Collected Fiction

by Irwin Shaw

  Luckily, the injury to Hugo’s ear came near the end of the season and his ordinary level of play was not so high that the drop in his efficiency had any spectacular effect on the coaches or the public. But Hugo, locked in his auditory half-world, fearful of silent enemies on his left and oblivious to the cheers and jeers of half the stadium, brooded.

  Off the field, despite occasional little mishaps, he could do well enough. He learned to sit on the left of the coach at all meetings and convinced his wife that he slept better on the opposite side of the bed than on the one he had always occupied in the three years of their marriage. His wife, Sibyl, was a girl who liked to talk, anyway, mostly in protracted monologues, and an occasional nod of the head satisfied most of her demands for conversational responses. And a slight and almost unnoticeable twist of the head at most gatherings put Hugo’s right ear into receiving position and enabled him to get a serviceable fix on the speaker.

  With the approach of summer and the imminence of the pre-season training sessions, Hugo brooded more than ever. He was not given to introspection or fanciful similes about himself, but he began to think about the left side of his head as a tightly corked carbonated cider bottle. He poked at his eardrum with pencil points, toothpicks and a nail clipper, to let the fizz out; but aside from starting a slight infection that suppurated for a week, there was no result.

  Finally, he made hesitant inquiries, like a man trying to find the address of an abortionist, and found the name of an ear specialist on the other side of town. He waited for Sibyl to go on her annual two-week visit to her parents in Oregon and made an appointment for the next day.

  Dr. G. W. Sebastian was a small oval Hungarian who was enthusiastic about his work. He had clean, plump little busy hands and keen, merry eyes. Affliction, especially in his chosen field, pleased him and the prospect of long, complicated and possibly dangerous operations filled him with joy. “Lovely,” he kept saying, as he stood on a leather stool to examine Hugo’s ear, “Oh, absolutely lovely.” He didn’t seem to have many patients. “Nobody takes ears seriously enough,” he explained, as he poked with lights and curiously shaped instruments into Hugo’s ear. “People always think they hear well enough or that other people have suddenly all begun to mumble. Or, if they do realize they’re not getting everything, that there’s nothing to be done about it. You’re a wise young man, very wise, to have come to me in time. What is it you told Miss Cattavi your profession was?”

  Miss Cattavi was the nurse. She was a six-foot, 165-pounder who looked as though she shaved twice a day. She had immigrated from northern Italy and was convinced that Hugo played soccer for a living. “That Pelé,” she had said. “The money he makes!”

  Dr. Sebastian had never seen a football game in his life, either, and an impatient look came over his face as Hugo tried to explain what he did on Sundays and about Johnny Smathers and not being able to hear cleats pounding perilously on his left side when he went in to stop a draw over center. Dr. Sebastian also looked a little puzzled when Hugo tried to explain just exactly what had happened at Green Bay. “People do things like that?” he had said incredulously. “Just for money? In America?”

  He probed away industriously, clucking to himself and smelling of peppermint and newly invented antiseptics, orating in little bursts that Hugo couldn’t quite hear. “We are far behind the animals,” was one thing Hugo did hear. “A dog responds to a whistle on a wave length that is silence for a human being. He hears a footfall on grass fifty yards away and growls in the darkness of the night. A fish hears the splash of a sardine in the water a mile away from him, and we have not yet begun to understand the aural genius of owls and bats.”

  Hugo had no desire to hear whistles on dogs’ wave lengths or footfalls on grass. He was uninterested in the splash of distant sardines and he was not an admirer of the genius of owls and bats. All he wanted to be able to hear was Johnny Smathers ten yards to his left in a football stadium. But he listened patiently. After what doctors had done for his knee, he had a childlike faith in them; and if Dr. Sebastian, in the course of restoring his hearing, wanted to praise the beasts of the field and the birds of the air, Hugo was prepared to be polite and nod agreement from time to time, just as he did when Sibyl spoke about politics or miniskirts or why she was sure Johnny Smathers’ wife was no better than she should be when the team was on the road.

