by Irwin Shaw
“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 were 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.
He was voted the game ball that Sunday, too.
In the locker room, the coach came over to Hugo while he was taking off his jockstrap. The coach looked at him curiously. “I really ought to fine you,” the coach said. “You left the middle as open as a whore’s legs on Saturday night.”
“Yes, Coach,” Hugo said, modestly wrapping a towel around him. He didn’t like rough language.
“What made you cover the buttonhook?” the coach asked.
“I …” Hugo looked guiltily down at his bare toes. They were bleeding profusely and one nail looked as though he was going to lose it. “Dusering tipped it off. He does something funny with his head before the buttonhook.”
The coach nodded, a new light of respect in his eyes.
It was Hugo’s second lie. He didn’t like to lie, but if he told the coach he could hear what people were whispering in a huddle fifteen yards away, with 60,000 people screaming in the stands like wild Indians, the coach would send him right over to the doctor to be treated for concussion of the brain.
During the week, for the first time, he was interviewed by a sportswriter. The article came out on Friday and there was a picture of him crouching with his hands spread out, looking ferocious. The headline over the article said, “MR. BIG PLAY MAN.”
Sibyl cut the article out and sent it to her father, who always kept saying that Hugo would never amount to anything as a football player and ought to quit and start selling insurance before he got his brains knocked out, after which it would be too late to sell anything, even insurance.
Practice that week was no different from any other week, except that Hugo was limping because of his crushed toes. He tested himself, to see if he could hear what people were saying outside of normal range, but even in the comparative silence of the practice field, he didn’t hear any better or any worse than he had before his ear was hurt. He didn’t sleep as well as he usually did, as he kept thinking about the next Sunday, and Sibyl complained, saying he was making an insomniac out of her, thrashing around like a beached whale. On Thursday and Friday nights, he slept on the couch in the living room. The clock in the living room sounded like Big Ben to him, but he attributed it to his nerves. On Saturday, the whole team went to a hotel for the night, so Sibyl had nothing to complain about. Hugo shared a room with Smathers. Smathers smoked, drank and chased girls. At two in the morning, still awake, Hugo looked over at Johnny, sleeping beatifically, and wondered if perhaps he was making a mistake somewhere in the way he led his life.
Even limping from his crushed toes, Sunday was a remarkable day for Hugo. In the middle of the first quarter, after the opposing tackle had given him the knee to the head on a block, Hugo discovered that he not only could hear the signals in the other team’s huddle but knew what they meant, just as though he had been studying their playbook for months. “Brown right! Draw fifty-five … on two!” came through in the quarterback’s voice to his left ear, as though on a clear telephone connection, and was somehow instantly translated in Hugo’s brain to “Flanker to the right, fake to the fullback over right guard, hand-off to right halfback and cutback inside left end.”
Hugo still lined up obediently in the defensive formations called by Krkanius; but once the plays got under way, he disregarded his regular assignments and went where he knew the plays were going. He intercepted two passes, knocked down three more and made more tackles than the rest of the team put together. It was with somber satisfaction mixed with a curious sense of guilt that he heard Gates, the opposing quarterback, snarl in the huddle. “Who let that fish face Pleiss in there again?” It was the first time that he had heard any quarterback in the league mention him by name.
It was only as he was leaving the field that Hugo realized that Smathers hadn’t called a play to him once during the whole game. He tried to catch Smathers’ eye in the locker room, but Smathers always seemed to be looking the other way.
On Monday morning, when they ran the game films, the coach kept stopping the film on plays in which Hugo figured and rerunning those bits in slow motion over and over again. Hugo began to feel even more uncomfortable than he usually felt at these Monday-morning entertainments. The coach didn’t say anything, except, “Let’s look at that once more”; but seeing himself over and over again, in the center of plays so many times, embarrassed Hugo, as though he were showboating in front of his teammates. It was also embarrassing to see how often, even though he was right there, he allowed himself to be knocked down by blockers who were primarily going for another man, and how many tackles he had made that should have been clean but that developed into dogged, drag-me-along-with-you-Nellie yard-eating affairs. It was a stern rule with the coach that no comments were allowed by the players at the showings, so Hugo had no notion of what his teammates’ estimate of his performance might be.
