Hard Rain Falling

by Don Carpenter

  Except for the thing that had wakened him from his sleep, the eye-opening, sudden awareness that he had been hustled the evening before. It had come to him with the impact of a kick in the chest: that pair of guys at the Rialto had cut him up, and done it easily. But what had made him sit up, fully awake and completely angry, was that he had let it happen. He was no mark. How had it happened? What had he been thinking about?

  “Stupid!” he hissed at himself as he got dressed. Pure case of buck fever, so excited by the idea of playing there, playing the best in Portland, that he forgot all about hustling, just automatically pretended that everybody in the world was just like him and wanted to play their best, for themselves. He could just see those two guys, in the men’s toilet or someplace, splitting his money. Laughing at him. Well, they had a right to laugh; he had been a fool.

  The voice of the man in the next room rose in sudden, wall-shaking anger: “But what we goin do when Cholly Chill gets heah?”

  Billy made a face. Southern accent, very heavy; Billy could imitate that kind of accent easily. The guy probably came West for the easy war money, and now he was worried about what to do when winter came. Too bad for him; go back home and pick cotton and eat hog jowls, or whatever the hell they did in the South.

  Do you know how lonely you are?

  Billy was startled; it was not quite a voice, more than a thought. What, he thought, lonely? I been lonely all my life. You mean homesick. He laughed aloud, but it was a sick laugh, fake and unconvincing.

  He had been in Ben Fenne’s an hour, practicing straight pool, when Denny and Jack Levitt came in. Looking at Denny’s bland Irish face, Billy wondered if he had been in on the hustle the day before. He did look tore-up and unshaved, as if he had spent a wild night on somebody’s money, and that was enough to make Billy suspicious of him, even though he came right over to Billy and laughed and said good morning, and introduced his friend Jack Levitt. This one was something else, too, the meanest-looking kid Billy had ever seen, with cold dead blue eyes, a head too large for his already large muscular body, blond curly hair, ruddy skin—just plain mean-looking, that was all. Billy shook his hand and felt his stubby fingers take a good hold on his own, and yet not squeeze too hard like a man trying to impress people. Billy decided he was afraid of Jack Levitt, and would do his best to have nothing to do with him.

  “What’s on the fire this morning?” Denny asked him. “You want to run up to Rialto and make some gold?”

  “I’ll play you, here and now,” Billy said.

  “I’m broke,” Denny said. “Anyway, you’re too good for me.”

  “I don’t go up to no Rialto for a while,” Billy said definitely. “You know what happened to me up there. Don’t you?”

  “Sure,” Denny grinned, “you got your ass waxed. So what? There’s plenty of guys up there you can beat.”

  “What’s in it for you?” Billy asked. “Why you bein so kind to me?”

  “We make side bets on you, man. You win, we win.”

  Billy had to laugh. “On your guts? Against your own friends?”

  “Money’s money, baby. We need all the loot we can get.”

  “Well, I found a home, you know? And I’m gonna hang around here for a while; see if I can’t get up an honest game.”

  “You’re chickenshit,” Levitt said shortly.

  Billy went back to his practice, turning his back on the other two. It made the skin on the back of his neck crawl to do it, but he had no choice. He shot carefully, and had to concentrate to keep his fingers from shaking. He heard them talking behind him, and then finally they went away.

  It was Saturday, and toward noon the poolhall began filling up. Many of the customers were in their teens, and these congregated around the two small snooker tables in the back, playing pink-wild snooker or sitting in the theater seats and making side bets, or just sitting watching. The keno game had four players, all men in middle age, and the rest of the tables and the bar were crowded. There were two horse-pinball machines behind the telephone booths at the inner end of the bar, and both had players and circles of watchers around them. The radio was on to a baseball game, adding to the babble of voices, clicking balls, the electric clunking of the pinballs, and the noise of the ventilating fan. The long dark room was blue with smoke and moist with humidity. Billy saw that men coming in from outside were wet, although it hadn’t been raining an hour before. Rain, that was one thing he hadn’t gotten away from; it rained in Portland almost as much as in Seattle. Of course to Billy rain was interesting for only one thing: it slowed down the cloth, and he had to shoot a little harder than usual to get the balls to perform properly.

