All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [124]
Which was:
An oblong field where white lines mathematically gridded the turf which was arsenical green under the light from the great batteries of floodlamps fixed high on the parapet of the massive arena. Above the field the swollen palpitating tangle of light frayed and thinned out into hot darkness, but the thirty thousand pair of eyes hanging on the inner slopes of the arena did not look up into the dark but stared down into the pit of light, where men in red silky-glittering shorts and gold helmets and spilled and tumbled on the bright arsenical-green turf like spilled dolls, and a whistle sliced chillingly through the thick air like that scimitar through a sofa cushion.
Which was:
The band blaring, the roaring like the sea, the screams like agony, the silence, then one woman-scream, silver and soprano, spangling the silence like the cry of a lost soul, and the roar again so that the hot air seemed to heave. For out of the shock and tangle and glitter on the green a red fragment had exploded outward flung off from the mass tangentially to spin across the green, turn and wheel and race, yet slow in the out-of-timeness of the moment, under the awful responsibility of the roar.
Which was:
A man pounding me on the back and screaming–a man with a heavy face and coarse dark hair hanging over his forehead–screaming, “That’s my boy! That’s Tom–Tom–Tom! That’s him–and he’s won–they won’t have time for a touchdown now–he’s won–his first varsity game and it’s Tom won–it’s my boy!” And the man pounded me on the back and grappled me to him with both arms, powerful arms, and hugged me like his brother, his true love, his son, while tears came into his eyes and tears and sweat ran down the heavy cheeks, and he screamed, “He’s my boy–and there’s not any like him–he’ll be All American–boy, did you see him–fast–fast–he’s a fast son-of-a-bitch! Ain’t he, ain’t he?”
“Yes,” I said, and it was true.
He was fast and he was a son-of-a-bitch. At least, if he wasn’t a son-of-a-bitch yet, he had shown some very convincing talent in that line. You couldn’t much blame Lucy for wanting to stop the football–his name always on the sporting page–the pictures–the Freshman Whiz–the Sophomore Thunderbolt–the cheers–the big fat hands always slapping his shoulder–Tiny Duffy’s hand on his shoulder–yeah, Boss, he’s a chip off of the old block–the roadhouses–the thin-legged, tight-breasted little girls squealing, Oh Tom, oh, Tom–the bottles and the tourist cabins–the sea-roar of the crowd and always the single woman-scream spangling the sudden silence like damnation.
But Lucy did not have a chance. For he was going to be All American. All American quarterback on anybody’s team. If bottle and bed didn’t manage to slow down too soon something inside that one hundred and eighty pounds of split-second, hair-trigger, Swiss-watch beautiful mechanism which was Tom Stark, the Boss’s boy, the Sophomore Thunderbolt, Daddy’s Darling, who stood that night in the middle of a hotel room, with apiece of court plaster across his nose and a cocky grin on his fine, clean, boyish face–for it was fine and clean and boyish–while all the hands of Papa’s pals pawed at him and beat his shoulders, while Tiny Duffy slapped him on the shoulder, and Sadie Burke, who sat a little outside the general excitement on her own private fog of cigarette smoke and whisky fumes, a not entirely unambiguous expression on her riddled, handsome face, said, “Yeah, Tom, somebody was telling me you played a football game tonight.”
But her irony was not the sort of thing Tom Stark would hear or understand, for he stood there in the midst of his own gleaming golden private fog of just being Tom Stark, who had played in a football game.
Until the Boss said, “Now you go on and get to bed, Son. Get your sleep, Son. Get ready to pour it on ’em next Saturday.” And he laid his arm across the boy’s shoulder, and said, “We’re all mighty proud of you, boy.”
And I said to myself: If he gets his eyes starry with tears again I am going to puke.
“Go on to bed, Son,” the Boss said.
And Tom Stark said,