Shoot The Moon (and more)

by Max Allan Collins

  Remember we were standing there naked at the time.

  “Ummm,” the correctional officer said.

  And kind of kicked at our clothes, which were neatly piled on the floor at our feet.

  So we put our clothes back on.

  I would have preferred having a uniform, frankly, and I know Wheat was very disappointed about not getting one. He said so. “What’s the use of being in jail if you don’t get a striped suit?” (He said this to me, later, having learned his lesson, finally, about talking with Ummm.)

  Both of us were wearing nicer, less comfortable clothes than we normally chose to wear. We had dressed up for our court appearance, very clean-cut college boy short sleeve shirts and pressed slacks. We looked like a couple of models in a Sears catalog, not DeKalb County Jail’s latest cons.

  And then something remarkable happened.

  Wheaty asked a question and the correctional officer actually answered. Made a sentence.

  Wheaty asked, “What happens now?”

  And the correctional officer said, “Now I lock you up.”

  “Ummm,” I said.

  Chapter 5

  Remember how I mentioned the jail, from the outside, looked like any big old brick building, an old school house maybe, the major difference being bars on the windows? The same was true of the inside. It was very similar to the junior high I went to in the seventh grade, same creaky floors, same grim pastel plaster walls. By grim pastel I mean all those nauseating institutional grays and greens society reserves for its criminals and school children. Of course the junior high I’d attended had been condemned and torn down six years ago, while DeKalb County was taking the more patient route and waiting for the jail to fall down under its own steam.

  We were taken to a place called the Bull Pen, which in no way reminded me of my old junior high. This was the real thing: a large oblong room enclosed by heavy iron bars, bars stretching from floor to ceiling. Around the Bull Pen, which was about twenty feet wide and seventy feet long, was a catwalk, and around the catwalk were more iron bars, on three sides anyway: the back wall was just that, the back wall of the jail itself.

  We were given individual cells within the Bull Pen. There were only six such cells, five of which were filled, now that we were there. The six cells were all in a row, and took up about a fourth of the Bull Pen. The rest was an open area (although there was a shower and a sink and all the necessary toilet facilities at one end) and in that open area were three large metal tables, which were sort of like picnic tables, although this wasn’t my idea of a picnic.

  But then it wasn’t my idea of a jail, either. On the way over I had envisioned a drunk tank, the sort you see in the movies, a huge cage where scrufty, bearded derelicts lurk, looking for somebody clean to throw up on: a filthy pit with the toilet out in the open and with no seat on it, and no place to sleep but on the bug-infested floor. Instead, I found myself inside a dormitory of sorts, despite the iron bars and cement floor; a clean, orderly-looking place where two men sat at a picnic type table and played cards, while another sat nearby watching television (which was up high, beyond the bars, out in the catwalk area), all of them very ordinary looking guys, wearing street clothes. All in all, it was much better than I had expected, especially considering the rundown condition of the jail itself.

  Still, it was nothing to write home about, and I was getting irritated at Wheat, who was walking around the Bull Pen with a grin on his face, looking the place over with the tickled expression of a new home buyer.

  I went to my cell. It was, like all the other cells, pretty good size, and had a double bunk; had two people been required to make use of this cell, which was the intent of its design, it would have been cramped. For a single person, it was almost roomy.

  Privacy was another nice feature. Blank metal walls were on three sides, the “front door” of the cell being bars and looking out on the area with the picnic tables. So I had privacy when I wanted it, and company when I wanted it. Who could ask for anything more, other than to be able to walk out of there.

  Wheat stuck his head in my cell, said, “Anybody home?”and came in and sat on the lower bunk. “This is really far out, isn’t it?” He was glowing.

  “Far out?” I said. “Far out? Look around you. See this light bulb in the wall here? Notice the wire mesh around it? That’s so we don’t take the bulb out and break it and use it to kill somebody. Do you notice anything funny about your shoes? That’s right: they took our shoe laces away from us. Our belts, too. That’s so we don’t hang ourselves. Did you notice we’re surrounded by not one, but two, count ’em folks, two rows of iron bars. Wheat. Haven’t you noticed? We’re in jail!”

