The Color of Money

by Walter Tevis

  He stood for a long moment looking around at the heavy tables, the cue racks on the walls, the metal talcum dispensers, the brown Olefin carpeting bought when half-drunk and never installed right, the Coke machine, cigarette machine, a stain on the green of Number Three, worn pockets on Seven, a loose cushion on Four, the table where a long roll on the right always had the ball curving off toward the rail. Behind the desk were a cash register; a Metropolitan Museum of Art calendar bought by mail by Martha and displaying a masterpiece on every page; four unread paperbacks, one by Graham Greene. On the desk sat an electronic time clock with a digital readout for each table and a by-the-hour setting that had gone up steadily for a dozen years; it was set now for two dollars an hour. The whole room was a rectangular box, its walls of yellow concrete block, its floor brown, its ceiling made of smoke-stained Celotex squares—all of it as familiar as the palm of Eddie’s right hand, as familiar as a divorced wife.

  He lifted the hinged part of the desk by the cash register and went back to the near-empty rack of private cues along the back wall above the radio. He got the key from his pocket and unlocked the middle one. It was a nine-hundred-dollar Balabushka with a linen-wrapped butt and a flawless maple front end. Its long ivory point was perfectly tipped in French leather; its center joint was polished steel. The cue felt good in his hand. It strengthened him. He unscrewed it carefully, found its snakeskin case under the desk, slid the two pieces in and strapped the cover down with its brass buckle. He turned off the air conditioner and the lights, and left carrying his cue. He did not look back.

  ***

  His plane was late and he had to go directly to the shopping center, with the cue case and nylon bag beside him in the cab. The air conditioner didn’t work properly; by the time the driver pulled into the huge parking lot, Eddie’s shirt was stuck to his back with sweat and he was coughing from too many cigarettes. It was one forty-five; they would begin at two. Above the entrance to a huge Sears store hung a banner reading GRAND OPENING. Below it was a smaller banner: FAST EDDIE MEETS MINNESOTA FATS! And under this, TWO P.M. THURSDAY. ADMISSION FREE.

  The table sat right out on the parking lot, on a wooden platform a foot high. It was surrounded by temporary bleachers with a few people in them. Four small black girls sat on the platform looking somber. In the bleachers were more kids, mostly black, climbing around and shouting. Eddie’s stomach sank. There was a canvas canopy over the table to protect from rain or direct sun, but there was no protection from kids, from the sounds of traffic, from the unsettling oddness of daylight. The table was like a toy in the bright light. A little four-by-eight with a stupid red cloth. A woman’s table.

  A television camera on a rubber-tired dolly sat at the side of the table, and another at the end. The contract had said three but there was no third in view. Eddie looked at his watch. Five till two. Fats was nowhere in sight. He walked up to the platform. The black girls stared up at him, their eyes wide. There was a man standing there wearing a brown suit and a sports shirt. “I’m Felson,” Eddie said.

  “Fast Eddie?” The man looked at his watch.

  “Yes.”

  “Where’s your partner?”

  “He’ll be here.” Eddie set his cue case on the table and then felt the cloth with his fingertips. It was slick and thin, at least fifty-percent synthetic. But he’d played on worse. The wooden platform was wide enough to hold the cameras and keep them out of the players’ way, but there were heavy black cables. They ran across a few feet of asphalt to a green panel truck parked at a corner where the bleachers met. The truck had big letters reading WKAB—MIAMI. A man sitting in the cab waved at him and smiled. Eddie had seen none of these people before and had no wish to talk to them. People had been drifting in ever since his arrival, but the bleachers were still mostly empty. He glanced at his watch. Two o’clock. He looked past the panel truck at the shopping-mall lot. A long gray limousine had just pulled in from the highway and was coming toward them. There was another open space between sets of bleachers on the other side; the limousine drove through this and pulled up in front of the platform. A chauffeur in gray uniform got out, walked around and opened the door. A beautifully dressed, enormously fat man stepped out. It was Fats. He wore a dark blue cotton suit that fit him perfectly, a white shirt and a red tie. There was applause from the stands. With his cue case under his arm in the way a British banker might carry a rolled newspaper, Fats stepped nimbly up on the platform, nodded pleasantly to Eddie. He held his hand out to the man in the brown suit and the man shook it. The limousine pulled away slowly. Fats opened his case and took out the two pieces of his cue. “Let’s shoot pool, Fast Eddie,” he said.

