I slid the door open and they came in.
Wheat jumped out of his soft chair. “Elam! Hopp!” It sounded like he was speaking a foreign language. “Come on in, you guys! It’s good to see ya!”
Hopp said, “Where’s our money?”
I said, “Uuuuh?”
Wheat said, “Whaaa?”
Elam said, “Hopp! Ease off, man.” He turned to us, and smiled. And for the first time since that day I met him in the jail, his smile seemed sinister to me, again. “Listen, boys,” he said. “You got to excuse Hopp here. We got a little hot driving up in this heat. Those lousy back roads! Ha! Bitch to find this place.”
They did look hot. Hopp was wearing faded blue working pants and a gray muscle-man shirt that had sweat circles under the arms the size of pie pans. Elam was wearing a yellow sports jacket, a dark blue silk shirt, white pants and a bulge under the left arm.
Hopp held up a fist that looked like he was holding up a rock.
He said, “Where’s our money?”
I said, “Whaaa?”
Wheat said, “Uuuuh?”
Elam said, “Hopp’s just hot, don’t mind him. But he’s right. We did come after our money. And it does look like you’re kinda hidin’ out from us. Not that we think you kids would even think of runnin’ out on your old pals. Ha! Who’d think that?”
“Why would we want to run out on you?” I asked. I didn’t know whether to be scared or confused. I settled on both.
Wheat said, “You guys came all the way up here to collect a crummy fifteen bucks?”
“Fifteen bucks?” Hopp snarled. “Fifteen bucks my butt! Who you trying to kid?”
“Awright, awright,” Wheat said, staying remarkably cool.
“Fifteen a piece, I mean. Thirty crummy bucks, I mean. So what’s the big hairy deal?”
“The big hairy deal,” Elam said, “is the fifteen hundred bucks each you owe us, pals. The three thousand bucks you owe us.”
Wheaty dropped his can of beer.
So did I.
Where was Clint Eastwood when we needed him?
Chapter 15
Wheaty laughed. Or maybe he whimpered. “You guys,” he said. “Cut it out, you guys. You got some crazy sense of humor, you guys. Stop kidding around.”
Elam said, “Maybe you haven’t noticed, but Hopp, he don’t kid around a whole bunch.”
“Why, uh, why don’t we all sit down,” I said, motioning to the two semi-circular couches that faced each other in the middle of the room. “I’ll, uh, get us some beers.” I picked up the cans Wheat and I had dropped and headed for the kitchenette area.
Wheat followed me. He said, “What is going on? What’s going on?”
I was opening the refrigerator. “Are they sitting?”
“What?”
“Glance back there. Are they sitting?”
“Yeah. Yeah, they’re sitting. What is this all about, Kitch? Three thousand bucks, Kitch. What kind of joke is that?”
Wheat’s hands weren’t moving around yet, but panic was clearly setting in.
I handed him two Olys and said, “Don’t get upset.”
“Who is upset? I don’t see anybody upset. Do you see anybody upset? I wish my mom was here.”
“Wheat. Cool. Stay cool.”
“You’re shaking, Kitch. You’re telling me stay cool, and you’re shaking. How can I have confidence in somebody who’s telling me stay cool and is shaking?”
“Will you just settle down? And when we go back in there, don’t say anything. I’ll do all the talking.”
“You’ll do all the talking. Just tell me one thing, Kitch... do you know what’s comin’ off here or not?”
“I think I do.”
“Really? No kidding, really? What?”
“I think we do owe them three thousand dollars.”
Wheat dropped the beer cans I’d handed him. These two were still unopened, fortunately, so it didn’t make a mess. He sat down at the kitchen table. His mouth was open. His eyes were as glazed as the stale doughnut over on the counter where he was staring.
Well, that was better than waving his hands around a hundred miles an hour. I guess.
“Hey!” Elam’s voice boomed, from out in the living room area.
Wheat jumped a little.
Me too.
Elam continued: “What the hell’s taking so long? Get your butts in here!”
