“Why don’t you tell me the problem, old buddy?” I suggested for perhaps the tenth time since I’d joined Rhino in the cocktail lounge of the Little Rock motel where I was staying.
This time he pulled himself together enough to attempt a reply. He lubricated his voice box with another slug of bourbon and then he answered. “The problem, old buddy, is that the quarterback would rather ball than play ball.” The basset hound eyes filled with pain as he used the word ‘ball’ to designate the sex act. It was the closest I’d ever heard Rhino come to using bad language, including the time he’d saved my life in ’Nam, an incident hairy enough to inspire longshoreman lingo from the tongue of a Mother Superior who’d taken vows of silence.
“So, since when are pro football players sworn to chastity?” I responded. “Hell, you know better than that, Rhino. Besides, there are some really super-beautiful women in Little Rock, from what I’ve seen. I don’t blame the guy.”
“Fecal matter!” Rhino’s wide head wobbled drunkenly on his thick neck. “You’re not reading the signals, Steve. I’m telling you that Terry Niemath would rather ball the players than play with the ball!”
I stared at him. He tried to stare back, but his eyeballs kept getting lost in the basset hound pouches. “This quarterback doesn’t like women?” I said slowly.
Rhino made a noise like a Kikuyu spear had just been stuck in his hide. “You’re beginning to catch on, old buddy. Ain’t that a urinator?”
“Terry Niemath is gay?”
My friend emitted a non-committal snort, as if about to plunge into a mudhole. Instead, he toppled forward onto the table and passed out cold. The maneuver was not unlike that of a monument falling.
“Gay,” I repeated to myself. “What do you know about that?”
After I put Rhino Dubrowski to bed in my room, I went back down to the bar and had another drink by myself. I had to think. I sipped the scotch slowly and did just that.
Rhino was in bad shape. The toot he was on looked like it might be several days old. He was at that stage where the booze went down smooth as water, until the point when the brain turned out the switch.
He was my buddy. I owed him. This quarterback problem had him on the ropes. It was up to me to do something about it.
Rhino hadn’t given me much to work with before he zonked out. I’d managed to pry loose some facts about quarterback Terry Niemath from him before his final fizzle, but not too many. As I thought about them now, sloshing the melting ice cube around my scotch with my middle finger, they seemed less and less helpful.
Terry Niemath was a nineteen-year-old who’d dropped out of Little Rock Central High at the age of sixteen. Terry’s mother had died giving birth to Terry, who was an only child. Terry’s father was an evangelical fundamentalist preacher who’d thrown Terry out of the house for giggling while singing Drop-Kick Me, Jesus, Through the Goal Posts of Life at the close of a prayer meeting. According to Terry, Daddy Niemath refused to join the Moral Majority because he thought Reverend Jerry Falwell6 was too permissive.
Since the split, Terry had gotten by with a series of odd jobs including playing bush league football with Sunday morning pickup teams. Terry had made quite a name as a quarterback around the state of Arkansas. Rhino had heard the talk and one of his first moves as a scout for the Whittier Stonewalls had been to check out Terry.
“The kid was fantastic!” he’d told me before the bourbon took over. “Pair of hands like Fran Tarkenton. A head for calling plays like Bart Starr. Tricky as Unitas and fast as Luckman. Most fornicating one hundred thirty-nine pounds of quarter-back on the hoof I ever did see! A real kidney-reliever!”
“A hundred thirty-nine pounds? Jesus, Rhino, nobody that light can play pro football!”
“This kid can! Greased lightning! Knows how to fall with the hit too.”
“A hundred thirty-nine pounds know how to fall with two ninety on top? You’ve got to be kidding, Rhino.”
But he wasn’t kidding. He was dead serious. He reminded me of how little Namath had weighed in his prime. Which was true, but that was still a bundle over one-three-nine.
“You gotta see it to believe it,” he told me.
“Okay. When do I meet this marvel?” I wanted to know.
“I’ll take you over soon as we have one more drink. I got Terry a room at my motel to be on the safe side.”
Only the one more after the one more had kept Rhino from doing that. Hell, I decided, I’d go look up this Terry Niemath by myself. Maybe we could discuss this gay problem. Maybe it wasn’t a problem at all. Maybe Rhino was just over-reacting to it out of his leatherneck jock background. Still, he had implied that Terry might be making passes at his teammates off the field as well as on. At one hundred thirty-nine pounds, that could be a very big problem. It would only be a matter of time before he came on with the wrong guy and got himself hammered into the ground. Gay is one thing. Foolhardy is another. Grab-assing the wrong linebacker could be very foolhardy. Very foolhardy indeed! Yeah, I’d best look up this Terry Niemath and have a talk with him.
The Riverview Motel where Rhino and Terry Niemath were staying was a couple of rungs down the old traveling-man ladder from mine. One look at it, and I knew that Rhino’s expense account must have a short leash. The overage desk clerk must have been a loser in the last Little Rock bubble gum-blowing contest. The result was tangled all through his stubble. Watching him pop one as I came through the door, I could see why. The poor sixty-odd-year-old kid hadn’t quite gotten the hang of it yet.
“Try puffing in your cheeks a little instead of puffing ’em out,” I suggested.
He popped another bubble all over himself and didn’t deign to answer.
“Terry Niemath in?” I inquired.
“Nope.”
“Know where I can find him?”
He looked at me peculiarly, dribbling stickum from the corner of his mouth. I guessed from the look that the bubble-popper had pegged Terry as gay. Probably he thought I was, too, and that was why I was looking for him. “Football stadium,” he said finally, his latest bubble attempt disintegrating in a spray of saliva.
I glanced at the clock behind him. It was after midnight. “This late at night?” I reacted. “What for?”
“Practice.” He laughed and the resulting mess stopped up his nose and got in the corners of his eyes. “Football practice. All the players down there.”
“Just where is the football stadium?” I backed away from his struggles.
He told me. I left. Behind me, the oldster was trying to rub the gum out of his cheeks with cleaning fluid.
Ten minutes later I pulled my rented car up in the parking lot behind the football stadium and doused the lights. There were half a dozen other cars already parked there. One of the exit doors from the stadium was flapping open in the wind. I crossed over to it and went inside.
It was dark. I followed the ramp by feel and emerged in the grandstand at about the fifty-yard line. Here, it was unexpectedly bright. I glanced up at the sky. There was a moon there, and some stars, but that accounted for only part of the brightness. I looked behind me. Yeah. One bank of spotlights had been turned on to illuminate a section of the field in front of the goalposts to my right.
As I started following the aisle through the grandstand to get closer to the pool of light, there was a sudden commotion from across the field. A stream of beefy flesh was pouring out of one of the team dressing rooms. I blinked and looked again.