The Franchise (11 page)

“Everyone mentions you,” Taylor said.

“Then you’ve been here before?” Wendy opened the car door; the interior light immediately attracted several varieties of flying insects, some quite large.

Taylor nodded and swung halfheartedly at the bugs invading the car. “Let’s get out and into the house before the big ones come.”

“How are Simon and Buffy?” Wendy led the way into the stone house.

“I haven’t seen them. Simon called from the Longhorn Motel when he found out A.D. had lost the rent money again. He just came over and got his stuff and vanished into the night. Haven’t heard a word since. You talk to Buffy?”

“We’re not that close. She was a loner and spent all her time with Simon. I was president of the house and nobody else wanted to make that horrid drive to Oklahoma.” Wendy opened the back door to the cabin.

“You never answered my question that day.” Taylor knocked down a moth that was flying straight for his eyes. “Do you forgive and not forget ...” They stepped inside, walked through the kitchen into the living room. “... or forget but not forgive?”

“Maybe I forgive
and
forget. Build a fire.” Wendy set her cloth shoulder bag on the table with a familiar clunk, then walked into the south bedroom.

“I find that hard to believe.” Taylor looked into the cloth bag. A pearl-handled, nickel-plated, five-shot, snub-nosed .38 fit snugly in a specially sewn pocket. Grip, handle and trigger quickly accessible, she could shoot the gun without removing it from the purse. “Very hard to believe. I personally forgive but never forget.”

“That’s nice,” Wendy called from the bedroom. “You would make a great pet elephant.”

“The idea is to not make the same mistake twice.”

“You’ll be easy to paper-train.”

Taylor found kindling in a brass woodbox and began constructing a fire in the rock fireplace.

Taylor Rusk and Wendy Cy Chandler spent several days at Doc Webster’s ranch, while back on the river their places on the floats drifted lazily, conspicuously empty in front of everyone on campus and in town.

Hardly anyone forgot or forgave.

“I
WANT COACH
and
general manager.” Red Kilroy sipped his Scotch and looked into the glass while he made his demands of Cyrus Chandler and Dick Conly. “I need complete control and autonomy just like I have over at the University. I will want to bring my whole staff. I want a lot of money and a part of the Franchise, stock options based on an incentive program indexed to wins and losses. I’ll want dental, medical and a slush fund. Otherwise, why should I leave the University?”

“We’ll meet most of your demands,” Dick Conly said, “because you are quite honestly worth it. But you can’t own any stock in the Franchise. The League prefers one owner. It eliminates the chance of public fights. Besides, I don’t want you as a stockholder. You’ll try and squeeze in deeper. I just want you to worry about wins and losses of football games, the evaluation of talent and the development of long-term program strategies and short-term tactics. That’s the job description. It pays four hundred thousand dollars base. We can work out the incentives and bonuses. You’ll like the numbers, but no, you would make a dangerous business partner. You can never be allowed to own. You don’t understand the concepts of balance and order. You always want more, to win, to have.”

“Then why should I leave the University?” Red leaned back smugly, dealing from a certain strength. The University job paid $200,000 plus oil-well overrides, a free house, a television show and endorsements that added another $150,000, three free cars and a slush fund—kept in his office safe—that was estimated at about $300,000, of which $100,000 went straight into Red’s pocket as cash, untaxed, yearly. There were free trips, million-dollar life insurance policies and scholarships for children. His total income with all the unlisted perks was over $600,000.

“You’ll leave,” Dick Conly replied. “If you don’t the NCAA and the FBI are going to be in your office the first thing tomorrow, going through recruiting files and opening your safe. Try explaining three hundred thousand dollars cash. Not everybody in this state went to the University. It just seems like it. Now, do we have to get down to ear-biting?”

“Bullshit,” Red said. “
You’re
in those files. You can’t turn me in and stay clean yourself.”

“Can’t we?” Conly said. “Are you certain? Well, I certainly hope we don’t have to go to all the trouble to find out. You’ll be an employee, a valued but replaceable technician—not an owner or partner, just an employee. We will pay you well, but don’t ask for an ownership position again.”

