Short Stories: Five Decades (129 page)

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.

“Case dismissed,” the magistrate said, sounding like a ferret who could talk. “Next.”

A lady who looked like somebody’s grandmother stepped up belligerently.

Five minutes later, Hugo was going down the night-court steps with Brenatskis. “Holy man,” Brenatskis said, “what came over you? It’s a lucky thing they got hold of me or you’d be all over the front page tomorrow. And it cost plenty, I don’t mind telling you.”

Bribery, too, Hugo recorded in his book of sorrows. Corruption of the press and the judiciary.

“And the coach—” Brenatskis waved his arm hopelessly, as though describing the state of the coach’s psyche at this juncture were beyond the powers of literature. “He wants to see you. Right now.”

“Can’t he wait till morning?” Hugo wanted to go home and lie down. It had been an exhausting day.

“He can’t wait until morning. He was very definite. The minute you got out, he said, and he didn’t care what time it was.”

“Doesn’t he ever sleep?” Hugo asked forlornly.

“Not tonight, he’s not sleeping,” said Brenatskis. “He’s waiting in his office.”

A stalactite formed in the region of Hugo’s liver as he thought of facing the coach, the two of them alone at midnight in naked confrontation in a stadium that could accommodate 60,000 people. “Don’t you want to come along with me?” he asked Brenatskis.

“No,” said Brenatskis. He got into his car and drove off. Hugo thought of moving immediately to Canada. But he hailed a cab and said “The stadium” to the driver. Perhaps there would be a fatal accident on the way.

There was one 40-watt bulb burning over the player’s entrance and the shadows thrown by its feeble glare made it look as though a good part of the stadium had disappeared centuries before, like the ruins of a Roman amphitheater. Hugo wished it
were
the ruins of a Roman amphitheater as he pushed the door open. The night watchman, awakened from his doze on a chair tilted back against the wall, looked up at him. “They don’t give a man no rest, none of them,” Hugo heard the watchman think as he passed him. “Goddamned prima donnas. I hope they all break their fat necks.”

“Evenin’, Mr. Pleiss. Nice evenin’,” the watchman said.

“Yeah,” said Hugo. He walked through the shadows under the stands toward the locker room. The ghosts of hundreds of poor, aching, wounded, lame, contract-haunted football players seemed to accompany him, and the wind sighing through the gangways carried on it the echoes of a billion boos. Hugo wondered how he had ever thought a stadium was a place in which you enjoyed yourself.

His hand on the locker-room door, Hugo hesitated. He had never discussed politics with the coach, but he knew that the coach cried on the field every time the band played
The Star-Spangled Banner
and had refused to vote for Barry Goldwater because he thought Goldwater was a Communist.

Resolutely, Hugo pushed the door open and went into the deserted locker room. He passed his locker. His name was still on it. He didn’t know whether it was a good or a bad sign.

The door to the coach’s office was closed. After one last look around him at the locker room, Hugo rapped on it.

“Come in,” the coach said.

Hugo opened the door and went in. The coach was dressed in a dark suit and his collar was closed and he had a black tie on, as though he were en route to a funeral. His face was ravaged by his vigil, his cheeks sunk, his eyes peered out of purplish caverns. He looked worse than Hugo had ever seen him, even worse than the time they lost 45 to o to a first-year expansion club.

“My boy,” the coach said in a small, racked voice, “I am glad you came late. It has given me time to think, to take a proper perspective. An hour ago, I was ready to destroy you in righteous anger with my bare hands. But I am happy to say that the light of understanding has been vouchsafed me in the watches of this painful night.” The coach was in one of his Biblical periods. “Luckily,” he said, “after Brenatskis called me to tell me that he had managed to persuade the judge to dismiss the case against you for a hundred dollars—naturally, your pay will be docked—and that the story would be kept out of the papers for another hundred and fifty—that will make two hundred and fifty, in all—I had time to consider. After all, the millions of small boys throughout America who look up to you and your fellows as the noblest expression of clean, aggressive American spirit, who model themselves with innocent hero worship after you and your teammates, are now going to be spared the shock and disillusionment of learning that a player of mine so far forgot himself as to be publicly associated with the enemies of his country—Are you following me, Pleiss?”

“Perfectly, Coach,” said Hugo. He felt himself inching back toward the door. This new, gentle-voiced, understanding aspect of the coach was infinitely disturbing, like seeing water suddenly start running uphill, or watching the lights of a great city go out all at once.

