Макс Коллинз - Shoot the Moon (and more)

Burden turned and looked at us — at me, in particular, wilting my burst of tough guy courage — and put a disgusted sneer on his face and said, “Shut your smart-ass traps. The Chief wants to see you.”

“The Chief?” I said.

“The Chief?” Wheaty said.

“The Chief,” Burden said.

“The Chief,” Friendly said.

The DeKalb Chief of Police whose, daughter’s wedding reception we had nakedly disrupted wanted to see us?

Burden said, “You don’t have any objections, do you? To seeing the Chief?”

“I want to see my lawyer,” Wheat said. “I want to see my mom.”

I said, “We don’t have to go with you. We haven’t done anything. We’re getting out of this car, right now.”

Burden flicked something on the dash that locked our back doors, and then proceeded to back out of the alley and drive toward DeKalb.

We didn’t go to the police station. We went to a residential area, a nice, quiet, upper middle-class neighborhood, with a lot of shade trees lining the streets and big houses with big lawns. Not mansions, but not exactly prefabs. We pulled up in front of one of them, a white one with black trim. A heavy-set guy in a yellow sportshirt and tan shorts was watering the grass in the front.

At Friendly and Burden’s bidding, we got out of the car and walked across the big green yard.

The Chief was not a good-looking man. His head looked small for his body; his facial features looked big for his head. Receding gray-black hair, bushy eyebrows over rather bulging gray eyes, fat round nose and a wide mouth, the sort that smiles all the time but never really does, really.

“So,” he said.

His voice was low. Rumbling bass.

“So,” I said.

Wheat said nothing.

“So you’re the boys who took their clothes off at my daughter’s wedding reception.”

“I guess so,” I said.

Wheat said nothing.

“Got some publicity out of it, didn’t you?”

“We didn’t do it for publicity, sir,” I said.

Wheat said nothing.

“What did you do it for?”

“What did we do it for?”

“What did you do it for?”

So I told him briefly, of our gambling debt to Shaker and how we’d paid it off, and that thirty days in jail, the hundred dollar fine and losing out on summer school had been punishment in spades for what seemed to us a relatively harmless prank.

“I agree with you,” the Chief said.

“What?” I said.

Wheat said nothing.

“That’s why I asked you boys here today.”

I didn’t point out that we hadn’t been asked: that we’d been brought.

“Come on inside and sit on the porch with me and have some ice tea.”

It took a few moments for the invitation to sink in.

That low, rumbling voice of his sounded sinister even when he was being friendly. Finally, we followed him to his porch, took tall glasses of lemoned, faintly sugared iced tea and sipped tentatively, half expecting the drinks to be spiked with something lethal.

“You pulled a bad judge, boys,” the Chief was saying, sipping his own iced tea. “A real hardnose and I want you to know the harshness of that sentence wasn’t any of my doing.”

“That’s... that’s nice to hear, sir,” I said.

Wheat said nothing.

“As a matter of fact,” the Chief said, “I really brought you here to tell you thanks.”

“Th... thanks?”

“Yes. What I’m going to say now is strictly confidential, you understand... but actually I’m grateful to you boys for streaking through that reception. It made my little girl’s wedding a wedding to be remembered. She thought it was wonderful!”

“Wonderful?”

“Great sense of humor, that little gal. And how many girls have their wedding reception written up in papers all over the country? The President’s daughter, but who else? So, we’re delighted, my little girl, her mama and me. Of course, officially, I have to be outraged. I hope you can understand that. For example, because the wedding photographer sold that picture of you to that wire service, I threatened to sue him... since that picture legally belongs to me, having paid him to take pictures, after all... and he settled out of court. Gave me back all the money we’d paid him to take pictures, and that thousand bucks he made, too. He still came out good, from the publicity. Anyway, I wanted to thank you. I can only say I’m sorry that you boys couldn’t have fared as well as we did in this affair. At least you can have the peace of mind to know that as long as you’re in this area, you don’t have to worry about the police chief bearing a grudge for what you did. I feel bad about the thirty days. It’s a crying shame. More tea?”

“Uh, no thanks,” I said.

Wheat said nothing.

“If you boys ever need anything,” he said, “just holler. And thanks again. You can find your way out, can’t you?”

We found our way out.

The cops took us back to Sycamore.

Friendly and I chatted about the weather, politics, baseball. Burden grunted an opinion now and then. Wheat said nothing.

Finally, after we were back to the Nizer place and the cops had gone, Wheat turned to me and said, “Thanks?”

So everything seemed to be falling into place for Wheaty and me, for a change. First, there was the DeKalb Police Chief not being mad at us, which had initially stunned us, then relieved us, and finally amused us. Second, Wheat’s father had come through with the furniture store job, meaning we’d make enough money during the month of August to come back to the University and finish up those few courses in the fall. And third, the Nizers, who were going on vacation to Colorado, gave us the key to their lake home in Wisconsin, in return for doing some minor, menial repairs and painting and such around the place, after which we’d have plenty of time to pursue our visions of sun and fun.

Other, less-earthshaking blessings were heaped upon us by a temporarily merciful providence. For one thing, Wheat’s Volks didn’t overheat on the drive to Paradise Lake, where the Nizer lake place was, despite a day so hot we almost longed for the air-conditioned jail. Almost. And for another thing, we were able to find Paradise Lake, which is one of the least developed and most hard to get to of the many lakes in that area, though I think it’s unfair of Wheat to call it “Paradise Swamp,” and I’m sure he was just kidding when he pointed over to the wet, weedy vacant lot next to the Nizer cottage and said he saw an alligator crawl out of there.

The cottage itself, though, was pretty nice, by Wheaty’s standards or anybody else’s. It was an A-frame with two bedrooms, one up and one down, and lots of burnished wood paneling, with early American furniture and a somewhat incongruously modern kitchenette, with a microwave oven we cooked TV dinners in. We did all the repairs and painting the first day. We spent Thursday and Friday chasing girls at the beaches at nearby Twin Lakes and Lake Geneva.

Late Friday afternoon, Wheaty and I were sitting in the high-ceilinged living room of the Nizer cottage, drinking Olympia beer (which is Clint Eastwood’s favorite brand, by the way, all us two-fisted types drink Oly, you know), discussing where we would go that evening in pursuit of pretty girls, when somebody knocked at the side sliding glass doors.

“Wonder if that’s the girls from last night?” Wheat mused aloud.

“Maybe,” I said, and went to answer it.

I drew back the drape that covered the glass door and it was Elam and Hopp standing out there on the sun-dappled porch.

“Hey!” I said smiling, genuinely glad to see them. I was glad to see them because jail was already fuzzing up in my mind, an experience viewed through the soft-focus camera of memory, turning those thirty days into an interesting, youthful experience that would make for some funny anecdotes in the years to come. Also, I was glad because I was on my third Oly.