by Walter Tevis
“What if I bank the eight?” Eddie said.
“Blindfold, maybe,” Usho said.
“Have a seat,” Eddie said. “Where can I get a game?”
“Next to impossible.”
“A friend told me there were money players around here.”
“Not anymore. Who’s your friend?”
“Fats, from Chicago.”
“Oh yes,” Billy Usho said, looking very Japanese. He could have said, “Ah so!” He opened his case and took out a cue that was different from the one he had used before. Its butt was wrapped in brown linen that matched his jacket. “I hear Fats came through here six years ago and cleaned them all out. But there was money in those days. It’s not like that now.”
“You’re just passing through too, aren’t you?”
“I’ve been here a week. You have to work at it.”
Eddie fell silent for a while. There was an amateurish game of pool going on in front of them, and they watched for a while. Then Eddie said, “Did you ever play the nine-ball tournament at Lake Tahoe?”
“Those tournaments are a bitch. You got to come in first or second, or the hotel bill eats you alive.”
“I hear Earl Borchard makes a good living at tournaments.”
“He’s a genius. So’s Babes Cooley.”
Eddie got down from his chair, put a quarter in the table and began shooting banks. Usho came over and watched.
Eddie tapped the five ball cross-side, freezing the cue ball. “I haven’t seen anybody play serious nine-ball for twenty years.”
Billy looked at him speculatively. “Where’ve you been?”
Eddie slammed a long cross-corner bank on the twelve ball. “In a fog, Billy. I’ve been in a god-damned fog for twenty years.”
“Good bank on the twelve,” Billy said.
***
As they walked out onto the parking lot at one, a carload of teenagers drove up, screeching to a stop in the space next to Eddie’s car. Six of them got out, the boys staggering and laughing, the girls squealing. Eddie and Billy watched as they went under the big red neon sign into Thelma’s. As Eddie was unlocking his car he turned to Billy and said, “Do you think I could beat Earl Borchard at nine-ball? Or Babes Cooley?”
“No,” Billy said, “I don’t think you could.”
“Why not?”
“This eight-ball in bars is nothing but a scuffle. The best players are in nine-ball.”
“What about straight pool?”
“Nine-ball. That’s where the money is.”
***
There was no way not to leave Arabella stuck in motels over the next two weeks. She read books, spent some time on the telephone, and they went to matinees of movies together, saving the night for pool-shooting. She would go to whatever bar he was working and stay an hour or so, but it was tedious for him and more so for her; there wasn’t anything for her to do.
Worse, he wasn’t making any money. The best game he found was for twenty dollars, and the man quit him after a few hours of it, leaving Eddie with a profit of a hundred eighty. That was in the first week, and even it was not repeated.
After three days in a Holiday Inn in Beaufort, North Carolina, Arabella’s boredom was beginning to show. She tried to be cheerful, but there were long silences between them at breakfast—or at what was lunch for her and breakfast for him. One day at noon, when he had just gotten up from a long, unsuccessful night at a downtown bar, several things went wrong. The hotel laundry service had lost two blouses, the television set had lost its ability to make a coherent picture, they went to lunch and the waitress brought her the wrong sandwich. She had ordered the Big Chuck hamburger; the waitress brought her liverwurst. Arabella stared furiously at the glossy white bread. Eddie tried to hail the waitress as she disappeared into the kitchen.
“Eddie,” Arabella said, “I want to go home.”
“There’s an afternoon flight from Raleigh. I’ll go with you.”
