A Short Story from Bill Rayburn

Bill is now living and writing in England.

Chiefs vs Raiders: The Real Story

Copyright 2012 by

Bill Rayburn

A tipsy, toothless, balding overweight 50-year-old with halitosis that would halt a ravenous wolverine in its tracks stumbled knowingly into the Black Hole before Sunday’s Raiders-Chiefs game. A Len Dawson jersey arrogantly draped the torso of this clueless but brave soul.

She turned and faced the rows of glaring, hate-filled faces. At the top of her lungs, she said, “Okay you Rhodes Scholars; I T apostrophe S is a contraction for what two words?”

She was presented with stony silence. Black-lensed sunglasses stared at her from every direction. Three or four ankle bracelets chimed in unison, not unlike cell phones going off in the white section. Someone whispered “Contraction? Is she pregnant?”

“Let’s give it another go,” she bellowed, turning to face the front of the section. Everyone was standing and watching her. There was not a nuclear family within twenty rows. “Four divided by two equals what?”

From in front, to the right, she heard a hushed, “Wait, I think I know that one.”

But again she was confronted with silence and 2000 baleful glares. The stench rivaled that of a porta potty in late August at a bran muffin plant in Juarez, Mexico. Somewhere folded into the olfactory miasma, an inattentive soul had apparently left a large wedge of Blue Stilton cheese in the trunk of a car too long.

“Last one,” she hollered at the top of her lungs. Still no one stirred. Other than the subtle sounds of needles breaking skin, she was facing a silent majority.

“When a cop holds a gun to your Uncle’s temple, what day of the week is it?”

She turned slowly, looking for any spark of intellectual vitality. It was like being in an under-watered nursery full of Boston ferns in the Atacam Desert in northern Chile. Life simply was elsewhere.

From behind she heard a young female voice. “That’s easy Vato. I know that one. I’m pretty sure it ends in a Y.”

The woman spun around to face back into the stands. She shook her head in disgust and turned and walked down the ramp toward the field. With each step she encountered a challenging, resistant shoulder bump and a grumbled “Who is this bitch?” echoed almost immediately by an incredulous “That’s a bitch?”

She reached the railing and turned to face the entire section. She put up both hands to make sure she had their attention.

“You guys make the Bataan Death March look like Mardi Gras.”

There were suddenly murmurs and grunts and one whisper of “Are we playin’ the

Saints?” “I’ll give you clowns one last chance. If Hector has two warrants out for his arrest, and he’s in a parking lot with ten thousand other ex-cons, all wearing Randy Moss jerseys, how many cops on scooters will it take to find him?”

In unison, the section responded in a throaty roar: “Randy Moss SUCKS!”