You can't win

by Jack Black

You don’t pay much attention to him now. The next room concerns you more. The noise of the alarm clock changes to a dull, empty, hollow protest. You know somebody has his hand on the bell, smothering it till he can turn it off. Now it stops. You hear somebody lumbering about, every step shakes the floor. He must be a big, heavy man who puts his heels down first when he walks. You hear him push a button and a vertical crack of light appears at the head of the bed you are standing by. You know what that is. This is an old house, and that’s a folding door.

The man now unlocks his door and steps out into the hall. You step softly to your door and listen. He goes heavily down the hall, muttering to himself. You hear him push the light button a couple of times but he gets no light—you unscrewed the globe; he thinks it’s burnt out. You hear him open and shut a door; he is in the bathroom. You turn back to your man. Then a window is thrown up with a bang in the room on your other side. Daylight is racing on you. You can see clearly now. You hear other noises. The place is becoming a hornet’s nest. You must give it up and get out. You’re not broke. You don’t have to risk everything here. You step out of the room, close the door softly, go downstairs, and out the front way.

Yes, reader, you went down the street and into a restaurant where you ate heartily. Then to bed for a good, healthy, sound sleep.

Not me! I went back to the hop joint.

You get up the next evening, go to the same restaurant, get something to eat, and look over the papers. You find nothing about your doings; you didn’t expect to. You know the gambler missed his silver. You know he will suspect somebody around the boarding house and lock his room door in future. You take stock and decide to lay off for a few nights and give your luck a chance to switch.

You are slowly making up your mind to get out of this burglary racket; it’s too tough. Suppose you had stuck up the gambler. Maybe his money was downstairs in a safe and you wouldn’t have got it. You would have had to dash out into the street whether you got it or not. How could you tell who would be in the street when you went out? The cop on the beat might be sitting on the front steps. You might bump into the milk man, the bread man, or the ice man. You decide that the whole thing is very uncertain, after all.

For the first time you see clearly this dangerous angle of this business of yours. You can plan and plot and scheme; you can figure out just what you’ll do from the minute you step into a place till you step out of it, but the great weakness of it is—you can’t tell who or what is going to be outside when you go out, and all your ingenuity can’t overcome it. You toss the whole thing out of your mind and go to a theater. After that you go to your room. It’s a warm night, you’re in no hurry about going to bed, so you sit in the dark by the window getting the cool air.

You wonder who will occupy the transient room directly across the light well from you. Last night a woman and two children were in it. They talked all during the forenoon and kept you awake. You hope they have gone away. Just as you are ready to go to bed a light is switched on in the room across the way. Idly you look over. The window is open and the curtain is up. A fat man with a pink complexion and gray hair is standing in the middle of the room. His door is still open, you can see through his room and out into the hall. He stands facing you, his legs apart, hands in his pockets, and his hat on the back of his head.

You decide he is about half drunk. He takes his hat off and throws it out of your line of vision, probably at the dresser. Now he turns around, goes to the door, and kicks it shut with a bang. Back in the middle of his room he puts a fat hand in his capacious pants pocket and comes up with a small roll of paper money. He unrolls the bills, looking at them with a mysterious smile on his fat face. You don’t understand his smile and wonder if he is thinking how he cheated somebody in a poker game; he looks like a gambler.

The roll interests you, the outside one is what you call a “salmon belly.” It is a yellowback—a big bill. The fat man now gets a chair and places it directly in front of his window, but instead of sitting down he stands up on it unsteadily. You get alarmed and watch him intently. Surely he’s not going to jump out? No, he takes the string and pulls the curtain halfway down. All you can see of him now is his bulky midsection. The upper part of him is silhouetted against the curtain. He raises one hand above his head, the hand that holds the bills. You can see its blurred shadow as he runs it along the roller at the top of the curtain. He takes hold of one edge of the curtain now, pulls it down a little till the ratchet is released, and lets it go up with a rattle and bang. He puts both hands on the windowsill to steady himself as he gets off the chair.