His wife, Jenine, slaps the set with the palm of her hand. Nothing happens. She slaps it again, and then kicks it, gently once, not so gently again. Still nothing. “Gee, Eustis, I never saw nothing like that before. In all the years I been watching football, I never saw nothing like that. What did T.K. Mann think he was doing? I mean, forcing Harv Matision to leave the street that way, and making him say all those dopey things about him hearing voices in his head. What do you suppose T.K. was trying to prove? He had Matision cold out on the street. Why didn’t he shoot him? It would have been such a perfect ending if he’d shot him right off, instead of carrying on the way he did and leaving the whole game up in the air like that. I mean, who won? We got this pool down at the factory, and in order for somebody to get all the money, we first got to find out who won.”

“Christ, a man can’t even have a simple day of watching football, anymore,” grouses Eustis, “without some queer cocksucker coming along and fouling it up. I feel like writing a letter to my sonofabitching congressman, that’s how pissed off I am with that faggoty Mann. That son of a bitch. I get one day of pure relaxation a week, and he has to screw it up. I hope they kick his ass out of football for good for pulling a God damned stunt like that.” He stares around the living room, as if seeing it for the first time. “What the hell are we supposed to do now?”

Jenine shrugs. “I don’t know.” She too looks blankly around the living room. “Guess I’ll go to sleep.”

“Shit,” groans Eustis. “I suppose that’s about it.” He chugs his beer, scoops out the last of the peanuts and gets up. “What a fucking heap. Me. Going to sleep at ten fucking o’clock on a Saturday night.”

Still clinging to the slender hope the TV may yet come back on sometime during the night and either resume the game or allow him to punch up some replays, he leaves the set turned on and dials the volume control all the way over to full. He takes one last, hopeful look at the screen. It’s still blank. “Son of a bitch,” he says. He doesn’t shut the bedroom door.

Bright and early the next morning, for the first time in his life, Eustis Conrad does, indeed, write up and send off a letter to his congressman. Jenine adds a poignant P.S.

Appendix

APPENDIX

Here’s your free personal souvenir program for Killerbowl XXI.

Tear it out and keep it near your television set for fast, easy reference during the game.

The Teams

Never before have two Killerbowl teams been so radically different.