by Walter Tevis
***
“Mr. Hegerman checked in about noon,” the clerk at the desk said.
“Could you let me in the room?” Eddie said. He had tried the house phone and let it ring five times. Then he checked the bar, the restaurant, the coffee shop and came back to the desk.
“You’re Mr. Felson?” the clerk said. “Mr. Hegerman’s partner?”
“Yes. Could I have a key?”
“Sheryl will let you in, Mr. Felson.”
Sheryl, it turned out, was the woman with dyed hair at the cashier’s window. Eddie followed her across the lobby and down a long hallway. At Room 117 he took the key from her and opened the door himself.
Fats was in bed. He was dressed and in a sitting position, with his eyes open and his face frozen like that of an elegant waxwork. He was clearly dead.
***
On the plane back to Lexington, Eddie had four Manhattans. When he arrived at the apartment he was drunker than he had been in years, even though it didn’t show. When Arabella let him in it was after midnight and she was wearing the white panties and T-shirt she sometimes slept in.
“Fats is dead,” he said as soon as he had set his bag and cue case down. “He made it to Indianapolis but he died before the match.” He went into the kitchen and got himself a beer.
“It’s a shock,” Arabella said. “A real shock.”
Eddie poured beer into a glass and watched the foam settle. “Even dead,” he said, “the son of a bitch looked good.”
Arabella smiled faintly. “I wish I’d met him.” She hesitated a moment. “Something came while you were gone.” She walked to the Korean chest in the living room and took a large, thin package from it.
It was postmarked Miami. In the upper left was a return address but no name. Eddie opened it and slid out a big color photograph. He held it near a lamp and looked.
Against matted trees on a white beach two roseate spoonbills stood on alarmingly thin legs. One of them had begun to hunch its wings up from its body. Its bill inclined upward; its eyes looked toward the sky. The other bird, slightly behind, watched, as if waiting to see what would happen when those pink-tipped wings began to beat the air.
***
Babes Cooley was a small young man, thin-hipped and thin-wristed, but his nine-ball break was like a sledgehammer. Balls spun themselves, ricocheted, caromed off rails; three fell in. He looked at the spread with contempt, thought a moment and began to mop them up. He nudged the one into the side, clipped the two into the far corner, sliced the five down the rail. His position for each was impeccable. When it came to the nine, he drilled it into the nearby corner pocket as though with a rifle. There was applause. As the woman referee racked them up, Babes looked at the man he was playing and said, “Your troubles have just begun.” The man looked away.
Eddie sat on the top row of the three-level bleachers, his cue on his lap, watching. Beside him an old black man was chuckling at Cooley’s arrogance, clearly liking it. Four games were going on at the tables below, with the first eight players having their first round. There were four rounds this opening day; each of the thirty-two entrants was slated for one match of ten nine-ball games. By midnight sixteen would be in the losers bracket and sixteen in the winners. It started again the next day at noon, with losers playing losers; after two rounds of that, eight men would be permanently out of the tournament. Then, after dinner, the winners from this evening would begin their matches. The system was called double elimination; it required a man to lose twice before he was out of it.
This was the first pool tournament Eddie had entered in his life. When he was young, the great hustlers—Wimpy Lassiter, Ed Taylor, Fats—would not have dreamed of going public. Nine-ball tournaments hadn’t even existed. Straight pool for coverage by newspapers had been left to the Willie Mosconis and Andrew Ponzis, superb players too, who donned evening dress and played in hotel ballrooms in New York or Chicago. They made a living from that and from a few endorsements, from a salary as showmen for the Brunswick Company, from giving exhibitions in colleges, publishing slim books with titles like Championship Pocket Billiards. While they tried to dignify the game of pool, to obliterate the memory of whatever smoky rooms they had learned it in—rooms that were always in the worst part of the worst towns—another network of professionals known only to a few had moved around some of those very rooms and others like them, in affable anonymity, men capable of as much pool-table dazzle as their tuxedoed counterparts, but dressed in brown suits like salesmen or in laborers’ dark green, travelling, looking for action. Eddie had joined that incognito fraternity and had, for a brief time in his life, been its finest player.
