Poor Player

By Lesley Krueger

Jack Hall is the star of a hit TV show filmed in Los Angeles. But his growing fame isn’t enough, and Jack decides to chuck it all to work for a human rights group headed by his sister, Peggy. The group’s work is based in Central America, and Peggy sends her brother to Mexico City to learn Spanish. She asks for help from journalist Hugh Bruce, a long-time Latin America hand. But when Jack arrives, both he and Hugh get far more than they bargained for—and far less than they want.

Settling temporarily in the capital, Jack quickly meets Hugh’s assistant, Maru Campagna. Maru’s family has been shattered by the death of her father, and she’s trying to reinvent herself in ways her mother and uncle disapprove. When she falls into a relationship with Jack, Maru’s family schemes for a quick marriage to a foreigner. But Maru isn’t sure, and Jack has no intention of getting married. He’s off to fight for human rights. At least he will be soon.

Hugh Bruce is both the witness and narrator of Jack’s quixotic quest. He’s also friends with another foreigner who owns a resort in the hot-spring zone north of Mexico City. Wayne Gibbings is a former L.A. restauranteur who moved south for profit, not ideals. But his hotel is failing, located too near a mountainous area where long-time ranchers have found a lucrative new crop, growing marijuana back in the hills while clearing peasant farmers off their land. Rumour speaks of a massacre.

When Jack arrives at the hotel with Maru and Hugh, he finds himself in the middle of a hair-trigger human rights case. Idealistic and unprepared, Jack tries to help—not that anyone asked. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, they say.

Who will Jack take with him?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lesley Krueger
• Release date: Aug 17, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005119171

Lesley Krueger

Lesley Krueger is an award-winning novelist and filmmaker. Her latest novel, Far Creek Road, will be published by ECW Press this coming October. Set in the early 1960s, the book follows Tink Parker, an adventurous, nosy and very funny nine-year-old living a happy suburban life. But the Cold War is slowly building toward the Cuban Missile Crisis. The world is in danger of ending -- and Tink's innocence comes under threat.According to Sheila Murray, author of Finding Edward, "With the charming and very funny nine-year-old Tink, Krueger has created an unforgettable character whose innocent curiosity busts through the societal conventions of early 1960s Canada. This is a masterful depiction of an atmosphere tense with fear and fuelled by grown-up transgressions, where adult morality is contaminated by politics that tear communities apart.”Lesley's previous novel, Time Squared, was published in 2021. Says critic Kerry Clare, "I’ll dive right in and tell you that the novel, Time Squared by Lesley Krueger, which I’ve loved more than I’ve loved than any book I’ve read in ages, could be billed as Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life meets Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, if we wanted to underline just how badly you really ought to read it. And oh, you really do."Lesley has written four other novels, two short story collections, a travel memoir and a children's book.She was born in Vancouver, Canada and after living in Boston, Mass., London, England, Rio de Janeiro and Mexico City, she makes her home in Toronto. There she writes fiction, works on films, and plays hockey in a couple of women's beer leagues, at least when her ankle isn't broken.

Book preview

Poor Player

a novel

Lesley Krueger

PRAISE FOR LESLEY KRUEGER

I’ll dive right in and tell you that the novel, Time Squared by Lesley Krueger, which I’ve loved more than I’ve loved than any book I’ve read in ages, could be billed as Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life meets Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, if we wanted to underline just how badly you really ought to read it. And oh, you really do.

—Kerry Clare on Time Squared

Krueger’s portrait of artists as young men and women is alive with wit and rebellion—an aesthetic vivisection of the young Victorian age.

—Globe and Mail on Mad Richard

The knitting together of Charlotte Brontë’s and Richard Dadd’s different trajectories worked like a dream. I was enthralled.

—Terry Gilliam on Mad Richard

In this remarkable piece of historical fiction, Krueger (Drink the Sky) imaginatively delves into the life of Richard Dadd . . . The two story lines . . . effectively juxtapose Dadd and Brontë, two very different people who travelled in similar circles during the same era and, more importantly, who were both entirely invested in what it means to be an artist. This question anchors the novel, adding depth and dimension to a terrific read.

—Publishers Weekly on Mad Richard, starred review

There is much to ponder in this elegant novel about the potentially catastrophic emotional toll of art, the irrational nature of love, the solitude of heartache and what happens when one life touches another, however briefly.

