Short Stories: Five Decades (125 page)

Then, just a minute before the end of the first regular league game of the season, something peculiar happened. Hugo’s team was ahead twenty-one to eighteen, and the other team had the ball on his team’s eight-yard line. It was third down and four to go and the crowd was yelling so much, the opposing quarterback, Brabbledoff, kept holding up his arms to get them to quiet down enough so that he could be heard in the huddle. The crowd hushed a bit; but, even so, Hugo was afraid he wouldn’t be able to hear Smathers when the play started. He shook his head to clear the sweat from the inside of his helmet and, for a moment, his left ear was parallel to the opposing huddle. Then the peculiar thing happened. He heard what Brabbledoff was saying, just as if he were right there next to him in the huddle. And the huddle was a good fifteen yards away from Hugo, at least, and the crowd was roaring. “I’m going to bootleg it to the weak side,” Brabbledoff was saying. “And, for Christ’s sake, make it look real!”

The opposing team lined up and just before the snap, Hugo heard Smathers yell, “Around end to the strong side, around end to the strong side, Hugo!”

The two lines leaped into action; the guards pulled out to lead the run to the strong side. Hugo could have sworn he saw Brabbledoff hand off to Frenzdich, the halfback, who churned after the screen of interference, while Brabbledoff sauntered back, as though out of the play. Everybody on Hugo’s team scrambled to stop the strong-side thrust. Everybody but Hugo. It was as though a button had been pushed somewhere in his back, making his moves mechanical. Struggling against the tide of traffic, he trailed Brabbledoff, who suddenly, in the clear, with no one near him, began to run like a frightened deer toward the weak-side corner, the ball now pulled out from behind the hip that had been hiding it. Hugo was there on the line of scrimmage, all alone, and he hurled himself at Brabbledoff. Brabbledoff said something unsportsmanlike as he went down with Hugo on top of him, then fumbled the ball. Hugo kneeled on Brabbledoff’s face and recovered the ball.

Hugo’s teammates pummeled him in congratulation and they ran out the clock with two line bucks and the game was over, with the score twenty-one to eighteen.

The team voted Hugo the game ball in the locker room and the coach said, “It’s about time you read a play correctly, Pleiss,” which was high praise, indeed, from that particular coach.

In the shower, Johnny Smathers came over to him. “Man,” Johnny said, “I could have killed you when I saw you drifting over to the weak side after I yelled at you. What tipped you off?”

“Nothing,” Hugo said, after a moment’s hesitation.

“It was a hell of a play,” said Smathers.

“It was just a hunch,” Hugo said modestly.

He was quieter than usual that Sunday night, especially after a win. He kept thinking about Dr. Sebastian and the sound of roses opening.

The next Sunday, Hugo went out onto the field just like every Sunday. He hadn’t heard anything all week that a man wouldn’t ordinarily hear and he was sure that it had been an acoustical freak that had carried Brabbledoff’s voice to him from the huddle. Nothing unusual happened in the first half of the game. Smathers guessed right about half of the time and while there was no danger that Hugo was going to be elected defensive player of the week by the newspapers, he served creditably for the first thirty minutes.

It was a rough game and in the third quarter, he was shaken breaking into a screen and got up a little groggy. Moving around to clear his head while the other team was in the huddle, he happened to turn his left side toward the line of scrimmage. Then it happened again. Just as though he were right there, in the middle of the opposing huddle, he heard the quarterback say, in a hoarse whisper, “Red right! Flood left! Wing square in! R down and out … on five!”

Hugo looked around to see if any of his teammates had heard, too. But they looked just the way they always looked—muddy, desperate, edgy, overweight, underpaid and uninformed. As the opposing team came out of the huddle, up to the line of scrimmage, Hugo moved automatically into the defensive formation that had been called by Krkanius, who played in the front four and ran the defense positions. “Red right! Flood left! Wing square in! R down and out … on five!” he repeated silently to himself. Since he didn’t know the other team’s signals, that didn’t help much, except that “on five” almost certainly meant that the ball was going to be snapped on the fifth count.

Smathers yelled, “Pass. On the flank!” and, again, Hugo felt as though a button had been pushed in his back. He was moving on the four count and was across the line of scrimmage, untouched, a fraction of a second after the ball was snapped, and laid the quarterback low before he could take a half step back into the pocket.

“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 coach 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.”