The Color of Law_ A Novel - Mark Gimenez [83]
EIGHTEEN
OVER THE COURSE of four seasons of Division I-A college football, playing against teams like Texas, Texas A&M, Nebraska, and Oklahoma, teams with players that outweighed the SMU players by forty or fifty pounds per position, Scott Fenney, number 22, had taken a beating. At 185 pounds, he was strong, fast, and tough; but when a 250-pound linebacker tackled him and drove him into the hard turf, he still hurt. He suffered two knee surgeries, a dislocated shoulder, five broken ribs, four broken fingers (the same one twice), two broken noses, one concussion, numerous abrasions and contusions, and a cumulative total of 117 stitches. But he never missed a single game.
Scott Fenney got up every time they knocked him down. And when he did, he always gave them payback, breaking a long run, returning a kickoff, scoring a touchdown. The payback helped make the hurt go away.
Senator Mack McCall had shown Scott the true meaning of hurt. He had hit Scott like no linebacker had ever hit him. Now it was time for payback.
Scott checked his watch and stood. He glanced out at the night lights of downtown. It was almost nine the next evening and Scott was in his office.
“Scotty,” Bobby said from the sofa. “I know this was my idea, but maybe it ain’t such a good idea.”
“You coming or not?”
Bobby stood. “Oh, yeah, I’m coming. Course, I feel like I’m boarding the Titanic.”
Mack McCall’s eyes roamed over the naked body of Jean McCall, and he recalled the first time they had had sex, fifteen years ago, not a month after she had graduated law school and joined his Senate staff. She was young, she was lean, she was sexy, and she was not his wife. His wife was not sexy or lean or young; she was old, forty-five, same age as he was back then, but he did not feel as old as she looked. Martha looked like her mother—not a woman he was particularly interested in having sex with.
At age forty-five, Mack McCall still felt young and randy, and he needed a woman who was young and randy, like Jean. They had sex nearly every day, anytime and anywhere—his private bathroom, the backseat of the limousine, the Senate cloakroom. She had an incredible body, a body that made him feel twenty-five again and brimming with testosterone. And she possessed a sex drive that could permanently disable a man half his age.
She was also a TV camera’s dream, beautiful, articulate, charming, and intelligent. When Mack began dreaming of the White House, he had to make a decision: Did he want a first lady who looked like a grandmother or a fashion model? The decision took less than a minute to make. He divorced Martha.
She hired an asshole for a lawyer and threatened to confirm what the tabloids had suggested: that Senator Mack McCall was having an affair with a member of his staff. Not that that was any big news on Capitol Hill, a member of Congress screwing around on his wife. But it was a sensitive issue when the particular member ran on a conservative family values platform and had his eye on the White House. Of course, Mack McCall could cut a business deal when the need arose. For $100 million, Martha kept her mouth shut and went home to Texas.
Jean had been worth every penny.
But the years had taken their toll on Mack McCall. Now, at age sixty, he didn’t feel twenty-five anymore; he didn’t feel forty-five, or even fifty-five; he didn’t feel young and virile and brimming with testosterone. So he did what any self-respecting sixty-year-old man with money and a wife twenty years younger than him would do: he went to the doctor. Every morning now, Senator Mack McCall showered, shaved, and slapped on aftershave and a testosterone patch, and every night he popped a Viagra pill, all in an effort to satisfy his sexual fantasies and Jean’s sexual desires.
That evening she was stretched out naked on their bed. Her body was still incredibly shapely and inviting; her black hair was draped over her shoulders and fell onto her firm breasts; her belly was flat with no stretch marks from pregnancies; her lean legs didn’t look like road maps.