***
It was colder in Lexington now, and he wore a scarf and gloves on his way to the Faculty Club in the mornings. The leaves had all fallen from the trees and been raked from the neatly cropped grass of the campus; there were still rake marks like the lines in the fine gravel of a Japanese garden. Eddie walked briskly from the parking lot to the club, chin down against the morning cold, cue case tucked under his arm. He liked it. After the raw towns in the South, with their neon and poverty, the university—with its substantial old brick buildings, its neatly kept walks, its sense of order and security—was a profound relief. He would walk into the anteroom of the Faculty Club, past the wooden tables where breakfast was being set up by students in white jackets, up the wooden stairs to the second floor and down the hallway to the game room, to uncover the big mahogany table and begin his morning’s work. He knew he did not belong here either by education, social class or any right other than Roy Skammer’s invitation; yet, he felt far more at home than by the bar tables near tavern dance floors or in the rough, smoke-stained rooms of North Carolina roadhouses. He felt at ease in the faded genteel quiet of an upstairs room with oil portraits of professors on the walls and chamber music sometimes drifting up from the lounge below. A faded oriental rug sat under the pool table, extending out a few feet from its periphery; Eddie’s leather jacket and scarf hung from the brass hook of a mahogany coatrack; the rotund face of an emeritus professor of history looked sternly down on the table; Eddie thought of him as Lexington Fats. Sometimes after pocketing a particularly difficult shot he would look up confidently at the old man’s face.
He had hoped his game was improved from the weeks of eight-ball, and it was. He was now making runs in the seventies and missing less. The glasses were a godsend. Whatever muscles of back and shoulder and arm it took to play pool for hour after hour had toughened; nothing in his body hurt anymore. He was still not as good as he once had been, when he could make a hundred balls without missing, but he felt he was getting there. In Albuquerque he would give it his best shot, and if he was hitting, would beat Fats. It was about time.
Arabella spent her days at home working on articles for the folk-art journal or typing papers for professors, sometimes complaining about the bad prose and footnotes she had to rattle her way through at her Selectric, but she seemed content to be working. The apartment was small for the two of them, and they spoke sometimes of finding a bigger one. They went out to movies some nights and spent others reading or watching television. Something in Eddie fretted at this part of his life. It was solid and easy, but he wanted something else. As his pool game came back, the old restlessness had reentered his spirit; he wanted to be playing for money, taking risks, staying at good hotels, sleeping till noon, winning money in cash, in hundred-dollar bills.
On his fourth day back from the South he went to Martha’s apartment to pick up some winter clothes he had left behind. Martha was there, and as usual had a cold. She was cordial but edgy as he pulled an armload of clothes from the maple dresser—sweaters, corduroy pants and an extra scarf. Being in the old apartment made him dizzy; he found he had nothing to say. She was silent too. He got what he needed and left.
Arabella told him there was space at one side of her big closet. He opened its sliding door to a four-foot row of dresses. There must have been forty of them, on hangers covered with quilted rayon. He ran a hand along colored silk, wool and linen. Near the closet floor a shelf held two long rows of shoes, lined up perfectly in Arabella’s British way, blue and red and brown and black shoes. Each held a lavender metal tree, its color precisely matching the coat-hanger covers.
Eddie found space at the end for his clothes and he hung them there—bemused by the array of the dresses and shoes, radiating along with the smells of potpourri and moth crystals the sense of another life.
A few days later they made a stab at apartment hunting. To get to a subdivision with moderately priced apartments, they drove through a fine old residential district, along a gently curving street lined with heavy elms. At a stop
sign Arabella said, “Look there,” and pointed to a house on Eddie’s side. Far behind an enormous lawn sat a white-columned porch banked by shrubbery; the house itself was of gray limestone with a red tile roof and a row of dormers; it had tall, airy French windows on the first floor. “That was my house,” Arabella said. It went with the clothes. She had lived there fifteen years, with a distinguished professor of art—a man who had his work shown in galleries in New York and who appeared often on television. Now she was the mistress of a pool hustler—a former pool hustler. Eddie said nothing and drove on.
***
“Don’t you miss the parties?” he said to her that evening.
“What parties?” She had just finished doing a paper on hydraulic engineering and was tapping the sheaf of pages against the top of her desk. “I need a paper clip.”
“Behind your typewriter. I mean parties at the university, when you were a faculty wife.”
