Shoot The Moon (and more)

by Max Allan Collins

  The bad thing about being incarcerated is boredom. Having nothing to do.

  A typical day in jail consists of waking up in your cell about six, showering, going down to breakfast at seven, coming back and sitting in the Bull Pen, going down to lunch at twelve-thirty, coming back and sitting in the Bull Pen, going down to supper at five-thirty, coming back and sitting in the Bull Pen, shower again if so inclined, and going to sleep in your cell about eleven.

  In the Bull Pen we could play cards or watch television. We could read, but no magazines or newspapers: we had to settle for the hardcover and paperback books available in the jail’s library downstairs. We could have pencils and paper. There was a monopoly game. A radio. We could take naps. We could go to the toilet. And that’s about it.

  Maybe that doesn’t sound so bad to you.

  Maybe you’re saying, “Well, it sure beats working.”

  Try it.

  You will find that any slight change from the norm, any minute deviation from the Bull Pen’s boredom, you will jump at. You will find yourself looking forward to doing your daily laundry. You will find yourself hoping the guards will say, “Today you guys can do some mopping downstairs.” You will cling to the moments, after meals, when you are allowed to go down to the basement and use the candy machine and cigarette machine. You will smoke cigarettes, even if you never smoked before, even if cigarette smokes gags the hell out of you, as it does me. You will play ping pong for an hour after lunch, because a ping pong table has been provided for you and you damn well take advantage of it. You will wash your hands twenty-five times in one day. You will drink enough water to make a fish say, “Come on now.” You will find yourself looking forward to the damnedest things, things that, in the normal world, you could never, ever imagine yourself looking forward to.

  You will find yourself looking forward to doing dishes.

  Chapter 9

  The next day, after lunch, a guard named Tobin, a sad-looking, middle-aged man who seemed as sorry to be here as we were, peeked through the Bull Pen bars and said, “Kitchen. Somebody to see you.”

  I looked up from my cards. We were playing pitch. Wheaty and I were partners. I had bid three and was having trouble making it. I immediately threw the cards in, went over to where the guard was looking in and said, “Fine.”

  And then it hit me.

  Visitation was allowed twice a week. On Tuesdays and Saturdays. This was Tuesday.

  Okay.

  Visitation hours were one to three in the afternoon. It was now a little after two.

  Okay.

  Only immediate family are allowed to visit prisoners. Don’t panic, I told myself. Maybe it’s Mr. Nizer. Maybe they allow lawyers to visit, too.

  I said, “Do they allow lawyers to visit?”

  “Yeah,” the guard said.

  “Is it Mr. Nizer, my lawyer?”

  “No,” the guard said.

  One down, three to go. Arlene?

  “Who... who is it?”

  Will the mystery guests please sign in:

  “Your parents,” the guard said.

  I moaned.

  “What d’you say?” the guard asked.

  “I moaned,” I said.

  “You know where the windows are? I’ll bring ’em over to the one on the right.”

  I knew where the windows were. Visitation windows. There were several of them, which opened up so you could talk to your loved ones without bars between you. Personally, I wouldn’t have minded the bars.

  Through the bars I watched my parents come into the catwalk.

  “Awk,” Wheaty said, from over at the metal table. “It’s your folks!”

  “Shush!” Peabody, the accountant, said. “Keep it down!” He was watching one of his soap operas.

  Meanwhile, I was entering my own.

  I looked out the window at my parents.

  My father was wearing a black suit and a black tie. He looked like he was in mourning. My mother was wearing a summery, cheery bright-color dress. She did not look like she was in mourning: she was in mourning. She was crying, sniffling, dabbing at her eyes with a hanky.

  I looked through the window and said, “Er, hi, Dad. Mom.”

  “Is that all you have to say?” he said.

  My father is on the tall side, a lean-faced, kindly eyed man with dark brown widow’s-peaked hair. He didn’t look particularly kindly right now, however. I told you he’s a minister, didn’t I? Well, I was glad I wasn’t on Death Row and this was the minister brought around to set me at peace with the world.

