The Color of Money

by Walter Tevis

  “I was more of an adult at thirty than I am now.”

  “You have to be grown-up to see that.”

  “You have to be grown-up to do something about it,” Eddie said.

  ***

  The first thing he saw when he came in the double doors was the row of machines: PacMan, Donkey Kong and Asteroids. They were in a basement anteroom, with a Pepsi dispenser and a row of pay phones. It was nine-thirty in the morning and no one was playing. Eddie walked past the machines, pushed open another pair of double doors and found himself in a poolroom of sorts. There were eight four-by-eight Brunswick tables in front and four Ping-Pong tables in back. Behind them was a row of a half-dozen pinball machines. To his right toward the far end of the room was a counter; behind it stood a sour-looking old man with dirty-looking white hair. He wore a striped shirt and a necktie, and he scowled at Eddie. From the ceiling hung long rows of fluorescent-light fixtures, several of which were flickering. The floor was covered with pale green plastic tile. From a radio on the desk beside the old man came the voice of the morning talk-show host Eddie had listened to, while opening up his own poolroom, for years.

  After a minute the man looked in Eddie’s direction and raised his eyebrows. Eddie turned and walked out. He would rather sell used cars than work in a place like that.

  ***

  The sign said FOLK ART MUSEUM, but the place he parked by looked like a junkyard. There was a fence made of rusted bedsprings, each separate frame decorated with a painted metal cutout in the middle. The one nearest the car showed a man in a sombrero holding a red guitar; next to it was a giant daisy, its yellow center sun-faded and with rust at the edges of the white petals. The entrance, Arabella said, was around at the side. She led him past more cutouts—a top hat, Popeye, a crouched tiger—to a wide gap in the bedsprings, with a giant rabbit head at each side. Eddie looked at these a moment as they went through and saw they were made from the hoods of junked Volkswagens painted pink, with the big ears cut from fenders and welded on. They were not cute rabbit heads; they had wicked grins.

  Eddie and Arabella were on the road to Connors, Kentucky, where he hoped to find and play pool with the man called Ousley. This junkyard that Arabella wanted to write about was on the way there.

  The area inside the fence was the size of a football field. Filling it like a mad cocktail party were dozens of metal figures, most of them life-size and quasi-human. Near him was a steel woman with an enameled face and enormous breasts; it took Eddie a moment to realize the breasts, painted flesh color, had been made from automobile headlights. The body was car bumpers, the arms were exhaust pipes, the head was a piece of a muffler, and the beehive hairdo was of wires and springs, with sequins glued to the metal. The face had a horrible grin, a grin that was both come-on and deathly. She was dressed in a black rayon slip and stood on a small pedestal made of two-by-fours. On this sat a neatly lettered card reading NEW YORK MODEL.

  “What do you think?” Arabella said. There was no shade in the yard, and she squinted up at him amusedly.

  “It gets your attention,” Eddie said.

  At the far end was a kind of shed with an enormous amount of clutter, mostly of rusted metal car parts. Arabella led Eddie that way, past figures of brightly painted women made from manifolds or exhaust systems or fenders or what appeared to be small boilers. Each had a pedestal and a card, with names like EVERYBODY’S AUNT HILDA or KINDERGARTEN TEACHER. Some of the women had the heads of animals. One of these chillingly bore the face of a praying mantis.

  As they approached the shed a shirtless man emerged from the shadowy piles of junk that filled it. He was short and squat and heavily muscled. When he came out into the light, Eddie could see that his forearms were covered with tattoos. He looked to be in his sixties and angry.

  “Hello, Mr. Marcum,” Arabella said. “I’ve brought a friend.”

  The man squinted at him suspiciously and then at her. “You’re the Weems lady. Did you find me a Heliarc?”

  “No,” Arabella said, “I told you I couldn’t afford it. This is Ed Felson.”

  Marcum, who was even shorter than Arabella, peered up at him. Then he held out a stubby and scarred hand. “She’s a good lady,” he said, nodding toward Arabella. “I can’t get nothing out of her, but she’s a good lady.”

  “You make all these yourself?” Eddie looked back at the field full of metal women.

