by Irwin Shaw
Then something happened that made him forget about football.
There was a crackling in his left ear, like static. Then he heard a man’s voice saying, “VHF one is out.” Immediately afterward he heard another man’s voice saying, “VHF two is out, too. We’ve lost radio contact.” Hugo looked around, sure that everybody else must have heard it, too, that it had come over the public-address system. But everybody was doing just what he had been doing before, talking in low voices, reading, napping.
“That’s a hell of a note.” Hugo recognized the captain’s voice. “There’s forty thousand feet of soup from here to Newfoundland.”
Hugo looked out the window. It was black and thick out there. The red light on the tip of the wing was a minute blood-colored blur that seemed to wink out for seconds at a time in the darkness. Hugo closed the curtain and put on his seat belt.
“Well, kiddies,” the captain’s voice said in Hugo’s ear, “happy news. We’re lost. If anybody sees the United States down below, tap me on the shoulder.”
Nothing unusual happened in the passenger section.
The door to the cockpit opened and the stewardess came out. She had a funny smile on her face that looked as though it had been painted on sideways. She walked down the aisle, not changing her expression, and went to the tail of the plane and sat down there. When she was sure nobody was looking, she hooked the seat belt around her.
The plane bucked a bit and people began to look at their watches. They were due to land in about ten minutes and they weren’t losing any altitude. There was a warning squawk from the public-address system and the captain said, “This is your captain speaking. I’m afraid we’re going to be a little late. We’re running into head winds. I suggest you attach your seat belts.”
There was the click of metal all over the plane. It was the last sound Hugo heard for a long time, because he fainted.
He was awakened by a sharp pain in one ear. The right one. The plane was coming down for a landing. Hugo pulled the curtain back and looked out. They were under the cloud now, perhaps 400 feet off the ground and there were lights below. He looked at his watch. They were nearly three hours late.
“You better make it a good one,” he heard a man’s voice say, and he knew the voice came from the cockpit. “We don’t have enough gas for another thousand yards.”
Hugo tried to clear his throat. Something dry and furry seemed to be lodged there. Everybody else had already gathered up his belongings, placidly waiting to disembark. They don’t know how lucky they are, Hugo thought bitterly as he peered out the window, hungry for the ground.
The plane came in nicely and as it taxied to a halt, the captain said cheerily, “I hope you enjoyed your trip, folks. Sorry about the little delay. See you soon.”
The ground hit his feet at a peculiar angle when he debarked from the plane, but he had told Sylvia he would look in at her place when he got back to town. Sibyl was away in Florida with her parents for the week, visiting relatives.
Going over in the taxi, fleeing the harsh world of bruised and defeated men and the memory of his brush with death in the fogbound plane, he thought yearningly of the warm bed awaiting him and the expert, expensive girl.
Sylvia took a long time answering the bell and when she appeared, she was in a bathrobe and had her headache face on. She didn’t let Hugo in, but opened the door only enough to speak to him. “I’m in bed, I took two pills,” she said, “I have a splitting—”
“Ah, honey,” Hugo pleaded. There was a delicious odor coming from her nightgown and robe. He leaned gently against the door.
“It’s late,” she said sharply. “You look awful. Go home and get some sleep.” She clicked the door shut decisively. He heard her putting the chain in place.
On the way back down the dimly lit staircase from Sylvia’s apartment, Hugo resolved always to have a small emergency piece of jewelry in his pocket for moments like this. Outside in the street, he looked up longingly at Sylvia’s window. It was on the fourth floor and a crack of light, cozy and tantalizing, came through the curtains. Then, on the cold night air, he heard a laugh. It was warm and sensual in his left ear and he remembered, with a pang that took his breath away, the other occasions when he had heard that laugh. He staggered down the street under the pale lampposts, carrying his valise, feeling like Willy Loman coming toward the end of his career in Death of a Salesman. He had the impression that he was being followed slowly by a black car, but he was too distracted to pay it much attention.