—Toronto Star on Mad Richard

By engaging us in two very different lives in a state of transformation, we become engaged in the process of what it means to become an individual, moral human being. It’s a powerful story about human. strength, and frailty. It touches something deep inside.

—The Toronto Star on The Corner Garden

"Lesley Krueger . . . has perfectly captured the laconic tone of an intelligent teen who can still offer moments of bracing lucidity and keen observation. . . . The Corner Garden is an ambitious book. It starts innocently as a contemporary picaresque journey, then delves into a history less and the nature of evil."

—Globe and Mail on The Corner Garden

Part carefully-wrought thriller, part eco-excursion into the heart of darkness . . . a young woman struggles with questions of identity against the backdrop of modern Brazil. Her elegant prose is a pleasure to read, and when Krueger ratchets up the tension, we go with her, hearts in mouth. She has intriguing and serious things to say about human nature and the planet.

—Quill & Quire on Drink the Sky

Drink the Sky captures both the precise local colour of Rio de Janeiro (where the author lived from 1988 to 1991) and the first-time visitor’s wide-eyed wonder. Krueger renders the exotic beauty of Brazil’s landscape and wildlife with rhapsodic authenticity. . . . The hidden story emerges piece by piece, as these things do, in a series of coincidences and unsuspected interrelations that weave the book’s two parallel plots  into a tense finale. As a cleverly plotted mystery, the book succeeds in hooking the reader.

—The Toronto Star on Drink the Sky

E-book copyright © Lesley Krueger, 2021

Originally published by Oberon Press

Krueger, Lesley, author

Poor Player/Lesley Krueger

Issued in electronic formats. 

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise—without the prior written permission of the copyright owner. The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the copyright holder is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

Cover design: Michel Vrana

ALSO BY LESLEY KRUEGER

FICTION

Hard Travel

Drink the Sky

The Corner Garden

Mad Richard

Time Squared

The Necessary Havoc of Love

Far Creek Road (fall 2023)

NON-FICTION

Foreign Correspondences: A Traveller’s Tales

Contender: Triumph, Tragedy and Canadian Baseball Player Harry Fisher

CHILDREN’S

Johnny Bey and the Mizzenglass World

www.lesleykrueger.com

POOR PLAYER

Seek simplicity and distrust it.

—Alfred North Whitehead

For Paul

PART ONE

ONE

MY FRIEND JACK HALL was an actor, and I think he was a good one. Or at least, he thought seriously about what he did. I often remember something he said about finding a character’s motivation, how it stemmed from the disconnect between the beauty of the world and the way the character refused to let it console him. That’s how he got inside his roles, he said, asking why a character couldn’t be consoled, and for what particular sadness.

You’ve got to ask what makes him unable to see beauty, Jack said one time. Hamlet can’t see it. He can’t see Ophelia. Ask yourself why he won’t let her console him, and you start to find the play.

Jack was unbeautiful himself. His nose took a wander down his face like a river veering past a sandbar. His lower lip was big and bowed, as if it had been stung by a bee. The Hapsburg lip, I believe it’s called. I have never liked it, although Jack let you know that women did. The Hapsburg lip, a brawler’s nose, curly black hair and skin that tanned coarsely. His best feature was his eyes, which were a light grey-green not commonly found with Mediterranean skin. Meeting Jack’s eyes, I would remember the granite of the Canadian shield. I never thought they saved his face, although Maru—and not just Maru—told me that Jack was a sexy-looking man.

Not handsome, I said.

Not pretty, she replied.

Jack himself seemed to look on his features the way a carpenter looks at this tools. When he was playacting for us, you could see him bang together a new character out of raised eyebrows and pursed lips. His vanity seemed rooted less in the features themselves than in his ability to exploit them and create a whole gallery of performances. He let slip one time that he expected his face to serve him well when he got famous. Civilians would never suspect it was him when they saw that anonymous-looking mug in the street.

When it finally caught up with him, fame was different than Jack had expected, if also pretty much what he’d bargained for. I gather it usually is. And Jack was right in predicting a certain anonymous and impersonal aspect to his fame. Jack as Everyman, or as Everyman would like to be, when finally put to the test.

But that was later. In fact, it happened a year after Jack had first arrived in Mexico City, when he’d showed up with an introduction from his sister to me and my friends. My name is Hugh Bruce and I work here as a reporter, a freelance journalist. Or, if you prefer, a foreign correspondent. Hugh Bruce, foreign correspondent. I’d liked the sound of that when I was first sent to Central America by one of the newsmagazines, being pretty heavily burdened back then by notions of my own superiority. At Harvard, they laid it on us with a trowel. But after knocking around Latin America for twenty years, most of it had worn off, and by the time Jack arrived, I tended to describe myself as just another drop in the immense stream of displaced people migrating around the globe. 

