"Nothing?"

"Nothing."

"I heard you were picked up for drunken driving," he said.

"You heard wrong," I said. "You can always check it."

He stuck his thumbs in his vest. Mr. Corporation.

I looked at his clothes. Three-hundred-dollar suit. A little old boy out of a Texas swamp. He'd gone a long way on a Texas Christian option play. He was guts from hell. I looked at the scar down the side of his skull, the busted nose; the broken jaw didn't show – they'd wired it good. I wondered if he had trouble getting up after sitting two hours in a movie with those bad knees. And the punctured lung only the Mayo Clinic could fix. But nobody was trying to kill him every week anymore.

His clothes, his eyes, his clean-shaven face, and his relaxed lips said: "I made it. I'm not running a two-bit bar after ten years in pro football. I'm management. One of these days I'll manage a top NFL or AFL club."

He saw me looking him over.

"We got some good boys," he said. "Couple guards out of Colorado. They'll make it with the Vikings next year."

"What about Vakos?"

"Oh, he'll be okay."

"He's still in the hospital, isn't he?"

"How're you feeling?" Binks asked.

"I've been training, if that's what you mean," I said.

"What's wrong with the stock-and-bond business?"

"Don't you read the papers?" I said. "Besides, I'm a quarterback."

"You had your chance," Binks said.

"Right. And I almost blew it," I said.

"You blew it."

I grinned.

But I didn't really feel like grinning because now in my mind I saw the motel room again when Leighton was in the hospital after the game with Baltimore. I lay on the bed reading the evening paper and the sports writers were still saying Namath was the best in the world. Maybe they were right but I still had two good knees. That was one of the evenings I wanted to forget, with, in the morning at breakfast, hearing the weather forecast in Chicago and Leighton's wife where she lay beside me in bed, saying, "I still can't believe it happened. I didn't even like you the first time I saw you." And then her lips warm and round and wet that morning and her tongue moving slowly round and round inside my mouth.