When the film was finally over, Hugo tried to be the first man out the door, but the c
oach signaled to him and pointed with his thumb to the office. Leaning heavily on his cane, Hugo hobbled into the office, prepared for the worst. The cane was not merely window dressing. The toes on Hugo’s right foot looked like a plate of hamburger and, while he waited for the coach, Hugo thought of ways to introduce his infirmity as an excuse for some of the less glorious moments of his performance as revealed by the movies of the game.
The coach came in, opening the collar of his size-nineteen shirt so that he could express himself freely. He shut the door firmly, sat down and grunted. The grunt meant that Hugo could sit down, too. Hugo seated himself on a straight wooden chair, placing his cane prominently in front of him.
Behind the coach, on the wall, there was a blown-up photograph of a player in a 1940ish uniform. The player’s name was Jojo Baines and he had once been voted the dirtiest lineman ever to play in the National Football League. The only time Hugo had ever heard a note of tenderness creep into the coach’s voice was when he mentioned Jojo Baines.
“Ever since you joined this club, Pleiss,” said the coach, “I have been appalled when I looked down at the starting line-up and seen your name on it—in my own handwriting.”
Hugo smiled weakly, hoping to recognize a pleasantry.
“I won’t keep it a secret from you, Pleiss,” the coach went on. “For two years, I’ve been trying to get rid of you. I have made the circuit of every city in this league with my hat in hand, eating the bread of humiliation, trying to beg, borrow or steal another middle linebacker. To no avail.” The coach had an ear for rhetoric, when he was so inclined. “No avail,” he repeated. “They all knew that as long as I had to start you every Sunday, we were never a threat to anybody. I am going to give you an impersonal estimate of your abilities, Pleiss. You’re slow, you have a miserable pair of hands, you don’t hit hard enough to drive my grandmother out of a rocking chair, you close your eyes on contact, you run like a duck with gout, you wouldn’t get angry if a man hit you over the head with an automobile jack and raped your wife in front of your eyes, and you get fooled on plays that would have made a high school cheerleader roar with laughter in 1910. Have I left out anything?”
“Not that I can think of, sir,” Hugo said.
“With all that,” the coach went on, “you have saved three games in a row for us. You make a mockery out of the holy sport of football, but you have saved three games in a row for us and I am hereby increasing your salary by one thousand dollars for the season. If you tell this to anyone else on the team, I will personally nail you by the hands to the locker-room wall.”
“Yes, sir,” said Hugo.
“Now, get out of here,” the coach said.
“Yes, sir,” Hugo said. He stood up.
“Give me that cane,” the coach said.
Hugo gave him the cane. The coach broke it in two, without rising from his chair. “I can’t stand the sight of cripples,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” Hugo said. He tried not to limp as he walked Out of the office.
The next Sunday was unsettling.
It started on an audible.
When the opposing team lined up after the huddle, Hugo knew that the play that had been called in the huddle was a short pass to the right flank. But when the quarterback took his position behind the center, Hugo saw him scanning the defensive setup and frowning. The quarterback’s lips didn’t move, but Hugo heard, just as though the man were talking directly tp him, the word “No.” There was a little pause and then, “It won’t work, they’re overshifting on us.”
Hugo didn’t have time to wonder at this new extension of his powers, as the quarterback began to call a set of signals aloud, changing the play he’d picked in the huddle. Everybody could hear the signals, of course, but Hugo was the only one on his team who knew that the quarterback was calling for an end around, from left to right. Just before the snap, when it was too late for the quarterback to call any changes, Hugo broke for the left side. He knew, without thinking about why he knew it, that the end would take two steps to his left, hesitate for one beat, then whirl around and streak for the quarterback and the ball on the way around the opposite end. As the ball was snapped, Hugo was knifing in between the end and the tackle, and when the end, after his two steps, came around, Hugo flattened him with a block. The quarterback was left all alone, holding the ball, like a postman delivering a package to the wrong door, and was downed for a five-yard loss.
But it was an expensive exploit for Hugo. The end’s knee caught him in the head as they went down together and he was stretched out unconscious when the whistle blew.
When he woke up some minutes later, he was lying behind the bench, with the doctor kneeling over him, prodding the back of his neck, for broken vertebrae, and the trainer jamming spirits of ammonia under his nostrils. The jolt had been so severe that when the coach asked him at half time how he had been able to nip the end-around play in the bud, Hugo had to confess that he didn’t remember anything about the play. In fact, he didn’t remember leaving the hotel that morning, and it took him a good ten minutes after the coach had spoken to him to remember the coach’s name.
