by Walter Tevis
The big man went on shooting. He was drilling the balls straight in, and he looked good at it. When he had finished the table, slamming the last ball the long diagonal into the far corner pocket, he looked up at Eddie. His face was pale and treacherous-looking, with a pout to the thick lips. He had the weedy beginnings of a mustache. Bobbie Gentry finished and Johnny Cash started, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” Eddie did not like the looks of the man nor the feeling in the buzzed-out barroom, but decided to heed Cash’s words and go with it.
“I heard of you,” Dent said.
Eddie nodded noncommittally. “Do you want to play eight-ball?”
“I expect you mean for money,” Dent said in a drawl, “being as they say you’re a hustler.”
“I started hustling pool thirty years ago,” Eddie said. “I’ll play you eight-ball for fifty a game if you want to play.”
“Shit,” the man said, “you sound mean as a snake, Fast Eddie. Maybe you’re just too good for me.”
Eddie shrugged. “Maybe I am.”
“I’ll try you for fifty.”
“Fine,” Eddie said. He took his glasses from the pocket of his leather jacket and put them on.
***
They tossed a coin for the break. The other man won it, broke the balls wide and ran half the solids before dogging a thin cut into the corner. Eddie played it carefully and had him beaten in five minutes. He was nervous but he had no trouble controlling the game. The room was silent when he finished. Dent reracked the balls. Then he reached up with the tip of his cue and slid a wooden bead along the string near the back wall, over a big Miller’s High Life poster.
Eddie looked at him.
“Break the balls,” Dent said.
“You owe me fifty dollars.”
“On the string,” Dent said, looking back over his shoulder toward it. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a clump of bills fastened with a money clip in the shape of a naked woman, and flashed it for Eddie. “Okay?”
“It’s the way we do it here,” the young man at the bar said.
Eddie shrugged, stepped to the table and broke the balls. He ran four of the solids and then missed deliberately, leaving Dent an easy shot on two stripes. Dent ambled heavily up to the table and began shooting; he made all the stripes and then pocketed the eight. Eddie felt annoyed at himself for making it that easy. The man was good enough without help. He would play it straight and not throw off; he would beat this man, with his dangerous baby face, his hostile, shifting eyes, until he quit.
It was difficult at first. Dent shot eight-ball well, but Eddie bore down and beat him, gradually adding beads to the string. His stroke was better than it had been for years, better even than during the long run against Fats at Albuquerque; he bent and shot, bent and shot, and the balls kept falling in. He won six in a row before Dent set his cue against the wall and took a huge sheepskin coat from a hook near it. He put the coat on, his back to Eddie.
Eddie looked up at the string. There were twelve beads pushed over to his side of it. He looked toward Norton Dent, even huger in the coat, and began taking his cue apart.
“You owe me six hundred dollars, Norton,” Eddie said.
Dent turned slowly. His voice was soft, almost amiable. “You’ve got to collect it.”
Eddie had the cue in two pieces now. He set the smaller one, the shaft, on the table. He took off his glasses and set them beside it. “Is that how you pay what you owe, Norton?” he said levelly. The danger was palpable, but he ignored it, did not care about it. He wanted to kill this oaf.
Dent took a step closer. Behind him, every man in the room was staring at them, waiting.
“I don’t pay what I don’t have to pay,” Dent said, “you pool-shark piece of shit.”
For a moment Eddie felt a horrible weariness, heard an old voice saying Do I have to do all this? He gripped the small end of the cue butt, stepped forward and swung hard, going for the side of the man’s head.
Dent was young, and faster than he looked. He ducked and turned; the stick fell across the collar of his coat. With his free arm Eddie rammed him in the stomach, cursing the coat that would soften the blow and knowing it wasn’t going to work, that he was going to get hurt. Maybe the others at the bar would stop the man.
