bigtime college recruiters would come charging back as well, the
boys from Nebraska and Texas A & M and Arkansas and all the
others who before the injury had come on to him as shamelessly
as a street whore supporting a drug habit, telling him in letter
after letter what a fine-looking thing he was with that six-foot,
two-hundred-pound frame of his and that 4.6 speed in the
forty and how sweet he would look in a uniform in Norman or
College Station or Fayetteville and how he should just stick with
me, sugar, I'll take good care of you. They would all be there pleading for him, just as they had before the knee injury, before his
dreams had so horribly unraveled.

He felt good when he left the little white house that he lived
in, where a green pickup truck sat in the bare, litter-strewn
yard like a wrecked boat washed up on the shore. He felt good
as he made his way out of the Southside part of town, the place
where the low-income blacks and Mexicans lived, and crossed
the railroad tracks as he headed for Permian over on the northeast side of town, the fancy side of town, the white side of town.

He felt good as he walked into the locker room of the
Permian field house that morning and pulled on his jersey with
the number 35 on it. He felt good at the pep rally as he and his
teammates sat at the front of the gym in little metal chairs that
were adorned with dozens of black and white balloons, the
decorations making them look like little boys attending a gigantic birthday party. The wild cheering of the entire student body,
two thousand strong, above him in the bleachers, the sweet hiss
of the pom-poms from the cheerleaders, the sexy preening of
the majorettes in their glittery black costumes with hair as intricately laced as frozen drizzles of ice and their tender Marilyn Monroe smiles, the way the lights dimmed during the playing
of the alma mater, the little gifts of cookies and candy and cakes
from the Pepettes, the pandemonium that broke loose when
defensive back Coddi Dean gave the last lines of his verse-

The moral is obvious, it's plain to see

Tonight at Ratliff Stadium, we're gonna stomp on Lee!

-all these things only energized Boobie Miles even more. The
feeling came back to him now, the cockiness, the "attitude" as
his teammates liked to call it, the self-confidence that had
caused him to gain 1,385 yards the previous season and knock
vaunted linebackers semi-unconscious. As he sat there, surrounded by all that pulsating frenzy, he could envision sitting
in this very same spot a week from now, acknowledging the
cheers of the crowd as he picked up the Superstar of the Week
award from one of the local television stations for his outstanding performance against the Rebels.

"A person like me can't be stopped. If1 put it in my mind, they
can't stop me ... ain't gonna stop me.

"See if I can get a first down. Keep pumping my legs up, spin out
of it, go for a touchdown, go as far as I can."

That's right. That's how it would feel again, getting that ball,
tucking it under his arm, and going forever like someone in the
euphoria of flight. Nothing in the world could ever be like it.
No other thing could ever compare, running down that field in
the glow of those Friday night lights with your legs pumping so
high they seemed to touch the sky and thousands on their feet
cheering wildly as the gap between you and everyone else just
got wider and wider and wider.

After the pep rally he went to class, but it was impossible to
concentrate. He sat there in a daze, the messages of algebra and
biology and English lost to him. Like most of his other teammates on game day, he couldn't be bothered with classes. They
were irrelevant, a sidelight to the true purpose of going to Permian High School: to play football for the Panthers. Only
one thought crossed his mind as he sat in those antiseptic,
whitewashed classrooms until the middle of the afternoon, and
it didn't have anything to do with schoolwork. He desperately
wanted to perform well against Midland Lee, to break tackle
after tackle, to be Boobie once again.

He didn't seem like a high school football player at all, but an
aging prizefighter who knew that if he didn't get a knockout
tonight, if he didn't turn his opponent's face into a bloody pulp,
if he didn't sting and jab and show the old footwork, he was
done, washed up, haunted forever by the promise of what
could have been. Could he regain his former footing as a star?
Or at the age of eighteen, was he already a has-been?

He felt good as he left class for the day and had a few hours
to kill before it was time to go to the field house to suit up.

He felt good.

After classes ended, Jerrod McDougal walked out of school into
the parking lot. It didn't take him long to find his black Chevy
pickup, perhaps the tallest object in all of Odessa with the
thirty-three-inch Desert Dueler treads that made it hard to get
into without a stepladder. He climbed inside the cab amid the
clutter of cassettes and paper cups. He found what he was looking for and did the same thing he did every Friday afternoon
in those lousy waning hours before game time.

The pounding of the drums came on first, then the scream
of "Hey!", then the sound of a guitar like that of ten-inch fingernails sliding up and down a blackboard, then explosive
sounds moving back and forth between the speakers. There
were more guttural yells, more screeching snippets of guitar,
then the sudden, ominous wail of an organ that kept building
and building and made his heart beat a little faster.

The guitars dug into his ears and the lyrics poured into his
veins like liquid fire, the louder the better, the angrier the better, every sound aimed to strike right at the top of the skull and
just rattle up there for a little while, get trapped in there, like a
ball bouncing repeatedly off a wall:

Thank God for Bon jovi.

