CREEP BLOCK
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nearby make a furious run at pocketpool with his right hand probably
reaching down through a good-sized hole, while with his left he made
elaborate gestures to accompany his conversation with another man,
both hands in his pockets, rocking back and forth on the balls of
his feet.
"Surely," I told myself in the manner of narrators of ghost
stories, "I'll be out of here in the morning." And, tired by the utter
uninterestingness of the whole business, I fell asleep. It was a few
hours later that I snapped awake. Whether it was the new noises and
unaccustomed order that followed the distribution of the box lunches,
or whether it was in fact the sudden realization that I probably
wouldn't be out of there tomorrow at all, I don't know. I had been
having a dream in which Jiggs Bannon came and bailed me out with
crisp, new fifty-dollar bills, carefully licking
his
right index finger
under his long upper lip to count them out. His hat was on and he
was looking very solemn, and his advanced age alone seemed faintly
reproving. I was saying to him, almost as I awoke, "I'm sorry I had
to call you so early in the day, Jiggs. I know you like to keep night
hours." And then I was glumly realizing that I hadn't called anybody,
Jiggs or some lawyer or even Mr. Vel at the hotel desk; that nobody
knew where I was; and that the police hadn't booked me on a
vagrancy charge but had put me into a kind of legal limbo. When
Jiggs finally -did come for me, three days later, by the way, there
wasn't the least bit of reproof. Only regret did he voice about having
to wait another day for an amenable bondsman; it was only then
that I discovered that, with great wit, Sergeant Felsenkopf had booked
me on a Peeping Tom charge. My only one.
Maybe it was only the noise of the lunch distribution that woke
me up. But here I was, strained and aching, wondering how long I'd
be
there, watching two guards depositing a little pile of cardboard
boxes on some of the unoccupied benches. Then they withdrew,
allowing hungry, bored and crazy men to approach the pile in various
ways. Graduate students in various subjects, meanwhile, glanced at
watches and took scrupulous notes in their little dugout overhead,
peering down through the one-way glass of the artificial skylights. I
ambled over, committed now to life as
it
seemed to be shaping up
for a while, and selected one of the lunch packages. It contained the
picnicky version of institutional slop: a bright orange-colored rub–
bery
slab of plastic cheese between two pads of cotton batting, an