“Maybe,” Cyrus interrupted, angering Dick Conly, “if you get us into the Super Bowl ... maybe then we’ll talk about an ownership percentage. Until then ...” Cyrus let it hang.

“I’ll think about it.” Red stood and left quickly.

“Well, Cyrus,” Conly sighed, “you have done it again. You just gave Red Kilroy the one thing that I wanted that ambitious bastard stripped of completely before we hired him—
hope.
” Dick’s aggravation was apparent.

Red Kilroy, with the fine survival sense developed as a major-college football coach, knew he had finally met his match in Dick Conly. But when Cyrus dangled the hope of percentage or stock options if they got to the Super Bowl, Red Kilroy had what he needed. The hope that he would own his
own
franchise.

Red Kilroy took the job.

They kept it secret until after the big alumni catfish fry and beer bust, when the “boosters” showed up with cash and catfish, coleslaw and Pearl beer.

There Red announced he was leaving the University to coach the Franchise.

The athletic director, T. J. “Armadillo” Talbott, gave him a plaque and launched into a rambling speech about commies infiltrating the Cotton Bowl committee and the NCAA.

Red Kilroy left the fish fry late that night, opened the safe in his office and took the whole football slush fund with him in a duffel bag.

He got away with close to $300,000.

How could the University report the theft of something that wasn’t supposed to exist?

Hardball, Red called it.

The University had many lean years after Red Kilroy left; the fans were certain it was because the great Red Kilroy had gone to the Franchise, and in a way they were right.

One Red Kilroy Era ended and another one began.

Once at the Franchise, Kilroy determined priorities.

Red’s goal of Super Bowl was servant to his desire to become Franchise owner. Think
win!
Every day, all day.

Red’s system was simple. Offense and defense were based on the same primary concept: the control of territory.

Many had broken the game down into various concepts of controlling territory. Lombardi did it at Green Bay based on excellent personnel and an infectious desire to excel under pressure, causing dams of emotion to burst forth into winning efforts; crazed men momentarily became superhuman, made no mistakes, executed. Lombardi was power and execution. Landry, a defensive expert at New York, had borne the 4–3, created the flex defense and adapted the multiple-formation offense to answer the questions of controlling territory. He perfected the scanning, retention and recall methods of the computer to construct models of future battles for turf. Landry was the general of the electronic battlefield. The prediction and adjustment capabilities were phenomenal. There was little or no need for emotion, but rather exquisite technical control.

Red Kilroy combined both, with an evangelist’s ability to convert or kill.

“Never be afraid to be human and make mistakes,” Red told his players. “Just don’t
ever
do it on a football field.”

“T
HERE’S NO PHONE
here,” Wendy announced. “That’s what I love about it. People really have to
want
to find you.” They were at the ranch, missing Water Carnival. Taylor had the fire burning when Wendy returned from the south bedroom of the stone house. She had changed into loose-fitting corduroy pants, a Peruvian wool poncho and rabbit-fur-lined buckskin squaw boots.

The stone house was cold, and the sputtering fire was making slow progress against the chill radiating from the cold rock. The roof was tin. The floor and walls were of thick odd-shaped limestone blocks in beige and pink hues. It was the native stone. The country was littered with it and it lay two miles thick below the thin topsoil.

It was the plateau. Old sea bottom. Skeletons and sea shells forty million years old.

The house was four rooms with a long porch running the length of the south side, facing the creek. The kitchen in the northwest corner had an ancient white enamel sink with a hand pump on the west wall with accompanying drain and butcher boards. A four-paned window was punched into the rock over the sink. The only light in the kitchen was a bare bulb hung from the center of the ceiling. The north wall was covered with white-painted metal cabinets surrounding an old white electric stove and a Coldspot refrigerator with the round motor humming and vibrating on the top. Next to the refrigerator, a door opened directly outside to the oak motte. A full rain barrel stood next to the outside door. It had rained heavily in the hills all week.

The kitchen table was heavy plank and set in the middle of the room. None of the eight chairs matched; two were handmade wooden captain’s chairs, three were from different Formica dinette sets and three were stolen from the University cafeteria. There was also an old tall wooden stool in the corner. The south wall was all pantry shelves filled with foodstuffs and kitchen equipment; on the top shelf sat a big box of D-Con.

