“Man, ain’t that the truth,” Hoxie enthusiastically agreed. “A year ago, I had it knocked, you know? Me and my old lady had just got divorced after thirty-two years of marriage. It had got down to the point where we couldn’t stand being in the same room with each other. I tell you, she had turned into the meanest damned woman that ever drew breath. Never happy. Nothing pleased her. She could find things to complain about before they even happened. Like she’d say, ‘I know what you’re gonna do next Wednesday. You gonna go out with those no-good friends of yours.’ Next Wednesday she’s complaining about, and it ain’t even here yet.
“Anyway, I finally had enough of it; I moved out and we got divorced. I took early retirement from my job at the post office, and that was when I really started living. I got a little place of my own, got a new TV, new stereo, new set of wheels, and — best of all — I started running around with this little fox in her second year of college. She had one of those father-complex things, you know; had to have an older man in her life. ‘Course, everybody said I was having a midlife crisis; tru’f is, I was having a ball. Only thing was, I started getting these damned sore throats all the time, and my voice would go hoarse.” Hoxie smiled widely. “This young fox of mine, she say it sounded sexy. After a while, though, it didn’t feel sexy. When I went to the doctor about it, I found out why.”
Hoxie sat back and sighed wearily. “Now the young fox is gone, the apartment’s gone, the new wheels are gone, my daughter and her husband have the TV and the stereo, and I got a room in their basement where I’m welcome to stay as long as they’s the beneficiaries on my life insurance.” He raised his beer glass in salute. “Like you said, life is a bitch.”
Hoxie fell silent then, and he and Potts sat looking at Lewis with expressions that said: Okay, man, what’s your story ? It took Lewis a few moments but he finally caught on. All he could really say, however, was that the only effect cancer had on his lifestyle was that he had to get his Thursday bets down early, and he’d begun to brood about dying in a cold climate.
“That’s it?” Hoxie said incredulously. “Hell, you might as well not even have cancer.”
“That’s fer sure,” Potts agreed. “I’ve knowed people with the flu had their lives more messed up than you.”
“Well, excuse the hell out of me,” Lewis said, annoyed. “Sorry I don’t have something worse to tell you. Hope I ain’t ruined your day.”
Potts and Hoxie exchanged glances and then suddenly burst out laughing.
“You know what this reminds me of?” said Hoxie. “The day I tol’ my daughter and son-in-law about my diagnosis. Know what my fool son-in-law said? He said it was too bad I couldn’t have a respectable disease like sickle-cell anemia. Said cancer was a white person’s disease!”
“You think that’s bad,” Potts told him, “listen to this. I was feeling kind of down about a month ago, so I went to see this Baptist preacher, thinking maybe he could console me a little, jack up my spirits, you know. Guess what the idiot said. He told me to thank God I had a disease like cancer instead of something impure like AIDS. Said AIDS was the Lord’s way of punishing the homosexuals of the world, but that cancer was for decent folks. An’ he was serious, too!”
Lewis loosened up then and joined in the laughter, although normally he was not the laughing type. He tried never to show any emotion; he did not consider emotion appropriate for a gambler. But with these two men, it did not seem unfitting in any way. Despite the conspicuous differences among the three of them, along with the fact that it had taken them more than two months to even say “Good morning” in the waiting room, Lewis now began to feel at ease with them and sensed that each one of them felt the same with him and with each other. All of a sudden, it seemed as if they had been friends for a long time.
When their laughter subsided, and before they could order more beer, Lewis began to feel sick and said he had better leave; he needed to be back in his apartment before the intense nausea hit him. Hoxie said he would leave, too, since his own nausea was imminent. Potts decided he would leave with them, saying, “No sense in drinking it if you can’t taste it.”
It was then that Potts suggested that they meet there again Saturday afternoon to have a few pitchers and watch the Bears game on the bar’s big-screen TV. Lewis and Hoxie, to their mutual surprise, readily agreed to the plan.
On his way home on the bus, with the numbers and odds and calculations in his mind beginning to spin about from the buzz of the beer, Lewis inexplicably blocked them out and again began thinking of Alan Lampley. Lewis had thought it was bad to have to spend the last months of his life in cold and dirty Chicago, but what must it be like to have to spend them locked in a prison cell?
~ * ~
The three of them began to meet at the bar several times a week: Wednesday nights before their treatment; Thursday afternoons following treatment; Monday evenings to watch a preseason Bulls game. They began to talk about Alan Lampley. Casually, at first, wistfully.
“Too bad that boy can’t join us for beers,” Potts said at one point.
“Yeah,” said Lewis. “Hell, big spenders like us, we’d even buy for the guards.”
Another time, Hoxie said, out of the blue, “Damn shame, kid that young having to deal with cancer and prison.”