The doctor wouldn’t let him go back into the game and his value to the team was neatly demonstrated to the coach by the fact that they lost by three touchdowns and a field goal.
The plane was quiet on the flight home. The coach did not appreciate a show of youthful high spirits or resilience in adversity by teams of his when they had lost by three touchdowns and a field goal. And, as usual on such occasions, he had forbidden any drinks to be served, since he didn’t believe the fine, full flavor of defeat should be adulterated by alcohol. So the plane sped through the night sky in a long funereal hush.
Hugo himself was feeling better, although he still didn’t remember anything about the game that afternoon. He had a nagging sensation that something peculiar and fundamentally unwholesome had occurred before his injury, but he couldn’t bring it up to the level of consciousness. There was a small poker game going on up front in low whispers- and Hugo decided to sit in, to stop himself from profitless probing into the afternoon’s events. He usually lost in these games, since one glance at his open face by any normally acquisitive poker player showed whether Hugo had a pair, two pairs or was buying to a straight.
Either because it was too dark in the plane for the other players to get a clear look at Hugo’s face or because the head injury had hurt some nerve and rendered him expressionless, Hugo kept winning a fair proportion of the pots. He was a careless player and didn’t keep track of his winnings and merely felt that it was about time that luck was turning his way.
After about an hour of play, he had a sizable stack of chips in front of him. He was sitting with three aces in his hand, having gotten two of them on a four-card draw, and he was about to raise the man on his left, Krkanius, who had drawn three cards, when somehow, just as though Krkanius had nudged him and whispered the news into his ear, he knew that Krkanius had a full house, jacks and fours. He didn’t raise Krkanius but threw his cards in. Someone else saw Krkanius and Krkanius put his cards down. Full house. Jacks and fours.
“I’m not feeling so well,” Hugo said. “I’m cashing in.”
He stood up and went back to his seat.
It was a miserable night and the plane was bucking through thick cloud and Hugo sat at the window, looking out and feeling horrible. He was a cheat. He could make all sorts of excuses to himself, he could say he had acted out of surprise, without thinking, that it was the first time anything like that had ever happened to him, but he knew that if that weird message hadn’t come through to him from Krkanius, on his left, he’d have raised Krkanius $10 and Krkanius would have raised him and Krkanius would be at least $20 or $30 richer right now. No matter how he tried to wriggle out of it, his conscience told him he was just as guilty as if he had taken $30 out of Krkanius’ wallet.
Then, in a flash, he remembered the afternoon—the moment on the field when he was sure that he knew what the quarterback w
as thinking on the end-around play and his automatic reaction to it and his blotting out the end. It was another form of cheating, but he didn’t know what to do about it. He could keep from playing poker, but he made his living out of playing football.
He groaned. He came from a deeply religious family, with a stern sense of morality. He didn’t smoke or drink and he believed in hell.
After the plane landed, Hugo didn’t go right home. Sibyl was away in Chicago, attending the wedding of one of her sisters, and he didn’t feel like rattling around in an empty house. Krkanius, who had emerged from the poker game the big winner, invited him and a couple of the other boys to join him for a drink and, while Hugo didn’t drink, he went along for the company.
The bar Krkanius took them to was crowded and noisy. There was a group of men with some girls at the bar, and as Hugo followed Krkanius to the back room, he heard a woman’s voice say, “Uh-huh. That’s for me. That big innocent-looking one.”
Hugo looked around. A round blonde at the bar was staring directly at him, a sweet small smile on her full lips. If you didn’t know what went on in her head, she looked like somebody’s pure young daughter. “I’m going to teach you a few things tonight, baby,” Hugo heard, staring, frozen, at the girl. The girl’s mouth had never shown the slightest tremor of movement.
Hugo wheeled and hurried into the back room. When the waiter asked him what he wanted to drink, he ordered bourbon.
“Man,” Krkanius said, surprised, “you really must’ve got shaken up today.” Nobody had ever seen Hugo drink anything stronger than ginger ale before.
Hugo drank his bourbon quickly. He didn’t like the taste, but it seemed to help his nerves. The blonde girl came into the back room and leaned over a table nearby to talk to somebody she knew. Remembering what she had been thinking as he passed her on the way in, Hugo ordered another bourbon. She glanced, as though by accident, at the table of football players. The way her sweater fit around her bosom made a peculiar ache come up in Hugo’s throat.