  “Dad, I don’t really know what to say.”

  “Why in God’s name did you take your clothes off and run through the DeKalb Holiday Inn?”

  “Dad, if I had it to do over again, I...”

  My mother made a whimpering sound in her throat.

  “You don’t have it to do over again, Fred,” he said, somberly. “It’s done. Over and done. It’s something you’ll have to put behind you.”

  That seemed to me a bad choice of words, but I didn’t say so.

  I said instead, “I’m glad you feel that way, Dad.”

  “Of course I feel that way. What other way could I feel? It’s the Christian thing to do. I believe in forgiveness. I believe in learning from mistakes and going forward. All I want to know is one thing.”

  “Yes, Dad?”

  “Why in God’s name did you take your clothes off and run through the DeKalb Holiday Inn?”

  “Dad.”

  “Yes?”

  I have never been particularly close to my father. He’s always been kind to me. He has never struck me. He has always been there with fatherly words of advice whenever fatherly words of advice seemed called for. But he’s always been sort of remote, and his love has always been, well, Christian enough, but not particularly warm. My mother I have always been closer to. Related to better as a human being. Unfortunately, she is a crier. Did you see Love Story? Maybe you cried at the ending, I don’t know; a lot of people did; I thought it was a crock, but a lot of people cried when they saw that ending. My mother was one of them. She cried for a week and a half.

  She was crying now.

  Right now when I needed her to referee between my father and me, she was busy crying and I had to deal with my good but distant father as best I could.

  I asked, “How did you find out, Dad?”

  “The Lord is everywhere. You can’t hide from Him, son.”

  “Dad... now don’t take this wrong... but you aren’t the Lord. You aren’t everywhere. How did you find out?”

  My mother reached in her purse. She was still crying, so I figured she was getting a fresh hanky. She wasn’t. She was getting a newspaper.

  She held it up.

  It was the front page of the St. Louis paper the folks subscribed to.

  Wheat and I were on it.

  Remember that photographer at the wedding? Well, he sold his picture of Wheat and me crashing through the bride’s family. He sold it to a wire service for a thousand dollars. You could see both of our faces very clearly. And most of the rest of us, too, though certain more delicate parts had had to be airbrushed out somewhat.

  There was a very humorous caption beneath the picture, having to do with two zany college kids streaking the police chief’s daughter’s wedding reception. You’ll excuse me if I don’t reprint that caption here, as I’m afraid I find it less amusing than most people.

  My mother tried to hand the paper to me, and I told her, “They won’t allow us to have newspapers.” She folded it back up, put it back in her purse, resumed crying.

  “Don’t ask me to explain,” I said. “It was stupid, and I got caught, and that’s all there is to it. I didn’t know it was the police chief’s daughter, I swear, Dad. It was all a terrible mistake.”

  “A terrible mistake,” he said. “What about summer school?”

  “They said we could have school books in here, so Wheat and I sent requests to the college asking if we could continue our
courses by correspondence, but... but the profs turned us down.”

  “So you’ll have to go back in the fall.”

  “I guess we will.”

  “And did you think of that when you took your clothes off and ran through the DeKalb Holiday Inn?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “What were you thinking of?”

  “I was thinking I wished I still had my clothes on.”

  “Being flip doesn’t answer my question.”

  “Well...”

  “It had something to do with gambling, didn’t it?”

  Dad knew my hobby was playing cards, and disapproved. I played for such low stakes that he rarely got angry about it, but he disapproved.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Someone bet you you could do it,” he said.

  “Not exactly. That’s pretty close, though.”

  “Have you learned anything from this?”

  “I learned to keep my clothes on in public.”

  “Do you find this situation funny?”

  “No. I don’t like jail. Wheaty seems to like it, but I don’t.”

  “Then I hope you’ve learned something. I hope you’ve learned not to break the law. I hope you’ve learned not to gamble. If I could feel you had learned not to gamble, I would feel better about this.”