All of which makes me a sucker for strays like Jack, who pushed a note through my mail slot one day when I was out.

"Buenos dias, Hugo. You don’t know me, but you know my sister Peggy. I am in the process of heading down to Central America to do my bit for human rights. I’m not claiming it will be anything much, but such as it will be, I’ve got to learn Spanish. Peggy pushed Mexico as a good place to do that, and she said you’re a good place to start for advice about schools and apartments and so on. Hey, some of my good friends are journalists. I used to call myself an actor until last week when I decided to chuck it and come down here. Now that you mention it, some of my worst enemies are journalists also, although I usually try to forget about the reviews. Does any of this tempt you to call me at the Hotel Maria Cristina? What about if I threw in a couple of beer?"

The signature was spiky. Jack I made out. Hall I knew. Peggy Hall was one of my best contacts in the Canadian human-rights field, a quietly brave woman who risked her life on frequent trips to Guatemala and El Salvador, secretly meeting with torture victims and the survivors of massacres, documenting their stories and pushing, when she got home, to expose the dirty and forgotten wars being fought in those sad countries.

Peggy led a radically divided life, one I don’t think I could have managed. At home she dressed in power suits, or at least her own Christian version of a power suit, lobbying Western governments to pressure various client states into improving their human rights records. Abroad she’d get herself locked in the trunks of cars to bump over terrible roads on her way to those secret meetings. She picked up the phone and got death threats, she suffered through the murders of friends, and once she nearly died herself, half asphyxiated in the trunk of an ancient jalopy on the way to God knows where. Now it appeared her kid brother was going to join the family business.

I phoned Jack up and invited him over to my place for a beer, feeling rather pleased with myself for knowing there was a furnished house for rent in my neighbourhood.

A house? he said when he arrived, those large actor’s eyes turning dubious. What am I going to do with a whole house?

I’d invited him to sit down, and had taken a chair myself. But Jack ranged around the living room as we spoke, taking in my collection of Latin American folk art. He was a toucher, running his fingers over the snakeskin glued to the carved wooden mask, the feathered tail on a ceramic chicken. I watched him nervously as he picked up a pair of breakable balsa wood fighters, pulling the string to make them box.

Calling it a house is generous, I told him keeping my eye on the boxers. It’s precisely one room wide. Spacious, I said. But compact.

Jack got the joke, his eyes glinting.

Not a lot of rooms, he said. But roomy.

Expansive, I agreed. But contracted. Airy, without putting on airs. A meek house, if I may paraphrase Dickens.

I pulled my legs up under me on the sofa, prepared to riff. But Jack’s smile had grown polite, and I could see I was on the verge of overdoing it. You can get hungry for friends when you live the expatriate life and end up coming on too strong. When Jack put the boxers back on the shelf, I saw he’d become wary of me.

It’s about the size of a decent apartment, I said.

I guess if I don’t care where I live, he said, thinking it through. If it’s cheap. Is it cheap?

After he’d gone, I decided I liked Jack’s list of questions about the house: furniture, utilities, public transport. If he was going to work in human rights, it was just as well he had a practical streak, especially when I remembered Peggy saying that her brother would hound directors to get a part and tore strips off unprepared co-stars. Peggy called Jack ‘frighteningly talented,’ and that was not what you liked to hear about someone who was planning to work for human rights in the war zones of Central America.

Peggy usually avoided sending dramatic types down south, instead deploying quieter people, bookkeeper personalities, even-handed and methodical. Totally nuts to be doing what they were doing, of course, but only underneath. I admit I didn’t much care for the idea of Jack as a responsibility Peggy was laying upon me. That’s probably why I kept reminding myself that he’d asked whether the house was close to shops. Whether the neighbourhood was secure. Whether he was going to have to live behind barred windows like mine. Being claustrophobic, he said.

And maybe that’s why I want to open my story with a visit we made to the market almost three months after Jack had arrived. Our local market: a practical, open place where Jack looked at home. It was held outdoors in those days, the roof of the old building having been weakened in the latest of Mexico’s great earthquakes before collapsing under the onslaught of a massive hailstorm. Around the shell of the fallen building, vendors had constructed alley upon alley of covered stalls crowded together in a pungent bazaar. It was confusing and dusty. But beautiful, as Jack would insist. The dimness of the makeshift booths, the pyramids of fruit on bamboo trays, the splash of atole in a cup, the chug-chug movement the kneeling women used to scrap the spines off cactus leaves.