In front of him, Babes Cooley moved from shot to shot with tight-lipped assurance, lit by bright fluorescents set into a ceiling of gritty Celotex. Babes was dressed gorgeously in a slick blue nylon running outfit, with red racing stripes on the pants and blue Nike shoes, as though he were a basketball player warming up. His opponent was a stolid local man in a brown sweater; he seemed assiduously to ignore the flash of his opponent as he sat in a chair against the far wall and waited to shoot. From the looks of Babes’ game he would have a while to wait.
On each side of this table, other matches were in progress. Two intense young men in tight blue jeans were at one; at the other, a weary man, older than Eddie, watched a youngster in his late teens who was taking a maddeningly long time between shots. The older man had looked familiar when the players were drawing their first-round positions a half hour before, and Eddie saw now with a start that he knew him. It was Gunshot Oliver from Kansas City, a legend from Eddie’s earliest days. When Eddie was fifteen, Gunshot had come through Oakland and played for two nights at Charlie’s; he was the first travelling hustler Eddie had ever seen. This man, waiting with a kind of bleak irritation for the high-strung younger man to shoot, was the first player Eddie had ever seen who exerted the professional’s quiet control over the cue ball, easing it off rails and ducking it between other balls to arrive at position in new and shocking ways. The way he bent to shoot and the steadiness of his stroke had opened Eddie’s eyes. Oliver shot all night against the best local hustler, a man Eddie would not be able to beat for another year, and by three in the morning was playing him at odds of one fifty to a hundred balls. By that time, Gunshot’s name was being spoken reverently by the dozen people watching and Gunshot himself was running seventy or eighty balls at a time with unwearied precision. It had thrilled Eddie’s young, ambitious soul.
The kid playing Gunshot now finally shot the three ball down the rail and missed. He shook his head and grimaced, probably blaming the table or the cloth or the lights, telling himself one of the weary stories of how he had been cheated of the ball. Oliver stood and walked slowly over to the table, limping slightly. When he bent to shoot, his back was to the bleachers; his unshined black shoes were run over at the heels; and there was a small hole in one of his socks. The kid had been lucky and left him safe. Oliver tapped the three ball lightly, trying to snooker the other player behind the five. But the tap was too strong, and the white ball bounced off the rail and out from behind the five, leaving the other man open on the three. Oliver scowled and seated himself.
Suddenly Eddie remembered something. That night in Oakland thirty-five years ago, after Gunshot Oliver had collected the last of the fifty-dollar bills—had broken the bank, such as it was—the man who lost to him said, “You shoot the best straights I’ve ever seen,” and Oliver had smiled faintly at him. “Have you ever seen Minnesota Fats?” he asked quietly. It was the first time Eddie had heard the name.
“I’ve heard of him,” the loser said.
“The best in the country,” Oliver said.
Fats was dead. It had seemed impossible then that a player like Gunshot Oliver—a man who calmly pocketed balls that Eddie had thought could not be made, a man who played position by moving the cue ball around as though it were a chess piece to set where he wanted it—would, by invoking a name, imply a level of play even beyon
d his own. Eddie had never played Oliver, had never seen him since that time, but in a few years he had moved beyond him, had learned to make his own chessman of the cue ball. Oliver was right about Fats. There were levels above levels, and Fats was at the top. Now he was in a fresh grave near Miami, probably under a headstone that read GEORGE HEGERMAN and gave dates, with no indication of the lovely stroke that had died with him.
Babes Cooley clipped the nine into the side, making it register in the pocket. He looked innocently at the seated man whom he was playing and said, “It just keeps on getting worse.”
Eddie wanted to shout at the arrogant young bastard, imagining him for a moment in his brash blue nylon playing straight pool against Minnesota Fats, being ground to helplessness by age and skill and experience. He sat there on the narrow bleacher seat, crowded in by a rapt audience of men, furious at Fats for being dead.