  “We have allowed our senses to atrophy.” Hugo winced as Dr. Sebastian rose on his toes for leverage and went rather deep with a blunt instrument. “We have lost our animal magic. We are only one third in communication, even the best of us. Whole new fields of understanding are waiting to be explored. When Beethoven’s last quartets are played in a concert hall, a thousand people should fall out of their seats and writhe in unbearable ecstasy on the floor. Instead, what do they do? They look at their programs and wonder if there will be time for a beer before catching the last train home.”

  Hugo nodded. He had never heard any of Beethoven’s last quartets and the floor of a concert hall didn’t seem like the place a nice, well-brought-up married American boy should choose to writhe in ecstasy; but now that he had taken the step of going to a doctor, he was going to see it through. Still, with talk like that, about dogs and owls and sardines, he could see why there were no patients waiting in Dr. Sebastian’s outer office.

  “A crusade,” Dr. Sebastian was saying, his eye glued to a lighted chromium funnel whose narrow end seemed to be embedded deep in Hugo’s brain. Dr. Sebastian’s breath pepperminted warmly on Hugo’s bare neck. “A crusade is called for. You have a most unusually arranged collection of bones, Mr. Pleiss. A crusade to lift the curtain of sound, to unmuffle, to recapture our animal heritage, to distinguish whispers in bedlam, to hear the rustle of roses opening in the morning sun, to catch threats before they are really spoken, to recognize promises that are hardly formulated. I never did see a bone structure like this, Mr. Pleiss.”

  “Well, that feller in Green Bay weighed nearly three hundred pounds and his elbow—”

  “Never mind, never mind.” Dr. Sebastian finally pulled various bits of machinery out of his ear. “We will operate tomorrow morning, Miss Cattavi.”

  “OK,” Miss Cattavi said. She had been sitting on a bench, looking as though she were ready to go in as soon as her team got the ball. “I’ll make the arrangements.”

  “But—” Hugo began.

  “I’ll have everything ready.” Dr. Sebastian said. “You’ve got nothing to worry about. Merely present yourself at the Lubenhorn Eye, Ear and Nose Clinic at three P.M. this afternoon.”

  “But there’re one or two things I’d like to—”

  “I’m afraid I’m terribly busy, Mr. Pleiss,” Dr. Sebastian said. He whisked out of the office, peppermint receding on the aseptic air.

  “He’ll fix you,” Miss Cattavi said, as she showed him to the door.

  “I’m sure he will,” said Hugo, “but—”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” Miss Cattavi said, “if you came back to have the other ear done.”

  When Hugo woke up after the operation, Dr. Sebastian was standing next to his bed, smiling merrily. “Naturally,” Dr. Sebastian said, “there is a certain slight discomfort.”

  The left side of Hugo’s head felt as though it were inside the turret of a tank that was firing sixty rounds a minute. It also still felt like a corked cider bottle.

  “You have an extraordinary bone structure, Mr. Pleiss.” The doctor raised himself on tiptoe, so as to be able to smile approvingly down into Hugo’s face. He spent a lot of time on his toes, Dr. Sebastian. In one way, it would have been more sensible if he had specialized in things like knees and ankles, instead of ears. “So extraordinary that I hated to finish the operation. It was like discovering a new continent. What a morning you have given me, Mr. Pleiss! I am even tempted not to charge you a penny.”

  It turned out later that Dr. Sebastian resisted this temptation. He sent a bill for $500. By the time Hugo received the bill, on the same da
y that Sibyl came back from Oregon, he was happy to pay it. The hearing in his left ear was restored. Now, if only Johnny Smathers wasn’t traded away and if their relationship could be patched up, Hugo was sure he’d be in there at middle linebacker for the whole season.

  There was a red scar behind his ear, but Sibyl didn’t notice it for four days. She wasn’t a very observant girl, Sibyl, except when she was looking at other girls’ clothes and hair. When Sibyl finally did notice the scar, Hugo told her he’d cut himself shaving. He’d have had to use a saw-toothed bread knife to shave with to give himself a scar like that, but Sibyl accepted his explanation. He was rock-bottom honest, Hugo, and this was the first time he’d ever lied to his wife. The first lie is easy to get away with.

