Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

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.