  The man in the brown suit was clearly some kind of manager, but he merely stepped off the platform when Fats spoke. He crossed the empty space of asphalt and seated himself in the second row of bleachers. The stands were about a third full now, and everyone was quiet—even the children. The black girls had moved from the platform and were sitting in a row on the second bleacher seat. They wore pinafores and had bright ribbons in their hair; they looked absorbed in what was about to happen.

  The TV men, two kids in T-shirts and jeans, had positioned themselves behind their cameras. “Keep the cables away from us,” Fats said to them. He was screwing his cue together; its butt was silver and the joint white. What was disorganized and confusing before, here around this red pool table in a parking lot, was now orderly. Fats tightened his cue, took a piece of pool chalk from his coat pocket and began chalking up.

  A crowd of teenage boys began scrambling into the bleachers, lining themselves up in the fourth row. Out in the parking lot a dog barked. Two balls sat on the balkline. Eddie tightened his cue, slid the case under the table and took his position behind one; Fats stood behind the other. They bent and lagged. The balls rolled down, rebounded, rolled back up. Eddie’s stopped an inch from the cushion, but Fats’ ball was perfect—touching it. “Your break, Fast Eddie,” Fats said. There was a director’s chair at one corner of the platform. Fats racked the balls at the foot of the table, walked over to the corner and seated himself. Eddie stepped up to the head of the table, bent down, made his bridge and broke the balls safe. The cue ball hit the corner ball, jarred it loose, bounced off the two bottom rails and rolled back up the table. The two colored balls hit their cushions and returned to the triangle. It was a perfect break. A few people in the stands applauded. At least there were some who knew what was going on.

  Fats walked up to the table and without even looking it over played safe, leaving Eddie much the same shot. They played it back and forth like that for a while until Eddie, squinting down the table at a blurred seven ball, missed the safety and left Fats open. He seated himself in the director’s chair and watched.

  At the place in the Keys, Fats looked old and weary; Eddie had guessed him at seventy, at least. But here, with his impeccable suit and his quick movements, he seemed far younger than that. And his stroke was beautiful as ever—smooth, controlled and relaxed. He circled the table as he had in Chicago twenty years ago when Eddie himself was young and hungry and had wanted to beat this enormous man more than he had wanted anything before in his life. Eddie watched him now as he might have watched the performance of a gymnast or a magician.

  Most of the people in the stands would not know a thing about straight pool, and the safeties would be incomprehensible to them; but they were watching intently. Fats moved at an even, graceful pace, bending for his shots and pocketing them without fuss. There should have been a referee, but it didn’t matter; Fats had the stage to himself and took it effortlessly. When he had pocketed fourteen balls, leaving himself a perfect break shot off the fifteenth, Eddie stepped up, racked the fourteen and sat down. Fats chalked his cue and went on shooting. More people came into the bleachers, silently. The TV cameramen dollied their cameras on rubber tires, pressed their faces against the viewers, walked quietly on their sneakers. Out on the parking lot, sunlight reflected from a car bumper would occasionally f
lash and dazzle; sometimes a person at a distance would shout to someone else; cars moved in and out. For a few moments a radio blared. Fats went on shooting and Eddie kept racking the balls and sitting again. It was beautiful to watch. He didn’t care who won.

  ***

  The limousine took them to the airport for the flight to Cincinnati. Eddie leaned back into the dark velvet upholstery, into the silence and cold air. Fats sat next to him, his eyes closed. He was still wearing the suit jacket, and the tie was still neatly tied. Finally Eddie spoke. “I don’t see how you do it,” he said. “I was lucky to get sixty balls.”

