Макс Коллинз - Shoot the Moon (and more)

I slid the door open and they came in.

Wheat jumped out of his soft chair. “Elam! Hopp!” It sounded like he was speaking a foreign language. “Come on in, you guys! It’s good to see ya!”

Hopp said, “Where’s our money?”

I said, “Uuuuh?”

Wheat said, “Whaaa?”

Elam said, “Hopp! Ease off, man.” He turned to us, and smiled. And for the first time since that day I met him in the jail, his smile seemed sinister to me, again. “Listen, boys,” he said. “You got to excuse Hopp here. We got a little hot driving up in this heat. Those lousy back roads! Ha! Bitch to find this place.”

They did look hot. Hopp was wearing faded blue working pants and a gray muscle-man shirt that had sweat circles under the arms the size of pie pans. Elam was wearing a yellow sports jacket, a dark blue silk shirt, white pants and a bulge under the left arm.

Hopp held up a fist that looked like he was holding up a rock.

He said, “Where’s our money?”

I said, “Whaaa?”

Wheat said, “Uuuuh?”

Elam said, “Hopp’s just hot, don’t mind him. But he’s right. We did come after our money. And it does look like you’re kinda hidin’ out from us. Not that we think you kids would even think of runnin’ out on your old pals. Ha! Who’d think that?”

“Why would we want to run out on you?” I asked. I didn’t know whether to be scared or confused. I settled on both.

Wheat said, “You guys came all the way up here to collect a crummy fifteen bucks?”

“Fifteen bucks?” Hopp snarled. “Fifteen bucks my butt! Who you trying to kid?”

“Awright, awright,” Wheat said, staying remarkably cool.

“Fifteen a piece, I mean. Thirty crummy bucks, I mean. So what’s the big hairy deal?”

“The big hairy deal,” Elam said, “is the fifteen hundred bucks each you owe us, pals. The three thousand bucks you owe us.”

Wheaty dropped his can of beer.

So did I.

Where was Clint Eastwood when we needed him?

Wheaty laughed. Or maybe he whimpered. “You guys,” he said. “Cut it out, you guys. You got some crazy sense of humor, you guys. Stop kidding around.”

Elam said, “Maybe you haven’t noticed, but Hopp, he don’t kid around a whole bunch.”

“Why, uh, why don’t we all sit down,” I said, motioning to the two semi-circular couches that faced each other in the middle of the room. “I’ll, uh, get us some beers.” I picked up the cans Wheat and I had dropped and headed for the kitchenette area.

Wheat followed me. He said, “What is going on? What’s going on?”

I was opening the refrigerator. “Are they sitting?”

“What?”

“Glance back there. Are they sitting?”

“Yeah. Yeah, they’re sitting. What is this all about, Kitch? Three thousand bucks, Kitch. What kind of joke is that?”

Wheat’s hands weren’t moving around yet, but panic was clearly setting in.

I handed him two Olys and said, “Don’t get upset.”

“Who is upset? I don’t see anybody upset. Do you see anybody upset? I wish my mom was here.”

“Wheat. Cool. Stay cool.”

“You’re shaking, Kitch. You’re telling me stay cool, and you’re shaking. How can I have confidence in somebody who’s telling me stay cool and is shaking?”

“Will you just settle down? And when we go back in there, don’t say anything. I’ll do all the talking.”

“You’ll do all the talking. Just tell me one thing, Kitch... do you know what’s comin’ off here or not?”

“I think I do.”

“Really? No kidding, really? What?”

“I think we do owe them three thousand dollars.”

Wheat dropped the beer cans I’d handed him. These two were still unopened, fortunately, so it didn’t make a mess. He sat down at the kitchen table. His mouth was open. His eyes were as glazed as the stale doughnut over on the counter where he was staring.

Well, that was better than waving his hands around a hundred miles an hour. I guess.

“Hey!” Elam’s voice boomed, from out in the living room area.

Wheat jumped a little.

Me too.

Elam continued: “What the hell’s taking so long? Get your butts in here!”

I led Wheat by the elbow, and juggled four beers and managed to get Wheat sat on the couch, across from Elam and Hopp, and got the beers distributed all around. Elam and Hopp popped the tops on the beer cans and Wheat and I jumped a little, again. I opened the top on my own can and handled it better. Wheat left his can unopened. He was just sitting and staring, like out in the kitchen. Elam’s sinister smile had faded, replaced by a frown that made me nostalgic for the smile. Hopp’s eyes were narrowed in his face, like a couple bad cuts that hadn’t healed.

I sat next to Wheat.

“There’s been a misunderstanding,” I said, with a smile even I did not believe.

I paused for Elam to say, “How’s that?” But he didn’t.

I pressed on. “It’s uh, really quite amusing when you think about it.” I laughed a little.

Hopp said, “Get on with it,” after which his lips pressed back flat together, making his mouth look like a gash in his face, going well with the festering sores that were his eyes.

Lord, was I scared.

But I had a speech to make, and I made it.

“When we set the stakes for our pitch game, at the jail,” I said, “we just said ‘ten/twenty,’ and everybody said fine, remember? But Wheat and I are penny ante players, and we assumed you meant ten cents a bump and twenty cents a game. We didn’t stop to think that you guys are higher-stakes players than we are, that you play in games where the table is literally littered with ten- and twenty-dollar bills. We didn’t stop to think that maybe you meant ten dollars a bump and twenty dollars a game.”

Wheat said, “Awk.”

I said, “Easy, Wheat. Easy. Anyway, that’s what happened... Wheat and I thought we were playing penny ante. You guys thought the stakes were, uh, a little higher. But... excuse me... but you guys are at fault, too, I mean, you should’ve known just looking at us that Wheat and me aren’t exactly high rollers. So, uh, everybody’s, you know, at least partially at fault? So, uh, can’t we just call it an honest mistake on all our parts, and uh, shake hands friends and... forget about it?”

Silence.

A year passed. Or maybe it was a minute. Anyway, I was a year older.

Finally Hopp said, “You’re going to pay.”

Which was an ambiguous thing to say. I mean, he could have meant that a couple of ways.

But I didn’t bother asking him to clarify.

Elam said, “That’s a real interesting story... but I just bet if you boys had come out the winners in that game, you’d be wanting to be paid off in dollars, not pennies.”

Hopp nodded. “They planned this all along.”

Elam said, “The pitiful part is, I thought you were a couple of nice kids. I liked you. Ha! I guess you got to be careful about making friends in jail.”

“Please,” I said. “Be reasonable. Look at it from our point of view. We’re not con artists. We’re just a couple of college kids who landed in jail because of a prank.”

“Ha! I thought you were in jail ’cause you took off your clothes and ran through a motel lobby.”

“Yes!” I said, seeing a straw and grasping at it. “And do you know why we took off our clothes and ran through that motel lobby?”

“ ’Cause you’re a couple of anti-Establishment hippies or somethin’, how the hell should we know?”

“Elam. Hopp. We owed this guy seventy-eight dollars from a card game, and couldn’t afford to pay him off, and he said if we streaked through the Holiday Inn lobby, he’d forgive the debt. I mean can’t you see that two guys who can’t afford to pay off a seventy-eight dollar debt, who’ll do something crazy and ridiculous and illegal and even land in jail because they can’t afford to pay off a seventy-eight dollar debt, aren’t too likely to have three thousand dollars lyin’ around to pay off another debt, which they got gambling in jail, where they landed after doing something crazy and ridiculous and illegal because they couldn’t afford to pay off a seventy-eight dollar debt? Hah?”