When he got home, he took out a pencil and paper and noted down every piece of jewelry he had bought Sylvia that fall, with its price. The total came to $3468.30, tax included. He tore up the piece of paper and went to bed. He slept badly, hearing in his sleep the sound of faltering airplane engines mingled with a woman’s laughter four stories above his head.
It rained during practice the next day and as he slid miserably around in the icy, tilted mud, Hugo wondered why he had ever chosen football as a profession. In the showers later, wearily scraping mud off his beard, Hugo became conscious that he was being stared at. Croker, the taxi-squad fullback, was in the next shower, soaping his hair and looking at Hugo with a peculiar small smile on his face. Then, coming from Croker’s direction, Hugo heard the long, low, disturbing laugh he had heard the night before. It was as though Croker had it on tape inside his head and was playing it over and over again, like a favorite piece of music. Croker, Hugo thought murderously, Croker! A taxi-squadder! Didn’t even get to make the trips with the team. Off every Sunday, treacherously making every minute count while his teammates were fighting for their lives.
Hugo heard the laugh again over the sound of splashing water. The next time there was an intra-squad scrimmage, he was going to maim the son of a bitch.
He wanted to get away from the locker room fast, but when he was dressed and almost out the door, the trainer called to him.
“The coach wants to see you, Pleiss,” the trainer said, “Pronto.”
Hugo didn’t like the “pronto,” The trainer had a disagreeable habit of editorializing.
The coach was sitting with his back to the door, looking up at the photograph of Jojo Baines. “Close the door, Pleiss,” the coach said, without turning around.
Hugo closed the door.
“Sit down,” the coach said, still with his back to Hugo, still staring at the photograph of what the coach had once said was the only 100 percent football player he had ever seen.
Hugo sat down.
The coach said, “I’m fining you two hundred and fifty dollars, Pleiss.”
“Yes, sir,” Hugo said.
The coach finally swung around. He loosened his collar. “Pleiss,” he said, “what in the name of Knute Rockne are you up to?”
“I don’t know, sir,” Hugo said.
“What the hell are you doing staying up until dawn night after night?”
Staying up was not quite an accurate description of what Hugo had been doing, but he didn’t challenge the coach’s choice of words.
“Don’t you know you’ve been followed, you dummy?” the coach bellowed.
The black car on the empty street. Hugo hung his head. He was disappointed in Sibyl. How could she be so suspicious? And where did she get the money to pay for detectives?
The coach’s large hands twitched on the desk. “What are you, a sex maniac?”
“No, sir,” Hugo said.
“Shut up!” the coach said.
“Yes, sir,” said Hugo.
“And don’t think it was me that put a tail on you,” the coach said. “It’s a lot worse than that. The tail came from the commissioner’s office.”
Hugo let out his breath, relieved. It wasn’t Sibyl. How could he have misjudged her?
“I’ll lay my cards on the table, Pleiss,” the coach said. “The commissioner’s office has been interested in you for a long time now. It’s their job to keep this game clean, Pleiss, and I’m with them all the way on that, and make no mistake
about it. If there’s one thing I won’t stand for on my club, it’s a crooked ballplayer.”
Hugo knew that there were at least 100 things that the coach had from time to time declared he wouldn’t stand for on his club, but he didn’t think it was the moment to refresh the coach’s memory.
“Coach,” Hugo began.
“Shut up! When a ballplayer as stupid as you suddenly begins to act as though he has a ouija board under his helmet and is in the middle of one goddamn play after another, naturally they begin to suspect something.” The coach opened a drawer in his desk and took out a dark-blue folder from which he extracted several closely typewritten sheets of paper. He put on his glasses to read. “This is the report from the commissioner’s office.” He ran his eyes over some of the items and shook his head in wonder. “Modesty forbids me from reading to you the account of your sexual exploits, Pleiss,” the coach said, “but I must remark that your ability even to trot out onto the field on Sunday after some of the weeks you’ve spent leaves me openmouthed in awe.”
There was nothing Hugo could say to this, so he said nothing.