I led Wheat by the elbow, and juggled four beers and managed to get Wheat sat on the couch, across from Elam and Hopp, and got the beers distributed all around. Elam and Hopp popped the tops on the beer cans and Wheat and I jumped a little, again. I opened the top on my own can and handled it better. Wheat left his can unopened. He was just sitting and staring, like out in the kitchen. Elam’s sinister smile had faded, replaced by a frown that made me nostalgic for the smile. Hopp’s eyes were narrowed in his face, like a couple bad cuts that hadn’t healed.
I sat next to Wheat.
“There’s been a misunderstanding,” I said, with a smile even I did not believe.
I paused for Elam to say, “How’s that?” But he didn’t.
I pressed on. “It’s uh, really quite amusing when you think about it.” I laughed a little.
Hopp said, “Get on with it,” after which his lips pressed back flat together, making his mouth look like a gash in his face, going well with the festering sores that were his eyes.
Lord, was I scared.
But I had a speech to make, and I made it.
“When we set the stakes for our pitch game, at the jail,” I said, “we just said ‘ten/twenty,’ and everybody said fine, remember? But Wheat and I are penny ante players, and we assumed you meant ten cents a bump and twenty cents a game. We didn’t stop to think that you guys are higher-stakes players than we are, that you play in games where the table is literally littered with ten- and twenty-dollar bills. We didn’t stop to think that maybe you meant ten dollars a bump and twenty dollars a game.”
Wheat said, “Awk.”
I said, “Easy, Wheat. Easy. Anyway, that’s what happened... . Wheat and I thought we were playing penny ante. You guys thought the stakes were, uh, a little higher. But... excuse me... but you guys are at fault, too, I mean, you should’ve known just looking at us that Wheat and me aren’t exactly high rollers. So, uh, everybody’s, you know, at least partially at fault? So, uh, can’t we just call it an honest mistake on all our parts, and uh, shake hands friends and... forget about it?”
Silence.
A year passed. Or maybe it was a minute. Anyway, I was a year older.
Finally Hopp said, “You’re going to pay.”
Which was an ambiguous thing to say. I mean, he could have meant that a couple of ways.
But I didn’t bother asking him to clarify.
Elam said, “That’s a real interesting story... but I just bet if you boys had come out the winners in that game, you’d be wanting to be paid off in dollars, not pennies.”
Hopp nodded. “They planned this all along.”
Elam said, “The pitiful part is, I thought you were a couple of nice kids. I liked you. Ha! I guess you got to be careful about making friends in jail.”
“Please,” I said. “Be reasonable. Look at it from our point of view. We’re not con artists. We’re just a couple of college kids who landed in jail because of a prank.”
“Ha! I thought you were in jail ’cause you took off your clothes and ran through a motel lobby.”
“Yes!” I said, seeing a straw and grasping at it. “And do you know why we took off our clothes and ran through that motel lobby?”
“ ’Cause you’re a couple of anti-Establishment hippies or somethin’, how the hell should we know?”
“Elam. Hopp. We owed this guy seventy-eight dollars from a card game, and couldn’t afford to pay him off, and he said if we streaked through the Holiday Inn lobby, he’d forgive the debt. I mean can’t you see that two guys who can’t afford to pay off a seventy-eight dollar debt, who’ll
do something crazy and ridiculous and illegal and even land in jail because they can’t afford to pay off a seventy-eight dollar debt, aren’t too likely to have three thousand dollars lyin’ around to pay off another debt, which they got gambling in jail, where they landed after doing something crazy and ridiculous and illegal because they couldn’t afford to pay off a seventy-eight dollar debt? Hah?”
Hopp spoke to Elam but looked at us. He said, “Give me your gun. I’m gonna kill ’em.”
Wheat fell off the couch.
Chapter 16
Just because Wheat and I were making fools of ourselves, dropping our beers on the floor, falling off the couch, don’t get the idea we were fooling around. It may read like slapstick comedy, but it lived like something else. Maybe you think the expression “scared silly” is just an expression. It isn’t. Wheat and I were fools out of fear.
While I was helping Wheat off the floor and back onto the couch, Elam was telling Hopp to take it easy.
“You take it easy,” Hopp said. “I say they got to pay.” This time it didn’t sound quite so ambiguous.
