Ruffians Read online

  Clay had to wait until all the DLs were done in the dome before the group would be taken by bus to the hospital for physicals. A lab coat announced there would be no lunch and that the bus would not be leaving for at least another hour. Clay shrugged, pulled on his Northern sweatsuit, and sat patiently in a remote corner of the Dome reading a ragged paperback copy of Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls that he had kept hidden in his bag.

  At the hospital, the DLs were seated in chairs that lined both sides of a long corridor. At the end of the hall was a door that every three or four minutes would expel one player while the one seated closest would get up and enter. Each time this happened, the entire forty-odd remaining players would each get up and advance one seat closer to the door. For fifteen minutes Clay silently refused to participate. But after five empty chairs separated him from DL20, the glares from his frustrated counterparts became so malicious that he found himself distracted and unable to concentrate, rereading the same sentence in his book several times. To restore order, and his own peace of mind, Clay decided to play by the unwritten rules of the game and moved closer to the door.

  As he sat, a man made his way down the hall. He wasn't a lab coat, but he carried a clipboard, a caliper, and a tape measure. He bent and fiddled briefly over each player before scribbling on his board. It wasn't until he was three seats away that Clay was able to figure out what lie was doing.

  "Fist," said the man when he reached Clay.

  Having watched DL20, who in turn had watched DL3, Clay knew to hold out his fist at arm's length while the man measured the circumference of Clay's fist and the distance from his big knuckle to his elbow. The man then said, "Head" and fixed the caliper to his skull, measuring its diameter from front to back and side to side.

  When the man had moved on, DL20 leaned over and murmured quietly, "That's the Seattle guy. I heard the Seahawks have some chart that tells how good you'll be in the league just by those measurements."

  Clay gave him a knowing look.

  "I'm Donny Drew," DL20 said. "You're Clay Blackwell, huh?"

  It was the first time that day Clay had heard mention of his name. He nodded his head to the oversized Nebraska farm boy.

  "Yeah," he said. "I don't remember when we met. . ."

  "Oh, I never met you," Donny said, "but shit, everyone knows you. Northern U. superstar. Grew up somewhere around there in New York, didn't you?"

  "Yeah," Clay said, "kind of born and raised, I guess you'd say."

  "You're one of the top guys in the draft this year."

  "Well, you never know . . ."

  "Oh, my agent knows. You're a first-round pick, a one for sure. I know about all the DLs, you know, D-linemen coming out in the draft.

  "I'm a three to five," Donny added rather proudly.

  Finally inside the door, Clay was given a folder with eleven empty boxes on its cover.

  "DL7 . . . Clay Blackwell?" asked a woman looking up at him from the desk.

  Clay nodded.

  "Fill each box with a circle. There are eleven stations in this room. You get one circle at each station. Don't come back until every box is filled."

  Seeing that no further explanation was forthcoming, Clay turned to assess his situation. The room was cavernous, and seemed to be a cafeteria whose tables and chairs had been cleared away. There were large booths separated by heavy blue curtains. Each booth had a number over its entrance. Players milled about between booths and queued outside others. Clay headed for Booth 11, which had no line.

  He entered this "station" to find two lab coats and a dentist. Clay sat on a stool while the dentist pulled back his lips. One of the lab coats took a picture of Clay's teeth. The dentist fished around Clay's mouth with a mirror, making comments into a Dictaphone. When he was finished, the dentist turned his back abruptly on Clay, and the second lab coat stepped forward to give him a round blue sticker with the number 11 on it, which he stuck on the appropriate box of his folder.

  "This is a cinch," he thought.

  Clay entered Booth 4 after waiting in a short line. Along with a booth for teeth and eyes and knee ligaments and body symmetry, there were seven additional booths. These housed a few lab coats and four or five physicians, one from every team represented and a corresponding trainer. Booth 4 was one of these. Someone grabbed his folder from his hand.

  "DL7," that someone called out.

  One of the physicians checked his hand to see that indeed he was DL7.

  "Take off your shirt," someone said.

