Knights of the Hill Country Page 3

  Her face was washed-out pale, and there was tearstains striping down her cheeks plain as skid marks on a dead-end road. That wasn't right. My mom was a laugher, a teaser and a tickler and a bathroom singer. She only cried at black-and-white movies.

  I asked her what was the matter, and she kind of stuttered around before finally she come out with how my dad up and run off. Moved to Sapulpa and wouldn't be coming back no more. Even took the lawn mower with him. Then she drew her top lip in tight and said that was all right with her. That was just fine, 'cause it didn't pay to try and count on people anyways. I waited around for her to say something else, give some explanation about why he left, but she never done it.

  Later on it come out that he run off with this little eighteen-year-old Barbie doll he met installing cable TV at her parents' house. My aunt told me that. She never had liked my dad. Or me neither, I don't guess.

  Wasn't long before Mom got sick of walking around Poynter and having to look at all the stuff that reminded her of Dad, so she got a job at the dollar store here in Kennisaw. We moved down the very weekend after school let out. Now here it was, the Fourth of July, and so far I hadn't done nothing but wander the streets and vacant lots by myself, talking to the ants and horny toads. We didn't even have money for fireworks. I did have one thing to look forward to, though. They was having an outdoor ceremony down at Leonard Biggins Park, and who do you think was going to be the guest of honor but old T. Roy Strong, the ex-All-Pro from off the Dallas Cowboys.

  As far as football stars from Oklahoma went, you couldn't get much bigger than T. Roy. Talk about your legends. T. Roy played quarterback for Kennisaw back in their famous undefeated days and went on from there to land runner-up to the Heisman Trophy as a college star, and as if that wasn't enough, he got drafted by the Dallas Cowboys in the first round and ended up helping them win the Super Bowl not once but twice. Now here he was, back with a pack of his old Kennisaw teammates to honor what a lot of folks called the greatest high school football team in the history of the eastern Oklahoma hill country.

  So, taking my shortcut down through a grove of trees on my way to the park, I was pretty excited, daydreaming up how it would be to talk to T. Roy Strong. I even got so far as picturing us tossing a football around and telling each other about our lives. Not just piddly things about where we was from and what kind of ice cream we liked, but deep things. Like what a father and son would talk about.

  Then, all the sudden, this kid dropped down out of a tree right in front of me. Just—boom!—there he was. It was Blaine, but course, I didn't know that then. For all I knew, he could've been something from outer space zapping out of the sky.

  “Halt there, knave,” he said, planting his hands on his hips. “Where doth thou thinkest thou art fixing to go?” Even way back then, he was broad shouldered and had him a deep tan and dark brown eyes and black hair that stuck up on top of his head like he hadn't combed it a day since school let out for summer. Nine years old and he already looked like he ought to be the star of something.

  “What'd you call me?” I said. I hadn't never heard the word knave, and I wanted to make sure he wasn't calling me any bad names.

  “Knave,” he said, like he'd heard some dumb questions but that one was the topper. “That means thou ain't a member of my kingdom.”

  “Who are you anyways?” The way he was talking, I thought he might be from another country.

  “Me? I'm Sir Galahad. Who the hell art thou?”

  “I'm Batman.”

  He grinned his big old shiny white grin and said, “Why, hell, this here's fixing to be the battle of the century, then.” And he bucked his head down and charged straight at my belly with no more warning than a bobcat gives a weasel.

  Right there was when I done it. Froze him solid in his tracks. It was almost like I was looking down on the both of us, figuring just what I had to do, and then—click—everything rolled into motion again. I dodged off to one side and at the same time grabbed ahold of Blaine's T-shirt at the shoulder, wrenching him around so's he couldn't hit me square on. Then, before he could figure out what was what, I tackled him like he thought he was fixing to do me, and we went tumbling down the side of this steep hill there, rolling over and over each other, ending up in the tall grass at the bottom.

