Free The Troubled Air by Irwin Shaw Page A

had obviously begun the moment Herres had broken the news, “but he hasn’t blocked out a tackle since he was in high school, and besides he’s got a trick knee. And there’s Shivarski, and he couldn’t outrun my mother in a hundred-yard dash. And when it comes to calling signals …” Samson looked up tragically to heaven. “It’s like giving a Swiss watch to an ape in the trees.”
    “I’m sorry, Samson,” Archer said. “There’s nothing I could do.”
    “You could try to talk to him,” Samson said, “Just try. The boys say he likes you. The boys say you’re the only one on this whole God-damn campus that cold-blooded sonofabitch gives two cents for,” he said bitterly. “You could try.”
    “He’s made up his mind,” Archer said. “You better find another quarterback by Saturday.”
    “Yeah.” Samson stood up. He laughed hollowly. “Just like that.” He picked up his hat. “I’m surrounded by enemies on this campus,” he said darkly, going out. “Waiting for me to fall.”
    Even the Dean of Men had called Herres into his office and tactfully attempted to persuade him to go back. Herres had been polite, crisp and unyielding, and he left the Dean of Men shaken and wondering if he was losing touch with the younger generation.
    “That demented editor came to me,” Herres said to Archer a day after Samson’s visit. “He said he wanted to be fair. He said he wanted to give me space in the paper to defend myself. He wanted me to explain what he called my disloyalty to the school, by giving my real reasons for quitting.”
    “What did you say to him?” Archer asked.
    Herres grinned. “I told him I was considering becoming a fairy and the boys on the team were not my style. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if he prints it. Give a man a couple of columns of print to fill up and he loses touch with reality. Loyalty!” Herres snorted. “What the hell loyalty do you owe a school? I pay my tuition and keep my grades above passing and refrain from punching the instructors. Aside from everything else, I got bored with playing football. The games’re all right, but the practice is a nuisance. And if the team loses a game or two because of me, what the hell do I care? Or for that matter, finally, what the hell does anyone care? There’s one boy, Sam Ross, a tackle, who cries in the locker room every time we lose a game. Twenty-three years old, weight two hundred and seven, blubbering away for fifteen minutes at a time. He ought to be put away. In a home for expectant mothers. Once he wanted to fight me because he heard me whistling in the shower after we lost by two touchdowns. Character building! You know what aspects of my character I built up playing football?”
    “What?” Archer asked curiously.
    “Cruelty, sadism, duplicity, pleasure in destruction,” Herres said slowly. “I figured it out before I quit. The reason I enjoyed playing was because I like to knock people down. I broke a man’s leg in a game last year and I walked alongside the stretcher pretending I was upset, but I was pleased with myself all the time. Looking down at him, yelling on the stretcher. Clean-cut American boy, building a sane mind, in a sound body every Saturday afternoon.” Herres peered mockingly at Archer. “Do you think I ought to put all this in a letter to the editor?”
    “Even so,” Archer said, although he was not surprised at what Herres had told him, remembering the savage way he drove into opponents, “even so, you might write a tactful letter to the paper to calm everybody’s feelings.”
    “Let them boil,” Herres said carelessly. “It’s none of their business.”
    “Vic,” Archer said slowly, displeased suddenly with the boy, “there’s a point up to which arrogance in the young is understandable, even engaging. It gives evidence of independence of spirit, courage, private confidence. But after a point—it shows vanity, cruelty, a disregard of the people around you. It’s the sin of