Dedication

This novel is dedicated to the memory of two of my high school teammates with whom I toiled on the gridiron as Oklahoma schoolboys. You will find them characterized in this fiction as heroes. In real life they were just that, both having paid the ultimate price for their country in Vietnam. Benny Bob Coe was a Green Beret with the 101^st Airborne Division; Johnny Ray Tagman served as an infantryman in the First Infantry Division. Benny was our All-Conference quarterback. Johnny was our tireless and long-suffering team manager. Both were killed in action.

Prologue

Friday, November 16, 1973, 9:14 p.m.
Wade Rokes Stadium; Hert City, Oklahoma.

            When the sneering human wrecking ball got off him, sophomore fullback Buddy Tarlson rolled from his back and came to his knees, his breathing ragged and painful. On all fours he looked imploringly to the sideline hoping the coaches would see fit to send in his relief.  But Coach Stott, a slight smile on his face, stared toward the prancing Hert City cheerleaders at the far end zone; and Coach Doyle stared darkly at the ground in front of him, his arms folded across his chest.  Besides, no replacement for him existed.  He’d come into the game in the first quarter to replace senior starter Charlie Hoff who’d been led away to the dressing room and never returned.  Tarlson staggered to his feet and wandered back toward the loosely forming huddle.

            The young fullback bent forward at the waist with his bleeding hands on his knees, and sucked in what air he could.  But the cracked rib on his left side made it feel like inhaling shards of glass.  The left tackle, Junior Waxworth, another sophomore replacement, stood behind Buddy in the huddle, and tried to use him as a leaning post.

            “Back off, Junior!” Tarlson rasped and pushed him with his butt.

            Waxworth, consumed by his own infirmities didn't, or couldn't, respond. Senior quarterback Beau Roberts, misshapen by his swollen lower lip and left cheek which had closed his left eye and turned the color of squashed grapes, showed fright in his one good eye as he called Tarlson's number again.  The fullback winced, emitting a short moan, as much in dread as in pain.  But he was, for all intents and purposes, their only choice.  Lyle Bonner, the only tailback left, could barely stand on two sprained ankles, and Bobby Snider, the slot back, no longer seemed to recognize the planet they were on, and had taken to whimpering.  Roberts wasn’t about to pass it, even if he could. They all just wanted to let the clock run.  Tarlson glanced up at the game clock.  His single solace came when he saw that only one minute remained in his, and his team’s, miserable season.

            Tarlson rubbed his swollen dislocated right pinky as they broke the huddle, and looked painfully across the line of scrimmage at the waiting defensive tackle for Hert City, whose team members had repeatedly referred to as "Bubba" throughout the contest.

            "Way to stick, Bubba!" they had said.  "Screw 'em in the ground again, Bubba.”  “He’s comin’ to your side, Bubba.” “Rip his head off, Bubba!"

            Bubba’s reputation had preceded him.  All season long newspaper stories had been written about his exploits on the high school gridiron.  Those became further enlarged by oral accounts from the usual gatherings of town men at the diners around the district and at the farmers’ co-ops.  His prowess had become legendary in three short months.  Legendary, yes, but Buddy Tarlson and his fellow Tsalagee Redmen knew first hand none of his ability was mythical. That knowledge hung on them as real and debilitating as a bully punch to the stomach.

            He’d emerged out of nowhere, moving into Hert City in the summer from somewhere in Texas.  Some said Houston; some said Dallas. Some said he swirled out of Midland-Odessa like a Permian Basin dust devil; half-man, half roughneck. The details remained sketchy on that part, just like the how and what concerning the large sigma shaped scar on his left bicep.  But its exact proportions looked too perfect to have resulted from an accident.

            When asked repeatedly how such a phenom had come to be on his team all of a sudden, the Trojan coach smiled his mirthless smile and said, “Here in the Trojan Nation, we don’t worry about the color of the horse, we just load the wagon.”  And then would go on at length about the winning attitude of “these kids” and how the “kids” were focused on getting to another championship.  To which the interrogator would frown and nod as if all the coach said had made perfect sense, and then would write it on her pad as a quote for the Tuesday edition.

            Beyond Junior Waxworth’s three-point stance, Tarlson could see a smirk curl Bubba's upper lip, but no humor escaped from his dark recessed eyes.  Tarlson decided Waxworth would receive yet another brain jarring forearm to the jaw, and he himself would once more abruptly meet the frozen turf of Rokes Field compliments of Bubba.

            At the snap of the ball, Tarlson took a jab step to his left then veered right, his arms open to receive the hand-off from Roberts.  Roberts spun quickly counter-clockwise, but in his half-blind and fully terrified state, he turned his head to his left in order to keep his good right eye on the lookout for the inevitably charging Bubba. As a result he lost the timing and ran flush into the slanting Tarlson.  Buddy tried to make a correction and grabbed at the ball still in Roberts fear-frozen hands.  The two of them danced a short frantic jitterbug more or less toward the line of scrimmage, Roberts obviously more concerned with the whereabouts of Bubba than giving the ball to his fullback.  Just as Tarlson broke the ball free from Roberts’s grip, Junior Waxworth flew backwards into the conjoined duo, sending the three of them crashing to the ground and the ball squirting skyward.  A meaty black arm reached out and gathered in the ball, and beneath a groaning Waxworth and a whimpering Roberts, Tarlson watched the ogre called Bubba jog the ten yards needed to the Tsalagee goal line.  That upped the score sixty-two – zip, Hert City.

            All Buddy Tarlson could think to say at that point–a phrase on the lips of his hapless teammates all that night; words echoed throughout the season in every town across the tri-county district–was, “Who is this guy?”