“Sometimes. Not often.” She found the clip, fastened the papers together and put them in a manila folder. Then she stood up and stretched. “At faculty parties what the women talk about is their children, and I don’t have children. It was a chance to dress up every now and then, but then I had to listen to Harrison. The two cancelled out.”
“I’ve heard that professors need wives.”
“To do the laundry?”
“You really are pissed at him,” Eddie said. “I meant to look good at parties, to help his career.”
“People say that, but it’s not really true. Harrison is what he is because he fills out a good grant-request form and looks superb in an Irish fisherman’s sweater. I don’t really hate him, Eddie. Thinking about him just irks me.”
“What were you in it for?”
She looked at him a long moment, then lit a cigarette. “I don’t know. Maybe the clothes.”
“You got a lot of them.”
“Security. I wanted to be taken care of, Eddie. By somebody good-looking and with a good career.”
“There’s nothing wrong with that.”
“Would you want it?”
He lit a cigarette and said, “What in hell are you mad at?”
She walked to the desk and picked up the paper she had typed. “I’m mad at Harrison and I’m mad at the professor who wrote this study of stress resistance in water-retaining structures.”
“I think you’re mad at me,” Eddie said.
“I’m tired of the university. There are students who graduate from here with nothing in their heads but drugs and rock music.”
“You’re forgetting sex. I think it’s me you’re mad at.”
She looked at him. “Eddie, why don’t you get your act together and start playing tournaments?”
“I’m not good enough yet. I may never be.” He looked at his watch. It was midnight. He walked over to the sofa and began unfolding it into a bed. “If you lived in a house like that, why don’t you have a lot of money?”
“The house belongs to Harrison’s mother and didn’t figure in the settlement. I get eight hundred a month in alimony.”
“You could live on that.”
Arabella was quiet while he got his shoes off. Then she said, “Eddie. When I got upset in North Carolina and wanted to come home, it wasn’t just the boredom and the bad food.”
“I thought there was something.”
“I need to do more than support a man in his career. It was beginning to feel as if I’d never left Harrison.”
“Thanks.”
“I’m sorry. You’re not like Harrison, but you’re another kind of star.”
That annoyed him but he said nothing.
When she spoke again her voice was resigned. “I could do more work for the arts-and-crafts journal. They’ve offered me an office for reading copy.”
“Take it.”
“It’s still working for professors.”
“Then don’t take it.”
“I just don’t know.” She looked upset. She walked to her desk and picked up the folder with the paper she had just finished typing. “Maybe all I want is to be with a good-looking man who’s good at what he does.” She tossed the folder back on the desk. “There’s a lot of pressure on women these days to be themselves. Maybe it’s all a mean joke.”
Eddie looked at her. “No it isn’t,” he said.
“But what can I do?”
He stood up barefoot and stretched. “I know that one. It’s a real son of a bitch.”
Chapter Six
The game was at a fairgrounds outside Albuquerque; from the parking lot came the smell of horses and straw, even on a cold November day. When Eddie got out of the taxi, Fats was at a hot-dog stand, eating a Coney Island piled with chili. In the autumnal sunlight his face had a distinct pallor.
Fats chewed and swallowed before he spoke. “I’ve seen the table,” he said. “A four-and-a-half-by-nine Gandy. It looks all right.”
“You look pale, Fats,” Eddie said.
“I was sick two weeks ago.” Fats held his cue case under his arm and finished the hot dog. He wiped his fingers and chin with a paper napkin, wadded it, dropped it in a trash bin nearby.
“Maybe you shouldn’t be here.”
“Being here is no problem. The chili dog is the problem.”
“Then stop eating chili dogs.”
“Let’s play pool, Fast Eddie.” Fats turned and started walking toward the open-air arena with a banner reading THE GREAT MINNESOTA FATS AND FAST EDDIE SHOOT OUT. He was, as always, light on his feet.