And then Elam said something very corny. He said, “Dead they aren’t any good to us.”
It was a corny line from a corny movie, and in a corny movie you would never take it seriously.
I took it seriously.
Wheat had that glazed look on his face again, was just sitting there like a big hunk of wood, and I for one was glad. I had enough to contend with just trying to deal with Elam and Hopp, let alone having to manage Wheat’s behavior.
Elam said, “Let me explain something to you boys. Let me explain something about gambling debts. Hopp and me are from Chicago. Grew up in the same neighborhood, and drifted into... business, together. We got lives of our own, of course, Hopp’s got a wife and five kids to support, and I got a lady friend who’s more expensive to take care of than that. It’s expensive period, livin’ in Chicago. Cost of living is somethin’ you wouldn’t be-lieve. But we get by, Hopp and me. Got to work our butts off to do it, though. We’re on the road a lot. Mainly what we do is knock over a bank here and there.”
My heart was a triphammer. I hadn’t been this worked up since I streaked through the DeKalb Holiday Inn. Elam was confirming suspicions I’d gathered spending time with Hopp and him in jail, but hearing him come right out and say, “We knock over a bank here and there,” was very disturbing. And put teeth in Hopp’s threat to kill us. Furthermore, my bladder was killing me.
“When Hopp and me get ourselves in a card game,” Elam was saying, “we take it serious. We play a lot of cards in Chicago, and we mess around with other kinds of gambling, too, only we aren’t just messing around. I like the horses, but Hopp, he leans toward dice. He’s a more physical type than me, I guess. Maybe you noticed. Anyway, when you gamble in Chicago, at least in the circles Hopp and me move in, you get in big trouble if you don’t pay up. In fact, you don’t even think of not paying up. Ha! Not for long, anyway. What you do, if you owe some guy some money, is you borrow some money from some other guy. You don’t go to a bank, ’cause bankers get upset when you ask for a loan to pay off a bookie. Besides, I try and make it a rule never to go inside a bank without a gun in my hand.”
“Why... why are you telling us this?” I asked, not wanting to hear any of it at all.
“Don’t interrupt. Anyway, where was I, oh yeah... that money you borrow when you can’t pay off a gambling debt, that’s called juice money. You know what that is, don’t you? You know what a shylock, a loanshark is, don’t you? Weekly interest going on forever, till you can pay off the principal? Good. Anyway, Hopp and me both owe this guy some money. We were out on the road, trying to pull off a couple deals that would give us some coin to pay off this guy, when we got tossed in the can. While we was in, our bill with this guy is goin’ wild as a pervert in a nudist camp. How could we make payments while we was in jail? So we owe this guy a lot of money. We can’t go home again.”
All of a sudden he was quoting Thomas Wolfe. “What do you mean?” I asked.
“We can’t go back to Chicago and Hopp to his wife and five kids and me to my lady friend till we can pay off this damn shylock.”
“What’s that got to do with Wheat and me?”
“You owe us three thousand. That would’ve been enough to get this guy off our backs a while and let us go home. We been in jail a year, boys. We want to go home.”
“Well, gee,” I said, suddenly feeling guilty, “I’m awful sorry. I mean, we really weren’t trying to put anything over on you... I can understand how disappointed you must feel.”
Hopp started to lurch toward me but Elam threw an arm over Hopp‘s chest and held him back.
Elam said, “I believe you, boys. I believe you when you say you misunderstood what the stakes were in our game. But that don’t change anything for Hopp and me.”
Hopp had settled down a little, after making his lunge and being halted by Elam. He said, “Whose Volkswagen is that outside?”
“My mom’s.” Wheat’s voice was very tiny, incongruously so coming out of his big hulking frame.
“Your mom’s?” Hopp said. “What’s she doing here?”
“Is she here?” Wheat said, round-eyed. “Where? Where?”
I said, “It’s Wheaty’s car. It’s in his mom’s name, that’s all.”
Hopp said, “I don’t give a damn whose car it is, we’ll take it back and sell it.”
Elam said, “Ha! That thing isn’t worth five hundred.”
“It is so!” Wheat said, and I shushed him.