  When he reported in to training camp, Hugo immediately patched up his friendship with Johnny Smathers. Johnny was a little cool at first, remembering how many times at the end of last season he had been made to look bad, all alone out there with two and three blockers trampling over him as Hugo was dashing away to the other side of the field, where nothing was happening. But when Hugo went as far as to confide in him that he’d had a little ringing in his left ear after the Green Bay game, a condition that had subsided since, Smathers had been understanding, and they even wound up as roommates.

  Pre-season practice was satisfactory. The coach understood about the special relationship between Hugo and Smathers and always played them together and Hugo’s performance was respectable, even though nobody was confusing him with Sam Huff or Dick Butkus or people like that.

  The exhibition games didn’t go badly and while Hugo didn’t distinguish himself particularly, he made his fair share of tackles and batted down a few passes, listening carefully to Johnny Smather’s instructions and not being caught out of position too many times. It was a more-or-less normal September for Hugo, like so many Septembers of his life—sweaty, full of aches and bruises and abuse from coaches, not making love on Friday and Saturday, so as not to lose his edge for Sunday, feeling frightened for his life on Sunday morning and delighted to be able to walk out of the stadium on his own two feet in the dusk on Sunday afternoon. For want of a better word, what Hugo felt was happiness.

  Then, just a minute before the end of the first regular league game of the season, something peculiar happened. Hugo’s team was ahead twenty-one to eighteen, and the other team had the ball on his team’s eight-yard line. It was third down and four to go and the crowd was yelling so much, the opposing quarterback, Brabbledoff, kept holding up his arms to get them to quiet down enough so that he could be heard in the huddle. The crowd hushed a bit; but, even so, Hugo was afraid he wouldn’t be able to hear Smathers when the play started. He shook his head to clear the sweat from the inside of his helmet and, for a moment, his left ear was parallel to the opposing huddle. Then the peculiar thing happened. He heard what Brabbledoff was saying, just as if he were right there next to him in the huddle. And the huddle was a good fifteen yards away from Hugo, at least, and the crowd was roaring. “I’m going to bootleg it to the weak side,” Brabbledoff was saying. “And, for Christ’s sake, make it look real!”

  The opposing team lined up and just before the snap, Hugo heard Smathers yell, “Around end to the strong side, around end to the strong side, Hugo!”

  The two lines leaped into action; the guards pulled out to lead the run to the strong side. Hugo could have sworn he saw Brabbledoff hand off to Frenzdich, the halfback, who churned after the screen of interference, while Brabbledoff sauntered back, as though out of the play. Everybody on Hugo’s team scrambled to stop the strong-side thrust. Everybody but Hugo. It was as though a button had been pushed somewhere in his back, making his moves mechanical. Struggling against the tide of traffic, he trailed Brabbledoff, who suddenly, in the clear, with no one near him, began to run like a frightened deer toward the weak-side corner, the ball now pulled out from behind the hip that had been hiding it. Hugo was there on the line of scrimmage, all alone, and he hurled himself at Brabbledoff. Brabbledoff said something unsportsmanlike as he went down with Hugo on top of him, then fumbled the ball. Hugo kneeled on Brabbledoff’s face and recovered the ball.

  Hugo’s teammates pummeled him in congratulation and they ran out the clock with two line bucks and the game was over, with the score twenty-one to eighteen.

  The team voted Hugo the game ball in the locker room and the coach said, “It’s about time you read a play correctly, Pleiss,” which was high praise, indeed, from that particular coach.

  In the shower, Johnny Smathers came over to him. “Man,” Johnny said, “I could have killed you when I saw you drifting over to the weak side after I yelled at you. What tipped you off?”

  “Nothing,” Hugo said, after a moment’s hesitation.

  “It was a hell of a play,” said Smathers.

  “It was just a hunch,” Hugo said modestly.

  He was quieter than usual that Sunday night, especially after a win. He kept thinking about Dr. Sebastian and the sound of roses opening.

  The next Sunday, Hugo went out onto the field just like every Sunday. He hadn’t heard anything all week that a man wouldn’t ordinarily hear and he was sure that it had been an acoustical freak that had carried Brabbledoff’s voice to him from the huddle. Nothing unusual happened in the first half of the game. Smathers guessed right about half of the time and while there was no danger that Hugo was going to be elected defensive player of the week by the newspapers, he served creditably for the first thirty minutes.