Cooley slammed the nine in on the break, said, “Ohhh yes!” and broke again after the balls were racked. He pocketed two on the break, but the one ball took a bad roll and froze itself to the bottom rail. The cue ball stopped at the top of the table. The one was nine feet away and the cut required was paper-thin. He would have to go for a safety. Okay, you son of a bitch, Eddie thought.
Cooley frowned, stepped to the end rail, set his bridge hand down on the wood, set the cue down decisively and stroked. The concentration of his thin body was sudden and remarkable. He took one practice stroke and then speared the cue ball. It flew down the table, whispered against the one ball and flew back up, dying in a cluster of balls. The one slid along the bottom cushion and plopped into the corner pocket. Someone in the crowd whistled and then there was loud applause. Eddie did not clap; he merely gripped his cue case harder. He would have avoided that shot and Fats might have missed it.
On the other table, Gunshot Oliver had begun to shoot. Eddie turned his attention back to that game. Oliver ran the four, five and six. When he made the six he brought the cue ball off the cushion and split the nine ball away from the seven beautifully, setting it up for the run-out. It was a straight-pool player’s shot, the kind of thing Eddie himself did almost instinctively. Oliver pocketed the seven, eight and nine. There was polite applause. But on the eight and nine his stroke lacked something; the cue ball, though it found places where the next shot could be made, did not have the sureness of movement that Eddie remembered from Oakland. Oliver stroked stiffly and the ball looked somehow dead as it rolled into positions that were barely adequate.
The referee began to rack the balls. Abruptly Eddie rose and stepped down from the bleachers. He tucked his cue case under his arm and walked away.
***
“The kids make me nervous,” he said into the phone. He lay on the freshly made bed in his Holiday Inn room, by his unopened suitcase.
“They don’t have your experience,” Arabella said.
He hesitated. “I’m fifty years old, Arabella. I watched Babes Cooley playing a half hour ago and I wanted to kick his punk ass. I’m old enough to be his father.”
“You’re still upset about Fats, aren’t you?”
She was right. “I thought I was going to learn some things from him.”
“Maybe he didn’t have anything more to teach you.”
“Maybe not.”
***
The poolroom was something like his own had been, but larger. It sat between a Big Bear supermarket and a fabric store in a faded shopping center directly across the interstate from the Holiday Inn. You drove over a cloverleaf, parked in front of the supermarket and pushed through glass double doors. On a gray, cigarette-burned carpet sat two rows of eight pool tables. In the aisle between them, three rows of temporary bleachers had been erected to face the tables on the right. The two tables at the far end were for the players to warm up on; the two near ones were covered with heavy plastic. The four in the middle were where the tournament games were played.
The eight tables on the left as you came in were in regular service, with the poolroom’s ordinary customers shooting their games and pretending to ignore the men who came in the door with expensive cue cases and sharp clothes. The tournament tables had a white card on the side of each, facing the bleachers. Most of the evening spectators were crowded in the bleachers near the table whose card displayed a “1”; Eddie’s first game was on Number Four. Eddie took his Balabushka out, slipped the empty case under the table and began to warm up. One bleary-eyed old man watched him dispassionately; no one else paid any attention.
After five minutes a clean-shaven young man with glasses and a white shirt came pushing through the space between the bleachers. He held out his hand to Eddie. “I’m Joe Evans,” he said politely. “You must be Mr. Felson.”
Eddie shook the hand. “Do you want to warm up?”
“A little,” the young man said.
There was a wooden chair for each of the players against the wall, separated by a small table that held a pitcher of water, an ashtray, a plastic shaker of baby powder and a towel for sweating hands, and a few fresh cubes of chalk. Eddie sat in one of the chairs and watched Evans.
The young man spread out the balls and began to run them in rotation, starting with the one. He was not very good; that was apparent immediately from his tight stroke and the self-conscious grimace on his face when he missed. He was playing as if for an audience, although no one was watching except Eddie and the old man in the bleachers. Eddie had seen this kind of player before: Evans’ emotional concentration was on not making a fool of himself. He was not thinking about winning, only about looking good. It would be simple to beat him.