Immediately Dent’s weight was on him, wrapping him in a bear hug, the greasy smell of the coat in his face. He dropped the cue butt and got in one solid punch against the side of the man’s nose before the sheer weight on his body held him down and a blow crashed against his neck and seemed to explode intolerably in his head.
He came to as some men were putting him into the backseat of his car. He was numb and could not see well. The men had been talking, and one of them was saying, “You can follow us and pick me up.” It was the young man, the one who had been presiding over this whole thing from the start. He was talking to a man in a red baseball cap. “Where to?” the man in the cap said.
The young man seemed friendly and sympathetic now. His coldness had gone. “You’ll be all right,” he said to Eddie in a confidential tone of voice. “Have you got a place to spend the night?”
“The Bonnie Brae.”
“Give me his pool stick and glasses,” the young man said to the one in the baseball cap. An older man was standing next to him, watching with solicitude. Eddie was sitting in the car, with the door beside him closed and the window down. The young man climbed into the driver’s seat. The man in the cap put Eddie’s cue case through the window and Eddie took it. He followed with the glasses. “Let me have your keys,” the young man said. Everything seemed friendly, well-organized. It was as though they did this every day of their lives. Eddie felt his face for blood, but there wasn’t any. He reached into his jacket pocket, found the keys, handed them up to the driver. “Pump the gas pedal first,” he said.
“You got him in the eye,” the old man said. “He’s a rough son of a bitch.”
Eddie leaned back in his seat, beginning to feel the pain in his body. He worked his hands a minute. They were all right. Nothing broken.
***
“My god!” Arabella said. “Did you get drunk?”
“I got beaten up.”
“I think you bloody did.”
It was after midnight, but she was able to get a first-aid kit from the motel office and put Bactine and Band-Aids on the cuts across his back, from the poolroom floor. He had bruises, but there was nothing to do about them. A blotchy place was developing on the side of his neck, and there was a smaller bruise on his forehead. He hurt badly in three places and his head throbbed. He was still dizzy. In the bathroom mirror his face looked terrible. “That gross son of a bitch,” he said. “I’d like to go back there and break his thumbs.”
“How horrible,” Arabella said.
“It would hurt like hell.” He came into the bedroom, limping slightly. His right leg was getting stiff. Arabella’s typewriter sat on the table with a stack of paper and the coffee-maker beside it. The plastic curtain over the closed window had the same design of boomerangs that the restaurant table had. On the dresser next to the TV sat the wine bottle. He poured himself a glassful carefully, using the hand that was the least sore, and then took a long swallow. He turned to look at her sitting against the bed pillows. “When we go back,” he said, “I’ll take the job.”
***
Arabella was no longer a faculty wife, but she was still invited to faculty parties. The first time she suggested he go, Eddie declined; but he was bored at the apartment watching television alone, and he went with her the next weekend. For an hour or so he felt uneasy with the professors and their talk of tenure and department cutbacks. He was painfully conscious of his own lack of education. The home he was in, with canvases on the walls painted by the professor who had invited them, with its plain, expensive furniture, represented an entirely different scale of life from the house he had lived in with Martha, with its cheery wallpaper in the kitchen. The kitchen here was white and austere; the me
n who stood around in it with drinks in their hands were all professors of art or English or history. Eddie read books but he knew nothing about those disciplines; nothing, from experience, about college.
But he did not live with Martha anymore. The elegant British woman in the silk dress, the woman with the curly silver hair and bright, intelligent eyes who looked right at men when she talked to them and who moved around with these people as more than an equal, was his woman. And he did not live in a suburban house with asphalt shingles on its sides; he lived in a high-ceilinged, white-walled apartment with folk-art paintings, downtown on Main Street.
Standing in the kitchen near the refrigerator, he listened to three art professors across the room. They were discussing next year’s raise in salary. One of them changed the subject to the Cincinnati Bengals’ chances for the Superbowl. No one was talking about art. No one had talked about art or literature or history in the hour he had been in the house. He looked at their clothes; not one of them was dressed as well as he. He took a sip from his Manhattan, walked over to the group and joined in. They talked about the scarcity of good quarterbacks. After a while, Eddie introduced himself. There was nothing to it.