  “Well,” Wheaty said, getting up off the bunk. “I don’t see why you have to be in a bad mood about it.”

  I just looked at him.

  He said, “I’m going out and meet the guys. Want to come?”

  Meet the guys?

  The guys?

  You mean those four criminals out there?

  “Okay,” I said.

  Chapter 6

  The guy watching television was named Peabody. He was a little pot-bellied man who wore wire-rimmed glasses and was around thirty-five years old. He wore a short-sleeve blue Banlon golfer’s shirt and brown slacks. His hair was dark and receding. He looked more like an accountant than a criminal. We asked him what he did for a living. He told us he was an accountant. He told us we looked more like college students than criminals. We told him we only looked like criminals when we had our clothes off. He didn’t seem to catch that. He was watching a soap opera he’d been following since he entered jail twenty-seven days before and told us, out of the corner of his mouth, that as soon as his stories were over (he followed various soap operas till four o’clock in the afternoon) he would get better acquainted with us. I could not imagine what he could be in for, unless he had embezzled or something else of a clerically criminal nature, but the county jail didn’t seem a likely home for an embezzler.

  “He’s in for beating the crap out of his wife’s boyfriend,” Elam said.

  Elam was one of the two guys playing cards. He was a friendly, self-confident guy with a wide, quick smile that seemed to me a bit sinister, at first anyway; later on, when I got used to him, it was just a smile. He was dark: dark complexion, dark hair, dark eyes, dark personality. He scared me a little, though he wasn’t a big, thug sort of person. Not that he was short or skinny or anything, it’s just with a guy like Wheaty around nobody else seems big, outside of maybe a palm tree. The scary thing about Elam were those eyes of his: they were kind of large, kind of pop-eyed looking, probably due to some sort of thyroid condition, though I never asked.

  The other guy playing cards was named Hopp. That was his last name. I never did hear his first name, or Elam’s either, for that matter. And as far as they were concerned, Wheaty was just Wheat, and I was Kitch.

  And Hopp was Hopp. A heavy-set, sour-faced guy who never said much besides, “Deal the cards.” He looked like Don Rickles, but even balder.

  I had the idea Hopp could kill you with his bare hands if he wanted to, and had the idea too that Elam would stick a knife in a buddy’s back for a dollar and a half.

  “He also beat the crap out of his wife,” Elam continued, still referring to the accountant named Peabody who, two tables away, was studying the television set with the concentration of an advanced yoga student.

  “How long’s he in for?” Wheat asked.

  “He got sixty days. All he does is watch those soap operas, which are the story of his life, you know? Wives cheating on husbands and vice versa and people beating the crap out of each other over it.”

  “But he’s such a little guy,” I whispered. Peabody seemed wrapped up in his soap opera, yes, but I whispered just the same: I wasn’t taking any chances getting a guy who beat the crap out of people mad at me.

  “Yeah, well, his wife and her boyfriend were little, too. And he used a putter on ’em, sneaked up on ’em while t
hey was together and tried to putt ’em to death. Ha!”

  Hopp said, “Deal the cards.”

  They seemed to be playing a rummy game of some kind. I didn’t recognize it, so it must’ve been a pretty obscure variant, I figured. There aren’t many card games I’m not familiar with.

  “Are his wife and her boyfriend okay?” I asked. Still whispering. “I’d think you could get hurt kind of bad by a guy hitting you with a putter.”

  “He’d of done a hell of a lot better with a two iron, I clue ya. Ha! Go fish, Hopp!”

  “Go fish?” I said. “You guys are playing ‘Go Fish’?”

  “Yeah. We been playing worse than that. We played Crazy Eights yesterday, if you can believe it. We been playing everything two guys alone can play, and neither one of us likes this two-handed baloney, lemme tell ya. And the accountant over there won’t play. He’s got his ‘stories’ to watch. Ha! You boys play cards?”

  “Uh,” I said, smiling a little. “Do they, uh, let you gamble in here?”

