North Dallas Forty Read Online Free PDF Page B

isn’t plenty of money, particularly when we have a three-hundred-dollar-a-month house payment and a maid. After today, I may be out of work.” Jesus, it had been right in my hands. The defensive back had fallen down. Son of a bitch!
    “All you do is worry about your precious football.”
    “It’s our precious football, unless you’d like to get another job.” I had been all alone, nothing but open field. Goddammit! How did I miss that fucking ball?
    “I might as well if I can’t have a baby. Staying home is really boring.” She had held a job as a nurse’s aide for three days. Our closet was full of pink-and-white-striped aprons.
    “We wouldn’t be worrying about money if you hadn’t quit your job with Brooks.”
    “I didn’t quit. I was fired.” I had worked two off-seasons for Brooks Harris “usin’ the ol’ name to make contacts and tell the folks our good news about real estate.” There was one problem, “inability to close” Brooks had called it. I just didn’t seem to be able to make that demand that would “push the customer from confusion to conviction to close.” All the customer’s reasons for refusing to buy seemed perfectly rational to me. Dammit, I know I didn’t take my eyes off it. B.A. could bench me.
    “Darlene Meadows said O.W.’s thinking about taking that job and ...” she turned to face me, “... Judith Maxwell told me she thought you and Seth were smoking marijuana again. Are you?”
    “No, we aren’t.” Maxwell and I had both tried to get our wives to turn on with us. They were horrified and screamed of brain damage and perversion. Seth and I had been under close scrutiny since. I must have been off balance when I made my break. It was right in my hands.
    We were the only people not in costume at the party. I said we had come as a famous flankerback and his wife. It didn’t help. My wife left me and sat with Darlene Meadows, who had come as Scarlett O’Hara, and Judith Ann Maxwell, who appeared to be Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Judith Ann was Seth’s third wife. I sat at the bar and thought about how much I would like to screw Darlene Meadows. O.W. Meadows had come as the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan; several of the black players left in frightened indignation. Judith Ann had dressed Seth in a solid-black gunfighter’s rig. He seemed a little embarrassed by it but rode it out to the bitter end. Maxwell even had a mock shootout with Jo Bob Williams, who, crisscrossed with bandoliers, had come as Pancho Villa. Both of them fell in a writhing heap on the dance floor. Shortly after midnight, Alan Claridge arrived in drag and claimed he was the real Gloria Steinem. The party broke up about forty-five minutes later. All the men had gotten hopelessly drunk.
    During the ride home, I slept in the back seat of the car. I awoke when I felt the car stop. My wife shut off the engine, leaned over the seat and punched me in the nose.
    “Lousy drunk son of a bitch.” She slammed the car door and I could hear her high heels clicking up the sidewalk to our house. My nose began to bleed.
    Thinking about wives brought me down and I headed back to Andy’s bedroom to smoke a joint. The bedroom was off limits to all but a select few, of which I considered myself a member, quite without any encouragement from Crawford.
    I immediately sat down on the bed and lit a joint, inhaling deeply, letting it seep through me.
    “Better than booze,” I thought, to assuage my conscience.
    The bed was unmade. On the bedside table was a half-eaten peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a bowl that in the distant past had contained soup. The red bedspread matched the carpeting and wallpaper. The sheets and pillowcases were silk. There was a small Sony color television lying on one of the pillows. On the other pillow was a vibrator and a set of Vise Grips.
    At the foot of the bed lay three checkbooks, all on different banks, and a stack of bills months old. Andy frequently mentioned that he handled