“So far, you’ve been lucky,” the coach said. “The papers haven’t latched onto it yet. But if one word of this comes out, I’ll throw you to the wolves so fast you’ll pull out of your cleats as you go through the door. Have you heard me?”
“I’ve heard you, Coach,” Hugo said.
The coach fingered the papers on his desk and squinted through his bifocals. “In your sudden career as a lady’s man, you also seem to have developed a sense of largess in the bestowal of jewelry. In one shop in this town alone, you have spent well over three thousand dollars in less than two months. At the same time, you buy an eight-room house with a swimming pool, you send your wife on expensive vacations all over the country, you invest fifty thousand dollars in a real-estate deal that is barely legal, you are known to be playing cards for high stakes with the biggest gamblers in the city and you rent a safe-deposit box and are observed stuffing unknown sums of cash into it every week. I know what your salary is, Pleiss. Is it unmannerly of me to inquire whether or not you have fallen upon some large outside source of income recently?”
The coach closed the folder and took off his glasses and sat back. Hugo would have liked to explain, but the words strangled in his throat. All the things that had seemed to him like the smiling gifts of fate now, in that cold blue folder, were arranged against him as the criminal profits of corruption. Hugo liked everyone to like him and he had become used to everyone wishing him well. Now the realization that there were men, the coach among them, who were ready to believe the worst of him and ruin him forever because of it, left him speechless. He waved his hands helplessly.
“Pleiss,” the coach said, “I want you to answer one question, and if I ever find out you’re lying.…” He stopped, significantly. He didn’t add the usual coda, “I’ll personally nail you by the hands to the locker-room wall.” This omission terrified Hugo as he waited numbly for the question.
“Pleiss,” the coach said, “are you getting information from gamblers?”
A wave of shame engulfed Hugo. He couldn’t remember ever having felt so awful. He began to sob, all 235 pounds of him.
The coach looked at him, appalled. “Use your handkerchief, man,” he said.
Hugo used his handkerchief. Damply he said, “Coach, I swear on the head of my mother, I never talked to a gambler in my life.”
“I don’t want the head of your mother,” the coach snarled. But he seemed reassured. He waited for Hugo’s sobs to subside. “All right. Get out of here. And be careful. Remember, you’re being watched at all times.”
Drying his eyes, Hugo dragged himself out of the office. The public-relations man, Brenatskis, was having a beer in the locker room with a small, gray-haired man with cigarette ash on his vest. Hugo recognized the man. It was Vincent Haley, the sports columnist. Hugo tried to get out without being seen. This was no day to be interviewed by a writer. But Brenatskis spotted him and called, “Hey, Hugo, come over here for a minute.”
Flight would be damning. Hugo was sure that the whole world knew by now that he was a man under suspicion. So he tried to compose his face as he went over to the two men. He even managed an innocent, deceitful, country boy’s smile.
“Hello, Mr. Haley,” he said.
“Glad to see you, Pleiss,” said Haley. “How’s your head?”
“Fine, fine,” Hugo said hurriedly.
“You’re having quite a season, Pleiss,” Haley said. His voice was hoarse and whiskeyish and full of contempt for athletes, and his pale eyes were like laser beams. “Yeah, quite a season. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a linebacker improve so much from one game to another.”
Hugo began to sweat. “Some years you’re lucky,” he said. “Things fall into place.” He waited, cowering inwardly, for the next doomful inquiry. But Haley merely asked him some routine questions, like who was the toughest man in the league going down the middle and what he thought about the comparative abilities of various passers he had played against. “Thanks, Pleiss,” Haley said, “that’s about all. Good luck with your head.” He held out his hand and Hugo shook it gratefully, glad that in another moment he was going to be out of range of those bone-dissolving eyes. With his hand still in the writer’s hand, Hugo heard the whiskeyish voice, but different, as though in some distant echo chamber, saying, in his left ear, “Look at him—two hundred and thirty-five pounds of bone and muscle, twenty-five years old, and he’s back here raking in the dough, while my kid, nineteen years old, a hundred and thirty pounds dripping wet, is lying out in the mud and jungle in Vietnam, getting his head shot off. Who did he pay off?”
