by Walter Tevis
There were five tables of the same small size as Haneyville’s, and games were in progress on three of them. One of the others had a plastic cover over it, and on the fifth a foursome of silent children were poking cue sticks at balls. Arabella looked at them for a minute; none was over ten years old. Then she whispered, “Is that the junior division?”
For some reason he felt irritated at the joke. “The parents are probably back there dancing.”
“With one another?”
“Honey,” he said coolly, “I don’t understand these places any better than you do. I’m just learning my way around.”
“I thought you made your living in places like this.”
“In poolrooms. Not barrooms.”
She got quiet then, and he began watching the three games. The ones on the first two tables were not much; none of the players had a decent stroke or knew what to shoot at, but what was happening on the middle table was something different. It was a cool, quiet game of serious nine-ball. One player was oriental. Japanese, with delicate features, narrow eyes and brown skin. He wore a blue velvet jacket that fit perfectly across his narrow shoulders, and a silvery open-collared shirt underneath, matching his silver trousers. The man he was playing was thirtyish, with a heavy beard and workingman’s clothes.
Two high director’s chairs sat against the back wall. Eddie took Arabella by the arm, led her over to them and seated himself with his cue case across his lap.
The Japanese was impeccably dressed. His hair, his nails and his shave were perfect. Eddie liked the quiet way he concentrated on his shots. The other player was quiet too, but sloppy in appearance, at least compared to the Japanese. He looked like Lon Chaney in the werewolf movies, at about the middle of the transformation, with bushy hair coming down over his forehead and the full beard.
They watched for about a half hour, and then Arabella leaned over and said, “When are you going to play?”
“If somebody comes in. Or if one of them quits.”
Just as he said this the bearded man, who had lost four games since they started watching, lost another. He handed the Japanese some money, unscrewed his cue, and left.
Eddie looked at the Japanese and grinned. “Do you want to play some more?”
“Eight-ball?”
“What about straight pool?”
The little man smiled. “We usually play eight-ball here.”
“All right.” Eddie stood and unfastened the clasp on his cue case. “What were you two playing for?”
The man continued smiling. “Twenty dollars.”
“How about fifty?”
“Sure.” Eddie could hear Arabella draw in her breath behind him.
The Japanese was easy to play but difficult to beat. There was no belligerence or muscling to him, but he shot a thoroughly professional game. He ran the balls out when he had an open table to work with and played simple, effective safeties when he didn’t. When Eddie made a good shot he would say, “Good shot!” He made a great many of them himself. Eddie had difficulty with the heavy cue ball. All bar tables used them, so the ball would bypass the chute when you scratched; and he knew he would have to get accustomed to the sluggishness. It caused him to misjudge his position a few critical times. After an hour had passed, he was down by a hundred dollars. He was racking the balls and considering raising the bet when the other man spoke. “Would you like to double the bet?”
Eddie finished racking, hung the wooden triangle at the foot of the table and said, “Why don’t we play for two hundred a game?”
The Japanese looked at him calmly. “Okay.”
But at two hundred Eddie went on losing. On some shots the cue ball seemed to be made of lead and would not pull backward when he needed it to. During the third game at two hundred, Eddie ran all of the stripes without difficulty but failed to make the eight ball because the weight of the cue ball threw his position off. There was no life to the damned thing; it was maddening.
The Japanese seemed unconcerned with the problem, making balls steadily, clicking them in like a tap dancer. They hardly spoke to each other. Eddie kept paying, racking the balls, and watching the other man shoot. Being short, he bent only slightly from the waist; his long cue stick seemed more intimate with the table, more neatly parallel to it, than Eddie’s. Eddie felt that pool tables were too low for a man of average height, and he himself was taller than average. When the Japanese stepped up to a shot, the way he bent his waist and extended his left arm, the way his right arm cocked itself for the stroke, and the way his quiet eyes zeroed in on the cue ball and then on the line extending from the cue ball to the ball he was going to pocket were perfect. The open front of his powder-blue jacket hung straight down, missing the side of the table by an inch; the crease at the bottoms of his silver trousers broke neatly above the tops of his polished shoes; and his brown, unlined face showed a hint of exquisite sadness. When Eddie stepped up to shoot now he felt, compared with the other man, big and clumsy, like the big, clumsy barroom cue ball he had to hit.
