LITMIR.BIZ

      On that sunny note, Cash crawled out of bed, got dressed and headed from Fargo to the Moorhead State campus on the other side of the Red River bridge. She nursed a tepid cup of coffee, intended to get her through her first two classes, while she tried to shake the dream from her head.

      With a one-hour break between her biology and psychology classes, Cash made a beeline for her Ranchero and retrieved her cue stick from behind the front seat. She took off across campus to the Student Union, heading for the billiard room.

      It was beet-hauling season in the Valley, and Cash was driving beet truck afternoons and evenings when her class schedule allowed. Between classes she would stop at the rec hall to practice her game.

      The rec hall allowed students twenty-four-hour access to the larger tables and no fee to play with a student ID. Her game had improved considerably since starting college. Barroom pool tables tended to be shorter so as not to take up too much drinking space. But here at the rec hall, the full-size tables were always open. Apparently, Midwest farmer-type college students weren’t pool sharks. They spent more time writing term papers and reading textbooks.

      Cash was learning a lot at Moorhead State College. She had already found out that most girls her age considered shooting pool a sin, against their church upbringing. While Cash drank Budweiser and wore straight-legged blue jeans and a clean T-shirt under a Levi jean jacket each day, a good handful of the students preferred smoking weed to drinking. They dressed in bell-bottom jeans and sheer peasant blouses: hippie attire. They talked about making love, not war. They flashed peace signs at each other as they crossed the green campus lawn.

      And then there were the college jocks, the students from small-town, conference-winning sports teams who were bigshot scholarship jocks now. They were too undersized for any professional team they might hope to be scouted for. And who knew to look for them in the Red River Valley of the North anyway?

      There were also the studious kids—students who in their small towns had been picked on, teased or ostracized because they got A’s in algebra without cheating, who read Macbeth and enjoyed it. The ones who willingly stayed after school to create potions in the under-financed science labs of the high schools ruled by the captain of the football team and his cheerleader homecoming queen.

      Cash had always played 8-ball for money, but here at college she had learned how to play 9-ball against fraternity jocks who considered it the only pool game worthy of their time. It kept her in shape for the money-making games at the Casbah—her home bar—over in Fargo, on the North Dakota side of the Red River.

      She removed her cue stick from the fringe leather case she had made a few years ago. She screwed the two lengths of stick together and rolled it across the green of the nine-foot table.

      She chalked the tip of her cue and broke the rack. She started with the 1-ball, then went ball by ball in numerical order, attempting a bank shot for each one into an opposite corner. She frustrated herself with her failures.

      She stretched her five-foot, two-inch frame over the pool table, her cue stick resting easily on the arch made between her thumb and curled pointer finger.

      “Cash, there you are!” Cash’s zone was broken. Shhi…t. She nicked the edge of the cue ball sending it toward the 11 but about three inches off. She slid back off the table and turned to see Sharon hopping down the three rec hall steps, her flared bell-bottoms swirling around her platform shoes. Hippie girl.

      “I was looking all over for you after science class. I’m in love! Do you think he’s married? Do you think he fools around if he is? Don’t you just love his hair, the way he kinda swoops it back over his forehead? And his bod… man.”

      Cash leaned over and aimed at the 11-ball again. “Who are we talking about?”

      “Mr. Danielson.” Sharon hopped up on the tall stool, crossed her legs and opened her long sweater jacket, her braless chest visible through the sheer gauze of her Indian-style shirt. “From now on I’m sitting in the front row, just like this.” She tossed her long blonde hair over her shoulder. “You can sit in the back row close to the door all by yourself. I want to be right up front where he can see all of me.”

      “You’re crazy.” Cash watched the 11-ball drop smoothly into the far-left pocket. She scanned the table looking for the 12-ball and calculated the best angle for a bank shot. “He’s an old man.”

      “He’s only thirty.”

      “That’s half dead.”

      “Mary Beth said she heard from someone that some of the teachers give A’s for head.”

      “What the heck are

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