  Clay did it.

  "Bend down and touch your toes."

  Clay saw by the stethoscope that it was one of the physicians who was speaking. The same one ran two fingers down the length of Clay's spine. Clay jumped.

  "That hurt?" asked the doctor gruffly.

  "Tickled," Clay said with a sheepish smile that was not returned.

  "Any injuries?" asked another doctor.

  Clay didn't quite know how to answer. He had no current injuries, but over his lifetime he had had his share. He couldn't think of anything worth mentioning though. He had never missed a college game because of an injury. If it wasn't serious enough to miss a game, then it certainly wasn't worth mentioning to this group.

  "No," Clay said.

  "No injuries, none?"

  "I never missed a game," Clay answered.

  It was quiet in the booth except for a lab coat who pounded furiously on the keyboard of a computer. Suddenly he looked up from the screen menacingly. "What about your elbow, fall of 1989?"

  Clay thought. "Yes," he said, "I ruptured a bursar sack in my elbow, but I didn't even miss a practice."

  "On the table, please," said a doctor who stepped up and grabbed Clay's arm at the forearm and the biceps. The doctor bent and twisted Clay's elbow in such a way that would have hurt any healthy elbow.

  "That hurt?"

  "No," Clay said.

  Another doctor stepped up to the table to do more of the same. As he held Clay's arm, he noticed a scar on his knuckle. He held Clay's hand up to the light.

  "What's this?" he asked.

  "Oh, that was from a fight when I was in high school," Clay said.

  The doctor looked up and said to no one in particular, "Make a note of that."

  "What about your left knee?" said the lab coat at the computer. "Didn't you sprain your left medial collateral in spring of 1990?"

  "Yeah, well, it was spring ball. I only missed a couple of days of practice, and I played in the spring game."

  Every doctor was interested in this, and now each one, as well as each trainer, had a shot at not only his left knee but his right. That done, there was more general poking and prodding which had no apparent pattern. It was the guy at the computer who finally gave Clay back his folder with a green 4 fixed in its box, but not before he flashed one final look of hostility.

  By the time Clay had all his boxes filled, his joints ached from twisting and turning and poking and prodding. He gave his folder to the woman at the desk. Without looking up, she told him to report to the fourth floor, Room 459 for EKG, X-rays, blood and urine, and his internal. Clay's eyes narrowed at the word internal.

  "After you've completed that," she said, "you can wait for your group in the main lobby. Someone will take you back to the hotel."

  On the fourth floor, a doctor who Clay had never seen before ushered him into a small examination room and asked him to drop his shorts and hop onto the table in the middle of the room. The doctor began talking about the lobster bisque at a French Quarter restaurant called Arnaud's. Clay would have been somewhat interested had he not been on all fours atop the examination table with the doctor's latex-covered finger shoved up his ass. Clay's Adam's apple bobbed as he gulped the bile that filled his throat. The doctor handed him a box of tissue and left the room. Clay got down from the table and wiped the lubricant from between his cheeks with handfuls of Kleenex.

  He was just pulling up his shorts when the doctor returned. He held out his hand for Clay to s
hake and said, "Well, that does it for you. It was nice having met you."

  Clay excused himself with a nod and a wave. "See you," he said as he shut the door. Clay could only frown and shake his head when the three other DLs outside the door looked up at his face for a clue.

  In the backwoods of a small Alabama town, an enormous estate was set on acres and acres of rolling lawns and gardens, completely enclosed by a high stone wall. There were pools and fountains beyond counting. Antique sculptures adorned the grounds, and priceless artwork, period furniture, and Oriental rugs graced the rooms of the main residence, a replica of the White House. It was like a jewel in the desert, and required more than two dozen servants to staff it, catering to the whims of its occupants. It was the Lyles estate, and Beatrice Lyles was its sovereign. Her son, Humphry, had told her she could live anywhere in the world, but nowhere except here, outside the town where she and her son had spent their earlier, more impoverished and pathetic lives, could she gloat and bully with proper authority.

