Knights of the Hill Country Read Free Page A

little red Mustang squealed down the road going the other way.
    “Did you see them girls' faces when I mooned 'em?” Jake said, laughing.
    Blaine checked him out in the rearview mirror and said, “Hey, yank your britches up, asshole. I don't want your naked butt on my upholstery.”
    “Are you kidding me?” Jake said. “You spilled enough beer on these old seats last Saturday night. I don't think you're gonna have to worry about my butt germs for a good long time.”
    “Besides,” Darnell said, “this has to be the oldest Blazer inthe history of the world. I'll bet it's the first one off the assembly line.”
    It was our quarterback, Darnell Wills, and our wide receiver Jake Sweet in the backseat and me and Blaine up front. All of us fresh and clean from our postgame showers, large and in charge.
    Blaine patted the dashboard and said, “Good old Citronella.” Citronella was what he called the Blazer. “She might be ancient, but, by God, she's loyal. And I'll tell you what, she's got a good pedigree too. Her first owner was George Washington hisself, and he sold her off to Buffalo Bill and he sold her to Babe Ruth and he sold her to Elvis Presley.”
    That was Blaine for you. He always could lay it on thick.
    “And old Elvis, he sold it to Emmitt Smith's daddy two months before he kicked the bucket on the bathroom floor at Graceland, and it was Emmitt sold it to me.”
    “You're full of it,” Jake said.
    “And on top of that, Citronella don't get jealous of all the girls I run in and out of that backseat back there.”
    Darnell had to laugh at that one. “Now you're really full of it.”
    “You ever seen anyone light a fart on fire?” Jake said.
    “Yeah,” I told him. “We seen you do it last week, and we didn't want to see it then.”
    Old Jake, he wasn't a half bad wide receiver, but he was always playing the fool. Sometimes he got on Blaine's nerves a little more than he done with the rest of us, especially this season.
    “You fart on my seat, and I'll break your arm,” Blaine told him, and he only barely sounded like he was exaggerating it.
    “What's the matter?” Jake shot back. “You still bent out of shape about almost losing us the game tonight?”
    Anybody but Jake would've known better than to say something like that to Blaine.
    Without the least warning, Blaine stomped on the brake pedal, and Citronella fishtailed to a dead stop right there in the middle of Main. He stared his Blaine stare into the rearview mirror. “You get your britches up right now, son, or I'm climbing back there, and we'll see who gets bent out of shape.”
    This time there wasn't no exaggeration about it.
    Jake tried staring his own stare back into the mirror, but it didn't hold up. “Jesus, Blaine, what's eating you? Can't you take a joke no more?” He started hitching up his jeans.
    Blaine didn't bother to answer that but just kept aiming his double-barrel glare into the mirror till Jake got his belt buckled. Then he gave a nod, like,
Okay, you're off the hook for now,
and started back down the street again.
    “Hell,” Jake said. “No one's worried about losing any games anyways. Not when we got old Hamp in there.” He reached over the seat and slapped my shoulder, but I just looked down at the dashboard. Last thing Blaine wanted to hear was how someone had to save his bacon.
    “That's the truth,” Darnell said. “You was amazing out there tonight, Hamp.”
    “Aw, I didn't do nothing the rest of you wouldn't have done.” I caught myself rubbing my palm along the short bristles of hair on top of my head. It's kind of a nervous thing I do when I get embarrassed. Blaine told me one time it drove him crazy, made me look like I didn't have no self-confidence, so I tried to quit, but it kept coming back.
    “Man oh man,” Darnell said. “I mean, you straight-out laid it on that quarterback. He was stretched out down there on the ground so flat he looked about like some old piece of pizza you gotta peel up