  As quick as we hit bottom, I sprung up on one knee, ready for some more combat, but Blaine—he just laid back in that high grass and laughed out loud. “Boy howdy,” he said. “Where you from anyways?”

  “I'm from here,” I said, still not one hundred percent sure the fighting was over.

  “Nuh-uh,” he said. “You can't be from here. I'm from here, and I ain't never seen you before.”

  I explained how I just moved to town and my mom worked at the dollar store, and he kind of checked me over with his eyes squinted up and said, “Well, that's different, then. As long as you're a Kennisaw boy, we can be friends.”

  And we shook on it right then and there—Fourth of July, bottom of the hill, east side of Leonard Biggins Park.

  Turned out, we both come over for the same reason, to see T. Roy Strong, and Blaine made sure we got prime seats in a big white oak just to the side of the pavilion where the ceremony was supposed to take place. Now, I didn't know that much about T. Roy's high school career back then, just that he was the top-dog legend all over eastern Oklahoma, but Blaine knew the facts on him from Genesis to Revelation, and he didn't mind sharing them while we waited up in that tree for the ceremony to kick off.

  The deal was, over ten years before me and Blaine was even born, the Kennisaw Knights football team only lost three games in an eight-year run. Six of them years, they went undefeated, with five of them six being straight in a row, just like we'd have a chance of doing later on. And out of all the great players to wear the black and gold, T. Roy Strong was the greatest. Bar none. He was a three-year starter at quarterback and could outrun, outthrow, and out-think any other high school quarterback in the country. Some said you might as well include college in there too 'cause T. Roy was that good.

  He held either division or state records in five categories, and one time he threw a touchdown pass out of his own end zone with his foot an inch from the back line. A one-hundred-and-nine-yard and thirty-five-inch touchdown pass! Another time he run a quarterback sneak to gain two feet and ended up on the other side of the goal line, eighty-five yards away. Got his picture all the way up in the Tulsa paper after that one.

  But his most amazing play happened in the state title game his senior year. He had these three triple-large linemen chasing him all over the backfield, nipping at his heels like grizzlies on a jackrabbit, so what did he do? He launched the ball, on purpose, straight into the helmet of the biggest one of them. Pow! The ball popped up at least twenty foot high, and when it come down, T. Roy snatched it out of the air and streaked down the sideline and all the way to the end zone, untouched. That one made the national news: QUARTERBACK CATCHES OWN TOUCHDOWN PASS!

  T. Roy Strong. They played offense and defense back then, and he even run back punts on special teams. You could still go up to the cliffs above Lake Hawkshaw outside of town and see where girls carved out their declarations of love for him in the rock. When he went pro with Dallas, they shifted him over to cornerback, and he had to retire after only six seasons with a bad shoulder, but that didn't matter. He was still a Dallas Cowboy, a Pro Bowl pick, a Super Bowl winner, and hands-down Kennisaw, Oklahoma's favorite son. No question.

  And I guarantee when he walked out on the stage in that little pavilion in front of me and Blaine, he still looked every inch the hero too. Except for the smooth way he moved, he could've been a town-square statue with that rock jaw and perfect haircut and slick gray suit. The crowd just about come out of their skin from cheering so hard. Behind him, six other big walking statues lined up, all members of the same team as T. Roy, the greatest of all the great Knights teams of the olden days.

  I never will forget the speech he gave that July Fourth, and I know Bl
aine won't neither. Right there, that was what it meant to be a Kennisaw Knight. He stepped up to the microphone and raised his hands to get the crowd to simmer down, bowing his head at first, real modest, then raising it back up and flashing that big wide perfect smile of his that let you know he was as glad to see you as he would be to see the president of the United States.

  “Thank you,” he said. “Thank each and every one of you who came out to help honor one of the greatest groups of guys anyone ever had the opportunity to play a game of football or any other kind of game with.”

  The whoops and clapping busted loose again, and he lifted his hands back up to quiet us down before going on. “It humbles me to stand here before this wonderful crowd of fans and alongside my old teammates, who have all gone on to accomplish great things. But we're not here to talk about that right now. We're here to talk about days past, a different time. A time when giants walked the Earth.”