  Humphry Lyles had risen from rags by cunning, unscrupulousness, and a certain amount of luck, and had made his fortune in the insurance industry, beginning by simply selling insurance policies and pocketing an occasional premium, taking his own risk that the owners would not make a claim. When he had amassed enough money, he opened a small office of his own, focusing his sales on the poor blacks most other insurance agencies never solicited. In a short time Humphry was successful enough to underwrite his own policies. From there, easily corrupted politicians and his own ruthlessness allowed him to expand his personal influence and business empire beyond the limits of even his own childhood dreams.

  In the early seventies, he sold his interests in insurance and formed a conglomerate, borrowing and leveraging and buying up whatever struck his fancy, from textile mills in New England to breweries in Australia. His most recent and notable purchase was the NFL's newest expansion franchise which he himself named: the Birmingham Ruffians. The only problem with his new business was that unlike his other holdings, the success of this venture was not measured strictly by profit, but by victories on Sunday afternoons. His team was almost the worst in the league, and in the great football state of Alabama, winning is everything. The Ruffians were an embarrassment, and Humphry was getting barragtd with criticism from every side.

  That was why he was here now. Only his mother could bolster his spirits and motivate him to succeed. It had been this way ever since he had been a child. And even though Beatrice was sometimes more of an annoyance than an inspiration for a middle-aged man of tremendous wealth, it was his habit to seek her out in times of trouble.

  "Well, boy, it's about time you paid your mama a visit," said Beatrice Lyles. She was somewhere in her sixties, but her rotund face and a jet black wig made her look more like Humphry's sister than his mother. It was an unusually warm day for February, and she was sprawled out on a large wicker divan beside a pool. A canopy protected her from the breeze, and she picked fresh-cut fruit from a silver tray as she spoke.

  "I've been busy, Mama," Humphry replied, "with the team."

  He sat down next to her in a wicker high-back. They had sat together like this countless times. In the predominant image of his youth, Humphry and his mother sat together in the barber chairs of the shop over which they lived. Humphry had few friends as a child. His appearance did little to help that. He was small and chubby and pale, and his mouth, set into a homely face, had a girlish look to it. His ugliness made growing up hard, and instead of playing with friends, he would sit for hours with his mother, talking or watching TV shows on a small black- and-white set perched atop the barber's counter.

  He regarded those meager times as the ones that had spurred him to success. Every evening after supper, he and his mother would hurry down the back stairs in time for Jeopardy.

  "You see these people, Humphry?" his mother had been fond of saying. "They think they're so smart, knowing things like who built St. Peter's Cathedral. We'll just sit back and laugh. All that stuff they know, and maybe they'll win a few hundred dollars. One day that will be small change to us."

  And now that was all true.

  Beatrice Lyles loved her boy with a passion that only an abandoned women can give a son, but her love had become twisted into an obsession that her boy be wealthy above all else. She herself had been the painful recipient of a lesson in the power of money. As a high school girl in a small Mississippi town, she had become involved with a boy who was from one of the town's wealthy families. Her own father was a dirt farmer and a drunk. When she discovered she was pregnant, she had assumed that she would be taken in and cared for by the boy and his family. They had other ideas, however. Her father was given a modest sum of money, and she was taken to a remote cabin in the backwoods where her pregnancy was terminated. She almost died, and when she finally recovered, she ran away.

  When she arrived, filthy and starved, in Baton Rouge she began to sell herself as a means of survival. She earned enough money to learn a trade as a beautician and then moved to the town of Meridian, where she now lived. She had not, however, escaped her street-walking days before she became pregnant with Humphry. So she had concocted a story about a dead husband that was believable enough for her to get a job and a place to live. And although she was now more comfortable than she had ever been, she had never forgotten that she and her son had lived in squalor.

  She also never forgot what had been done to her by those who had money and power, and it was a burning, gnawing thing in her now swollen gut that never gave her peace. She was determined to instill in her son the yearning for material possessions, and power, and the cunning to acquire them. She knew the rich and how they thought. Humphry would learn the rules early in life and play to win.