  Fats said nothing.

  “In Cincinnati we’ll be in an auditorium,” Eddie said. “It should be air-conditioned.”

  Fats kept his eyes closed, clearly resting. As they pulled into the Miami International Airport he turned over toward Eddie and said, “You need glasses.”

  For a moment Eddie was furious. The fat man had spoken as though he were a child.

  ***

  “Eddie,” Fats said later, on the plane, “you weren’t hitting them like you used to.”

  “I was a kid then. Now I’m middle-aged.”

  “Middle age doesn’t exist, Fast Eddie. It’s an invention of the media, like halitosis. It’s something they tame people with.”

  “Maybe you’re right.” But Eddie didn’t feel convinced. The stewardess came with their drinks—a Manhattan for him and Perrier for Fats, and he busied himself with arranging his seat tray and then getting the cap off the little bottle and pouring the drink on top of the cherry in the plastic glass.

  “I’m over sixty,” Fats said, drinking his Perrier. “When I was supposed to be middle-aged I ignored it and it went away. You slow down a little. You get smarter. That’s all there is.”

  It wasn’t true. Not for him. He didn’t feel the way he had felt as a young man. He felt washed out, and frightened. “My pool game isn’t what it was.”

  “Then practice.”

  “I do practice.”

  “How often?”

  It was less than once a week. In his own poolroom, shooting pool bored him. He only shot balls around when there was nothing else to do with himself. He shrugged but didn’t answer the fat man.

  Fats folded his hands across his enormous lap and closed his eyes. Eddie looked out the window, at the gray mass of clouds below them, and finished his drink. Pool did bore him. There was no excitement in it anymore. And the sharp young kids—kids who played nine-ball and one-pocket—annoyed him. Just their need to win radiated a chill into him. But what else was there? He had tried selling real estate, a field where his charm and looks might have helped him, and it had been terrible. You had to kiss the asses of people you didn’t even want to look at. The same with insurance. He had thought he was a hustler, and a good one, until he had tried the ordinary world of American business. It had turned his stomach and had frightened him. In five weeks of showing apartments and rental houses in Lexington, smiling and nodding and lying, taking inconvenient phone calls and answering querulous or bullying or misleading questions, showing places to people who he knew were only fooling around, he had made seven hundred dollars. Seven hundred lousy dollars, before taxes. It was no good and he quit it. But what else was there? These were hard times. International Harvester, the paper on his lap said, had closed down in Fort Wayne. People waited in line from before dawn for jobs Eddie felt he wouldn’t last at for a week. Machine-tool operator. Pressman. Sanitation worker. And he hadn’t finished high school. There was thirteen thousand in his bank account, and that was it. He would have to stop this drift in his soul or he would be unloading cabbages at the A&P.

  On the other hand, here was Fats. Sixty-five, probably. He had no job, lived well, took pictures of birds, still shot first-class pool, ate beautifully and lived in the sun. He had probably never worked a day in his life. It could be done.

  He looked over at Fats, whose eyes were open again.

  “How did you do it, Fats?” he said. When Fats said nothing, Eddie finished off his drink and, feeling the alcohol now, went on. “My life is falling apart, Fats. My wife’s gone and my poolroom’s gone. My pool game’s down to half. Less than half. How in hell did you manage to avoid all that?”

  Fats looked at him and blinked. “I went on winning, Fast Eddie,” he said.