“Yeah, it ain’t like he killed some upright citizen,” said Lewis. “All’s he done was ice a drug dealer.”
“It ain’t right,” said Hoxie.
“They call that justice?” Potts demanded.
“Don’t confuse justice with the law,” Lewis said sagely. “Them’s two different things.”
On Thursdays now, when the guards brought Alan in, the three began bobbing their chins at him, nodding, giving him a wink. Potts even stood up one day to talk to him, but one of the guards got between them and said to Alan, “Just keep moving, Lampley.” To Potts, the other guard said, “Sorry, the prisoner isn’t allowed to talk to anyone except medical personnel.”
But they knew that Alan had recognized their overtures of friendliness, understanding, even commiseration, because he began to nod back their greetings, and even grin a little. The little signals they passed to him seemed to say: You’re not alone.
In the bar, the three new friends, after a pitcher or two, began to daydream of helping Alan. “If I was to win me the lottery,” Potts said, “you know what I’d do with part of it? I’d hire the bes’ damn criminal lawyer in the city to try and get that boy paroled or something, so’s he could die in some real nice place.”
“Yeah,” Lewis said drily, “like us.”
“If I was to win the lottery,” Hoxie said, “I wouldn’t mess with no lawyers. I’d hire me three or four real tough street dudes to jump them guards and turn that boy loose. Give him enough money to skip out to South America or someplace.”
“Now that’s a good idea,” Lewis allowed.
“Only thing bad about it is ain’t none of us gonna win no lottery,” Potts said glumly.
“Seems like,” Hoxie said, “I always be reading how some group or organization or something be trying to get some worthless piece of shit off death row ‘cause he’s got a low IQ, or his mama whipped his ass too much when he was a kid, or something. But don’t nobody seem to be helping this boy. Leastwise, nobody we know of.”
“People don’t help other people ‘cause they’ve usually got something to lose by doing it,” Lewis said. “Only time people really go out on a limb for somebody is when they got nothin’ to lose.”
“You mean people like us?” Potts asked.
Neither Lewis nor Hoxie answered.
For a long time, nobody said anything. But they all knew what the others were thinking.
~ * ~
They got down to it the next time they met, when Potts said, “I wish there was some way we could help the kid.”
Without consciously realizing it, that was what Lewis had been waiting for.
“We could,” he said simply.
“What do you mean?�
� Hoxie asked. “How?”
“Get the jump on those two guards. Be easy. They ain’t expecting no trouble from three sick guys like us. We could take ‘em down with no problem, let the kid go, and use them shackles they got on him to chain up the guards and the radiology tech in the scan room. Before anybody knew what was happening, we could all be out of the hospital and gone.”
“Yeah, but gone where?” Potts asked. “The hospital knows who we are, where we live —- hell, we’d be caught before lunchtime.”
“Not if we had an escape plan,” Lewis said.
Hoxie frowned, but with interest. “What kind of escape plan?”
“I ain’t sure,” Lewis admitted. “But it’d have to be a plan where we could all get out of the country. Go to someplace where we couldn’t be extradited. And where we could still get our treatments. Like Argentina.”
“Lewis, good buddy, you are dreaming,” Potts said. “An escape plan like that would take a whole hell of a lot of money.”
“Well,” Lewis said quietly. “I just happen to know where we can get our hands on a whole hell of a lot of money.”
He told them about the four suitcases of cash that he saw being brought into the betting parlor run by his friend Ralph every Thursday morning. Hoxie’s eyebrows went up.
“Man, are you talking about sticking up one of them parlors that’s owned by Cicero Charley Waxman? If you are, that ain’t too smart. “
“Who’s Cicero Charley Waxman?” Potts asked.
“Bigtime rackets boss who runs the gambling on the North Side,” Hoxie told him. “We steal from him, he’ll have his hoods after us like fleas after a junkyard dog.”
Potts shrugged his skinny shoulders. “So what? Look, if we busted this kid loose, we’d have the Chicago cops and the Illinois state police after us anyways. A few hoodlums wouldn’t make no difference.”
“He’s right,” Lewis said. “If our escape plan worked, we get away from everybody. If it didn’t, what’s the difference who catches us? We go to jail or we get killed. We’re dying anyways.” Lewis leaned forward with his elbows on the table and lowered his voice. “Look, I’m gonna be straight with you guys. I want those four suitcases of dough as much for myself as I do for the kid. I don’t know if I’m gonna beat this cancer or not—just like you guys don’t know if you’ll beat yours. But if I don’t beat it, I’d like to spend my last days in someplace clean and warm; maybe some little beach village not too far from a city where there’s a modern hospital where I can get my treatments —”
“You know, I got the same feeling,” Hoxie admitted. “I’d like to have a way to get the hell out of my daughter’s house. I don’t want to die in no basement room. That little beach village sounds mighty good to me.”