A heavy post-and-lintel archway led through the south wall into a living area, twenty-five feet square, with Indian rugs hung on the rock walls and laid on the rough stone floor.

The fireplace took up the west wall of the living room; on the hearth was an umbrella stand full of old hand-whittied canes and a Confederate cavalry sword and scabbard once carried by a captain in Hood’s Texas Brigade.

Four tall eight-pane glass windows in the south wall overlooked the porch. Two hammocks hung from the smooth cedar posts that held up the tin roof. There was a nice view of the crest of the hill, dropping straight to the creek. Nestled into the south side of the ancient protective grove of live oaks, the cabin commanded the high ground north of Dead Man Creek.

Two doorways off the living room led to separate bedrooms. The brass double beds were piled high with down comforters and hand-sewn quilts. The walls were hung with blue-and-gray paintings, black-and-white photographs and bookcases; books were scattered everywhere. The main subject of almost every book was the War of Rebellion. Doc was an antisecessionist-Sam Houston-Jacksonian-Democrat native Texan.

Wendy Chandler crept over to the fire silently and knelt on the red and black Indian rug, holding out her hands to the flame.

“You build a great fire,” she said.

“They offer a course in this at the University.” Taylor tossed on the twisted piece of oak. “It’s for jocks. Helps us with hand-eye coordination, keeps our grade points up and we get warm.” He stopped talking and watched Wendy for a moment as she looked into the fire and nodded slowly, lost in the flames.

Taylor felt a chill.

“These damn rock houses are cold. It’s colder in here than outside. Let’s go outside and warm up, give the fire a chance to get burning.”

Taylor held the door onto the porch open. Keeping her eyes on the fire, Wendy backed outside under a clear night sky.

“You have a girl at the University?”

“I had one, sorta. Turned out she was a person who
forgot
but
never forgave.
She ended up mad at me for all sorts of things she couldn’t recall. We broke off after she”—Taylor hesitated—“pulled a knife on me.”

“Pulled a knife on you!” Wendy was startled.

“Yeah, well, she carried a Buck knife. She was afraid of men, she told me. I knew she had the knife but there was just something about the way she snapped it open, that”—Taylor paused—“scary sound when the blade clicked, locked open. She was a pretty girl too. Somebody must have scared the shit out of her.... Maybe I made a sudden movement. It is sort of like why you carry the nickel-plated thirty-eight in your purse.” It became a direct question.

“I carry it to shoot anybody I think needs shooting,” Wendy said. “So don’t press your luck and stay out of my purse. My mother gave the pistol to me when I left for the University.” that was all the explanation Wendy volunteered.

“Do you sleep with it?”

“If I have to.”

“Maybe tonight you’ll get lucky and won’t have to sleep with the big iron.”

“Maybe tonight I’ll get lucky and hit what I shoot.”

“C
YRUS!”
J
UNIE STEPPED
down into the sunken work area of the mammoth den.

The walls were covered with trophy heads ranging upward from the tiny dik-dik to second largest water buffalo ever recorded killed by a rich man. There were around fifty head-and-shoulder mounts, four types of big game cat fully stuffed, an upright Kodiak bear and two elephant tusks crossed above the marble fireplace mantel.

Cyrus Chandler, Dick Conly and Red Kilroy were down in “the Pit,” the sunken center of the huge room. They were studying the teletype lists of the unprotected players that the other franchises were tossing into the For Sale pot known as the player pool.

“Cyrus!” Junie was insistent as she handed her coat to the maid, Isabelle, who disappeared down a long hallway. “Listen to me!”

“Goddammit, Junie, what the hell do you want now?” Cyrus glared at her for a moment, but then his eyes began creeping back toward the player list.

“Wendy wasn’t on her throne.”

Cyrus let out a long, slow sigh. “What throne?”

“At Water Carnival on the Pi Phi float. She’s president of the sorority, you know.”

“I know, Junie, just like her mother before her,” Cyrus said. “You two are a grand tradition. Now, what am I supposed to do about Wendy not being on her throne? Is there a usurper that I can squeeze out economically? Maybe ruin her father with incriminating financial or sexual innuendos—questions of paternity?”