When Eddie was nine hundred dollars down, the man excused himself to go to the bathroom. Eddie walked over to Arabella. “I hope you’re not bored,” he said.
“It’s really a thrill,” she said. “I wish you’d teach me more, Eddie, so I could understand it better.”
“Sure.”
She looked behind her to see if the other player was still gone from the room. Then she leaned forward. “When are you going to start beating him, Eddie?”
“As soon as I can.”
“Aren’t you losing on purpose? Isn’t that the way you do it?”
“I told you,” Eddie said, frowning, “I’m not a pool shark. I’m trying to beat the man.”
“Oh,” she said, clearly disappointed.
“I’m having trouble with the cue ball….”
She just looked at him.
Just then a waitress came in. “Anybody here want something from the bar?”
“Sure,” Eddie said, and then to Arabella, “What would you like?” He realized that his voice was cold.
Arabella spoke to the waitress. “Do you have white wine?”
“Sure, honey,” the waitress said brightly. “You want dry or extra dry? We’ve got a nice dry Chablis.”
“I’ll have a glass of that.”
“Bring me a Manhattan on the rocks.” Eddie was feeling uncomfortable. The man on the far table ordered beer.
Just then the Japanese came walking back into the room. “Do you want a drink?” Eddie asked.
“Bourbon and soda.” He smiled at Eddie. “Tough work, shooting eight-ball.”
There was something about him. Eddie could not help liking him. A lot of hustlers were that way, since their livelihoods depended partly on charm; but the feeling for this little man was stronger than that.
The Japanese picked up his cue, set its butt on the floor between his feet and held it so its tip was level with his chin. Then he slipped a small metal rasp from his coat pocket and began tapping the cue tip with it. It was something Eddie hadn’t seen for so long that he had forgotten: the man was dressing the tip to make it hold chalk better.
When he finished, Eddie said, “Could I use that a minute?”
He nodded and handed it to him. Eddie stood his cue in front of him and gave it a few taps.
“That’s a very pretty stick,” the Japanese said.
“Thanks.” Eddie scuffed the center of the tip where there was a hard spot, and then began chalking it heavily. The other man took a square of chalk and did the same thing. He looked at Eddie and said, “I’m Billy Usho.”
“Ed Felson. This is Arabella.”
“I’ve enjoyed watching you play.” Arabella twirled her wineglass by the stem.
“That’s nice.” Usho smiled. “My wife says it bores her. Out of her skull.”
“That’s a shame,” Arabella said. “I think it’s a beautiful game. Very intricate and bright.”
Eddie began racking the balls. He felt, as he ha
d before in his life, that if he didn’t do something his money would drift away from him and he would go on losing. He did not like Arabella’s sympathy with the little man. He did not like his own. The Japanese was like Fats: another cool man who dressed impeccably. Another star. Eddie was better than this dapper Japanese, better maybe than Fats.
“Let’s play for five hundred,” Eddie said.
“That’s a lot of money for eight-ball.”
Eddie straightened up from racking and shrugged. At the table across the room, the men who had ordered beers were staring at him. They must have heard him say five hundred dollars. He noticed for the first time that the kids had left the other table, had apparently been gone for some time. He looked over at Arabella briefly; her face was expressionless. He turned back to Billy Usho. “What have you got to lose?”
“Okay.” Billy picked up the chalk again, ran it lightly over the tip of his cue, bent to the table and smashed the rack of balls open.
Eddie took a deep breath and watched, not sitting, keeping his back to Arabella. The five ball fell in; that gave Billy the solids. Eddie kept his eyes on the table and not on Usho’s clothes or his smooth, youthful face.