***
The bedroom overlooked a garden that separated the building from the back of a clothing store. There was a kitchen with white countertops, a dining alcove, and a big living room overlooking Main Street. They would have to buy a dining table and bedroom furniture. It was on the second floor and the view from the living room was not as broad as the view from Arabella’s other apartment, but they were still downtown. Arabella had just started her editorial job with the journal and she was too busy to take more than a quick look; but when he told her it was three sixty a month, she said, “Take it, Eddie.” He signed the lease and gave two months’ rent as a deposit. Then he called a moving company.
***
“Eddie,” Skammer said, “I’d drop it all and go on the road. I don’t care about tenure. If I could shoot pool like you shoot pool…. Shit, if I could play the oboe, or learn to be a chef….” They were in the Skammers’ big kitchen.
“Roy signed up for a cooking school in France,” Pat said, “but we backed out at the last minute.”
“Lost my nerve.” Skammer plucked the onion from his Gibson and held it between thumb and forefinger for a moment.
“Lost your deposit money too,” Pat said.
Skammer shrugged and popped the onion into his mouth.
“It’s hard to make a change,” Eddie said.
“You’re doing it,” Arabella said.
He looked up from the couch at her. “It was handed to me. The judge gave the poolroom to Martha.”
“Some have greatness thrust upon them,” Skammer said.
Eddie looked back to him. Skammer wore perfectly fitting beige corduroys, beige Saucony running shoes and a white cotton boat-neck sweater that fit him loosely. “What’s wrong with teaching history?”
“Grading the papers,” Skammer said immediately.
“You complain a lot about departmental meetings,” Pat said, “and about living in Kentucky.”
“Camouflage,” Skammer said. “I give lecture courses in world history, and I enthrall the students with my enlightened chatter. I point to maps and I tell anecdotes about the wives of generals. I describe political factions and frown over conditions in the cities.”
“It sounds fine to me,” Eddie said.
“You love it,” Pat said levelly. “You love the sound of your own voice.”
“Maybe I do. But when I read the humbug they write in exam books with their blue Bics, I want to cut my throat.”
“You and your exquisite sensibilities,” Pat said. “Sit down and I’ll serve the salad.”
“You’re changing the subject,” Roy said. “Every time I read their papers I want to resign.”
“Maybe it’s because there’s no show business in grading papers,” Pat said.
“You and your damned insights,” Roy said, cheerfully.
The Skammers lived in a farmhouse on the Old Frankfort Pike. All of the rooms were austere except for the kitchen, which had a brick fireplace and a white sofa. The high-tech table and chairs were lit by track lights, and the floor was scarred pine, varnished and bare. A big window looked on a field with patches of snow and a barn in the distance.
Arabella put the salad bowl on the table and carried the wooden fork and spoon to Roy. “Toss the salad,” she said. “Maybe you don’t want feedback from your students.”
“That’s the truth,” Roy said. He went over to the table and slipped the implements under the mound of lettuce leaves in the wooden bowl. “Maybe I just want to show off.”
“There are worse things than that,” Eddie said.
Roy began agitating the leaves expertly. “I’d rather shoot pool,” he said.
“In front of an audience,” Pat said.
“Honi soit qui mal y pense,” Roy said, lifting the leaves and letting them drop back into the bowl.
“The trouble with shooting pool,” Eddie said, “is that it’s no good if you don’t win.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” Skammer said.
“Let’s eat,” Pat said. “The roast’ll be ready in ten minutes.”
***
When they were driving home Eddie asked Arabella how much money the Skammers made.
“He’s an associate professor,” she said. “Twenty-six thousand, probably. She’s an assistant and makes about twenty.”
“They’re doing all right.”
