Макс Коллинз - Shoot the Moon (and more)

Wheaty isn’t much of a poker player, either. He doesn’t bluff well. His face could be called a lot of things, but a poker face it ain’t.

However.

He happens to be a very fine pitch player. The game requires skill, intelligence and a sense of adventure. Wheat has all those things. There are occasions in pitch when a certain amount of bluffing goes on, where you pretend to be holding a card you aren’t, or vice versa, and Wheat holds his own there, too. Having a partner gives him stability and coolness. Whereas in poker, for example, where he’s on his own, he tends to panic. In pitch, he’s a master.

Elam and Hopp were pretty good, too, but we won most of the time.

Hopp proved to be a poor team player, for one thing. His temper was bad, his judgment too (he wouldn’t bid when he should, he would bid when he shouldn’t, things like that) but he and Elam had been together a long time as, well, business partners of sorts, and Elam understood Hopp well enough to compensate for most of Hopp’s weaknesses. Elam and Hopp made use of body language, which is a nice way to say they stopped just short of signals, and they talked across the table outrageously: “I don’t know whether I should bid,” Hopp might say, and Elam might casually reply, “It’s only money.”

Which was, by the way, another reason why pitch was a good game for us. In order to gamble, we had to be a little careful. Obviously, the guards knew the possibility at least existed that we were gambling for money, but seemed willing to look the other way as long as we weren’t blatant about it. Pitch is scored on a sheet of paper, and I served as bookkeeper and kept track of who owed what. If we’d played poker, for instance, we’d have to use matchsticks as chips and all that, and it would have gotten complicated. This way, a simple tally sheet did it.

We had settled the stakes that first day, when a guard wasn’t around. A guard strolled around the catwalk once every half hour and recorded what each of us was doing, on a sheet on a clipboard; but we didn’t have constant supervision by television monitor as some jails do. Sometimes Elam got talking about what he and Hopp did for a living, which was a little scary; Wheat and I would exchange nervous glances, and then study our cards.

Anyway, the stakes.

Elam had suggested ten/twenty, and Wheat and I had readily agreed. We usually played a little bit higher stakes with our frat brothers and other college friends: ten cents a bump, twenty cents a game seemed pretty penny ante, even for penny ante players like Wheat and me; we’d have preferred a quarter a bump, fifty cents a game. But Elam and Hopp had been here before we were, so they had a right to make house rules. And besides, we’d be playing for a month, and a month was long enough to build up good losses or winnings, even at ten/twenty. (Though in pitch, if teams are evenly matched, things tend to even out, usually, over the long haul.)

In case you don’t understand the card game pitch, I’ll explain just a couple of things to make all this understandable to you. Pitch is a game where you bid, and if you don’t make your bid, you go down: you bump. It varies game to game, but the way we played it, if you won you didn’t have to pay for the times you bid and missed. There are variations of pitch, but we played the four point variety (high, low, jack and game) in which you can bid anywhere from one to four. If you have a great hand and feel sure you can make all four points, you “shoot the moon” and, if you make it, you automatically win.

“I think I’m going to shoot it,” Wheat said.

Hopp looked up sourly. “Shoot it then.”

“I don’t know,” Wheat said. “I don’t know.”

“You only live once,” I said. (We did our share of talking across the table, too.)

Elam said, “Last time you guys shot the moon, you got your picture in the paper.”

But Wheat hadn’t heard any of this. He was studying his cards like an archeologist trying to figure out some brand of particularly baffling hieroglyphics.

Finally he said, “Okay. Okay. I’m gonna do it. I’m gonna do it. I’m going to shoot it. I’m going to shoot the moon! I’m shooting it, you guys!”

“Keep it down!” Peabody said. Twice already he’d asked the guard to turn up the television.

So Wheaty shot it in diamonds and we made it. Easily.

There was a whole lot of shooting the moon that afternoon. I shot it once and made it, Hopp shot it once and bumped, and Wheat shot it twice and made it both times. We were really getting the cards. All Hopp got was glum. Elam’s attitude was what the hell.

By the end of that evening, Wheat and I were, by my tally, ahead $1.50 each.

After I showered, I stuck my head inside Wheat’s cell and said, “Some cards we were getting.”

“I shot it twice and made it,” Wheaty said. “I shot it twice and made it.”

“I wonder why Hopp takes it so hard? It’s just nickel and dime stuff.”

“Some people like to win. I know I do. I shot it twice and made it!”

I was grinning. I couldn’t help it.

“You know something, Wheat? You been right all along. Jail isn’t such a bad place after all.”

So we played a lot of pitch. At one point Wheaty and I were ahead $10. Then for a long time we fluctuated between one dollar and five dollars. That’s each, of course. Hopp continued to be in a bad mood, but he never got violent or anything. He just would say, “Deal the cards,” and give off sour vibrations and that was that.

The Bull Pen population stayed the same: just the five of us: Elam, Hopp, Wheat and me. And Peabody, the accountant. We never did get to know Peabody very well.

Downstairs was different. The faces at meal time weren’t always the same. The black kid’s trial got under way, but he still ate his meals with us, and heard how his soap operas were doing from Peabody; I think it was a week exactly before we got out that he got his ten years in prison and left, and Peabody seemed very lonely at meals after that. Sometimes there would be just a few of us, just basically the Bull Pen regulars and a handful of others in the jail (there were also women prisoners in jail, but we never saw them). Other times it would be fairly crowded, if the drunk tank had filled up; we had crowds for the Saturday and Sunday meals, usually, as a lot of drunk-and-disorderlies got tossed in jail on the weekend. We didn’t pay much attention to the shifting faces at mealtime. We were a clique, Elam, Hopp, Wheat and me. We played cards together, after all. We lived here.

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...