McDougal closed the tiny eyes of his face and leaned his head
against the back of the seat. He waited to see if the feeling
would be there, as it had been a couple of weeks ago when
Permian had beaten the hell out of the Bulldogs, had taught
them a thing or two about having the fucking nerve to step on
the same field with the Panthers, the Boys in Black. And it was,
yes it was, a series of chills shooting down his hack straight to
his spine like lightning splitting a tree, a tingling feeling that
both reassured and excited him. And at that moment, at that
very moment, he knew there was no way that Permian could
lose to Midland Lee tonight, no fucking way, not as long as he
was alive.

It was all that mattered to him, not because it was a ticket to
anything or a way out of this town that held as many secrets as
the back of his hand. Long before, when he had stopped growing at five nine, he had put away all lofty dreams of playing for
the University of Texas, or anywhere else for that matter. He
knew that all he was, when you got to the core of it, was an
offensive tackle with a lot of heart but little natural ability.

After the season there would be plenty of time to think about
college and careers and all that other stuff that a high school
senior might want to start thinking about. But not now, not
when the most important moment of his life was about to take
place. Friday night is what he lived for, bled for, worked so
hard for. It sure as hell wasn't school, where he shuffled from
one creampuff course to another. It wasn't the prospect of
going into the oil business either, where he had watched his
father's company, built with sweat and tears, slide through the
continued depression in oil prices.

Thank God for Bon Jovi.

The tingling sensation stayed with him, and he knew that
when he stepped on that field tonight he wouldn't feel like a
football player at all but like someone much more powerful entering a glittering, barbaric arena.

"It's like the gladiators" was the way he once described it. "It's
like the Christians and the lions, like Caesar standing up there
and saying yay or nay. There's nineteen thousand fans in the
stands and they can't do what you're doing, and they're all
cheering for one thing, they're cheering for you. Man, that's a
high no drug or booze or woman can give you."

He pulled back into the school parking lot. He left his pickup
and entered the locker room of the field house where everything had been laid out the night before with the meticulousness of a Christmas display window, the shoes and the shoulder
pads and the socks and the pants all in their proper places, the
helmets fresh and gleaming from the weekly hand cleaning by
one of the student trainers.

Mike Winchell hated these moments in the field house, wandering around in his uniform as the minutes dripped away
with excruciating slowness. Secretly he wished that he could be
knocked out and not wake up until five minutes before game
time when there was no longer any time to dwell on it. He was
the quarterback and that gave him a certain status, because just
about everybody in town knew who the quarterback was and
the novelty of having his picture in the local paper had worn off long ago. But with all the responsibilities-learning the audible calls and the three-play packages, not getting fooled by
that overshifted defense the Rebels liked to run-it was hard
not to feel overwhelmed.

He awoke early that day, in the darkness of the shabby house
on Texas Avenue that shamed him so much he wouldn't even
let his girlfriend enter it. In silence he had carefully wrapped
up some toast and bacon in paper towels so he would have
something to eat when he got to school. Then he got his mother
up so she could drive him there since, unlike most kids at
Permian High School, he didn't have his own car. They barely
said anything to each other, because he hated questions about
the game. When she dropped him off she whispered, "Good
luck," and then left.

Once he got to school he had to go to the pep rally, where his
long, angular face, framed by balloons, had a look of delicate
sadness as haunting as a Diane Arbus photograph. It was a fascinating face, Huck Finnish, high-cheekboned, yet somehow
devoid of expression, the eyes flat and deadened against the
roar and tumult that surrounded him, impervious to it, unable
to react.

He welcomed going to class afterward, finding relief in the
equations spread across the blackboard in algebra II, glad to
have something else filling his head besides the thousand and
one things that were expected of him. But outside class the
pressure intensified again, the Lee game hovering over him like
a thundercloud, the incessant questions of the students as he
walked through the halls driving him crazy and offering him
no escape.

Everyone seemed uptight to him, even the teachers who
always dressed up in black on game day. When he walked
through the halls of school during the season it wasn't as a
proud gladiator, but instead he seemed enveloped in an almost
painful shyness, his head ducked to the side and his eyes shifting furtively, fending off questions with one-word answers, es pecially hating it when people came up to him and asked, "Do
y'all think you're gonna win?"

He had first started as a junior, and back then he had been
so nervous that the butterflies started on Tuesdays. In the
huddle his hands shook. Teammates looked at him and wondered if he was going to make it. But this season he was leading
the district in passing and had cut his interceptions down to
almost none. A big game against the Rebels would be further
vindication, further proof that he had what it took to be a college quarterback in the Southwest Conference.

There could have been other options for him. During the
season he had gotten a letter from Brown expressing interest
in him because he was not only a decent quarterback but a good
student. But for Winchell, who had never been east of the
Texas-Louisiana border, the mere idea scared him to death.
Rhode Island? Where in God's name was Rhode Island? He
looked on a map and there it was, halfway across the earth, so
tiny it could move into West Texas overnight and no one would
ever know it, taking its anonymous place beside Wink and Kermit and Notrees and Mentone.