“As I was saying, as long as no harm has been done to this multitude of undeveloped souls who are, in a manner of speaking, our responsibility, I can search within me for Christian forbearance.” The coach came around the desk and put his hand on Hugo’s shoulder. “Pleiss, you’re not a bad boy—you’re a stupid boy, but not a bad boy. It was my fault that you got involved in that sordid exhibition. Yes, my fault. You received a terrible blow on the head on Sunday—I should have spotted the symptoms. Instead of brutally making you do wind sprints and hit the dummy for two hours, I should have said, ‘Hugo, my boy, go home and lie down and stay in bed for a week, until your poor head has recovered.’ Yes, that’s what I should have done. I ask your forgiveness, Hugo, for my shortness of vision.”

“Sure, Coach,” Hugo said.

“And now,” said the coach, “before you go home to your loving wife and a good long rest, I want you to do one thing for me.”

“Anything you say, Coach.”

“I want you to join me in singing one verse—just one small verse—of
The Star-Spangled Banner
. Will you do that for me?”

“Yes, sir,” Hugo said, sure that he was going to forget what came after “the rockets’ red glare.”

The coach gripped his shoulder hard, then said, “One two, three.…”

They sang
The Star-Spangled Banner
together. The coach was weeping after the first line.

When they had finished and the echoes had died down under the grandstand, the coach said, “Good. Now go home. I’d drive you home myself, but I’m working on some new plays I want to give the boys tomorrow. Don’t you worry. You won’t miss them. I’ll send them along to you by messenger and you can glance at them when you feel like it. And don’t worry about missing practice. When you feel ready, just drop around. God bless you, my boy.” The coach patted Hugo a last time on the shoulder and turned to gaze at Jojo Baines, his eyes still wet from the anthem.

Hugo went out softly.

He stayed close to home all the rest of the week, living off canned goods and watching television. Nothing much could happen to him, he figured, in the privacy of his own apartment. But even there, he had his moments of distress.

He was sitting watching a quiz show for housewives at nine o’clock in the morning when he heard the key in the door and the cleaning woman, Mrs. Fitzgerald, came in. Mrs. Fitzgerald was a gray-haired lady who smelled of other people’s dust. “I hope you’re not feeling poorly, Mr. Pleiss,” she said solicitously. “It’s a beautiful day. It’s a shame to spend it indoors.”

“I’m going out later,” Hugo lied.

Behind his back, he heard Mrs. Fitzgerald think. “Lazy, hulking slob. Never did an honest day’s work in his life. Comes the revolution, they’ll take care of the likes of him. He’ll find himself with a pick in his hands, on the roads. I hope I live to see the day.”

Hugo wondered if he shouldn’t report Mrs. Fitzgerald to the FBI, but then decided against it. He certainly didn’t want to get involved with
them
.

He listened to a speech by the President and was favorably impressed by the President’s command of the situation, both at home and abroad. The President explained that although things at the moment did not seem 100 percent perfect, vigorous steps were being taken, at home and abroad, to eliminate poverty, ill health, misguided criticism by irresponsible demagogues, disturbances in the streets and the unfavorable balance of payments. Hugo was also pleased, as he touched the bump on his head caused by the policeman’s club, when he heard the President explain how well the war was going and why we could expect the imminent collapse of the enemy. The President peered out of the television set, masterly, persuasive, confident, including all the citizens of the country in his friendly, fatherly smile. Then, while the President was silent for a moment before going on to other matters, Hugo heard the President’s voice, though in quite a different tone, saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, if you really knew what was going on here, you’d
piss
.”

Hugo turned the television off.

Then the next day, the television set broke down, and as he watched the repairman fiddle with it, humming mournfully down in his chest somewhere, Hugo heard the television repairman think, “Stupid jerk. All he had to do was take a look and he’d see the only thing wrong is this loose wire. Slap it into the jack and turn a screw and the job’s done.” But when the television man turned around, he was shaking his head sadly. “I’m afraid you got trouble, mister,” the television repairman said. “There’s danger of implosion. I’ll have to take the set with me. And there’s the expense of a new tube.”

“What’s it going to cost?” Hugo asked.

“Thirty, thirty-five dollars, if we’re lucky,” said the television repairman.

Hugo let him take the set. Now he knew he was a moral coward, along with everything else.