"Well, then," Little Nick said, "since me and Blackie had nothing to do with trying to take you, it wouldn't be fair for you to take a package like that off us, would it?"
"I don't know," I said.
"That's an upsetting thing for you not to know about," Little Nick said. "Were you planning on cashing in those chips and leaving? It would kind of clean out the house."
"I reckon I will think about it a while," I said.
"You do that," Little Nick said. "Me and Blackie and you will all think about it. And by the way, Blackie, there's no need of Al and Carmine staying in here. Why don't you give them something to do outside the joint, keeping an eye on things?"
"Good idea," Blackie said. He got up and went out of the room with Al and Carmine, and in a minute come back without them and said, "All right, Nick. They're set."
"That's fine," Little Nick said. "Well, Toby, how's the thinking going?"
I said, "In a way, I would like to give all them chips back to you on account of it warn't your fault."
Blackie said, "That would be a nice place for you to stop thinking."
I said, "Blackie, I can't help it that I always done a lot of thinking and can't always stop when somebody wants. I reckon it is like a vice that a feller can't break. So I have done some more thinking about this. And what I come up with is, what if I had took that feller's word for it and had bet on seven and had lost one of them packages you talk about?"
Little Nick said, "If you had dropped a package, you'd have dropped it trying to cheat. So it would have been your own fault."
"Well, yes," I said. "But would it have been fair for you to win a package through me getting out-cheated?"
Little Nick turned to Blackie and said, "Why the hell don't you get in this? I'm getting backed into a corner."
"Let's keep it simple," Blackie said. He said to me, "Toby, if you had dropped a package, me and Nick wouldn't have wanted to see you get hurt, no matter what the reason. So we'd have told you to forget it because we're all friends."
"That's real nice of you," I said, "and now I reckon I know what to do. In this bag I got one thousand and twenty-four blue chips. And in my pocket I got twenty- two blue chips. To start with, I owe you fellers fifty blue chips, don't I?"
Blackie said, "We're all friends. Forget the fifty blues you owe us."
"No, I like to square things up," I said. I got out the twenty-two blue chips from my pocket, and counted out twenty-eight blue chips from the bag, and gave them to Little Nick. I hefted the bag and said, "This here is a lot of clams, Blackie."
"You're telling me? Damn near twenty thousand."
"I wouldn't want to clean all them clams out of the game," I said, "so what I am going to do is this."
I got up and started toward the door. Little Nick made a jump for the door ahead of me, and Blackie grabbed him and said, "You're crazy. Not in here."
"Goddam it," Little Nick said, "I'm just trying to be polite and open the door for him."
"Sorry," Blackie said. "My nerves are having the screams."
They both opened the door and I went out with them following. I walked into the room where all the games was, and called out, "Would all you folks listen to me for a moment?"
At first only a few of them turned around, but then they seen me and remembered me winning all them chips, and they begun poking other folks and pretty soon everybody in the room was listening.
"Folks," I said, "like you know, I won a lot of clams tonight. And when I give it some thought, I knowed it warn't right to take all them clams out of the game. So here is a table nobody is using right now and I want all you folks to have fun so I am dumping all these here chips on this table and kindly help yourselves and have fun."
I dumped all them blue chips on the table, and turned around to see how Little Nick and Blackie liked that way I had worked out of being fair. I reckon they was kind of stunned at how good I had worked it out, because for a moment they stood there like they was froze, staring at me. Then Blackie made a dive for the table, and Little Nick made a dive for the table. But they warn't fast enough. A real wave of folks broke over that table and you never heard such yelling and shouting in your life. There was chips flying all over the place and folks making dives here and there, and it would have scared you except all them folks was laughing and having a high old time but Little Nick and Blackie. They cleaned them chips up like a flock of hungry chickens pecking up corn. Then they run back to the games and begun yelling for action.
Little Nick and Blackie come up out of it the way a feller that had lost the ball might crawl out of a pile-up in football. Little Nick said to Blackie, "All I got was about thirty. How about you?"
"I had a double handful," Blackie said, "but some dame walked on my hand so I ended with one handful of chips and one handful of high heel."
"Anyway," Little Nick said, looking back at the room, "we're gonna have a big night."
"Yeah," Blackie said. "A big night—on us." He looked at me and said in a tired way, "Toby, that was quite an idea you had. Any time I feel like committing suicide, I'll ask you for another idea."
"That is mighty nice of you to say so," I said. "And I'm real glad I could fix things for you fellers to have a big night."
Little Nick said, "When you want to have another fling, let me know. There's a guy runs a joint over to the East Coast that I don't like, and I'll put you onto him." He walked slowly to his office and closed the door behind him.
"I hope he is not sore or nothing," I said.
"Oh no," Blackie said. "He just wants to die but he's too tired to do it. Let me walk you back to your place, Toby."
"It's only next door and I can find the way."
"I need a little air. And besides, I wouldn't want you to run into anybody who might think you were carrying twenty thousand clams."
We walked outside and I thought of something and said, "But Blackie, why would anybody think I was carrying twenty thousand clams when it would be just as easy to cash them in for ten or twenty dollars or whatever they cost?"