***
In the taxi afterward, Eddie stared out the window at the distant Rockies. He had concentrated, shot well, seen the balls clearly and lost by seven points. One fifty to one forty-three.
Fats was leaning back in his seat, his black cue case across his lap. Finally he spoke. “That was a good run.” Eddie had scored over eighty balls before missing a difficult bank shot.
Eddie said nothing. It made five matches in a row that Fats had beaten him. There would be only one more—at Indianapolis in early December. If he couldn’t beat a seventy-year-old man one game out of six, he was hopeless. He had no business trying to play pool for a living.
“Did you use the list?” Fats said.
“Most of it.” He had not tried the two towns at the bottom, although one was in driving distance of Lexington.
“It’s a good list,” Fats said. “I won money in every place on it.”
“It worked at first. I beat Billy Usho in Memphis for seven thousand. A few thousand from a man named Boomer.”
“After that?”
As the road curved, Eddie could see the eminence of Scandia Peak, snow-capped, from between two lesser mountains. “Nothing. Maybe enough to pay the hotel bill.”
“Did you find Ousley in Connors?”
“I hear it’s a terrible place.”
“Ousley has money. He owns coal mines.”
“Maybe I’ll go next week.” He looked at Fats. “Tell me something. Have you ever had a job?”
“No.”
“Have you ever played nine-ball tournaments?”
“I don’t like the kids who play them.” Nine-ball had always been a different world from the one Eddie knew, even though he had played it from time to time.
“If I don’t take a job,” Eddie said, “I’ve got to do something. There’s more money in nine-ball than there is in bars.”
Fats pursed his lips. “You might win the small ones.”
“There’s a big one in Chicago next month. And then, in the spring, there’s Lake Tahoe.”
“You won’t win those. How much nine-ball have you played?”
“Not a lot.”
“Earl Borchard could beat you at straight pool, and he plays nine-ball better. You need more experience.”
“Fats, I have experience. I was beating every player in the country when those kids were in kindergarten.”
“This is nineteen eighty-three,” Fats said.
“November.”
“That�
�s right. I was looking in Billiard’s Digest. There’s a tournament in Connecticut the day after we play in Indianapolis. It goes three days, and first prize is twenty-five hundred. You can practice nine-ball a few weeks and then get in it.”
“I’ve been practicing.”
“That’s right,” Fats said, “but I just beat you.”
They drove the rest of the way to the airport in silence. When the driver slowed to get in line at the Eastern Airlines terminal, Fats said, “It’s mainly a matter of growing up.”
Eddie looked at him but said nothing.
***
Arabella was out when he let himself into the apartment. A note by the telephone read, “Roy Skammer called twice,” and gave the number. He opened a beer and dialed.
“Fast Eddie,” Skammer said, “how would you like a job?”
“You’re full of surprises.”
“The man who runs the billiard room at the College Union is retiring, and I talked to the dean about hiring you.”
“How many tables?”
“Eight or ten. There’s Ping-Pong, and some other things. Do you know where the building is?”
“Yes.” It was the only modern building he walked by on the way to the Faculty Club.
“Why don’t you drop in tomorrow morning and look it over? The old man’s name is Mayhew.”
“I will,” Eddie said.
***
Arabella had been serving wine and cheese at a student art show in the university gallery; she didn’t get home until midnight. Eddie didn’t mention the job. When she asked him about Fats he said, “I still can’t beat him.”
“Maybe next time.” She had gone into the bathroom to soak her feet. “I don’t know why I agreed to run those openings. Thelma’s was more interesting.” She began filling the tub.
“Fats says I need to grow up if I want to beat the kids who play nine-ball.”
“That sounds like Heraclitus. The way up is the way down. The way forward is the way back.”
“I don’t like riddles.”
“Sorry,” Arabella said. She splashed water on her ankles and then bent to begin soaping her feet. “I don’t think I’ve ever understood growing up.”