Pieces of Soap

by Stanley Elkin

  “You,” a voice said. “Hey, you. Soldier.”

  “Who? Me?”

  “Of course who you. Sure who you. You see any other colonels in the area?”

  “I’m not an officer.”

  “And too bad for our side that. So how you doing, sailor? How you holding up?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Glad to hear it. Not all of us can say the same. Come over and play this game with me. A quarter a pop.”

  “No thanks. I don’t think so.”

  “Why?”

  “Those things are rigged. I’d never win.”

  “Yeah, that’s right. You got my number. You know what a shill is?”

  “Sure.”

  “You’re hired.”

  He handed me a dart.

  “No,” I said, “I told you.”

  “First game’s free. Throw it.”

  “Where?”

  “Where? At the target, in the air, at some tootsie’s tush. What’s the diff? It’s rigged. You told me already.”

  “No,” I said, “I better not.”

  “Geez, in carny thirty years, I run a game, and nobody comes. Let someone see you priming the pump, General. Be my hope for a better life. Throw the damn thing!”

  I threw the dart. It wavered in a quadrant of cork.

  “How do you like this,” he called, “I got the Robin Hood of darts here. And another winner!”

  “Sure,” I said I-wasn’t-born-yesterday-wise. “What do I win?”

  “Four bits,” he said and put a half dollar down on the counter. I picked it up. “Hey,” he said, “where you going? Hey you!” he said, raising his voice. “I’m running a business here! Hey,” he shouted, “what do you think this is?”

  “I’m a winner,” I called over my shoulder, “I won this,” and slipped the fifty cents into my pocket and went off to find Joan, to tell her the hustle I’d discovered.

  “They’ll break your bones off,” she offered.

  “Nah,” I said, “it’s foolproof. They let you win the first game. I take my prize and quit.”

  “Please,” she said, wife-wise.

  And I was right, even good at it now, my hick-innocent passerby look perfected by this time, my lonely-soldier-on-shore-leave aura not as studied as when I had found my calling, my who-mes more natural. Also, I had dropped the whistling, the more obvious blocking, all the la-dum-de-dum-dums of my plowboy distraction. Less scuffle, more scoot, no kicking up dirt, and my hands gone out of my pockets. A kid from Chicago who’d never even heard of the turnip truck. And cleaning up, I tell you. A prize in every box. If not the fifty cents of the initial bonanza—and compulsive gamblers are right, incidentally; it ain’t what you stand to win, it’s the action—then things, to me, on my roll, in the first ripening flush of my triumph over the system, even if the system were only the here-today/gone-tomorrow trucks and jerry-built tents and ramshackles of mudshow, even if it were only the barker’s promissory spiel, important stakes of high order because they represented some grand ineffable gotcha! for little guys everywhere, and maybe, just maybe, I was, back in that 1956 Virginia summertime, soldiering for the first time and seeing, for the first time too, no pun intended, action, the genuine article, the real thing.

  Here, as best I remember them, in addition to the fifty cents, are the spoils of that war, those campaigns:

  From Po-ker-eeno—a package of Camel cigarettes.

  From the ringtoss—a ball-point pen.

  From knocking over the top bottle of wooden milk—an ink eraser in a cellophane packet.

  I also took away a ruler, a bag of marbles, a plastic doll.

  And urged Joan off, and Sherm and Linda, too, who had come to watch me, pressing the cigarettes on them, the pen, the ruler, the eraser, the marbles, my doll. “Don’t you see,” I said, “it’s not as if I even wanted this stuff.”

  And strolled off to work the next booth. Ahead of my time. The Death Wish guy, the subway-vigilante one.

  “Soldier,” called a voice. “You soldier!”

  “Let me get this straight,” I told him a moment later, “you let me play the first game free.”

  “Absolutely free,” he said.

  “And I’m under no obligation.”

  “Scot free. No obligation.”

  “Jeez, I don’t know. I ain’t ever heard of an arrangement like that. It sounds, you know, too good to be true.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said, “I’m market-researching Pingo in your area, and Uncle Sam lets me write free games off my taxes.”