  The crowd couldn't help but let out another roar, and me and Blaine looked each other in the eye, both of us nodding, not having to say a word about how big a moment it was we was witnessing in front of us.

  T. Roy went on then, reeling off all the team's big triumphs, the hard work they put in, the adversity they faced, and the unbreakable bonds they forged. For a second there, he even cried a little. Right out in the open. Anyone littler might've got ridiculed for doing something like that in public, but everyone just loved T. Roy more for it. He'd learned the meaning of courage, he said, and strength and comradeship. He'd reached the top of a mountain and stretched up his hands and felt the warmth of God shining down on his face, as if to say, “T. Roy, job well done.”

  “And so, in conclusion,” he said, “I hope all you here in Kennisaw, in this small town in the Oklahoma hills, will remember the greatness that lies within. Stick together. Do good, and then push yourself to do even better. The Knights of the hill country stand for honor and integrity, inner fortitude and grit, and the triumph that comes from hard work, and all of you here are a part of that magnificent tradition!”

  The crowd boomed so loud then that every bird in every tree around that pavilion launched up into the air at the same time, hundreds of them, soaring up and up, like they was a mirror of the way all of us was feeling down below.

  Blaine looked at me and said, as serious as if he was reciting off the Pledge of Allegiance, “That's the way I'm gonna be one of these days. Just like that.”

  “Me too,” I said, every bit as serious.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Course, Blaine wasn't up there with T. Roy, even before his knee injury, but if you didn't know him like me, you'd have swore he thought he was, the way he strutted cocky as hell down senior hall on Monday after that Wynette game. Like a flying ace come back from war after saving his country. And that was all right. Just being a Kennisaw Knight made you a hero in our town. Up and down Main Street, old men was always slapping us on the backs and shaking our hands, telling us to keep up the good work. Make Kennisaw proud. At school, you couldn't hardly get to class on time for folks, students and teachers both, coming up to tell you, “Good game.”

  But truth be told, that kind of stuff always felt awkward to me, uncomfortable, like wearing a heavy coat that really belonged to somebody else. Thing was, away from tackles and passes and dodging blockers, I didn't have the least idea how to stop time and look two seconds ahead and know what to do. I didn't understand why it was, but outside the stadium, gravity was different. Walking around them high school halls, I felt as heavy and slow as a big old Clydesdale stomping around in a herd of quarter horses. Even with folks telling me how great I played against Wynette, I couldn't do nothing but sort of shrug, rub my hand across the top of my head, and say thanks, while Blaine could stand there and talk for fifteen minutes, people he'd known all his life grinning at him like he was a movie star. Man, I wished I could be that way.

  Blaine took up his usual spot, leaning against the senior-hall lockers with his thumbs in his belt loops, and I stood next to him, trying not to look so big and redheaded. “Check out them jeans,” he said, nodding towards Darla Monroe as she walked away down the hall in her skintight Rockies. “Did you see how tight them things was? I could just about read the label on her underwear through there.”

  “Yeah,” I said, but I wasn't really paying much attention. Instead, I looked off towards the door of my homeroom, thinking of someone besides Darla.

  “Damn, son,” Blaine said. “You didn't hardly look at her.”

  “I've seen her before.”

  “I'll tell you what, we better get you a girlfriend before people start thinking there's something wrong with you.”

  “What if there ain't nobody I really like all that much, though?”

  “It don't matter if you like 'em. They just have to look good. Remember when we drove over to OU to look around campus? All the big dogs there had the best-looking women. That's just one of your natural rights when you're a football player. Why, when T. Roy Strong played down in Dallas, they say he went out with a new girl every night. Now, that's the way it oughta be.”

  “I don't know about that,” I said. Down the hall, Sara Reynolds come walking around the corner, heading for history class. I started that way myself. “I'll talk to you later. It's time for class.”

  “What's your hurry? Hang around and watch the scenery go by with me for a while.”