I was on one side of Jack that day, with Maru hanging on his other arm. Maru was my assistant, my part-time assistant, as she had been for almost six years. Bird-like Maru. Her father had called her huesitos—little bones—and it’s true the easy diminutives of Mexican Spanish describe her well. You have to picture a delicate woman, girlishly beautiful, dark and slight, who carries herself with a bashful elegance that might owe something to the hints I once gave. I’d been the one to introduce her to Jack, although it had not been my intention to provide him with a girlfriend as well as a house. Far from my intention, if you must know.

Maru also worked in her uncle’s bookstore, where she clerked and did the books. I’d met her there not long after arriving in Mexico, when I’d wandered in looking for the new book of stories by Garcia Marquez. And I’ll admit, when we first talked, all the usual plot lines that occur to a man who has just met an attractive woman occurred rather forcefully to me.

But Maru didn’t entertain any idea of the kind, and without saying a word she made this perfectly clear. I didn’t even bother to ask her to dinner, although it somehow came up, either that time or during my next visit, that I needed an assistant who could clip newspapers for me, pay the bills, do a little research and pick up the bits and pieces of gossip a Mexican could retrieve better than a foreigner. Somehow Maru managed to imply that her tasks at the bookstore were less than demanding, and over the next couple of weeks, we worked out an arrangement which, on the whole, had suited us both for years.

Suited us fine, as a matter of fact, until Jack was paying his third or fourth visit to my house. We were sitting in the living room when I heard Maru rattle her key in the lock. She’d had her own key for ages, and I didn’t think anything of it. I certainly didn’t think she’d be interested in Jack. He wasn’t particular attractive. I’d invited him over for Peggy’s sake, and for that niggling sense of responsibility one feels for the young.

Jack was young. He was six years younger than Maru, if you’re counting. And although she’d had boyfriends since she’d started working for me, both of them were foreigners who in the end had dropped her for foreign women, and Maru swore that would never happen again. In fact, by the time Jack showed up, I’d come to believe that what people said of me was also true of Maru. I hadn’t married. Therefore would not marry. Both of us had missed the boat and got used to swimming. Right, Maru?

Hugo, I brought your clippings, she’d called, clattering across the entrance tiles in her high-heeled shoes. "I wish you’d drop that New York Times. It comes off on my fingers worse than anything."

She stuck her head in the living room. And I never would have predicted it. Certainly wasn’t ready for it. Jack stood up, their eyes met, and there it was. They were. Hormones. Isn’t that how you describe it?

So shy she was. So flushed her cheeks, so frequent her averted smiles as we all sat down. To a casual observer, the gentleman might have appeared less eager than the lady. He leaned back on the sofa while she leaned forward in her chair. He crossed his arms behind her head, he listened to her chatter. But sometimes you would catch a glint in Jack’s eyes that said he could hardly believe his luck.

Oh! she said. "But you have to have some Mexican food before going off to Central America. What they have there, Hugo says you could call it food, but you couldn’t call it cuisine. I should show you some Mexican food. Have you eaten yet tonight?

How surprising. He hadn’t.

Two and a half months later, my files were woefully disorganized. Unclipped newspapers were stacked in my halls. What did Maru do all day? I knew Jack had found the neighbourhood gym, and he seemed to spend more time there than he did at language school. It was a seedy old-style hang-out where Jack lifted weights. There he’d learned about the after-hours clubs, downmarket dance halls, the jai alai palace—places Maru had never been. Jack was the one who ended up taking Maru on a tour of Mexico City, where she’d lived all her life. But that was at night. And during the day?

Tired. She was tired. Was I supposed to be happy about the fact she was too tired to do her job?

Maru had been the one to propose the detour through the market that particular Saturday afternoon in June. I had been taking them over to my place to meet a friend in town for a visit when Maru said I needed a new plant for my garden. I wondered whether Jack noticed she always had an excuse to avoid the direct route between my house and his, which would have taken them past the site where her family home had stood before it was destroyed in the same earthquakes that had weakened the market. Two of them, back to back, three or four years before.