None of the solids was in an easy position, and the cue ball was frozen to a side rail. Billy studied the lie for a long time before he played safe. The cue ball stopped between the eight and the four, out of line with all the striped balls. Eddie would have to keep his nerves steady and his balls tight just to get a decent safety out of it. The cue ball would have to be banked rail-first into the eleven. It was a pisser.
Just then the waitress came in with their drinks. Eddie gave her a ten, took his Manhattan and turned back to the table. If he shot it hard, the eleven might go in the side; it was a foot and a half away from the pocket and in a direct line with it. But, Jesus, to thump that big cue ball off the cushion and try for a perfect hit on the eleven was a killer. He looked at Billy’s Japanese face, his almost pretty face, for a moment and thought, To hell with him. He took a long swallow from the sweet drink, set it down, not looking at Arabella, and walked over to the table. He could make the eleven ball.
He did it quickly, spreading the fingers of his left hand over the eight, elevating the cue stick, stroking once and then tapping the cue ball. He could feel the purchase on the big, clunky ball that roughing the leather of the tip had given him. He watched the white ball pop off the rail and hit the eleven dead center, watched the eleven roll into the side pocket. The cue ball stopped in position for the thirteen. Eddie chalked, took three steps over and pocketed the thirteen. Then the nine, the fifteen, the fourteen and the twelve. The black eight sat four inches from the lower corner and his cue ball ten inches from the eight. He plunked the eight ball into the pocket and went back to his Manhattan. Billy paid him silently and racked the balls.
At midnight Eddie raised the bet to a thousand and Billy brought in two backers. One wore a dark suit and looked like a banker. The other could have been a rodeo cowboy. He chewed tobacco, drank Rolling Rock beer, and paid Eddie in worn-looking hundred-dollar bills from what seemed an inexhaustible supply.
At one in the morning, Eddie put Arabella in a taxi and sent her back to the Holiday Inn. She kissed him sleepily before getting in the cab. “I’m glad you started beating him.”
“You know what I’m going to do tomorrow?” Eddie said to her. “I’m going to buy some new clothes.”
***
After they closed the bar at two-thirty, a crowd of a dozen diehards stayed to watch. Someone kept feeding quarters into the jukebox in the other room; the muted voices of Conway Twitty and Merle Haggard came through the open doorway. Billy’s face was no longer unlined, and his hair no longer neatly combed. There was a smear of talcum powder near the lapel of his blue jacket, and his narrow eyes were narrower.
Eddie was reaching a place he had almost forgotten, where the nerves of his arms and fingertips seemed to extend through the length of the Balabushka to the glossy surfaces of the balls themselves, to the napped green of the table. There were no aches in his feet or shoulders, and his stroke was unruffled, pistonlike, and dead-accurate. He could not miss. There was no way he could miss. The whole fatty accumulation of his middle-class life had fallen away from him, and his movements at the table were both fully awake and dreamlike. The visual clarity was astounding. The click of his cue tip against the cue ball, the click of the cue ball against the ball he was tapping in or easing in or nudging in or powering in was like the click of oiled machinery. He was silent and loose; in some newly awakened reach of his mind he was dazzled by himself.
Billy did not quit for a long time. It was amazing that he didn’t quit. He shot fine pool, better than he had played at the beginning, and he even won games. There was no way to prevent him from winning games. But he had no real chance. By three o’clock in the morning it must have been clear to everyone in the room, as it was to Eddie, that he had no chance; but he kept on playing and his backers kept handing money to Eddie.
With the rail-first bank on the eleven ball, he had lost his clumsiness with the cue ball; and now he made it dance for him, still sluggish though it was. He had found the string for it and his control was flawless. He even felt a certain fondness for the big white ball, like the fondness he had felt for Billy Usho; but now he was in command of both. There was nothing in life like this. Nothing. To stroke and hit the cue ball, to watch the colored ball roll with the certitude that he himself imposed on it, to see and hear the colored ball fall into the pocket he had chosen, was exquisite.