  “Every goddamned one of them. You wouldn’t have a beer in that car of yours?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe you could get us some.”

  “After a bit, Mr. Marcum,” Arabella said. “I want to show Eddie your sculptures.”

  “What happened to that young man? I thought he was going to sell my things in Lexington.”

  Arabella looked at him a moment and then spoke carefully. “You were asking for more money than Greg could pay. He said there would be no deal.”

  “We were just haggling,” Marcum said. “He could have called me back.”

  “Greg wasn’t able to invest anything near what you were asking. What I want to do, Mr. Marcum,” Arabella said clearly, “is interview you. I’ve brought a tape recorder.”

  “They said I was going to be on television over a year ago but nobody came by. Maybe I wasn’t pretty enough.”

  “This isn’t television. I want to do an article for Kentucky Arts magazine.”

  “Is there money in it?”

  “It might get some attention for you.”

  “Shit,” Marcum said. “My neighbors give me all the attention I want. Money’s what I could use.” He turned to Eddie. “You can buy us some beer at the A&P. Just take a left and go two blocks.”

  “Okay,” Eddie said. “What about Miller’s?”

  “Get Molson’s, if they got it,” Marcum said. “Heineken’s is all right too.”

  “I’ll get the recorder out of the car,” Arabella said.

  As Eddie handed her the little Sony from the backseat, he said, “Who’s Greg?”

  “An art dealer.”

  Eddie put the key into the ignition. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

  “That’s right,” Arabella said. She put the strap over her shoulder and walked back into the junkyard. Eddie drove off, remembering the youthful face of the man in the newspaper. He could visualize the two of them—Arabella and the artistic young man—fussing over Marcum’s crazy cartoon “sculptures.” He got a six-pack of Molson’s and a bag of Cheetos at the supermarket and then drove away.

  ***

  Eddie walked around the yard in sunshine, drinking a beer from the bottle and looking at the statues as though they were people at a party. The materials they were made of were appropriate to the looks on their faces, to the insolent way they stood and stared forward. He felt an affinity for the anger of the old bastard, banging and welding his gallery of bitches in this dead-end coal-mining town. Arabella was back in the shade sitting on a rusted boiler interviewing Marcum. It was one of those surprisingly warm November days when the odd gust of wind could chill you while the open sun made you perspire. Eddie finished his beer, stared for a while at a chromium woman with a chromium dog on a real leash, and then walked back to the shed.

  Arabella stood up at he came near. Apparently she had finished. Marcum was opening another beer for himself. “I saw you looking at the woman with a dog,” Arabella said. “I’m trying to buy it from Deeley.”

  For some reason this irritated him. “Where would you put it?”

  “By the door to the bathroom. I like the New York Model, but she’s awfully heavy and big. What do you think?”

  “Buy what you want,” Eddie said. “We can carry it in the backseat.” He walked over and got the last beer.

  “I’m going to take another look,” Arabella said.

  When she had left, Marcum spoke to him. “How do you like my girls?”

  “I like mine better.”

  The old man laughed. “She’s a peach, all right. She your wife?”

  “I
don’t have a wife.”

  “That’s the best way. Why buy a cow when you can get milk free?”

  “I don’t know anything about cows,” Eddie said. “It looks like you don’t care much for women.”

  “People say that. I just call ’em the way I see ’em.”

  “You must have seen some mean ones.”

  The old man shrugged. “If I could get the right kind of welding equipment. A Heliarc.” He looked at Eddie thoughtfully. “That young man she was here with before you, when they came in on a motorcycle. He said you could buy a used Heliarc in Lexington.”

  “I don’t know anything about welding either,” Eddie said. “What kind of man was that young man?”

  Arabella was out in the yard, bending over to look at the legs of the chromium woman.

  Marcum peered up at him thoughtfully. “I didn’t like him.” He indicated Arabella—now standing with her hands on her hips—with a forward motion of his bald head. “She liked him plenty, though.”

  Eddie said nothing. He took a long drink from the beer bottle. Arabella came back over to them. “Look,” she said to Marcum, “I’d like to have the woman and dog, but I don’t have a lot of money.”

  Marcum shrugged. “I couldn’t let it go for less than four thousand.”