  After a while, John the houseman came up to Billy and said, “You got to get off the table now.”

  A pang of fear ran through him, and a split-second afterward embarrassment and anger; he knew he wasn’t being kicked off the table because of race, but because there were players waiting, and it was policy to kick off practicers when there were two- or three-handed games waiting. But he could not help feeling that first reaction, and when he turned to John and shrugged, he saw in his eyes an expression of understanding, almost wariness. John said quickly, “Players waitin.”

  “Yeah,” Billy said. He paid his time and put his cue away, and then, idle, went over and stood watching the keno game.

  Keno is played on a standard billiard table; at one end is a wooden platform raised almost an inch above the level of the felt, and along its front edge is a brass ramp. There are four rows of holes in the ramp, spaced alternately, and each hole is numbered. In the exact center of the platform is a starred hole. Any player whose ball lands in the starred hole gets a keno and the point value of the ball. If the ball or balls land in any other hole, the player gets the value of the hole, and if the number on the ball matches the number of the hole, he also gets a keno. The game is played with a regular set of fifteen pool balls, racked at the other end of the table. In the game Billy was watching, each keno was worth fifty cents from each player, and the player with high score when all the balls were on the rack got a dollar from each of the other players, less any kenos. Each game ended with a flurry of calculating and arguing over the score, but Billy saw at once that there was plenty of money changing hands. It looked like a game worth getting into.

  Keno looks like a luck game, which is its chief attraction to poor players, but as Billy stood and watched, now drinking a bottle of Coke, the players with the best stroke always seemed to come out ahead. There was more to the game than met the eye; it was not enough to ram your cue ball into another ball so that it banked around the table and ended up on the platform, although that is just exactly what most of the players did. Players came and went; at one point, as Billy watched, there were six of them, and a man with the placid face of an idiot stood by the blackboard keeping score and talking about the game like a sports announcer. But the good players, without seeming to, always managed to play their cue ball back to a bad position for the next man, and instead of just getting a ball up onto the platform, played it so that it knocked into other balls, rearranging them on the platform and making higher scores. Also, the good players seemed to know the precise strength a ball needed to roll up to its keno hole and stay in it, without bobbling out or flying off the end of the table. Still, it looked easy to Billy, and he itched to get in.

  He fidgeted through three or four games, and then finally got in without half-trying. A tall red-faced man who had been losing steadily as Billy watched, cursing his bad shots and bad lays as bad luck, finally got out in disgust when he had to pay off eight kenos and game. “Shit, this sure as hell aint my day,” he announced. He walked up to the wall rack to put his cue in it, and instead, thrust it into Billy’s hands. “Here,” he said. “You try it.”

  Billy moved up to the table, picked up a piece of chalk, and stood there chalking the cue, and no one seemed to object. One of the players said to him, “You follow me,” and he was in. Apparently, his money was as good as anybod
y else’s. The action-feeling started to come over him, and he felt good; he could feel it thickening in his throat, and deep in his belly was a sense of anticipation almost sexual. When it was his turn to shoot he bent over the table slowly, savoring the feeling. He banked the six-ball off the side rail with the speed and direction he assumed would make it go up onto the ramp, hit the twelve-ball, which was in the center keno hole, displace the twelve, displace the ten-ball behind it, and give him a score of at least twenty-eight plus keno, maybe double keno if the ten kept rolling and landed in its own hole in the back row. Instead, the six sped up the ramp, glanced off the twelve without moving it, skipped over the top of the ten and off the back of the table, coming up against the bar with a crack.

  The idiot at the scoreboard chanted,“...and the new money jumps the rail and draws a blank! Next shooter, Mister Frank Bartholomew, if you please!”