  It was a rough game and in the third quarter, he was shaken breaking into a screen and got up a little groggy. Moving around to clear his head while the other team was in the huddle, he happened to turn his left side toward the line of scrimmage. Then it happened again. Just as though he were right there, in the middle of the opposing huddle, he heard the quarterback say, in a hoarse whisper, “Red right! Flood left! Wing square in! R down and out … on five!”

  Hugo looked around to see if any of his teammates had heard, too. But they looked just the way they always looked—muddy, desperate, edgy, overweight, underpaid and uninformed. As the opposing team came out of the huddle, up to the line of scrimmage, Hugo moved automatically into the defensive formation that had been called by Krkanius, who played in the front four and ran the defense positions. “Red right! Flood left! Wing square in! R down and out … on five!” he repeated silently to himself. Since he didn’t know the other team’s signals, that didn’t help much, except that “on five” almost certainly meant that the ball was going to be snapped on the fifth count.

  Smathers yelled, “Pass. On the flank!” and, again, Hugo felt as though a button had been pushed in his back. He was moving on the four count and was across the line of scrimmage, untouched, a fraction of a second after the ball was snapped, and laid the quarterback low before he could take a half step back into the pocket.

  “Have you got a brother on this team, you son of a bitch?” the quarterback asked Hugo as Hugo lay on the quarterback’s chest.

  After that, for most of the rest of the afternoon, by turning to his right, Hugo heard everything that was said in the opposing huddle. Aside from an occasional commonplace remark, like “Where were you on that play, fat ass, waving to your girl?” or “If that Hunsworth puts his fingers into my eye once more, I’m going to kick him in the balls,” the only operational intelligence that came across to Hugo was in the quarterback’s coded signals, so there wasn’t much advantage to be gained from Hugo’s keenness of hearing. He knew when the ball was going to be snapped and could move a step sooner than otherwise, but he didn’t know where it was going and still had to depend upon Smathers in that department.

  Going into the last two minutes of the game, they were ahead, fourteen to ten. The Studs were one of the strongest teams in the league and Hugo’s team was a twenty-point underdog on the Las Vegas line and a win would be a major upset. But the Studs were on his team’s thirty-eight-yard line, first down and ten to go, and moving. Hugo’s teammates we
re getting up more and more slowly from the pileups, like losers, and they all avoided looking over toward the bench, where the coach was giving an imitation of General George S. Patton on a bad day along the Rhine.

  The Studs went briskly into their huddle, keyed up and confident. Hugo had been blocked out of the last three plays (“wiped out like my three-year-old daughter” had been the phrase the coach had used) and he was preparing his excuses if he was pulled out of the game. The Studs were talking it up in the huddle, a confused babel of sound, when suddenly Hugo heard one voice, very clearly. It was Dusering, the leading pass catcher in the league. Hugo knew his voice well. Dusering had expressed himself to Hugo with some eloquence after Hugo had pushed him out of bounds in what Dusering considered an ungentle-manly manner after a thirty-yard gain on a pass to the side line.

  “Listen,” Dusering was saying in the huddle fifteen yards away, “I got Smathers all set up. I can beat him on a buttonhook on the inside.”

  “OK,” Hugo heard the quarterback say, and then the signal.

  The Studs trotted up to the line of scrimmage. Hugo glanced around at Smathers. Smathers was pulling back deep, worried about Dusering’s getting behind him, too busy protecting his area to bother about calling anything to Hugo. Hugo looked at Dusering. He was wide, on the left, looking innocent, giving nothing away.

  The ball was snapped and Dusering went straight down the side line, as though for the bomb. A half-back came charging out in front of Hugo, yelling, his arms up, but Hugo ignored him. He cut back to his left, waited for a step, saw Dusering stop, then buttonhook back inside, leaving Smathers hopelessly fooled. The ball came floating out. Just as Dusering set himself to get it at waist height, Hugo flung himself across the trajectory of the pass and gathered it in. He didn’t get far with it, as Dusering had him on the first step, but it didn’t matter. The game was, to all intents and purposes, over, a stunning victory. It was the first pass Hugo had ever intercepted.