Haley gave Hugo’s hand another shake. He even smiled, showing jagged, cynical, tar-stained teeth. “Nice talking to you, Pleiss,” he said. “Keep up the good work.”
“Thanks, Mr. Haley,” Hugo said earnestly. “I’ll try.”
He went out of the stadium, not watching or caring where he was going, surrounded by enemies.
He kept hearing that rasping, disdainful “Who did he pay off?” over and over again as he walked blindly through the streets. At one moment, he stopped, on the verge of going back to the stadium and explaining to the writer about the sixty-three stitches in his knee and what the Army doctor had said about them. But Haley hadn’t said anything aloud and it would be a plunge into the abyss if Hugo had to acknowledge that there were certain moments when he could read minds.
So he continued to walk toward the center of the city, trying to forget the coach and the gamblers, trying to forget Vincent Haley and Haley’s nineteen-year-old son, weight 130 pounds, getting his head shot off in the jungle. Hugo didn’t bother much about politics. He had enough to think about trying to keep from being killed every Sunday without worrying about disturbances 10,000 miles away in small Oriental countries. If the United States Army had felt that he wasn’t fit for service, that was their business.
But he couldn’t help thinking about that kid out there, with the mortars bursting around him or stepping on poisoned bamboo stakes or being surrounded by grinning little yellow men with machine guns in their hands.
Hugo groaned in complicated agony. He had walked a long way and he was in the middle of the city, with the bustle of the business section all around him, but he couldn’t walk away from that picture of Haley’s kid lying torn apart under the burned trees whose names he would never know.
Slowly, he became aware that the activity around him was not just the ordinary traffic of the weekday city. He seemed to be in a parade of some kind and he realized, coming out of his private torment, that people were yelling loudly all around him. They also seemed to be carrying signs. He listened attentively now. “Hell, no, we won’t go,” they were yelling, and, “U.S. go home,” and other short phrases of the same general import. And, reading the signs, he saw BURN YOUR DRAFT CARDS and DOWN WITH AMERICAN FASCISM. Interested, he looked carefully at the hundreds of people who were carrying him
along with them. There were quite a few young men with long hair and beards, barefooted in sandals, and rather soiled young girls in blue jeans, carrying large flowers, all intermingled with determined-looking suburban matrons and middle-aged, grim-looking men with glasses, who might have been college professors. My, he thought, this is worse than a football crowd.
Then he was suddenly on the steps of the city hall and there were a lot of police, and one boy burned his draft card and a loud cheer went up from the crowd, and Hugo was sorry he didn’t have his draft card on him, because he would have liked to burn it, too, as a sort of blind gesture of friendship to Haley’s soldier son. He was too shy to shout anything, but he didn’t try to get away from the city-hall steps; and when the police started to use their clubs, naturally, he was one of the first to get hit, because he stood head and shoulders above everybody else and was a target that no self-respecting cop would dream of missing.
Standing in front of the magistrate’s bench a good many hours later, with a bloody bandage around his head, Hugo was grateful for Brenatskis’ presence beside him, although he didn’t know how Brenatskis had heard about the little run-in with the police so soon. But if Brenatskis hadn’t come, Hugo would have had to spend the night in jail, where there was no bed large enough to accommodate him.
When his name was called, Hugo looked up at the magistrate. The American flag seemed to be waving vigorously on the wall behind the magistrate’s head, although it was tacked to the plaster. Everything had a bad habit of waving after the policeman’s club.
The magistrate had a small, scooping kind of face that made him look as though he would be useful in going into small holes to search for vermin. The magistrate looked at him with distaste. In his left ear, Hugo heard the magistrate’s voice—“What are you, a fag or a Jew or something?” This seemed to Hugo like a clear invasion of his rights, and he raised his hand as if to say something, but Brenatskis knocked it down, just in time.