  There were five players in the game, and it was a long time before Billy shot again. But he was not conscious of the wait; he was too busy watching the shooters. When it was his turn, high man had a score of 32, and there were two kenos on the board. He sized up the lay of the balls carefully. Somebody yelled, “Shoot the fuckin shot,” but he paid no attention. This time he had a clear shot, no bank necessary. It was the five-ball, whose holes were in the back row; he could try for a keno and five points, but now he distrusted his stroke for this game, and suspected that if he shot a direct shot he would go off the back again. There was a cluster of balls in the middle of the platform, two of them not in holes but just leaning against other balls. The shot would be to play the five into the pack; but if he did so, his cue ball would also go up onto the ramp, and wipe out his score. Billy’s stroke was good enough for him to be able to hit the five with lower left draw so that the cue ball would end up going back and forth across the table, but to do so he would have to hit the five too hard. There were other balls to shoot at, but none of them in good position. There was only one other alternative; to massé the cue ball so that it curved up behind the five and drove it straight into the pack instead of at an angle; then the cue would spin backward. But this was a circus shot, extremely difficult, and making the shooter look like a show-off and a fool whether he missed or made it.

  But it was the only shot by which he could catch up. So, estimating carefully, stretching his fingers into his high, massé bridge, Billy fired. The cue ball took off in one direction, then curved sharply up behind the five, struck it, and zipped back to the end rail, where it hit two other balls and came to rest. The five rode up the brass, powered by spin the reverse of the cue ball’s, hit the pack, imparted its spin to the other balls and knocked them free; they wobbled, and then settled in other holes. The five itself landed in the two hole, but Billy got the score from four other balls as well: a total of 44 points.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” somebody muttered.

  “What, no kenos?” cried the idiot, “forty-four points for the gennleman, stepped out into the lead... “

  Billy felt better.

  An hour or two later, when he looked up toward the door, he saw Denny and Jack Levitt coming in again. But he did not care; he was not even interested. He could make plenty of money right where he was; he was already twenty-odd dollars ahead, and there was nobody in the game who could really beat him. He knew he was having beginner’s luck, too, but he was glad for that; he would take any luck he could get.

  Denny came up to him after a while and said, “Hey, how about loaning me a buck?”

  Automatically, Billy reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a crumpled dollar and handed it to him. “Don’t spend it all in one place,” he said.

  “Thanks, baby. I’ll pay you back tonight.” He went up to the bar and yelled, “Twenny nickels!” Later, Billy saw him at the pinball machines, standing stiffly and slamming the machine with his palms, cursing and begging. Billy laughed to himself. What a mark! Playin a machine! To Billy that was like throwing the money out a window. But he didn’t care; he was getting rich right here.

  Jack Levitt sat on a high stool between the number one billiard table and the keno table, watching Billy. It made a game more interesting if there was somebody in it you were rooting for or against, and Jack wanted to see Billy win. He knew already that Billy was a phenomenon, a natural like Bobby Case. It was a pleasure just to watch him shoot, even in a game like keno, full of slop and bad luck and yelling. Jack wished there was something he could be great at, some skill or talent he could find in himself that would give him something to do. He was a good fighter—no one anywhere near his own size had ever beaten him, in or out of the orphanage—but that was different, because every man ought to be able to defend himself, with his fists or a knife or a gun or whatever came to hand. That was basic. No, he wished he had some talent, like Billy’s for pool, that would make him as busy with himself as Billy seemed to be. And anyway, a talent like Billy’s was worth money; that was the end result of talent—you made money against the less talented. So there he was again, back to the old need: money.

