One day in jail was pretty much the same as the next. Only the first few days, and the last few, really stand out distinctly in my mind. Oh, yes, there was that Tuesday when Wheat’s folks came around. That stands out in my mind, too, though nothing much happened, outside of some yelling from Wheat’s mom, though it wasn’t as bad as Wheat had imagined it would be. But then, nothing could be.
The day before we got out, Hopp shuffled the cards and said, “Let’s up the stakes. Double ’em.”
Wheat and I exchanged muted grins, said, “Sure,” simultaneously. Elam and Hopp were into us for five bucks each and we didn’t mind giving them a chance to make their money back.
Elam said, “Hold it, Hopp. I can’t see doubling the stakes. We’re into these guys enough as it is.”
Elam was kidding, of course, and Wheaty and I laughed, which made Hopp kind of mad.
“Okay, punks!” Hopp said. It was like somebody opened the door on a blast furnace. “Self-confident little smart-ass punks. You got the guts to play for a little more, or not?”
The laughter caught in our throats. We’d been around Elam and Hopp so long we’d begun to forget (or maybe accept) what they were, which was crooks. My first impression of Hopp, remember, was that he looked like a killer. I’d gotten used to him, considered him kind of a grouchy comedy relief, a Wheaty in reverse: short and fat and unhappy and harmless. But I all of a sudden realized that one element of that equation was off-kilter: that Hopp was Wheat in reverse, all right but Wheat was the one who was harmless and Hopp, well...
Hopp slapped the metal table with his hand and it was like he’d hit it with a trowel. The sound was a kind of pinging echo bouncing off all the bars around us.
“Well?” he demanded.
Elam said, “Hopp. Cool off, man. We’re all friends here. Ha! What the hell? Why not sweeten the game up a little bit? It’s only money. You guys willin’? Okay. Twenty/forty she is.”
That was in the morning. We won till eleven o’clock. By lunch we had hit the even up point. After lunch we kept on losing. It was all downhill. We never rallied. They weren’t cheating us or anything: the odds were just catching up with us. We’d had nearly thirty days of predominantly good cards. It was time for a losing streak.
We kept playing trying to climb out of it, ending up throwing good money after bad. We played most of the evening. We lost $15 each.
Neither of us felt too terribly bad about it. After all, we were getting out of jail tomorrow.
Hopp’s reaction, however, was rather intense. For Hopp, that is.
He went around smiling, which was unsettling.
Chapter 12
I hadn’t seen the sun for thirty days. It was good seeing it again. It hurts to look at the sun, you know, but I did anyway, and loved it. Looking at the sun is just one of the many trivial things that seem important after you’ve spent time in jail. The sky is very blue in the summer, in the Midwest, and the clouds are very white. I studied them. Wheat was doing the same.
Walking outside in fresh air — not the stale, supposedly air-conditioned stuff we had breathed inside — was pleasurable beyond words. It took us half an hour to walk the couple blocks back to the apartment at the Nizer house. We would just stand on a street corner, breathing, feeling the hot sun on our skin, looking at cars drive by with pretty girls in them. Not all the cars had pretty girls in them, of course, but a lot of them did, and a lot of girls seemed pretty to me today that maybe wouldn’t have before I went to jail for thirty days.
Next door to the Nizer house is a carry-out food place, a minor league chain restaurant that combines elements of several of the major leaguers, selling fried chicken, hamburgers, ice cream, you name a kind of junk food and this place sold it. The place was a huge plastic-looking red barn with a four-foot statue of a chicken on top.
Between us we had a few dollars left from what we had taken with us to jail (Mr. Nizer had loaned us twenty bucks each to spend on cigarettes and candy and what-not, while we were inside) and we proceeded to order and eat five cheeseburgers and two double malts and a pound of French fries between us. Wheaty ate one more cheeseburger than I did, but I ate more French fries than he did.
The food at the jail had been good, but we had developed an insane craving for some nice, greasy junk food. And the nice, greasy junk food at this particular carry-out joint was served by some very young, very pretty girls in short white dresses like nurses wear in cheap sexy movies.
Maybe you’ve guessed by now that pretty girls are another of the not-so-trivial things you miss spending time in jail.
As we sat and ate our cheeseburgers and malts and fries, Wheat said, “We’re gray.”
“Huh?”
“Our skin is gray.”
“No it isn’t. What do you mean, our skin is gray?”
“See for yourself.” He held out a hand as evidence. It was not gray. It was largely yellow and red, being smeared generously with mustard and ketchup.
“What are you talking about, Wheat?”
“You skin’s just as gray as mine is. Everybody’s skin’s gray after they get out of prison.”
“We weren’t in prison, Wheat. We were in jail. And we weren’t in jail long enough for our skin to turn gray.”
“What would you call it, then? The color our skin is.”
“Pale. Regular pale skin color. Eat your cheeseburger.”
“Here it is summer. The middle of summer, Kitch! We ought to have real nice tans by now.”
“It’s hard getting a real nice tan in the Bull Pen.”
“I know. Your skin turns gray in there.”
“You’re incredible. You loved jail, while you were in there! Couldn’t get enough of the place! Now that you’re out, you’re complaining. You’re something else.”
“I guess you’re right. I guess I am going to miss the old Bull Pen at that.”
“Wheat. Forget what I said. Go ahead and complain.”
I was in no mood to wax nostalgic about that hole. I was in a mood to revel in sun, cheeseburgers and pretty girls.
“Come on, Kitch. Admit it. You enjoyed yourself. All those cards. Even if we did end up losing.”
“Aw, I was getting tired of playing cards. Give me the salt.”
“Here. The hell you were tired! You never get tired of cards. You’d play cards tonight, Kitch, if ya got the chance.”
“You’re wrong there... no more cards this summer. Sun and fun, that’s where it’s at.”
“Now you’re talkin’!”
“Only...”
“Only what, Kitch?”
“Only I suppose we really ought to get out and find ourselves some jobs. We’re going to have to raise the cash for school this fall. And it won’t be easy finding a summer job at this late date.”
“We could go back and work at my dad’s store, back home.” Wheaty’s dad is manager of a furniture store, which is where we had worked for a year between high school and college.
“Think he could use us?”
“He always runs a big sale in August, Kitch, you know that. He’ll be able to use some extra help.”
“And till August rolls around, sun and fun?”
“Sun and fun.”
We toasted malt cups.
“We’ll call Dad tonight,” Wheat said. “Collect. You know something, Kitch? I’m gonna kind of miss our ol’ pals Elam and Hopp. What a couple zany guys.”