Флетчер Флора - The Hot Shot

“That’s just a crying God-damn shame about you,” I said. “Besides, old Mopsy’s just got her nose hard because I won’t have anything to do with her any more, and all I told her was that if she was so damn anxious to save it, I’d just stay away and not tempt her to spend it,” and the old man got quiet then and looked at me and said, “You mean that’s really all you said to her?” and I said yes, and he said, “Well, that don’t sound so God-damn filthy to me.”

That set the old lady off, and she said to the old man, “That’s right. Support him in his wickedness. How the hell can you expect him to be anything but a bum with no respect for womanhood when you say it’s not filthy to say something like that to a nice girl like Mopsy?” and the old man said, “Who the hell asked you to horn in, and how the hell do you know who’s a nice girl and who’s not? You never had any experience at it.”

The old lady began to bawl and cuss the old man and threaten to leave him for talking to his own wife like she was no more than a street-walker, and the old man said any time she wanted to leave he’d be glad to help her pack, and they got going so good that they forgot all about me and Mopsy and how the whole thing had started, and I went in the kitchen and had some cold supper and left. I was still trying to figure out a way to get hold of a fin, because here it was Wednesday already and Saturday would be the day I’d have to have it, and I even thought about going uptown and trying to find a drunk to roll in an alley, but that’s sucker stuff, that’s really taking a big chance for peanuts, and I’d never done anything like that before, and I didn’t do it now. I finally went over to Bugs’s house and told him how I was working on that classy doll for him, and how I thought I might get the job done if only I could scrape up a fin for this brawl at the Country Club, and then I asked him if he thought his grandmother would be good for that much. He said, Jesus, no, it was a long time from last pension day, almost the end of the month, and he’d already got to his grandmother for all she could stand, so I said sure, thanks for nothing, and went away.

Walking along, I got to thinking, What if all of a sudden I’d just see a fin lying on the sidewalk in front of me, just see it lying there as big and green as a God-damn corn field, and I actually got to thinking about it so hard I got the idea that maybe I could make it happen just by thinking of it that way, so I closed my eyes and walked along a way with them closed, and then I opened them and looked down at the sidewalk, but there wasn’t any fin there, of course, and nothing like that ever happens except in some God-damn corny story where some jerk finds some money, a nickel or something, and runs it into a fortune and then spends the rest of his life telling other people what a hell of a guy he is and what bums they are for not doing the same thing.

Just to show you how things go sometimes, though, I finally got the fin with hardly any trouble at all, and that was because Thursday was the old man’s payday, and he got drunk at the tavern on the way home from work and passed out on the sofa in the living room in his clothes. As luck would have it, the old lady had gone over next door for a few minutes just before he came home, and I helped myself to a fin from his stinking pocket while he was flopped on the sofa, and that’s all there was to it. He was a pretty shrewd old bastard, though, and the next morning he missed the fin and accused the old lady of taking it. She said he was a damn liar, of course, which he was, and then she looked at me and said, “Wasn’t you home when your old man came in?” and I said, “Don’t go accusing me of swiping the God-damn lousy fin,” and she looked back at the old man and said, “You lost it, you drunken bum. What the hell you want to accuse us of stealing your money for?” You could see the old man wasn’t convinced of it, but there was always the chance it was true, so he let the matter drop and probably took the fin out of the grocery money later.

That afternoon at practice, we didn’t do anything but take turns shooting free-throws and tossing the ball around and stuff like that because we never went at it very hard the last practice before a game, and afterward we all went in the locker room and sat around on the God-damn hard benches while old Mulloy drew diagrams of plays and stuff on a blackboard with a piece of chalk. To tell the truth, I couldn’t see much sense to it, because once we got in a game we hardly ever used any of the plays but just ran like hell and banged the damn ball at the bucket, but I guess it made old Mulloy feel important to go through all that bull just the same. He’d be talking along about something, and all of a sudden he’d point his damn finger at someone like he was ready to pull the trigger, and he’d say real fast, “What would you do in these circumstances?” and then he’d go on to tell the circumstances, and whoever he’d pointed at had damn well better know what he was supposed to do or else get chewed. You could see from the way the bastard acted that it made him feel important as all hell, a real hot-shot coach and all that, but like I said, we hardly ever went in for any of that fancy crap in a game, and what’s more, he didn’t seem to give a damn whether we did or not, and all he’d do then was jump up and down on the God-damn bench and yell, “Run, run, run!” until you wanted to poke him right in his stinking mouth.

After he finished with the chalk-talk, which was what he called it, he started in with the old pepper crap, and that was even worse. The idea was to get us all steamed up over the game and ready to go out and give our all for the dear old school and such bull, and he began by telling us what a tough team this was we were going to play, and how we’d have to play like we’d never played before if we hoped to beat them, and at first he hadn’t had much hope, to tell the truth, but now he was sorry as hell he’d had so little faith, and he wasn’t ashamed to admit it and say right out he was sorry, and he knew we weren’t going to hold it against him, or let him down, and he wasn’t going to say anything more about it, not a Goddamn word, but he knew we were going out there tomorrow night and win this game, and all in all it was just about the sloppiest crap you could ever hope to hear.

When it was all over and he let us go, I went over to old Tizzy Davis, because there was something that had been bothering me, and I wanted him to put me straight, but I hardly knew how to bring it up. I’d thought about it some and had decided that it would be best to be just sort of casual, so I said, “By the way, Tizzy, about this thing at the Club tomorrow night. I forgot to ask Marsha what the guys generally wear,” and he said, “Oh, these things are just little informal brawls. Most of us just wear something like what we ordinarily wear to school,” and so that was all right, a big relief, as a matter of fact, and if he’d said anything else I’d have been right up that old creek without a paddle.

I fooled around the house almost all day Saturday and started out for the school about two hours before time for the game to start, and the old man was home at the time and said, “Where the hell you off to now?”

“I’m off to school to play basketball, if you want to know, that’s where I’m off to,” I said, and he said, “I thought I told you to quit that God-damn foolishness,” and I said, “Who the hell pays any attention to what you say?”

“I’ll damn well show you who better pay some attention to what I say,” he said, “and I’ll tell you something else right now. You get home here early tonight and don’t go lousing around Beegie’s pool hall or bumming the streets, and I don’t want any other old bastard like old Beacon telling me you been talking filthy or doing some other God-damn thing to shame your family.”