  Chapter 7

  Lunch was vegetable beef soup, barbeque pork sandwich and orange Jello with banana slices and marshmallows. And milk. “I love this place,” Wheaty said. Slurping his soup. “This place is better than Howard Johnson’s.”

  For once I agreed with Wheat. The soup was great, and the sandwich was no slouch, either. And while I’m not much on Jello salad, as Jello salads go, this one wasn’t bad.

  Elam, who was sitting next to Hopp across the table from us, said, “The sheriff’s wife does the cooking. She’s a real honey. Nice looking broad, too.”

  Hopp said, “You been in here too long.”

  Sometimes, when he wasn’t playing cards, Hopp said things other than “Deal the cards,” but it was always sort of startling when he did.

  “What about dessert,” Wheat said. “Do we get dessert?”

  Elam nodded. He spoke as he chewed his Jello salad. His teeth and the Jello were just a shade different in color. “Wait till you taste the homemade doughnuts in the morning. Melt in the mouth. Best jail I was ever in.”

  “But isn’t it kind of, uh, run down?” I asked. “I mean, are most jails in this bad a shape?”

  “Hell, kid, you don’t know when you got it good. Don’t you know a jail with personality when you see it? This jail’s been around. Half of Capone’s boys spent their summer vacations in this joint.”

  Wheaty said, “You mean Chicago gangsters stayed here?”

  I said, “In the DeKalb County Jail? How come?”

  “Cook County Jail got so overcrowded, some of the neighboring counties had to take the overflow. My uncle was a bootlegger back then, told me all about it. Some of the people in charge here was on the take, so Capone’s boys got the regular red carpet treatment. I understand they used to let ’em out to go get a beer, take in a movie, go out on a date. Ha!”

  “Lace curtain jail,” Hopp said.

  “Huh?” Wheat said.

  “Yeah, that’s right.” Elam said. “They called this place the lace curtain jail, ’cause the Prohibition crooks got treated like royalty. And you know something? We’re treated that way ourselves. Good food, friendly guards, lots of privileges, and that Bull Pen with its big cells and TV and tables and decent toilet and shower, if that ain’t home away from home I never saw it. Take it from me, I been in jails. This one’s a honey.”

  “Even if it is falling down,” I said, not fully convinced.

  “Because it’s falling down,” Elam said. “The people running this jail, the sheriff for example, who has to live in here himself, feel so damn guilty about havin’ to run a rattletrap old place like this, feel so damn sorry for us poor slobs stuck in here, why they bend over backwards makin’ us feel comfy. Now you take a modern jail, all shiny and spit and polish, hell. The people running those places get to feeling like their tenants got it too good, got it soft, like a guy should feel lucky to be staying in such a nice looking new place with its chrome crappers and all. Ha! I tell ya something else, you get the worst damn chow in those places. Worse than army chow. You won’t find food like this in a new jail.”

  We were eating downstairs, in a cell block similar to the Bull Pen but larger, with twenty cells (a row of ten on either side of the room) and bigger metal picnic tables than we had upstairs, two of them, where we’d been seated for the meal, the food already on the tables waiting for us when we got there. Three other prisoners joined the five of us from the Bull Pen for this and subsequent meals. A guard stood out in the catwalk and watched us eat.

  Peabody, the accountant, was eating with a black guy at the other table. The black guy was small, skinny, boyish looking. He was probably about twenty. He was wearing a gray tee shirt and jeans. Peabody and the black guy were talking a mile a minute. It looked like they were planning a break or something.

  Elam saw me watching them and said, “Hey. Don’t stare at those guys.”

  “Huh? Oh. Sure. I didn’t mean to, uh...”

  “That little spade’s a killer. He could have a temper. They got him in a separate cell. He’s in for killing his wife’s boyfriend.”

  “Oh,” I said. Somewhat shaken. “I, uh, see why he and Peabody hit it off so good. They have something in common.”

  “Hope to shout they got something in common,” Elam said. “They’re both soap opera freaks. The spade’s got a portable TV in his cell. That’s what they’re jabbering about, their soap operas.”

  Wheaty said, “My mom watches soap operas.”