It was simple. A few times during their match Evans had opportunities, but he blew them. Eddie could see his mind working from watching his face, trying to talk himself into shots, trying not to think about what he was leaving for Eddie if he missed, generally letting his head get in the way. A few times Eddie felt genuinely sorry for him, at the way he beat himself; but most of the time he was annoyed. Eddie played him methodically, shooting nine-ball as though it were straight pool; he beat him ten to four. During the last few minutes, a half-dozen latecomers, unable to get seats near the hot game on Table One, came to the bleachers near their table and watched. There was mild applause when Eddie won the tenth game. That was it until tomorrow; he was now one of the sixteen winners.
***
“I’m glad you’re off to a good start,” Arabella said.
“The kid was terrible.”
“He must have been good enough to get the entry fee.”
“I’ve got someone named Johannsen tomorrow. I don’t know who he is, but he’ll be tougher. How’re things at the magazine?”
“There isn’t much to do right now. I spend a lot of time with the secretary, drinking coffee.”
“It sounds better than typing.”
“Eddie,” she said, “I wish I had a talent like you have. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life working in an office doing what some man tells me to do.”
“I’ll teach you how to play nine-ball.”
“It isn’t funny, Eddie. If I could shoot pool like you, I’d be rich.”
Somehow that annoyed him. “Buy yourself a cue stick,” he said.
“I mean it, Eddie. You sat on your talent for twenty years.”
“I’m not sitting on it now.”
There was silence on the line for a moment. Then she said, “Beat that man tomorrow, Eddie. Beat him bad.”
***
Johannsen was chubby and wore a plum-colored sweater over blue jeans; he appeared to be about thirty. During the warm-up he was unself-conscious and accurate. It was two in the afternoon, and they were playing on Table Three, with a dozen people watching when the referee stopped the practice, racked up the nine balls and put two extra balls out for the lag. Eddie won the break by lagging his ball to within a quarter inch of the cushion, but when he smashed them open nothing went in. From behind him he heard a whispered voice in the stands say, “Straight-pool player,” and he knew,
grimacing, what it meant: in straight pool you never had occasion to hit the balls that hard. It took practice to learn to do it. He turned to look at the man now breaking in the match starting on their right; the young player drew his cue back, hesitated, and slammed his whole body forward against the table as he rammed the stick into the cue ball. The diamond of nine balls flew apart so hard that the nine, from the center of the rack where it was always placed, spun off two cushions and narrowly missed a pocket before coming to a stop. On Eddie’s break the nine ball had barely moved; and Johannsen, despite the cluttered position of the balls, ran them out.
It looked for a minute to Eddie—furious with himself and able to do nothing but wait—that he would run out the next rack, but he made a mistake on the seven ball and missed it, dogging it into the rail near the bottom corner.
Eddie stepped up icily and ran the seven, eight and nine. On the break he tried to slam them harder, but only one ball fell in and the nine barely moved. But the way it moved left it lined up dead with the three ball for the corner pocket, and Eddie took advantage of that. He ran the one and two, and made the nine on a combination. That got him applause. On the next break he hit harder, ending with his belly against the table and his cue stick extended in front of him; this time the nine stopped near the corner pocket, with the four a few inches on the other side of it. He felt better about the break shot now. But the two ball was at the far end of the table; and when he came off the one, his position on it was wrong. He bent, stroked twice, and slammed into it, giving the stick a forward fillip with his wrist, for strong drawing English. And crammed the two ball into the pocket and back out again, dogging it. Eddie turned away, to see Babes Cooley on Table Four pocketing the nine-ball to applause. He sat down and looked at the floor. He heard Johannsen getting up to shoot, heard the tap that would send the two ball into the pocket and the cue ball back down to a simple position on the three, heard Johannsen shoot the three ball in, and looked up in time to see him line up the four and nine and make the easy combination—scoring the nine ball, winning the game and the break. Johannsen had him three to two and had the break coming up. It was a son of a bitch, especially because this imperturbable man in the sweater was one of the weaker players in the tournament. He had won a college nine-ball championship somewhere once in the Midwest, and that was it. If Eddie couldn’t blow him away, he had no business being here.