  “And I keep what I win?”

  “You have my word.” He handed me a Ping-Pong ball. “Just toss it into the mouth of the whoosie.” He pointed to a sort of funnel, the size and color of a galvanized pail. Complicated tubing bunched at the bottom of the contraption separated and fed into a group of lettered baskets on a shelf behind him at about the level of his waist. “Just toss it,” he said. “Gravity takes care of the rest.”

  I stood at his foul line and took my free throw. The ball disappeared into the funnel, where I heard its tinny ricochet. It emerged into one of the clear plastic tubes, made a brief, intricate passage through the thing’s intestines, and dropped into a basket.

  “Number one-oh-two in basket ‘F,’” he said and referred to a chart at the side of the booth. “One-oh-two. There, see it? One-oh-two in basket ‘F.’ Seven-and-a-half points.”

  “What happened?”

  “I told you,” he said. “You won seven-and-a-half points.”

  “What do I get?”

  “Seven-and-a-half points. All right,” he said, and extended a Ping-Pong ball, “it costs a quarter to play.”

  “No,” I said, “forget it, I don’t want to.”

  He took down an expensive portable shortwave radio from his shelf and placed it on the counter. “Ten points and she’s yours.”

  “Nah, it’d never happen.”

  “You’re one tough GI Joe, ain’t you? OK,” he said, “I shouldn’t encourage this, but it’s slow tonight and I’m giving you a second game on the house.”

  “Well,” I said, “if it’s on the house . . .” And won another point. “No,” I said, backing off, “I see what’s happening.”

  “It costs you a quarter to see what’s happening. What have you got to lose?”

  Because he was right. What did I have to lose? I was half a buck ahead, the Camels, the ball-point, the eraser, the ruler, the marbles, the doll. I paid my quarter and won an Add-a-Prize. He put a toaster down beside the radio.

  I had eight-and-a-half points. I was a point-and-a-half away, not so much from the prizes, which even I knew by now I would never win, but from finding out all the ways I would never win them. Wasn’t that worth a quarter? Wasn’t such knowledge worth a quarter?

  I won half a point.

  On the next toss I didn’t win anything. I was at nine points and holding.

  Then I won a free game.

  The free game won me another Add-a-Prize, a beauty, a seventeen-jewel wristwatch.

  All right. I’ll spare you the details. To tell the truth, I don’t really remember the details. The details compounded. They were ad hoc details. Ad hoc and ad hominem. Ad hoc and ad hominem and Add-a-Prize details, too. By the time I was into him for $4.75—this was 1956; if $4.75 wasn’t a night on the town it was at least two or three hours of it—the price of Ping-Pong balls had jumped to fifty cents. (He explained this, too. It was the cost of doing business, he said. When the value of the prizes exceeded $500, it was only natural that the list price of a Ping-Pong ball had to go up. You had to pass along your expenses to the consumer or you could go broke. It was a law. It was Keynesian, Malthusian. It was on the Chart. He showed me. It really was. On the wonderful chart that codified the random and might have been a document of summerness and summertude itself, of the makeshift and make-do I mean, of high summer’s open-air tree-house conditions and arrangements.) And these had joined the wrist-watch, toaster, and radio on the co
unter: a 35-millimeter camera, a Waring blender, a pair of binoculars with Bausch & Lomb lenses, and a $50 gift certificate for my lady from the Spiegel catalogue people of Chicago, Illinois.

  Who’d caught up with me by now. Who’d caught up with me and was tugging on the sleeve of the uniform and begging me to come home with her as if we were characters in a saloon in a nineteenth-century melodrama. Which I wouldn’t. (Because I was wrong. The compulsive gamblers are wrong. What you stand to win is the action! We weren’t born yesterday. I was behind a high-tech, sky-high heap of 1956 treasure—and is that how they beat you I wondered, by piling prize upon prize until it gets too high to see over, let alone throw over, and you have to toss the Ping-Pong ball blind, is that how they beat you, by messing with your vision, by hobbling your eyes and turning it into an actual athletic contest with actual handicaps like golf or the steeplechase, is that how, will it say on the Chart?—holding nine-and-a-half points.)