  “See ya at lunch.” I didn't even turn back. There wasn't no use trying to explain Sara Reynolds to Blaine.

  She was already in her usual desk when I walked into class and slid into my seat in the next row over, a yard or two behind her. She had a way of setting there with her back real straight and her ankles crossed and her hands folded on the desktop that made a perfect picture. About all the skin you could see on her was them little fingers barely sticking out from the sleeves of her big baggy sweatshirt, but that was all right. Sometimes I'd just stare at them fingers. Mr. Foudy, the history teacher, started in saying something, but it wasn't about Sara Reynolds, so I didn't really give a day-old donut what it was.

  You think I felt awkward clomping down the hall with people congratulating me right and left, treating me like I was different somehow? Well, that wasn't nothing compared to how it was when it come to schoolwork and girls. What I wouldn't have gave to stop time and see the right thing to do with them two.

  Taking tests was terrible. During class, dates and names and terms would go floating out of my reach like cottonwood feathers blowing off on the wind, and it'd only be later, way after school let out, the right answer would light back down on my shoulder. But what can you do? It's not like I could call the teacher up at nine o'clock at night and say, “Hello there, Mr. Foudy? This is Hampton Green, and you know that question number twenty-three on the test today? The one about where old Robert E. Lee did his surrendering at? I just remembered the answer was supposed to be Appomattox, Virginia. Thanks. See ya tomorrow.”

  Wasn't no teacher living or dead that'd buy a deal like that.

  But worse even than the tests was girls. Nothing like a girl to turn me right into a fool. My friends didn't care none what kind of grades I made, but there wasn't no letup on the hard time they gave me about how bad I was with girls. Sometimes I would've traded just about everything I done on the football field just to know the right thing to say to the right girl, but when it come to flirting, it might as well have been French, for all I could understand of it.

  Sara Reynolds wasn't exactly the type any of my friends would look at as prime girlfriend material for a Kennisaw Knight, though. Especially Blaine. She was real smart, took advanced chemistry and violin lessons, and seemed kind of shy most of the time, except when she disagreed with something a teacher said. Look out then. None of that stuff's likely to get a girl elected prom queen anytime this century, but I didn't care. There was just something about her.

  It didn't have nothing to do with a pair of tight Rockies neither. Her jeans was every bit as baggy as them sweatshirts she always wore.
I swear, you couldn't tell whuther her body had started developing any more shape to it senior year than back when she first showed up in Kennisaw during eighth grade.

  And it sure wasn't that hair of hers. Now, I don't want to sound like I didn't think she was cute, 'cause I did, but even she'd probably admit her hair wouldn't land her on no magazine covers, not with how she just parted it in the middle and let it run wild from there. The way it was, that cute little pale face of hers looked about like it was peeking out through some kind of crazy brown shrub that the biology books hadn't got around to classifying yet. On humid days it was a whole jungle.

  Back in junior high, the boys traipsed along behind her in the hall, asking her dumb questions like when was the robins coming back to roost in that nest she had on her head. “Farmer Brown called,” they'd say in their singsongy way. “He wants his haystack back.” Then somebody come up with the nickname Bush Girl. It never caught on too good, though, since she wouldn't never get mad about it. She'd just shake her head and look at them boys with that sad expression in her big brown Sara Reynolds eyes. Not sad for herself— nuh-uh—but sad for them boys and their foolishness.

  And that was it. That was the thing about Sara Reynolds, them sad, soulful brown eyes. I noticed them from day one but never figured they had much to do with me till a few weeks back when she come up after class and talked to me about the massacres.

  What happened was, I got in some trouble for asking Mr. Foudy how come every time the Indians won a battle back in the Old West days, it got called a massacre, and every time the cavalry won, they called it a victory. Usually, I ain't one for talking up in class, but I'd been mulling this deal over for about a week, and it just didn't seem fair to me. But after the class got to laughing, I guess old Mr. Foudy thought I was trying to be some kind of troublemaker.