  “I’m through with gambling, Dad.”

  “Good, good. You’ll be glad to know we paid your lawyer friend, Mr. Nizer, paid him back for covering your $100 fine.”

  “That’s... that’s very kind of you Dad. And Mom. Do you know if Wheaty’s parents know about this?”

  “They get the newspapers.”

  “Oh. Yeah.”

  “They sent money with us to pay his fine. You can tell him. They’ll be here next Tuesday to visit him. You can tell him that too.”

  “I will.”

  “Your sister is fine.”

  My sister Angela is twenty-six and lives in Portland, Oregon, with her insurance salesman husband and their kid, and my parents see her once a year, if they’re lucky. How they knew she was fine was beyond me, unless they had talked to her on the phone about my taking my clothes off and running through the DeKalb Holiday Inn. After all, they get the papers in Portland.

  “Do you want us to visit you again?”

  “It was great seeing you, Dad. And Mom. But it’s a long drive for you. Why not just write. I’d love to get some letters.”

  Mom smiled through her tears and said, “Ghhghallnfll.”

  She meant she’d write.

  “Good, Mom,” I said.

  Then my father asked me some questions about life in jail, and I answered them, and things loosened up a little. Mom finally stopped crying, partially, and asked a few questions herself. It wasn’t so bad, then.

  Finally my father said, “We’ll be going now. Don’t forget what you told me.”

  “Uh, oh, sure, Dad.”

  “About gambling.”

  “Right. I’m through with gambling.”

  We said our goodbyes, and they left, and I went back to my cards.

  Chapter 10

  Hopp said, “Deal the cards.”

  I was telling Wheaty about how we were famous, how we had our picture in all the papers. And of course Wheat’s response had been, “My mom’ll kill me,” and I told him he’d get the chance to find out next Tuesday when she came to visit him. He then got uncharacteristically silent and morose and sat shuffling the cards repeatedly, shuffled the spots off ’em.

  Elam was vaguely amused by it all and made a gently sarcastic attempt to cheer Wheat up, saying, “Don’t sweat it, kid. Ha! Maybe that skin book for the broads, what is it? Playgirl? Maybe they’ll offer you a thousand bucks, to pose for ’em, now that you’re a star, who knows?”

  Wheat brightened, said, “You really think so?” and kept shuffling.

  And Hopp said deal the cards.

  Wheaty dealt the cards.

  We were playing pitch. We had played it all day yesterday, and all morning today, and we were working on the afternoon.

  Pitch is a good game for a foursome, even if you’re not in jail. I find poker somewhat boring with less than six guys, and bridge is no good unless you’re playing with really first-rate players. I’ve been Wheaty’s bridge partner before, and the game requires a little more patience than Wheat’s willing to bring to the table.

  Wheaty isn’t much of a poker player, either. He doesn’t bluff well. His face could be called a lot of things, but a poker face it ain’t.

  However.

  He happens to be a very fine pitch player. The game requires skill, intelligence and a sense of adventure. Wheat has all those things. There are occasions in pitch when a certain amount of bluffing goes on, where you pretend to be holding a card you aren’t, or vice versa, and Wheat holds his own there, too. Having a partner gives him stability and coolness. Whereas in poker, for example, where he’s on his own, he tends to panic. In pitch, he’s a master.

  Elam and Hopp were pretty good, too, but we won most of the time.

  Hopp proved to be a poor team player, for one thing. His temper was bad, his judgment too (he wouldn’t bid when he should, he would bid when he shouldn’t, things like that) but he and Elam had been together a long time as, well, business partners of sorts, and Elam understood Hopp well enough to compensate for most of Hopp’s weaknesses. Elam and Hopp made use of body language, which is a nice way to say they stopped just short of signals, and they talked across the table outrageously: “I don’t know whether I should bid,” Hopp might say, and Elam might casually reply, “It’s only money.”