Blackie stopped like he had walked into a wall. "How's that again?" he said.
"Well, Blackie, the way I get it, a clam is nothing but a white chip which is the color of part of a clam shell anyways. Anybody knows you can buy a box of chips in a store for a dollar or so, and you can get a hundred chips in a box, and I reckon that is what you fellers sell them for, with maybe a little profit tacked on. Them chips I had looked like a lot but warn't worth more than ten or twenty dollars. So if I had cashed them in like I thought of doing, except I didn't want to take money from you fellers, I would have cashed them in for money ruther than for twenty thousand white chips or clams if you want to call them that. So why would anybody think I was carrying twenty thousand clams?"
Blackie done some breathing like he had a bad cold, and said, "The only way I can explain it is that there are a lot of idiots in the world, and it looks like I'm one of them. We could have bought those chips back from you for twenty bucks, huh?"
"Well, yes, except it wouldn't have been fair to you fellers. Blackie, you don't look very good."
"I got hit all of a sudden by a rush of thoughts to the head. Let me get you started home while I still have some strength left." He gave a whistle, and Al and Carmine popped up from behind a car a little ways ahead of us.
"Signals off?" Al said.
"Signals off," Blackie said.
"Hello, fellers," I said. "What are you doing out here?"
"They're making sure nobody swipes any hub caps," Blackie said. "You can't trust anybody these days. You can't even trust a sucker to try to cheat you. Good night, Toby. I don't think you'd better come here to gamble any more."
"I think you are right," I said. "Now that I have tried it out, I see that a feller can lose too much money at it."
14
I RECKON I done something wrong that night I played craps, on account of me and Blackie warn't never very close after that. Oh, we would kid around when we run int
o each other, but it seemed like Blackie was holding me off and didn't want to be friends no more. What I mean is, if me and him had been friends, Blackie would have got a little more worried about some of the troubles we started to have.
The troubles started the night after I played craps. I went down to check our dock and found all our rowboats gone. They had been tied up good and I knowed they hadn't untied themselves. It was lucky I went down when I did, because somebody must have done it just a little while before, and the tide hadn't had time to take them far. I seen something black out in the pass, and shucked off my shirt and pants and swum out to it, and it was one of our boats. The oars was in it so all I had to do was row down the tide and I ended up getting all the boats back.
I couldn't set on the dock every night watching that it didn't happen again, so I took to mooring the rowboats a ways out in the water every night and swimming back.
That stopped the boat trouble. But it turned out we had traded in boat trouble for other kinds. The next night when we was all asleep, somebody went onto our dock and opened up the live bait boxes that was floating beside the dock with our crabs and shrimp and minnows in them. He turned them boxes upside down and all the bait got away. So I took to mooring them bait boxes out by the rowboats at night, and that took care of the bait trouble.
But then the next night a car drove past our shack and somebody heaved a jar of green paint in through the window. The jar broke and spattered our place some. Well, that warn't so bad, on account of we had been trying to fix on a color to paint the inside of the shack, and that green was a nice cool shade and looked pretty good. So we decided to paint our shack green when we got around to it. But the next night somebody come by in a car and thrun a rock through the window and fired a shot in after it. The green paint had turned out handy but there is nothing much you can do with a rock and a used bullet. There was a paper wrapped around the rock, and the paper had words on it in pencil printing that said: "If you're smart you'll get out before they have to carry you out."
You could tell the feller who wrote that warn't friendly. I couldn't work out no way to keep that kind of thing from happening, on account of I couldn't tow our shack out into the water at night and moor it with the rowboats and bait boxes. Pop and Holly got the idea Little Nick and Blackie had something to do with what was happening, so I went around and talked to Blackie about it.
"Toby," he said, "it hurts me to have you think we'd pull stuff like that."
"Well," I said, "if it's not you folks, who is it?"
"In about three weeks you're gonna put in a legal claim for that property of yours, aren't you?"
"That's right, Blackie. And you and Little Nick didn't want us to do that, and tried to buy our place off us. That's why it looked like maybe you and Little Nick might want to run us off our place before the time is up."
"Maybe you ought to think about other guys who don't want you to put in a legal claim."
"What other guys, Blackie?"
"The way I get it, the government is down on you. Maybe it's the Department of Public Improvements trying to start a rock garden in your shack. Or the Department of Public Welfare figures you need more ventilation in there, and drilled a hole with a forty-five slug."
"That's a real interesting idea of yours, Blackie. And it's smart of you to guess it was a forty-five slug on account of that's what it was. But I still don't know what we had ought to do about it."
"You can always sell out to Little Nick and me."
"But then you might get them rocks and bullets."
"Anything for a friend, Toby."
"Well," I said, "I don't reckon we will be selling out, but I'm glad to know you and me are still friends, and it's nice of you to be so helpful."
I told Pop and Holly about that but they still warn't satisfied. They said when you come right down to it, Blackie hadn't done much helping after all but had left us where we was before. And them troubles kept on.