Arabella was quiet for a minute. Then she said, “I think he really does hate it. He doesn’t have the strength to leave.”
“It sounds like a good life to me.”
“He tried to kill himself. A couple of years ago.”
“Come on….” Eddie said.
“With pills. He took a sabbatical to write a book and he didn’t write anything. Just hung around the house and tinkered with the plumbing. One morning he didn’t wake up and Pat took him to the hospital. They pumped him out.”
Eddie shook his head. “I wouldn’t have thought he was the type.”
“Well,” Arabella said, “there’s a lot of it going around.”
***
The second drugstore he tried had dental plaster. He bought two cartons of the large size, along with a deck of plastic playing cards, and put them in the backseat. The next morning he drove out to the old poolroom.
The windows were boarded up, but the key still opened the front door. There were no workmen around. He had never seen workmen, only the sporadic effects of their presence. The carpet was gone now, and the counter had been torn out and lay against the wall like a passed-out drunk. He ignored all this and walked to the back wall where the closet door stood by the men’s room, still bearing its Employees Only sign. Nothing in it had been touched. He took down a large roll of cloth wrapped in clear plastic and labeled SIMONIS, easing it from the top shelf and putting it into an empty toilet-paper box. On another shelf was the tenon lathe, like an oversize pencil sharpener; he set it carefully next to the roll of cloth and then got the magnetic tack hammer, the four-foot level and a stack of roofing shingles. From a low shelf he took a small carton labeled TWEETEN ELK MASTER and a cardboard box filled with white plastic cylinders. He took those and then looked around himself. After the familiarity of the supplies closet, the devastated poolroom was a synchronistic shock, moving him instantaneously from the way things had been to the way they were now. The effect was not altogether unpleasant; there was no love in him for this place. He could have torn it apart himself. He looked at his watch. It was seven-thirty. The college Rec Room didn’t open until nine.
He got there a little before eight and locked the door behind him for privacy. Mayhew’s supplies closet was at the end of the room facing the pinball machines; he got from it a brace with a fork bit, a hex wrench and a screwdriver.
In ten minutes he had the rails off number eight and was removing the old cloth, using the scr
ewdriver to pry loose the staples that held it. When he was finished he folded the faded and worn fabric and put it in the trash. The three-piece slate underneath was a mess; he cleaned out the loose plaster and then picked the rails up from the floor and set them on it. By the time he had the feather strips pulled and the old cloth off the cushions, it was nine. He stopped working, turned on the rest of the lights and opened up. Three students were at the door, all of them in down coats, waiting to play the arcade machines. He got quarters for them from the cash register and went back to work, ignoring the dim electronic threats from the machines and the voices of the students.
You had to level the table itself first; if you did it after patching the slate, the patches would crack. He used the center slate for a benchmark, setting the level across it and then tapping a shingle under one of the table legs to bring the bubble to center. He switched the level to right angles, checked it and slipped in another shingle. It took several minutes to get it right, placing the level the long way, the short way, and diagonally, choosing between thick and thin shingles. Three black students came in to play nine-ball; he gave them the balls and the diamond-shaped nine-ball rack, ticketed their table for the time. The clock punched out 11:42 on the card. The lunchtime crowd would be in at about twelve-thirty; he would be too busy to finish the table. He hurried back to it, wanting to get the three pieces of slate leveled and patched before that happened.
It went pretty fast. It was years since he had done any of this, but he had forgotten none of it. There was something deeply satisfying about doing it and doing it right. Not many people knew how. Clearly, Mayhew—or whoever did it for him—did not. Eddie got the rest of the old plaster off the slates and leveled them, sliding playing cards between the big slabs of slate and the wooden joists that held them, raising one end and then the other by the thickness of two aces or a jack, until they were all three perfectly aligned. He sighted down each end of the table and then used the level. With a whiskbroom he swept the plaster dust away; he went back to the closet, took an empty coffee can and began mixing the dental plaster.