***
Coming into the room, he tried not to wake her, but she stirred when he closed the door. A moment later she turned the bedside light on. She was squinting at the clock radio, her hair disheveled and her breasts bare. She didn’t look at him. “Dear God!” she said. “It’s five o’fucking clock.”
“A quarter after,” Eddie said.
“Maybe you should play tennis.”
“No I shouldn’t.” He set the cue stick in the closet and began unbuttoning his shirt. He took it off and laid it across the back of a chair. “I’m going to take a shower.”
“Come on to bed.”
“After the shower.”
“All right,” she said, sitting up and rubbing her eyes. “I missed you last night. How much did you take him for?”
“Take him for?”
“Isn’t that what you say?”
He grinned at her, a bit dreamily. He felt thoroughly tired. His arms and legs, his chest and back, felt warm and relaxed, and the dull ache in his insteps and in his right arm—his stroking arm—was more a comfort than a pain. He reached into his right pocket and pulled out a handful of bills. He dropped it on the bed at her side and then pulled out another handful. Hundreds had a special shade of green on their backs, and the numbering that read “100” was curved pleasantly at the corners, the engraving baroque and substantial. He had always loved them. He dropped the second beside the first, then pulled out more, along with a fistful of loose bills. Arabella had become wide-eyed. She stared at the money and then up at his face. He felt deeply relaxed and yet alert; if someone attacked him he would respond like a drowsy leopard, like a great white shark, lazy and deadly.
“Good god in heaven!” Arabella said softly, looking at the money beside her.
He dug deeper and found another dozen of them in that pocket. Then he shifted to the other pocket, where there was a roll, pulling it out with thumb and forefinger. On the bed the roll uncoiled itself like a living thing, to become a sheaf. More bills were beneath it. He slipped them out a few at a time. The pile of green bills next to Arabella now filled up the space from her knees to her elbows, covering about a foot’s width of the bed. She reached down, scooped up a double handful and held them against her cheeks as a child might hold a beloved doll. “Where have you been all my life, Eddie?” she said.
“Who cares?” Eddie said. “I’m here now.”
***
The next day Arabella drove to Thel
ma’s with him at noon and played a pinball machine while he waited around for someone to come in. He got a handful of quarters at the bar and practiced, but none of the people who walked into the bar for an afternoon beer came back to the room where Eddie, feeling like a house hustler, was banking balls up the rails. By late afternoon it had gotten to him. During his years in Lexington he had come to hate these long days with pool tables and the endless, desultory shooting. There were games going on at the other tables now, but not for money. The excitement of the night before was gone. By the time they had their supper at the bar, his arm was tired and his feet ached.
After supper Arabella sat in the canvas director’s chair she had watched from the night before, reading a book. At nine he went out to the bar, got two bottles of beer and poured hers into a glass.
“Well,” she said, “think of how you did last night.”
“Do you want to play?”
“All right.” She closed her book and set it on the table by the beer.
He showed her how to draw the cue ball by putting bottom English on it and how to make a proper bridge with her thumb and forefinger. Her concentration was impressive. He set up balls for her and watched her tap them in, and for a while, it was a pleasure. She liked getting things right. He took the seat she had been in, drank his beer slowly from the bottle and watched her. After a while he was reading from The Collected Stories of V.S. Pritchett while she shot the balls around on the table. They were strange little stories, about Englishmen; he read three. When he looked up from the third, Arabella was standing in front of him, her arms crossed over the top of the Balabushka.
“It does get boring after a while,” she said.
Eddie stretched and yawned. “Not at five hundred a game.”
“Let’s go to the room, Eddie. I’m tired.”
***
The next evening around eight o’clock, Billy Usho came in. This time he was wearing a chocolate-brown velvet jacket and tan slacks over light Italian shoes. He was carrying his cue case and he smiled ruefully when he saw Eddie sitting in the director’s chair.