“Maybe,” Hopp said, and began what was the closest thing to a speech I ever heard come from those thin, menacing lips, “we could go rent a U-haul truck and back it up to this place and haul everything away. There’s no neighbor on either side. It’ll be dark soon. Some of this stuff looks like antiques to me. And the kitchen appliances and all would help. What do you think?”
What I thought was that the Nizers would feel we had somewhat taken advantage of their hospitality, if we aided Elam and Hopp in looting their lake home, but I had the good sense not to say anything.
Wheat didn’t.
He said, “That’d be stealing!”
Everybody looked at him. Hopp especially.
He said, “But if you guys think it would be best, well...”
Elam said, “No. This antique stuff is a pain in the butt getting fenced. For all the work it’d take emptying this place, we’d come up with peanuts. And some of these lake areas are patrolled pretty regular, ’cause there’s a lot of vandalism and burglaries in any area where you got homes that aren’t in use all the time, cottages like this one, that only get used on good weather weekends. No. Bad idea.”
“You got a better one?” Hopp said.
“Better isn’t the word.” Elam said, and his sinister smile returned. “Winning,” he said, as if it were a magic word.
“Winning?” Hopp said. “That’d take three men, at least!”
Elam nodded toward us.
Hopp got this skeptical look on his face.
Elam said, pleasantly, “How would you boys like to work out what you owe us?”
Wheat and I exchanged a worried look. We had thought, from the way the conversation had drifted, that Elam and Hopp (or anyway, Elam) had accepted the concept of our not owing them anything except $15 each.
I said, “I won’t be involved in anything illegal.”
“Me either,” Wheat said. “Streaking’s where I draw the line.”
Elam blew air out of his cheeks, thoughtfully. “Okay,” he said. “I got to talk to Hopp alone for a minute. We’re gonna go over there a minute and then we’ll be right back. Okay?”
We nodded.
Then they were over whispering in the kitchenette, and Wheat said, “I got to go to the bathroom.”
“Join the club.”
“What do you think they’re talking about?”
“I don’t know. Whatever it is, I don’t like it.”
“Maybe
you didn’t realize it, Kitch, but I was scared crapless through all of that.”
“Really? You sure covered it well, Wheat.”
“Maybe, but all I know is one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m not ever gonna get involved with those guys in anything again, without first knowing the stakes.”
Which is one of the smartest things I ever heard Wheat say.
I only wish one of us had been listening.
Chapter 17
Elam and Hopp returned from the kitchenette and took their places on their semi-circle couch and faced us. Hopp tried to smile. He didn’t show any teeth. I never saw any of Hopp’s teeth in my life. But he did try to smile, I’ll give him that much. It came off as a fold in the fabric of his face, which was better than a gash, I guess. Elam’s smile was sinisterly unsinister, if you can follow that. Or maybe I was just getting paranoid.
Judge for yourself.
Elam said, “Let me tell you about a little town a few hundred miles from here. In this little town is a little bank. The bank is really just a sort of store-front operation, small, single room. A branch office of a bank from another, little bit larger town nearby. You’d think in such a small town, with less than a thousand people, the bank wouldn’t keep much cash in its vault. You’d be wrong. Because this little town has nearly a dozen businesses. Of course the business district, if you can call it that, isn’t much... one city block, on one side of the street... a little grocery store, an appliance store, a tavern... and you know it’s a little town if there’s only one tavern! The other side of the street is taken up by a filling station that’s next to, or I guess is part of, a repair shop that does more farm machinery repair than auto, and sells farm machinery too. On the north edge of town there’s another filling station, with a cafe. Between the filling station and where that little business district I told you about starts is a grain elevator, a lumber yard and two feed stores. On the other side of the little business district is a Shell oil storage depot, with all kinds of trucks that make all kinds of deliveries in the area. And what that all adds up to is that for a little branch office bank in a little bump-in-the-road town, that bank has some pre-tty heavyweight depositers. Maybe ten, fifteen thousand in that vault, on a weekend. Watched over by a staff numbering two. A manager, and a teller. Ten, maybe fifteen thousand dollars, and two employees lookin’ after it. I tell ya, it’s a crime.”
Shoot The Moon (and more) Page 6