Read Online All Hat by Brad Smith - Free Book Online Page B

team the young guys used to joke that Al had three pitches: slow, slower, and slowest. Of course, what the kids couldn’t understand was that a pitcher pitches with his brain, not his arm. Ray watched, smiling, as Al threw a total of four pitches, got a pop-up and a double-play ball, and walked off the field. Slow, slower, and slowest. Ray could see the guys kidding Al as he went into the dugout, and he knew what they were saying—ragging him about his age, his paunch, his lack of speed. The same things Ray might say when he went down to the field.
    After another inning he got into the Caddy, sat there with the engine running for several minutes. Then he pulled out onto the street and headed out of town.
    On the inside, all a man thinks about is getting out. Night and day, it’s always there, like an unfulfilled promise—that always indistinct point of time somewhere in the distance when he is no longer in stir. It occupies a man’s head when he’s thinking about it, and it occupies his head when he isn’t. The mental pursuit of that future moment is so powerful that he invariably forgets to consider the next question.
    What to do when it finally happens.
    Because being out with nothing to do and nowhere to go is not all that much different from being in. The difference between being inside and being out was that on the inside, a man always had a plan. And that was to get out. Being out robbed him of that objective, and it was in looking for a brand-new objective that he usually got himself in trouble.
    *   *   *
    Dean and Paulie were at the bar in the Slamdance. Dean drinking a vodka martini, Paulie, beneath his porkpie, nursing a beer, both transfixed by Misty strutting the stage. Dean was pissed at Tiny Montgomery; he’d asked Tiny for Grey Goose vodka—that’s what Misty drank—and Tiny had told him he wouldn’t know Grey Goose vodka from gray goose shit. So Dean, on his third drink, had yet to tip the big man. Tiny was taking his penance in stride; Dean wasn’t much of a tipper in the best of humor.
    Misty was into her finale when the door opened and a guy walked in, a guy Dean recognized but couldn’t finger. The guy was late thirties, brown hair, thin. Wearing jeans and a leather jacket. When he came under the light of the bar Dean could see he had a slight hook in his nose and a thin scar across the point of his chin. His hands on the bar were large and calloused.
    â€œPaulie, who’s that dude?” Dean asked.
    Paulie glanced over real quick, then went back to Misty, who was stark naked now, on a blanket on the floor, knees up, giving the boys on pervert row a reason to pay six bucks for a bottle of beer.
    â€œI seen him before someplace,” Paulie said.
    Tiny Montgomery walked over to the man, and they shook hands across the bar, Tiny smiling broadly. He brought the man a beer, refused payment. They talked until a customer drew Tiny away. The man in the jacket took his beer to a corner table and sat with his back to the wall.
    Misty finished up, gathered her clothes and her blanket, and headed backstage. Paulie turned back to the bar and reached for his beer. He was thinking about asking Misty to go on a picnic.
    Dean drank off his vodka, signaled to Tiny for another, and the big man brought it over. This time Dean tipped.
    â€œWho’s that guy you were talking to?” Dean asked.
    â€œWhat guy?”
    â€œIn the leather jacket in the corner.”
    â€œRay Dokes.”
    â€œRay Dokes.” Dean tried the name like he was sampling a drink. “How come I know him?”
    â€œHe’s the guy,” Paulie said. “I just remembered.”
    â€œWhat guy?”
    â€œHe’s the guy put Sonny in the hospital for all them months,” Paulie said.
    â€œSonofabitch,” Dean said. “I thought he went to jail for that.”
    â€œHe did,” Tiny said. “That’s why you haven’t seen