Her father’s financial problems meant the house had been rebuilt by Maru’s uncle Fernando, who rented it out while Maru and her mother lived in a tiny apartment inherited at the same time, a place Maru hated so much that when anyone caught her near it, she pretended to be visiting poor relatives. Every penny she earned was dedicated to buying back her family house, and knowing that, both Fernando and I had been willing to overlook the extent to which she’d been slacking off at work.

But not forever. In fact, I was growing desperate for things to get back to normal, the way they had after her other boyfriends, and I hoped Maru’s detour to buy a plant for my garden was her way of signalling that she intended to take care of me whatever happened.

Maru’s intentions. Jack’s plans. Things were complicated enough even before you considered that her uncle Fernando had recently asked me to intervene and speed things toward what he called ‘a satisfactory conclusion’ only three months after she and Jack had met.

THE PLANT SECTION of the market had shrunk to an old woman named Graciela and her stall. The plants were sickly in the dust and bad light, but Maru insisted she wanted a lily.

A lily, Graciela said. She pottered happily around the back of her stall, talking over her shoulder to Maru with a deferential familiarity that had been building ever since Maru was a child shopping with her mother.

But that plant’s too small, Maru objected, when Graciela finally brought one out front.

And Señor Hugo is a giant? Graciela asked, ribbing me broadly. "He’s a boy, but not one of the kind that’s still growing. He grows on you, though, doesn’t he? Twines around you anyway, querida."

I had to object, not least on the grounds of consistency. As she had pointed out on several previous occasions, someone as short and stout as my humble self was spherical, was round. And the round did not entwine. It bounced back from terrible puns like hers. The round object might enfold, it engulfed, it sometimes—theoretically—enraptured. But it did not entwine.

"As you say, señor, she replied. Though I would guess that someone else does that."

She turned to Jack, inviting his sally. But despite his three months in Mexico, Jack’s Spanish was execrable, and under the influence of our local gym, it was only getting worse. He frowned at Mama Graciela, trying to understand, then shrugged her off and turned away. Not one of your longer attention spans. But the lively market presented Jack with innumerable quick tableaux. Jolts per minute, aren’t they called?

Ripe avocadoes, a vendor called. They’re ready for you, sir, if you’re ready for them.

"Chickens so fresh they’re still cackling. Watch your finger, señora, or she’s going to bite it off."

Jack turned restlessly from one tableau to another, his easy sympathies shining through his light grey eyes. Amusement at the vendors’ cries turned to pity at the sight of a hobbled old woman and concern at the crying of a child. He picked absently at the leaves of one of Graciela’s plants. She’d have another sale if she caught him.

Yet both Maru and Graciela had forgotten about Jack—forgotten about both of us—to act out a happy scenario. They laughed. Maru picked a silver hair off the old woman’s apron. She called her Grandma, abuelita. And without realizing it, they both began to speak less robustly, a little more intimately, and it was slow enough that Jack caught something of what they were saying and went very still.

Weddings. They were talking about weddings. Jack and Maru’s wedding, to be precise. Booking the church, arranging the flowers. Jack’s eyes narrowed when Graciela rubbed her hands in a perfect imitation of our local priest. Here was Maru’s uncle’s idea of a ‘satisfactory conclusion,’ even though we’d all heard Jack allude to his low opinion of marriage. He would have to be convinced, converted, coerced to the altar, and Fernando would not have been happy to see Maru putting the item so publicly on the agenda.

Hugh’s friend is sitting there waiting, Jack said abruptly, interrupting Graciela in the middle of a particularly flagrant pun. Aren’t we supposed to go meet him?

I mumbled something inadequate as Maru first looked puzzled, then blushed deeply as she realized Jack had understood. When Graciela saw what was going on, a growing slyness deepened the lines around her mouth.

Peso. Graciela jumped in to say something about peso, meaning not just money but also weight. As she continued, even Jack understood that she was making a bawdy pun about adding up the costs after a wedding; about being chafed by a new and heavy weight.

Really she was saying, It’s one thing to sleep with him if you’re angling to get married, That’s a tactic, a technique, and we can’t get too fussy about the techniques of survival in Mexico because everybody has them, and none is particularly nice. But if he’s made it this clear he has no intention of marrying you, then you’re either desperate or you’re doing it for looser reasons, aren’t you?

Maru looked increasingly sulky, like a thwarted teenager. What’s your best price? she asked abruptly.

Graciela’s face closed up, and she hunched her shoulders with a servility that wasn’t entirely assumed.

"A