  “I just don’t have it, Deeley.”

  “A fellow from Chicago offered me six.”

  “You should have sold it,” Eddie said.

  “It’s worth ten,” Marcum said. “That piece makes a statement and it’s got good, clean welds.”

  Eddie nodded. He had seen the welds, and they were irregular and gapped. There was rust on the woman’s feet where they touched the ground. It would take no more than two days to make that thing, including the dog. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the cash he had brought for pool. He counted off ten fifties, holding the money so Marcum could see it, slipped the rest of the roll back in his pocket and set the five hundred on a grinder table beside them. “I’ll give you this for it,” he said.

  “That’s a work of genuine American folk art,” Marcum said. “There’s thousands taken pictures of that piece and tried to buy it.” Marcum’s livelihood consisted of charging people a dollar to see his “museum” and take snapshots.

  “You can make another in two days,” Eddie said. He looked hard at Marcum.

  “It wouldn’t be the same.”

  “Eddie,” Arabella said, “you don’t just…”

  He kept looking at Marcum. “Maybe better.” He looked at the piles of scrap metal that virtually surrounded them. “You’ve got enough bumpers here to make forty.”

  Marcum looked at him angrily. “I couldn’t take less than a thousand.”

  Eddie shrugged, picked up the bills and put them in his pocket.

  “Just a minute,” Marcum said softly, “just a goddamned minute…”

  ***

  “I had no idea you carried so much cash,” Arabella said. She was holding the metal dog in her lap as though it were a real puppy. The chromium woman lay on the backseat.

  “Cash brings things into focus.”

  “It seems wicked.”

  “The man’s broke. Five hundred will keep him in Molson’s Ale till the Fourth of July.”

  “Poor Deeley,” Arabella said. “Poor Deeley.”

  ***

  It took them another hour, going eastward along Interstate 64, to reach Connors. During the election campaign there had been a flood of Democratic television commercials showing shuttered factories and dying mill towns; Connors looked like one of those commercials. Eddie turned off the four-lane, rounded the cloverleaf, pulled up at a stop sign, and there it was: tin storefronts embossed to resemble stone, Kay’s Luncheonette—a converted ranchhouse with dusty African violets in its picture window; small buildings of sooty concrete block bearing neon—BURTON’S DRIVE-IN LIQUORS, BILLY’S PACKAGE STORE, IRENE AND GEORGE’S BAR AND GRILL. As seen from the highway, the town’s periphery was shut-down coal tipples and gray factories with empty parking lots; its center was the four-way stop sign where Eddie’s car now sat.

  He pressed the accelerator and went through the intersection.

  “It might be fun,” Arabella said.

  Eddie said nothing, and drove along the main street until he saw the sign directing them to the motel. He followed the route grimly and found the motel at the edge of town, with a view of the interstate highway they had just left. The Bonnie Brae Inn—TV, Pool, $22.00 DBL. He pulled into the near-empty parking lot, by the sign saying “Office.”

  “This is it?” Arabella said.

  “Unless we go to Huntington, West Virginia.”

  “And you’d commute. Is there anything interesting in Huntington?”

  “There’s a Chinese restaurant.”

  “Let’s try it here,” Arabella said cheerfully.

  ***

  The room wasn’t too bad. Eddie carried her Selectric in from the car, set it on the round table by the window and plugged it in. There was a straight-back chair by the dresser, and she brought that over, put a sheet of paper in the typewriter and typed a few lines. “It’ll be fine,” she said, looking up at him.

  “I’ll get the other things.” He took the box from the car trunk with the Vesuviana, the can of espresso, the loaf of bakery rye, the cups and spoons and the hot plate, the half-dozen books and the big bottle of dry white wine. Then he brought in the woman and dog made from car bumpers and set it by the window. The view was of a barren field with dark hills in the distance, but the light was good. He began checking things out. The television worked; the mattress was firm; the carpet underfoot was thick. Arabella had taken off her shoes and was walking around.

  “I ought to carpet my apartment, Eddie,” she said. “It’s fun to go barefoot.”

  “The statue looks good,” Eddie said. “I’ll give you a call if I’m going to be late.”