  “Come away,” Joan pleaded.

  “Stan,” Sherm pitched in.

  “Half a point,” I told him. “I only need half a point.”

  “It’s that last half point that’s the hardest.”

  “Take Joan away,” I said; “I’ve got to know how it comes out.” “Jerk,” she said, “you know how it comes out!”

  “Then how they get it to come out that way!”

  I grinned at the guy. We were co-conspirators.

  “Ball’s in your court,” he reminded me gently. I threw it and he added a big stuffed teddy to my prizes. I pushed fifty cents toward him through a space I cleared for it on the counter. He shook his head and pushed it back to me.

  “What’s this, mercy? I don’t need it. Give me a ball.”

  “Sorry, pal,” he said. “Balls are a buck. You’ve been wavering on the cusp of the eight-bit ball for some time now. The teddy bear pushed you across. Look at the chart.”

  “Sure,” I said, “so that’s how. OK. All right. You price us out of the market. You just bring us up to where it’s too rich for our blood. I see. All right. That’s what I needed to know. Thank you.”

  “Hey, where you going?”

  “Didn’t I tell you thank you?” I said. “I appreciate it. Really,” I said. “I do. I’m grateful for the instruction.” And started to walk away.

  “Hey, soldier.” No, I thought, he wouldn’t. Maybe he means Sherm. He could even mean Joan. “Is this what happens?” he asked. “You turn tail and run?”

  “Look, you beat me fair and square. You run a crooked game but you beat me fair and square. I’m not complaining, but I know when I’m licked. I’m not buying any more Ping-Pong balls.”

  “Right,” he said, “I’m not selling any. I’m out of the Ping-Pong ball business.”

  Then he did something I’ll never forget. I won’t. Though I’ve never forgotten any of it. He reached into his pocket and brought out a wad of bills that could have been the actual weight and measure of money, as forty nickels, say, constitute a roll, or fifty dimes in any Savings and Loan or Federal Reserve Bank in the country do. I could only guess at the total, but as soon as I saw it I knew that this was the size a roll of bills came in. The rubber band that held it together, rust red as the eraser on your pencil, could have been issued by the Bureau of Engraving; even the amount, give or take the newspaper even I knew must have been there for bulk and ballast, the singles that probably hid behind the tens and fifties and twenties that salted it, would have been as fixed and set as the rate of exchange. I don’t know. Say $600. That was the metaphor we used for it anyway.

  “What.” It wasn’t a question.

  “How much money do you have left?”

  “What.”

  “In your wallet? That you ain’t spent yet?”

  He explained it to me. How it wasn’t his business. How he worked for the guy. A rat. A thief. A bastard. A cheat. That for months he’d been thinking about it. How he could do the guy in. No, nothing violent. Not kill him. He didn’t mean kill him. He didn’t believe in violence. But pay him back. Dish out to others. What they dish unto you.

  “Look in your wallet. How much money you got left?”

  I didn’t have to look. “Six dollars,” I said.

  “Give me.”

  “I told you, I quit.”

  “No,” he said, “not the game. The game is finished. Give me your six dollars.”

  “Why?”

  “To pay the guy back. The rat.”

  “Pay him back.”

  “Sure,” he said. “To wipe that thief out. Listen,” he said, “I give you your prizes. The short-wave, the watch, the big stuffed teddy—all of it. And the roll,” he said, holding it out. “All the money in the roll!”

  “And I don’t have to throw any more Ping-Pong balls.”

  “No,” he said, “the Ping-Pong balls are over.”

  “Not even if it’s a free game.”

  “Of course not,” he said. “We fix the bastard.”

  “I don’t understand what you need the six dollars for.”

  “So when I tell the bastard how you came along and wiped him out and he asks me, ‘O yeah, then where’s the dough it cost him to play?’ I can show him this six and the money you already lost and the cheat’s got no comeback.”

  I held on tight to my six dollars. He extended his wad of bills.