  He hadn't understood all she said to him as a small boy, but looking back now, he understood the significance of his training. His mother had pounded into his head the idea that it was money, and nothing else, that mattered. She tutored him in craftiness and guile, and always stressed that the end justified the means.

  "I read in the paper that they want you to sell the team. I won't remind you that I told you never to buy it," his mother said, dropping a ripe strawberry into her puckered-up mouth. "They say you don't have a clue about the game, say you've got a little big man complex."

  Here she snickered. "That team has been more than you bargained for, hasn't it, Humphry?

  "Yes, it has," she continued, not giving him a chance to respond. "It's been a regular nightmare. Do you know what it is that you've done? You've allowed people to ridicule us. I told you long ago that money was the only important thing. This game, this . . . team is a weakness. You put yourself in a position where even my household staff can have a laugh on you. By God, after all I've taught you, after all we've done.

  "I'm disgusted," she said finally.

  Humphry stared silently into the pool, thinking about his dilemma. He didn't feel the need to reply to his mama's badgering. She had always talked to him in a strict, condescending manner.

  "Humphry, why don't you say something?"

  "Huh, oh, you're right, Mama. I'll have to straighten it out. Mama, I'll be staying a few days if that's all right."

  "Of course, w. you know you're always welcome here. This is your home, we built this together."

  A black cat wandered out of the shrubbery and hunted quietly along the edge of the pool.

  "Mama, there's a cat."

  "Oh, that's Lidia's cat," his mother said, suppressing a yawn.

  "I told her I didn't want that cat here," Humphry said, rising and grabbing the cat by the scruff of its neck. He rolled up his shirtsleeve with his free hand, knelt down, and plunked the cat and his arm into the water up to his elbow. There was only a slight rippling and bubbling on the surface of the water as the life was suffocated from the animal. Humphry stared out across the lawn and held the cat down until it was still.

  "I'm allergic to cats," he said, throwing the soggy black cat into the bushes befor
e he sat back down.

  "God in heaven, Humphry! What would you like me to tell Lidia?

  That cat's the only thing she has in this world."

  "Tell her to do as I say," Humphry said simply.

  They sat silently for a while.

  Finally, Mrs. Lyles said, "You won't let Lidia's cat take three breaths in your presence, but you let those newspaper people crap all over you . . . God in heaven."

  It was Clay's college roommate, Ralph Levette, or Lever, who picked him up from the Syracuse airport late Saturday morning when he arrived home from New Orleans. Lever was an enormous man. He weighed over three hundred pounds although he was not quite as tall as Clay. His arms and legs were stout, and his belly was rather prodigious. Lever was the starting right offensive guard for Northern. Like Clay, he was the physical stereotype of his position. Next year at this time, Lever too would go to the combines. He would be OL-something.

  "How was it?" Lever asked before Clay had shut the rusty door of the big green Impala. Lever's car was typical for a college student, riddled with dents and corrosion, four unmatched snow tires, no hubcaps.

  "It went well, but it was bad," Clay said. "Hey, Lev, can you swing by my folks' house? I gotta get my wash."

  "Sure. What's that mean ... it was bad."

  "Well, I did real good in all the tests."

  "Hell, I know that. Tell me why it was so bad."

  Clay told him about being filmed and measured with nothing on but his underwear, and about the doctors who pulled him like taffy, and finally about the internal exam.

  "That's some sick shit, man," Lever said, hawking and spitting out his window. "I don't know if I can go for that shit."

  "You'll go for it ... if you want to get drafted. No one gets drafted in the top rounds without going to the combines."

  "Yeah, well, I can't see letting some guy stick his finger up my ass, even if he is a doctor. I just can't see it."

  "You gonna be like Seldon?" Clay said. "Big shot. All-American. Gonna be a second-rounder. No need for a big shot like him to go to the combines. He didn't get a finger up his ass. But it cost him . . . let's see, the difference between the second and the ninth round . . . about a million. Yeah, you're right, Lev, it's not worth it."