  “Well,” Elam said, “if she comes to see you visiting day, you’ll have to introduce her to Peabody and the spade.”

  Wheaty was too busy eating his Jello to catch Elam’s good-natured sarcasm. Wheat just said, “My mom’s not going to come visit. I’m not telling her I’m in the clink.”

  “The clink,” Hopp said.

  Elam said, “I take it this is the first time either of you boys has been in the, ha!, clink. Do I guess right?”

  We said yeah.

  “So what are you in for? Now. You don’t have to say if you‘d rather not. First, lemme point out Hopp and me are generally bigger-time than county jail, know what I mean, but we lucked out, if you can call being stuck in the, ha!, clink, lucky. We got caught with some TVs in the back of a van. The van was ours, the TVs weren’t. We got a year. We got another thirty-six days and then we’ll be back to chasing a little bit more profitable rainbows than TV sets. I even got a particular little rainbow in mind.”

  Elam, like most thieves (he said), had a straight profession to fall back on, or use as a cover if need be, and his was short-order cook, though he had aspirations toward gourmet-style cooking. (Hopp’s straight profession was piano-tuning, although on no occasion did he reveal any interest in or leaning toward anything at all musical; and all I could think of, when Hopp told us he was a piano-tuner, was that scene in The Godfather where a guy gets strangled with piano wire, which fit Hopp’s image a lot closer than anything musical.)

  “Why are you guys in the county jail?” Wheat asked, having finished his Jello and tuned into the conversation. “How come you guys didn’t get sent up the river?”

  “Up the river,” Hopp said.

  “Normally, yeah, I guess we’d been, ha!, sent up the river. But see, any sentence of a year or under is served in the county jail. Had we got a year and a day, it’d been prison.”

  I whispered, “Then why’s that black guy here? Didn’t he get more than a year for, uh, doing away with his wife’s boyfriend?”

  “Doing away with,” Hopp said.

  “The little spade didn’t get nothin’ yet. He’s waiting to go to trial. You wait for trial in county jail. Prison’s after that. So. What are you boys in for?”

  I tried to think of a way to change the subject. I didn’t know what a couple of tough guys like Elam and Hopp would think if they found out we were just college kids who’d been railroaded over a harmless prank. If they found out we were just punks, maybe they’d beat us up or rape us or something, and I wo
uld much rather just play cards with them.

  But Wheat said, cheerfully, “We streaked the police chief’s daughter’s wedding reception.”

  And Elam laughed, a loud, uproarious laugh.

  And Hopp smiled.

  It was the first time I had ever seen Hopp smile, and it would prove to be a less than frequent event.

  Elam said, “You guys are okay. That’s about the best damn reason I ever heard of for being in jail.”

  “Well,” I admitted, “I guess it does beat beating up your wife and her boyfriend with a putter.”

  Chapter 8

  After lunch, metal tubs of hot water were brought in and set on the metal tables, and some towels too, and we washed and dried the dishes we’d just used. And I enjoyed doing it.

  Because finally Wheaty had found something about jail he didn’t like.

  “I don’t mind jail,” Wheaty said, “but this washing dishes is punishment.”

  Wheat was beginning to get flustered. He was waving his hands around. Some soap suds flicked onto Hopp’s shirt.

  Hopp showed his teeth. And he wasn’t smiling, either.

  He spoke.

  He said, “Settle down.”

  Wheat dropped his hands. They clunked on the bottom of the metal tub like stones. Soap suds flicked onto my shirt.

  “Kid,” Elam said, using a curled soapy finger to summon Wheat closer.

  Wheat, mouth open, eyes white and round, leaned closer.

  “Take it from me, kid: don’t bitch.”

  “You mean you like washing dishes?” Wheat asked.

  “Ha! I love it. You will too.”

  And we did, eventually.

  What Wheat and I didn’t know, having been in jail for only a few hours, was the boredom factor. You see, the bad thing about being incarcerated is not being stuck inside: most everybody spends the better part of the day inside one building or another, and if it’s a factory or some other place where you work, you aren’t really free to leave or go outside whenever you want, so it’s not so different from jail or prison.