  “All right,” I said, getting it straight, “I give you six dollars and you give me six hundred. Is that how it works?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Plus I get all the prizes.”

  “That’s right.”

  “That I see on this counter. And the six hundred.”

  “That’s right.” He extended the money farther. It was practically under my nose.

  “You swear?” I said.

  “On my honor.”

  “You swear on a Bible?”

  “Cross my heart.”

  “On your life?”

  “On mine, on my kids’.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, “I still don’t quite get it.”

  “What are you,” he asked, steamed now, watching me narrowly, “one of these First-Game-Free freaks? You go up and down the midway taking us for our rulers and ink erasers, ripping off our cigarettes and marbles and ball-point pens, and making trouble?”

  “People do this?”

  “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy, Rube.”

  “All right,” I said, “I—”

  He ripped the six dollars out of my fist.

  He handed me a Ping-Pong ball.

  “But you said,” I said, stunned, flummoxed, looking helplessly at the ball in my hand, rattling off the terms of our deal, and shouting how we had a verbal contract.

  “Are you crazy? Do they take crazy people in the army now? What happened to section eights?”

  “I’m telling,” I said. “I’m calling a policeman.”

  “You’re telling? You’re telling? Sure, sonny, go ahead.”

  We were the same age. Only he looked his. As a matter of fact he looked like the guy in Carousel, what’s-his-name, Billy Bigelow, and I looked like the stuffed teddy. “I am,” I repeated, “I’m calling a policeman.”

  And I did. A state trooper. And told him my story as I guided him back to the booth, the two of us in uniform and one of us incredulous. And repeated it before the man who had taken my money, and Joan and Sherm and Linda, too, now, picking up my party, collecting them like Dorothy loose in Oz. Warming to my grievance. Hot on it. Outraged. All of them incredulous, the guy in the booth who ran up against suckers every day but maybe had never had to deal with a bad sport before or ever even heard of a whistle-blower. The trooper shook his head and told him to give me my six dollars back. Then both of them shook their heads, then all of them did, gnawing away at what they believed was some rich mother lode of the improbable like babes at tits.

  Hey. Hey, you. This is my true confession. It was my summer and my sound-and-light show, and just beca
use my guard was dropped that don’t make it no open season or holy occasion or olly olly oxen free on fools.

  THE MILD ONE

  I am not now and never was a member of Hell’s Angels. Nor fitted my helmet out of Pots and Pans. Nor wore fascism’s spooky zips, snaps, chains, and leathers, its hulking, spit-in-your-eye costume jewelry. Trying to prove something though, its tweedy, vitiate equivalent, maybe. I taught at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee the summer of ’69. Where Richie went to school, Ralph Malph. Hard by where Arnold flogged hamburgers, Fonzie cool. In that schizoid summertime when Armstrong picnic’d the moon and Manson helter-skeltered Sharon Tate, and the entire UWM English department (or so it seemed to me, still nursing a myocardial infarct already eighteen months old) drove motorcycles and did taverns, not a half dozen among them seeming to have left actual houses, seeming instead to have been air-lifted off oil platforms or come down from watchtowers in forests, the lighthouse’s tight, spiral staircasing. Sleeping in scaffolding, gantry, the snug cement cubbies along the infrastructure of municipal buildings—car barns, little rooms behind the steel doors in subway tunnels. They lived in tents maybe, or sleds on railroad tracks, in the wide cabs of trucks and long trailers on the littered ground of construction sites. Never admitting they had homes to return to, spouseless, kidless, echt goyim, or no, not goyim, not anything religious, just guys off on a tear, boys being boys. (This is how they seemed to me, who envied them.) Men with expertise, throwing about the names of their bikes as if they were equipment in which they were checked out, rigs they were qualified to drive, the lengths of the fuses they were entitled to light, the candlepower of the acetylene they were certified to spark—all the graduated tolerances and earned sufferances their table talk, like laborers gifted in band-saw, in trowelers and dozers and yard loaders, the teamsters’ knacks, their competencies and aptitudes, metiers and flairs, green-fingered in blacktop and carpentry and all the alchemies of poured cement.