Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

“Beginner’s luck,” Hugo said. Later on, the automobile distributor would tell his wife that Huge didn’t look it, but he was witty.

They hailed a taxi outside the hotel. Fallon hadn’t brought his Lincoln Continental, because there was no sense in taking a chance that somebody would spot it parked outside the hotel and tell the coach his quarterback stayed out till two o’clock in the morning. In the taxi, Fallon asked, “You got a safe-deposit box, Huge?”

“No,” Hugo said.

“Get one tomorrow.”

“Why?”

“Income tax,” Fallon said. In the light of a street lamp, he saw that Hugo looked puzzled. “What Uncle Sam doesn’t know,” Fallon said lightly, “won’t hurt him. We’ll cash these checks tomorrow, divvy up and stash the loot away in nice dark little boxes. Don’t use your regular bank, either.”

“I see,” Hugo said. There was no doubt about it; Fallon was a brainy man. For a moment, he felt a pang of regret that he had taken Nora Fallon to a motel the week before. He hadn’t regretted it at the time, though. Quite the contrary. He had just thought that if the child Sibyl was carrying turned out to be a girl, he wouldn’t send her to school in Lausanne.

Sibyl awoke when he came into the bedroom. “You win, honey?” she asked sleepily.

“A couple of bucks,” Hugo said.

“That’s nice,” she said.

***

By now, Hugo was free of doubt. If God gave you a special gift, He obviously meant you to use it. A man who could run the hundred in nine flat would be a fool to allow himself to be beaten by a man who could do only nine, five. If it was God’s will that Hugo should have the good things of life—fame, success, wealth, beautiful women—well, that was God’s will. Hugo was a devout man, even though, in the season, he was busy on Sunday and couldn’t go to church.

During next week’s poker game, Hugo saw to it that he didn’t win too much. He let himself get caught bluffing several times and deliberately bet into hands that he knew were stronger than his. There was no sense in being greedy and killing the goose that laid the golden eggs. Even so, he came out almost $2000 ahead. Fallon lost nearly $500, so nobody had reason for complaint.

When the game broke up, Connors, the automobile distributor, told Hugo he’d like to talk to him for a minute. They went downstairs and sat in a deserted corner of the lobby. Connors was opening a sports-car agency and he wanted Hugo to lend his name to it. “There’s nothing to it,” Connors said. “Hang around the showroom a couple of afternoons a week and have your picture taken sitting in a Porsche once in a while. I’ll give you ten thousand a year for it.”

Hugo scratched his head boyishly, turning his left ear slightly toward Connors. The figure $25,000 came through loud and clear. “I’ll take twenty-five thousand dollars and ten percent of the profits,” Hugo said.

Connors laughed, delighted with his new employee’s astuteness. “You must have read my mind,” he said. They shook on the deal. Hugo was to go on the payroll the next day.

“He’s got a head on his shoulders, old Huge,” Connors told his wife. “He’ll sell cars.”

Another of the poker players, Hartwright, the racehorse owner, called Hugo and, after swearing him to secrecy, told him that he and what he called “a few of the boys” were buying up land for a supermarket in a suburb of the city. There was inside information that a superhighway was being built out that way by the city. “It’ll be a gold mine,” Hartwright said. “I’ve talked it over with the boys and they think it’d be a nice idea to let you in on it. If you don’t have the cash, we can swing a loan.…”

Hugo got a loan for $50,000. He was learning that nothing pleases people more than helping a success. Even his father-in-law, who had until then never been guilty of wild feats of generosity, was moved enough by the combination of Hugo’s new-found fame and the announcement that he was soon to be a grandfather to buy Hugo and Sibyl an eight-room house with a swimming pool in a good suburb of the city.

So the season went on, weeks during which Hugo heard nothing, spoken or unspoken, that was not for his pleasure or profit, the golden autumn coming to a rhythmic climax once every seven days in two hours of Sunday violence and huzzas.

The newspapers were even beginning to talk about the possibility of “The Cinderella Boys,” as Fallon and Hugo and their teammates were called, going all the way to the showdown with Green Bay for the championship. But on the same day, both Fallon and Hugo were hurt—Fallon with a cleverly dislocated elbow and Hugo with a head injury that gave him a severe attack of vertigo that made it seem to him that the whole world was built on a slant. They lost that game and they were out of the running for the championship of their division and the dream was over.

Before being injured, Hugo had had a good day; and in the plane flying home, even though it seemed to Hugo that it was flying standing on its right wing, he did not feel too bad. All that money in the bank had made him philosophic about communal misfortunes. The team doctor, a hearty fellow who would have been full of cheer at the fall of the Alamo, had assured him that he would be fine in a couple of days and had regaled him with stories of men who had been in a coma for days and had gained more than 100 yards on the ground the following Sunday.

An arctic hush of defeat filled the plane, broken only by the soft complaints of the wounded, of which there were many. Amidships sat the coach, with the owner, forming glaciers of pessimism that flowed inexorably down the aisle. The weather was bad and the plane bumped uncomfortably through soupy black cloud and Hugo, seated next to Johnny Smathers, who was groaning like a dying stag from what the doctor had diagnosed as a superficial contusion of the ribs, was impatient for the trip to end, so that he could be freed from this atmosphere of Waterloo and return to his abundant private world. He remembered that next Sunday was an open date and he was grateful for it. The season had been rewarding, but the tensions had been building up. He could stand a week off.

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.”