  ***

  The bar at the Palace had one of those big-screen projection TVs; a quiet row of men in working clothes were watching a Rock Hudson movie on it as he came in. He stood at the bar, ordered a beer and looked around. Behind him sat two coin-operated tables, with no players.

  “I’m looking for a man named Ousley,” he said when the bartender gave him the bottle.

  “Ousley?”

  “He plays pool for money.”

  The old man sitting next to Eddie looked up. “If it’s Ben Ousley you want, he’s gone to California. Two years back.”

  “You a pool player?” the man on the other side said, reaching out shakily to touch Eddie’s cue case.

  “I’m looking for a game.”

  “Used to be some big games in here,” the first old man said.

  A younger man down at the end of the bar spoke up. “Norton Dent,” he said clearly. “He’ll play you.” Eddie did not like the tone of his voice.

  “Fine,” Eddie said. “Where is he?”

  “He might be in tonight,” the young man said, looking down the bar at Eddie. “Maybe tomorrow.”

  “Can you call him?”

  The young man looked away. “No. You’ll have to wait.”

  Eddie shrugged. There was a quarter change from his beer. He put it in the table, racked the balls, opened his cue case and took out his cue. When he was screwing it together he looked up to see that most of the men at the bar were ignoring the movie; they had swiveled in their seats to watch him. It was somehow unnerving, being stared at by these lean old men in blue and gray shirts. They watched impassively from small eyes set in seamed faces, like a photograph from the Great Depression.

  He broke the rack and began to shoot, banking the balls. The table was easy. His stroke was smooth and certain and he made clean shots, bringing them sharply off the cushions and into the pockets. It was a matter of getting the feel of the table under pressure, and keeping it. He had almost forgotten that, over the years. He ignored the men watching him, neither grandstanding for them nor missing deliberately to deceive them; and he banked the ba
lls in prettily with his glossy Balabushka. It was reassuring to come into a strange place like this, with its dim hostility, and fall immediately into perfect stroke.

  He came to the bar and got two dollars’ worth of quarters. The movie was still on, but no one was watching. They were all looking at him. He got the change and went back to the table.

  ***

  By six in the evening, the bar was full of men, but no one wanted to play. There was a grubby washroom, and he cleaned the table grime from his hands as well as he could before taking his cue apart and putting it back in the case.

  The young man was still at the end of the bar, still drinking Rolling Rock beer. He didn’t turn around when Eddie came up to him. “I’ll be back at eight-thirty,” Eddie said. “If your friend comes in, tell him I’m looking for him.”

  “He’s no friend of mine,” the man said, staring at his beer bottle.

  “Eight-thirty,” Eddie said.

  The young man turned around and looked up at him with a cold, inward stare. “I’ll tell him your name. If you’ll tell it to me.”

  “Ed Felson,” Eddie said. “I’m called Fast Eddie.”

  The young man turned back to his beer.

  ***

  “I did eight pages on Deeley and watched ‘Search for Tomorrow.’ Or maybe it was ‘Search for an Abortionist,’ considering the overall tone.”

  “You had a better day than I did.”

  “It wasn’t bad. I took a walk down the road and found a drive-in movie.”

  “Maybe we can go tonight. The man I’m waiting for may not show up.”

  “Debbie Does Dallas,” Arabella said. She was pouring them each a glass of white wine from the big bottle, using the motel’s plastic glasses. “I suspect it’s about oral sex.”

  “Sounds like a winner.” Eddie seated himself on the bed next to a pile of Arabella’s papers and took the wineglass. “We’ll stay through tomorrow. The player I was looking for, the one Fats told me about, isn’t in town, but there’s one other. He’ll be in tonight or tomorrow.”

  ***

  Dent was there when he came in. He was a huge, soft-looking man in his thirties, with sideburns and a gray T-shirt with the words EAT ME. He was shooting balls on Eddie’s table, using a cheap jointed cue with a scarlet butt. The young man was still sitting at the bar. The TV was off. On the jukebox Bobbie Gentry sang “Ode to Billy Joe.” A couple of the old men had their heads on folded arms at the bar. “Here he is,” the young man said coldly to the big man at the table. “Fast Eddie.”