One night it would be a car knocking down most of Pop's fence in front of our place, and the next it would be somebody throwing a stink bomb into our rest room, and the next it would be a dead fish dropped in our barrel of drinking water or a bullet shot into our tank of salt water.
Like Blackie said, maybe them things was done by the government, but there was other things going wrong that you had to blame on Little Nick and Blackie. Some pretty rough fellers was coming out to play them gambling games. They done a lot of drinking at Little Nick's bar, and whooped and hollered at all hours. Near about every night there was a scrap of some kind, and once I seen Al and Carmine beat up a feller that was arguing about something. Another time a feller that had done too much drinking knocked down the stand that the Jenkinses had outside their trailer to show off their shell jewelry. The Browns got an empty whisky bottle through their window. Fellers that come out from town to fish at our bridge begun complaining about the way some of them gambling fellers raced their cars over the bridge and almost hit folks.
I went to Blackie and talked to him about that. This time he didn't even make out like he wanted to be helpful.
"You got to expect a little high-spirited stuff," he said. "If it's getting too noisy for you, we'll still buy your place. But the offer won't hold much longer."
After that I seen we had to do something, and I drove into Gulf City and told the sheriff what was going on and asked him to quiet things down.
"Well," he said, giving a little yawn but covering it real polite with his hand, "I'd like to help, but the way things are right now, you folks aren't on county land. So I can't do a thing. You might talk to the State Highway Patrol, but they can't operate off the road, and anyway they're kind of down on you people for squatting on that land the state forgot to claim. So I guess they won't do anything. Looks to me like you people have a little law problem of your own out there."
I said, "What do folks do when they got a law problem like this and can't count on no law officers?"
He give another little yawn, and said, "I guess you elect your own law officers. It won't be legal, but as far as I can see, nothing's legal out there. Oh, and make sure you line up a couple substitute law officers, too. From what the boys on the East Coast tell me about Little Nick and Blackie, you might use up law officers kind of quick."
Well, that warn't very helpful either, but the sheriff had give me an idea. I come back and talked to Pop and Holly, and to the Browns and Jenkinses, and we called a town meeting for that afternoon. We wanted to be fair about it, so I dropped by at Little Nick's and Blackie's and told them there was to be a meeting to elect a law officer and they was invited to come and vote if they wanted.
Little Nick said, "You clowns have gone nuts."
Blackie said, "We could have a sweet setup here, if you people would only cooperate. You don't know when you're well off."
"We got to have a little law around here," I said.
Blackie give a grunt. "A little law! There's no such thing as a little law. It's like a guy who has sworn off the bottle saying he'll just take one little drink. You start off with one law and can't stop."
"We will have to take that chance, Blackie."
Little Nick said to Blackie, "We been too easygoing. I told you a week ago we ouglitta quit fooling."
"Now wait," Blackie said. "I got an idea. I think we ought to go to that meeting."
Little Nick said, "None of your other ideas worked out."
"None of yours did either," Blackie said. "Whose idea was it that cost us twenty thousand clams? Whose idea cost us a big bill for jacking this place back up on the pilings?"
"All right," Little Nick said. "We'll give your idea a whirl. Count us in on the meeting, Toby."
We set the meeting for three that afternoon on our porch. When the time come, Little Nick and Blackie warn't there but we started off anyways. Holly knowed how to run a meeting from going to them in high school, so we elected her to what they call the chair, which is a person who sets at a table and bangs on it when folks talk too
much which they always do at a meeting. Holly asked if we had any old business, and I spoke up about our troubles, but Holly said that had to come up under new business on account of we hadn't had no old business because we hadn't had no meetings before. You might think that old business would be anything that has already happened, but that is not enough. It don't get old until you have talked it over at a meeting, and I reckon it is the talking that makes that business kind of wore out and old. We got to new business finally and I brung out the bullets I had dug out of our place and the rock somebody had thrun into the shack, and started telling about our troubles.
I hadn't no more than started when Mr. Brown said, "Look at that, would you?"
We looked and seen eight fellers coming from next door. There was Little Nick and Blackie, and Al and Carmine, and four of the fellers that run the gambling games. They come crowding onto our porch, and it was nice of them to show that much interest in law when they didn't care much for it anyhow and could take it or leave it alone. We told them what we had done so far, and I showed them the rock I had just been talking about.
Blackie said, "All of us have a lot of work to do so let's get on with the voting."
Holly said, "The chair rules you're out of order."
Blackie said, "I know something about meetings too, so let me get a word in, sister. I move that the chair is out of order. All in favor say aye."
Every one of them fellers that had just come in yelled, "Aye!"
"Opposed?" Blackie said.
The Jenkinses and Browns and Pop and me yelled "No" but we couldn't make as much noise as them eight. When you come right down to it, they had eight yells to six for us if you didn't count Holly.
"Motion carried," Blackie said. "I move we elect a new chairman and that it's Carmine. All in favor?"
There was another yell that drowned out the rest of us.
Carmine shoved up to the table and kind of nudged Holly out of the way and set down.
"Now just hold on, Carmine," I said. "This don't look right to me and—"
"You're out of order," Carmine said, giving me a shove. "Are there any motions?"
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