  Which was, by the way, another reason why pitch was a good game for us. In order to gamble, we had to be a little careful. Obviously, the guards knew the possibility at least existed that we were gambling for money, but seemed willing to look the other way as long as we weren’t blatant about it. Pitch is scored on a sheet of paper, and I served as bookkeeper and kept track of who owed what. If we’d played poker, for instance, we’d have to use matchsticks as chips and all that, and it would have gotten complicated. This way, a simple tally sheet did it.

  We had settled the stakes that first day, when a guard wasn’t around. A guard strolled around the catwalk once every half hour and recorded what each of us was doing, on a sheet on a clipboard; but we didn’t have constant supervision by television monitor as some jails do. Sometimes Elam got talking about what he and Hopp did for a living, which was a little scary; Wheat and I would exchange nervous glances, and then study our cards.

  Anyway, the stakes.

  Elam had suggested ten/twenty, and Wheat and I had readily agreed. We usually played a little bit higher stakes with our frat brothers and other college friends: ten cents a bump, twenty cents a game seemed pretty penny ante, even for penny ante players like Wheat and me; we’d have preferred a quarter a bump, fifty cents a game. But Elam and Hopp had been here before we were, so they had a right to make house rules. And besides, we’d be playing for a month, and a month was long enough to build up good losses or winnings, even at ten/twenty. (Though in pitch, if teams are evenly matched, things tend to even out, usually, over the long haul.)

  In case you don’t understand the card game pitch, I’ll explain just a couple of things to make all this understandable to you. Pitch is a game where you bid, and if you don’t make your bid, you go down: you bump. It varies game to game, but the way we played it, if you won you didn’t have to pay for the times you bid and missed. There are variations of pitch, but we played the four point variety (high, low, jack and game) in which you can bid anywhere from one to four. If you have a great hand and feel sure you can make all four points, you “shoot the moon” and, if you make it, you automatically win.

  “I think I’m going to shoot it,” Wheat said.

  Hopp looked up sourly. “Shoot it then.”

  “I don’t know,” Wheat said. “I don’t know.”

  “You only live once,” I said. (We did our share of talking across
the table, too.)

  Elam said, “Last time you guys shot the moon, you got your picture in the paper.”

  But Wheat hadn’t heard any of this. He was studying his cards like an archeologist trying to figure out some brand of particularly baffling hieroglyphics.

  Finally he said, “Okay. Okay. I’m gonna do it. I’m gonna do it. I’m going to shoot it. I’m going to shoot the moon! I’m shooting it, you guys!”

  “Keep it down!” Peabody said. Twice already he’d asked the guard to turn up the television.

  So Wheaty shot it in diamonds and we made it. Easily.

  There was a whole lot of shooting the moon that afternoon. I shot it once and made it, Hopp shot it once and bumped, and Wheat shot it twice and made it both times. We were really getting the cards. All Hopp got was glum. Elam’s attitude was what the hell.

  By the end of that evening, Wheat and I were, by my tally, ahead $1.50 each.

  After I showered, I stuck my head inside Wheat’s cell and said, “Some cards we were getting.”

  “I shot it twice and made it,” Wheaty said. “I shot it twice and made it.”

  “I wonder why Hopp takes it so hard? It’s just nickel and dime stuff.”

  “Some people like to win. I know I do. I shot it twice and made it!”

  I was grinning. I couldn’t help it.

  “You know something, Wheat? You been right all along. Jail isn’t such a bad place after all.”

  Chapter 11

  So we played a lot of pitch. At one point Wheaty and I were ahead $10. Then for a long time we fluctuated between one dollar and five dollars. That’s each, of course. Hopp continued to be in a bad mood, but he never got violent or anything. He just would say, “Deal the cards,” and give off sour vibrations and that was that.

  The Bull Pen population stayed the same: just the five of us: Elam, Hopp, Wheat and me. And Peabody, the accountant. We never did get to know Peabody very well.