  Last night had been a failure. Fun, yes; but they had searched the house from top to bottom and found no ready cash at all. Of course, there were a lot of things they could have stolen and tried to sell: clothes, radios, phonographs, several cases of liquor (none bearing the Oregon State Liquor Tax stamps, Denny had noted with admiration), and more canned and dried foods than Jack had ever seen outside the orphanage, as if the Weinfelds expected another war and wanted to be prepared. But Jack and Denny had ditched the Cadillac and had no intention of going near it. They had even wiped their fingerprints off it, feeling both sheepish and hip. They couldn’t walk through residential streets carrying goods, even before dawn. So they had gotten drunker, played the radio, fooled around, cooked some food in the kitchen, and then slept. They had played rock-scissors-paper for the right to sleep in the big bed on the main floor and Denny won, but unfortunately fell asleep with one of Weinfeld’s big Cuban cigars in his hand and burned the gold satin coverlet pretty badly before the smell woke him up. There were three bedrooms upstairs, two obviously girls’ rooms, and Jack had slept in the boy’s room, so drunk he didn’t even bother to take his shoes off.

  But no money! A day and a night had passed, another day was passing, and nothing had changed. He did not even have enough to buy some lunch. Of course he would not starve in the poolhall; he could always bum twenty cents for a hot dog; but that wasn’t any good. All his stuff locked up in his hotel room, the clothes he was wearing getting rancid (it had been a delight showering in the Weinfeld’s amazing five-spray, tiled shower, but when he put his clothes back on he could smell them, and they seemed damp against his skin, disgusting)...in fact, his whole life, since he had quit his second job two weeks before, had been rapidly going down the drain.

  He had been working as a delivery boy for a blueprint company, and quit after an argument with the manager. The manager, a gray man with yellowish eyeballs, had accused Jack of taking money out of petty cash. Jack had taken the money, all right—all the delivery boys did, as a matter of course—but he knew it could not be proved and he denied it. When the manager still looked suspicious, Jack told him he could take his job and stick it up his ass. Then he demanded the wages due him and walked out. He had hated the job anyway; running all over downtown Portland with huge unwieldy rolls of blueprints, always running, never enough time to walk, then sweeping the place out and having to put up with the bossiness of the printmakers, who for lack of any real authority tried to push the boys around. And besides, the place smelled of heat and chemicals, and nauseated him. He could not understand how people could work there and even claim they liked it.

  Since then he had been living on his wits, and not doing a very good job of it. Now he was really up against it, for the first time in his life; really at the point where he had to decide if he was going to let them run his life for him (as they always had in the past) or whether he was going to run it. So far, since his romantic dash for “freedom,” he had run it
right straight into the ground. How easy it would be to just give up and let them take over again. Go back to the orphanage where he had a bed and meals and clothes issued to him, where he worked because they told him to work, went to school because they told him to go to school.... But it would only last another year or so, until he was eighteen. Then even the orphanage would kick him out. But he could do what a lot of the others did, join the Army. They said the Army would take care of you; three squares and a flop, and all you had to do was obey orders; there wasn’t a war on, so no danger of getting your ass shot off; just a nice, easy life, uniforms, barracks, chow, and marching around with a rifle.

  The very thought of it made Jack sick to his stomach. He knew it was not for him. He had run away from the orphanage in the first place because he was the toughest boy in the place and there was no more challenge for him and he was going crazy from boredom. Or something. The Army would be the same; he would feel that dull surge of hatred when somebody tried to tell him what to do, and sooner or later he would pop somebody and they would throw him in the stockade.

  Well, he could get a job. Do what he was told. Bother no one. Dry up and blow away. Ffft. What was the difference?

  He watched the green bills disappearing into Billy Lancing’s pocket at the end of almost every game. There was getting to be quite a wad in there. Jack felt hunger for that money. He wanted to walk up to Billy and just take it away from him. Why not? Why not wait till he leaves, follow, catch him in a lonely place, brace him, take all the money and the hell with it? Jack felt a tickling of emotion he could not identify, something to do with the Negro’s talent, and it might be unfair (odd word!) to steal his money...but the thought passed, and he decided if he had a chance, he would do it. He hoped the kid wouldn’t hate him for it. What difference did that make? He and the kid weren’t friends; every time the kid glanced at Jack his eyes veiled over with what Jack knew was fear; hell, the kid probably hated Jack, and every other big mean-looking white.