Free Sweet Nothing by RICHARD LANGE

I used to imagine that the church was God’s armored fist and the tower beside it His sword. One felt safe with something like that always so close. Safe. Oh, how I longed to be a boy again.
    Perhaps if I talked to a priest, I thought, he’d have some words of reassurance about the thickness of the walls between worlds and how one can wrestle evil without being infected by it. I wouldn’t have believed anything he said, but it might’ve provided temporary solace, like a soothing balm for a wound that can never heal.
    I couldn’t bring myself to enter the church just then, however, to return to darkness and heavy silence no matter how sanctified, so I continued to sit on the steps and marvel at the many tiny delights the morning brought my way. The swifts darting so skillfully among the chimneys, the sound of a teacher calling her students to class, the smell of bread from an old woman’s basket. And then, both ashamed and unashamed, I bowed my head and wept.

The 100-to-1 Club
    THE SUN HAS NEVER felt as good as it does when I finally step out of that jailhouse and into a beautiful Friday morning, the air smelling a little like jasmine, a little like the ocean; happy weekend smiles on all the faces in the windows of a passing bus; and the mountains sitting right there, like they sometimes do, looking close enough to touch.
    I’ve only been locked up for forty-eight hours, but this bit was worse than any of the others because it was so unexpected. The cops broke into the little casino Kong runs in the back room of his bar, saw the slots and the craps setup, and before you know it, I was being yanked out of my seat at the poker table and slammed against the wall, and when they ran my license, up popped a couple of speeding tickets that had gone to warrant. Two years I’d managed to fly under the radar, and just like that, I was back in the system.
    But I’m not going to let it mess me up. I’m going to focus on the things I have to be grateful for—like the fact that Larry’s waiting for me out front like he promised he would be, and that he passes me a big old cup of coffee as soon as I slide into his truck, and that he tracked down Domingo and collected the money D owed me and used it to bail me out, all on the back of a single frantic phone call. Unbelievable. You can count friends like that on one hand—hell, one finger.
    “Larry, my man,” I say. “Let me buy you breakfast.”
      
    THE DENNY’S IN the shadow of the freeway next to the jail is the first place a lot of guys go right when they get out, to eat a decent meal and use a toilet with a door. I see a couple of dudes I was in with sitting at the counter—ID bands still on their wrists, property bags at their feet—digging into tall stacks of pancakes and double orders of ham and eggs.
    “Tell me what I missed,” I say to Larry across the table.
    He forks a sausage into his mouth and shrugs. Syrup glistens on his mustache. He’s a listener, not a talker.
    “Anybody die? Anybody hit it big?” I ask.
    “It was only two days,” he says.
    Yeah, but it sure seemed longer. Probably because I barely slept. The guy in the next bunk moaned and groaned all night, suffering through his dreams, and during the day I was too wound up to nap, surrounded as I was by bad men with bad intentions. I spent all my time guarding my personal space, displaying enough aggression to ward off the jackals but not so much that I riled the tigers. My hands are still shaking. When I lift my glass to drink, orange juice sloshes over the rim.
    But back to the good stuff: I’m out, my only friend came through for me, and I’ve got a date this afternoon with Lupe, a beautiful girl I met last week at this pool hall where I shoot sometimes. We’re going to the track, me and her and her kid. She couldn’t get a sitter, so I told her to bring him along. “There’s all kinds of kids there,” I told her. “They love it.”
    “How’s work?” I ask Larry.
    He shakes his