  ***

  That night in his room near Cincinnati, Eddie watched television but could not get interested. Fats was right; he needed glasses. He had been so relieved at the way things went at the shopping center after Fats showed up—so pleased that Fats didn’t stalk off in fury or blame him for getting them into a rinkydinky contract—that he hadn’t cared how his own game had gone. Stupid. He got up and switched the TV off. It was nine-thirty. He undressed, put on his trunks and stepped out the door. The evening air was warm and humid. The pool was across a grassy area, and behind it the huge Quality Court cloverleaf shone in green and red over a smaller sign that read WELCOME, MINNESOTA FATS! He gritted his teeth at the absence of his own name and walked over toward the pool. It was good to feel warm air on his skin. He would get his name on the sign at the next place. And he would shoot a better stick here tomorrow than he had done in Florida. Fats was good, but he wasn’t impossible. Eddie had beaten him before. And Fats was gross and old; and he, Eddie, was as lean and flat in the stomach as he had ever been.

  The pool was empty and well-lighted. He dove into the shockingly warm water and began swimming across and back, not stopping between laps. He did twenty and then swam to the ladder and got his breath, then he climbed slowly out.

  Fats was sitting in a poolside chair, wearing his bathing suit.

  Eddie had brought a towel. He dried his hair and face with it and then looked at the other man, who was regarding him impassively. “You’re right about the glasses,” he said.

  Fats said nothing. Eddie dried himself and sat down. They were not far from the highway and he could hear traffic. “That was my first game of straight pool in years,” he said.

  Fats did not reply. They sat together for about five minutes and then Fats got up, walked ponderously to the ladder and climbed into the pool. He treaded water for a moment and then began to swim, slowly and lazily. He was not a particularly good swimmer but he moved along. Eddie watched him and wondered again how a person so huge could handle himself so well. After a while Fats stopped and climbed out. Sheets of water fell from his chest and belly as he came up the ladder. He stopped halfway up, resting his arms on the ladder’s bannisters. “Fast Eddie,” he said, “you’re going to have to do better. It won’t work unless you shoot better pool.”

  “Sixty balls is pretty good,” Eddie said.

  Fats shook his head, and water sprayed from his dark hair. “I missed deliberately to give you a chance,” he said.

  Eddie said nothing and stared at the water. It was probably true. He had not cared enough about the game. Finally he said, “Maybe we should play for money.”

  Fats was seating himself in a deck chair. “I don’t want complications.” Fats had brought a towel; he began drying his hair with it. “You said you wanted to get back in it, Fast Eddie. Why is that?”

  “I need the money.”

  “You won’t make much.”

  “If ABC picks it up, I will.”

  “What if they don’t?”

  “Then it’s a start,” Eddie said.

  “How much money do you need, Fast Eddie?”

  Eddie looked at him. “Sixty. To buy a poolroom.”

  “You can’t buy a poolroom for sixty.”

  “My old one was sold and I got half.”

  “Maybe you’re better off out of it.”

  “I don’t know anything else, Fats. I can’t sell cars or insurance. I quit school after the eleventh grade.”

  They were quiet for a long time. Then Fats stood up, picked up his towel and looked back to Eddie. “You’ve got a long way to go, Fast Eddie,” he said.

  ***

  The game was in a p
roper auditorium downtown. The first six rows of seats had been taken out and a four-and-a-half-by-nine Brunswick table put there below the stage. Shaded incandescent bulbs hung over the green wool cloth. Admission was four dollars a seat and the auditorium was almost full. Two cameras from the local TV station sat on the floor near the table, and another was on the stage. It was a professional setup, and Eddie felt relieved to see it. There was even a referee.

  Fats sat in the high leather chair at the end of the table. Eddie pocketed a half-dozen balls and then walked over to him. People were still coming into the auditorium. “I need to start hustling pool again,” he said.

  Fats looked at him. “You’re not good enough, Fast Eddie.”

  ***

  After a few minutes the referee came over to brush the table down for the game. The manager, who had met them earlier at the door, walked out onto the stage. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “there are legends in the game of pocket billiards, and we have two of them with us this evening. Mr. Ed Felson, known as Fast Eddie. And the incomparable Minnesota Fats.” There was loud applause. The referee, finished with the brushing, placed two white balls on the balkline. He spoke softly, like a headwaiter in a pretentious restaurant. “The gentlemen will lag for break.”