Макс Коллинз - Shoot the Moon (and more)

Hopp spoke to Elam but looked at us. He said, “Give me your gun. I’m gonna kill ’em.”

Wheat fell off the couch.

Just because Wheat and I were making fools of ourselves, dropping our beers on the floor, falling off the couch, don’t get the idea we were fooling around. It may read like slapstick comedy, but it lived like something else. Maybe you think the expression “scared silly” is just an expression. It isn’t. Wheat and I were fools out of fear.

While I was helping Wheat off the floor and back onto the couch, Elam was telling Hopp to take it easy.

“You take it easy,” Hopp said. “I say they got to pay.” This time it didn’t sound quite so ambiguous.

And then Elam said something very corny. He said, “Dead they aren’t any good to us.”

It was a corny line from a corny movie, and in a corny movie you would never take it seriously.

I took it seriously.

Wheat had that glazed look on his face again, was just sitting there like a big hunk of wood, and I for one was glad. I had enough to contend with just trying to deal with Elam and Hopp, let alone having to manage Wheat’s behavior.

Elam said, “Let me explain something to you boys. Let me explain something about gambling debts. Hopp and me are from Chicago. Grew up in the same neighborhood, and drifted into... business, together. We got lives of our own, of course, Hopp’s got a wife and five kids to support, and I got a lady friend who’s more expensive to take care of than that. It’s expensive period, livin’ in Chicago. Cost of living is somethin’ you wouldn’t be- lieve . But we get by, Hopp and me. Got to work our butts off to do it, though. We’re on the road a lot. Mainly what we do is knock over a bank here and there.”

My heart was a triphammer. I hadn’t been this worked up since I streaked through the DeKalb Holiday Inn. Elam was confirming suspicions I’d gathered spending time with Hopp and him in jail, but hearing him come right out and say, “We knock over a bank here and there,” was very disturbing. And put teeth in Hopp’s threat to kill us. Furthermore, my bladder was killing me.

“When Hopp and me get ourselves in a card game,” Elam was saying, “we take it serious. We play a lot of cards in Chicago, and we mess around with other kinds of gambling, too, only we aren’t just messing around. I like the horses, but Hopp, he leans toward dice. He’s a more physical type than me, I guess. Maybe you noticed. Anyway, when you gamble in Chicago, at least in the circles Hopp and me move in, you get in big trouble if you don’t pay up. In fact, you don’t even think of not paying up. Ha! Not for long, anyway. What you do, if you owe some guy some money, is you borrow some money from some other guy. You don’t go to a bank, ’cause bankers get upset when you ask for a loan to pay off a bookie. Besides, I try and make it a rule never to go inside a bank without a gun in my hand.”

“Why... why are you telling us this?” I asked, not wanting to hear any of it at all.

“Don’t interrupt. Anyway, where was I, oh yeah... that money you borrow when you can’t pay off a gambling debt, that’s called juice money. You know what that is, don’t you? You know what a shylock, a loanshark is, don’t you? Weekly interest going on forever, till you can pay off the principal? Good. Anyway, Hopp and me both owe this guy some money. We were out on the road, trying to pull off a couple deals that would give us some coin to pay off this guy, when we got tossed in the can. While we was in, our bill with this guy is goin’ wild as a pervert in a nudist camp. How could we make payments while we was in jail? So we owe this guy a lot of money. We can’t go home again.”

All of a sudden he was quoting Thomas Wolfe. “What do you mean?” I asked.

“We can’t go back to Chicago and Hopp to his wife and five kids and me to my lady friend till we can pay off this damn shylock.”

“What’s that got to do with Wheat and me?”

“You owe us three thousand. That would’ve been enough to get this guy off our backs a while and let us go home. We been in jail a year, boys. We want to go home.”

“Well, gee,” I said, suddenly feeling guilty, “I’m awful sorry. I mean, we really weren’t trying to put anything over on you... I can understand how disappointed you must feel.”

Hopp started to lurch toward me but Elam threw an arm over Hopp‘s chest and held him back.

Elam said, “I believe you, boys. I believe you when you say you misunderstood what the stakes were in our game. But that don’t change anything for Hopp and me.”

Hopp had settled down a little, after making his lunge and being halted by Elam. He said, “Whose Volkswagen is that outside?”

“My mom’s.” Wheat’s voice was very tiny, incongruously so coming out of his big hulking frame.

“Your mom’s?” Hopp said. “What’s she doing here?”

“Is she here?” Wheat said, round-eyed. “Where? Where?”

I said, “It’s Wheaty’s car. It’s in his mom’s name, that’s all.”

Hopp said, “I don’t give a damn whose car it is, we’ll take it back and sell it.”

Elam said, “Ha! That thing isn’t worth five hundred.”

“It is so!” Wheat said, and I shushed him.

“Maybe,” Hopp said, and began what was the closest thing to a speech I ever heard come from those thin, menacing lips, “we could go rent a U-haul truck and back it up to this place and haul everything away. There’s no neighbor on either side. It’ll be dark soon. Some of this stuff looks like antiques to me. And the kitchen appliances and all would help. What do you think?”

What I thought was that the Nizers would feel we had somewhat taken advantage of their hospitality, if we aided Elam and Hopp in looting their lake home, but I had the good sense not to say anything.

Wheat didn’t.

He said, “That’d be stealing!”

Everybody looked at him. Hopp especially.

He said, “But if you guys think it would be best, well...”

Elam said, “No. This antique stuff is a pain in the butt getting fenced. For all the work it’d take emptying this place, we’d come up with peanuts. And some of these lake areas are patrolled pretty regular, ’cause there’s a lot of vandalism and burglaries in any area where you got homes that aren’t in use all the time, cottages like this one, that only get used on good weather weekends. No. Bad idea.”

“You got a better one?” Hopp said.

“Better isn’t the word.” Elam said, and his sinister smile returned. “Winning,” he said, as if it were a magic word.

“Winning?” Hopp said. “That’d take three men, at least!”

Elam nodded toward us.

Hopp got this skeptical look on his face.

Elam said, pleasantly, “How would you boys like to work out what you owe us?”

Wheat and I exchanged a worried look. We had thought, from the way the conversation had drifted, that Elam and Hopp (or anyway, Elam) had accepted the concept of our not owing them anything except $15 each.

I said, “I won’t be involved in anything illegal.”

“Me either,” Wheat said. “Streaking’s where I draw the line.”

Elam blew air out of his cheeks, thoughtfully. “Okay,” he said. “I got to talk to Hopp alone for a minute. We’re gonna go over there a minute and then we’ll be right back. Okay?”

We nodded.

Then they were over whispering in the kitchenette, and Wheat said, “I got to go to the bathroom.”

“Join the club.”

“What do you think they’re talking about?”

“I don’t know. Whatever it is, I don’t like it.”

“Maybe you didn’t realize it, Kitch, but I was scared crapless through all of that.”