Lawrence Block: No Score

Which was very good.

But it could have been better. I mean, even considering the fact that my commissions were all being held for me by the Dynamic Termite Extermination, Inc. office, and that I had been doing my Coke buying and moviegoing out of my own savings for a couple of months, the fact remained that I had over a hundred dollars in my wallet, along with various cards to prove I was me in case I died and they wanted to make sure the body wasn’t Judge Crater or Ambrose Bierce. There was also a picture of Aileen that I kind of liked, and that I would miss.

It would have been good if I had been able to bring my wallet. And it would have been even better if I had had something to put my wallet in, because although the night was unseasonably hot, it’s never a good idea to rum amok in Indiana’s fifth largest city with no clothing whatsoever on your body.

I’ve read books where the hero suddenly gets struck naked one way or another. Or he breaks out of jail and has to get something to replace his prison uniform. Or he soaks his clothes swimming to safety and can’t wait for them to dry. Or there are these telltale bloodstains telling tales all over the place.

When this happens in books, what the guy usually does is swipe clothing from an untended clothesline. The authors don’t generally dwell on it too intently. They just throw something like Dressing himself with clothes purloined from an un tended clothesline, Stud Boring relentlessly took up the trail of the three pencil sharpeners. Then they plunge right into the action without giving you time to think about it.

In the movies, they’re even cooler about it. I saw this done just the night before last, as a matter of fact. This guy broke out of prison, out of a chain gang actually, and one moment you saw him running down the road with his prison clothes all shredded from the brambles and wet from the swamp he went through to throw the dogs off his trail, and then there was another shot of him getting off a bus, wearing a shirt and tie and carrying a leather suitcase. They didn’t even cheat by giving you the abandoned clothesline bit. They just came right out and admitted that they didn’t know how the hell Stud Boring got those clothes, and that they weren’t going to try to fake their way out of it. I suppose you have to admire them for it.

The thing of it is that if you can find a clothesline in the middle of the night, tended or untended, you are better suited to this sort of thing than I was. I don’t even think I’d care to look for one in the daytime, because the checking I did showed that (a) people don’t leave their clothes hanging out overnight and (b) most of them don’t even have clotheslines nowadays. I went zipping through backyards looking for clothes and the whole thing was a large zero. No lines and certainly no clothes. I wouldn’t have thought of looking in the first place except that I remembered all those dumb books. You’ve got to be very suspicious of everything you read.

I think I know what happened. Years ago nobody had clothes dryers, and everybody who washed clothes had to hang them out to dry, and with that many people washing clothes, there would always be a certain number who would forget to take their clothes in for the night, or who wouldn’t get around to it because they were baking bread or beating rugs by hand or putting up preserves or watering the horses or any of those good old-time things that people don’t do anymore. So in those days it was perfectly open and aboveboard to have Stud Boring steal clothes from a wash line. (Open and aboveboard for the writer, I mean. It was still illegal for Stud Boring.)

But nowadays when a writer is trying to get old Stud out of a tight place, the first thing he thinks of is what he read somewhere else. (That’s why so many books are the same. The writers all get ideas from each other.) And because they were never running around naked in the middle of the night, they don’t know that they’d be better off looking for an abandoned clothes dryer, for Pete’s sake, in this modern day and age.

After I figured out that I wasn’t going to get clothes off a line, I sat in a dark corner of somebody’s garage and tried to think what to do next. I thought about going where the clothes were. Clothes in general, I mean. Not my own clothes, which were all in my room, which was a place I knew better than to go back to. But other clothes, that I could sort of find before they were lost. The first ideas I had all involved breaking into someplace or other. Somebody’s house, or some store that sold clothes.

I figured if I broke in anyplace I would get caught, and if I got caught I would be worse off than ever, because in addition to fraud and statutory rape they could also put me in jail for burglary. And while I thought if worst came to worst I could probably get a suspended sentence for the other charges (assuming Flick remembered who to bribe for a change), I could see myself spending a long time in prison for burglary. I also figured anybody breaking into a house or a store stood a very good chance of getting opened up with a shotgun.

Then I thought, but not for long, about Lying In Ambush and crowning somebody with a brick or something heavy, say a traditional Blunt Instrument for example, like a saxophone. Having just been hit on the head myself, I didn’t want to do the same to a stranger. Besides that, you may remember that I’m not even coordinated enough to pace the Upper Valley basketball team to a regional title, and that I get nauseous just thinking about violence for any length of time. I was violent enough with the three cops, but that’s something else. I mean, I had something to fight for.

Then I tripped over a muddy shoe.

To give you an idea how brilliant I was, I looked at what I tripped over and said to myself, Oh, it’s a shoe, and put it out of the way so I wouldn’t trip over it again. And I must have sat around scheming for another five minutes before I remembered that shoes were things you wear on your feet, and that I wasn’t wearing any at the moment, and that, therefore, a muddy shoe was better than no shoe at all, and I ought to follow the old proverb that starts out If the shoe fits.

Here’s another proverb. If the shoe doesn’t exactly fit, wear it anyway, because shoes are almost as hard to come by as clotheslines.

These shoes were a little loose, and down at the heels, and thin in the soles, and one of the laces had been broken and tied together again. If they’d been in better shape, the owner wouldn’t have used them for gardening and I wouldn’t have tripped over them, so I didn’t really have any right to complain.

I didn’t have time to complain, either. Because I figured out that some people had special shoes that they used for gardening or painting or any kind of yard work, and others had special pants and shirts, and that if I looked in enough garages I could probably put together a wardrobe that would get me a lot of curious glances, I’ll admit, but that would, all things considered, get me less attention than my present costume of shoes and nothing else.

Some people lock their garages, but most of them don’t. Most people don’t have anything wearable in their garages, but some of them do. And I wasn’t fussy about fit or looks or style, and garages are fairly easy to get in and out of without disturbing anybody, and to make a long story short (or at least as short as possible, at this stage of the game) I wound up wearing the muddy shoes and a pair of paint-blotched dungarees and a red-and-black plaid hunter’s jacket and a little peaked gardener’s cap.

And in the same garage where I found the hunter’s jacket I found something else, and while it didn’t take the nose of a bloodhound to ferret it out (or the nose of a ferret to bloodhound it out), I’m going to come right out and say that it was brilliant of me to take it along. Look, I’ve told you about all of the idiot things, so I might as well take whatever credit I can get.