Lewis and Hoxie looked at Potts. The Southerner nodded slowly. “I guess I got a reason, too. I’d like to have my wife and kids with me when I go. Somebody to say goodbye to besides strangers.” He blushed slightly. “No offense.”
“Looks like we all understand each other,” Lewis said.
They sat back and raised their beer glasses in a silent toast.
~ * ~
They met in Lewis’s shabby little apartment the following evening and, over pizza and beer, began to make plans.
“First thing in the morning,” Lewis said, “we go downtown to the federal building and get passports. Then we gotta figure some way to get a gun —”
“I can cover that,” Hoxie said. “My son-in-law gots a thirty-two-caliber Saturday-night special he keeps in a drawer nex’ to his bed. It’s a little gun, but he had it chromed and it looks bigger.”
“Just one gun all we need?” Potts asked.
“Yeah, the other two guys can keep their hands in their pockets like they got guns, too,” Lewis said. “Anyway, we’ll take guns off the guys carrying the money. They’re bound to be strapped.”
“Okay. What else?” Hoxie asked.
“Plane tickets,” said Lewis. “I checked out the airlines this morning. There’s an Argentine Air flight from here to Buenos Aires at nine o’clock every night. One-way fare is eleven hundred and eighty bucks, first class.”
“First class!”said Potts.
“Certainly,” Lewis confirmed. “We’ll be in the money; you don’t think we’re gonna fly coach, do you?”
“Where we gonna get the money to buy first-class tickets?”
“We don’t need no money. The airline will hold the tickets at the airport until two hours before flight time; we pay for them when we check in. But we do need a little front money for a few other things.”
“Like what?” Hoxie wanted to know.
“We need to rent a car. We need to rent a motel room out near the airport. And we need to buy some clothes for the kid; we can’t have him running around in that orange jumpsuit. Either of you guys got a credit card?”
“Not me,” Hoxie said glumly. “My daughter canceled mine. She gives me an allowance now, like I was some kid.”
“I got a Visa card,” said Potts. “I don’t use it much; just for groceries and stuff when I run short of cash.”
“What’s the credit limit on it?”
“Five hundred.”
“That ought to be enough. You got a driver’s license?”
“Yeah. Tennessee license.”
“That’ll do. We’ll rent the car at the airport the night before, and drop it off when we go to catch the flight.”
“We taking the kid with us?” Potts asked. Lewis shook his head.
“Can’t. He won’t have no passport. We’ll give him a fourth of the money and then he’s on his own.” Hoxie and Potts exchanged cheerless looks. Lewis shrugged. “It’s the best we can do for him.”
For a long moment then, the three men were silent: looking at each other, looking down at the remains of the pizza, sipping beer that was turning warm, drumming silent fingers. It was a brief time of limbo, a heavy interval in which any one of them could have hesitated just a hint, looked even a trace tentative, and maybe the whole unlikely scheme would have broken to pieces in their minds and evaporated like some juvenile plan to steal a math test the night before the exam. But none of them faltered.
“Well then,” Potts drawled, “when do we do it?”
“A week from Thursday,” Lewis said. “We should have everything set up by a week from Thursday. We’ll do it then.”
~ * ~
When a week from Thursday came and Lewis’s friend Ralph opened the parlor door to let Lewis in to make his early bets, the parlor manager was surprised to find Lewis accompanied by two men he had never seen before. “What the hell?” he said, holding the door only partly open.
“These are a couple of guys I go to the hospital with,” Lewis explained. “Just let ‘em stand inside out of the cold while they wait for me, okay?”
“Damn it, Lew, I shouldn’t even be letting you in before the place opens,” Ralph complained. “Now you’re taking advantage by showing up with two guys I don’t even know —”
“They’re okay,” Lewis assured him, gently shouldering his way in and gesturing for Potts and Hoxie to follow. “They’ll wait by the door, you won’t even know they’re here, Ralph. Come on, let me get my bets down ...”
Reluctantly, Ralph closed and locked the door behind them. Walking around the betting counter, he studied Lewis curiously. There was something different about him. Suddenly it dawned on Ralph what it was.
“Where’s your racing form?” he asked. It was the first time in twenty years that he could remember seeing Lewis without a racing form either in his hand or sticking out of a pocket.
“I, uh — guess I forgot it,” Lewis said. He tried to sound casual, but he knew at once that he had blown the ploy; the nervousness that he heard in his own usually sanguine voice betrayed him.
Ralph glanced at Potts and Hoxie, who were just inside the door, watching intently. His eyes narrowed suspiciously. “All right, Lewis, what’s going on?” he demanded.
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