The Color of Money

by Walter Tevis

  “He beat me in New London.”

  She reached out and turned the water off and then slipped herself into the tub. “That was New London,” she said. “A lot’s happened since.”

  “I hate his guts,” Eddie said. “I hate him like I hate that kid lover of yours.”

  She said nothing, but began soaping herself. Eddie took off his shirt and lit a cigarette. He seated himself on the padded bench and looked out the window. After a while he heard the water begin to run from the tub and then heard her drying herself off. Then she said, “The mess at the shop is cleaned up. The police never picked anybody up.”

  “What about fingerprints?”

  “Nothing. It was all smears or something.”

  “If I win this,” Eddie said, “we could go back in business.”

  “Eddie,” she said, “it doesn’t matter to me right now whether we go back into business or not. Just win it.”

  He turned and looked at her. She was dressed now, in a gray skirt and black sweater. “I’m afraid of Cooley,” he said. “Scared shitless of him.”

  They arrived early because Arabella wanted a good seat. She managed to get in the third row of the bleachers next to the quiet blonde who travelled with Cooley. There was only one table now, in the center of the room. Eddie went to the practice area and began shooting. His stroke felt tight; his glasses had begun to irritate the bridge of his nose; his hands were cold. He kept shooting, softening his stroke a bit; he was getting into it when the PA voice came on: “The finals of the losers’ matches will begin in three minutes. The players will be Mr. Gordon Cooley and Mr. Ed Felson.” Eddie felt himself go tight. He picked up the poolroom cue from where it was leaning against the wall, gripped it in his right hand with the Balabushka and headed between the bleachers. The table sat empty under a trapezoid of light, and the people in the stands had become quiet. Cooley was approaching from the bleachers on the other side, just now walking into the lights. It was like a boxing arena before a title fight. Eddie put his free hand into his pocket so the trembling wouldn’t show.

  Cooley had a following. As he set his cue case on the table and opened it, someone in the stands shouted, “You’ll do it, Babes!” and somebody else bellowed, “Kill!” Cooley smiled, looking down at the cue he was taking from its case. Then he glanced briefly up at Eddie but said nothing.

  The announcer introduced them, listing a dozen titles for Cooley, including New London and this tournament itself from the year before. Eddie was “the legendary Fast Eddie Felson.”

  The referee’s white shirt-front glistened in the lights; his tuxedo looked brand-new, perfectly pressed. “The gentlemen will lag for break.” He wore white gloves and carried two white balls. He set them at the head of the table, on the line, and the two players bent and shot together. Eddie hit his ball too hard; it came back to the top rail and bounced a foot away. Cooley’s lag was perfect.

  Now Cooley was all calm efficiency. He set the cue ball on the line, drew back, smashed the balls open, dropping the five and eight. Not taking his eyes from the green he chalked and began running. He had the table empty in two minutes, to applause, and the referee racked. Eddie sat in his chair, watching, trying to calm himself.

  When Cooley drew back his arm for the break, a voice shouted, “On the snap, Babes!” and he plowed into them. The nine did not go, but the table opened for him. He ran it. The applause this time was louder. Two-nothing. Eddie began tapping his foot on the floor.

  And on the next break Cooley made the nine. The applause was thunderous. Babes stopped in the middle of chalking up and turned to face the largest bleachers. “It had to be,” he said. Then he turned, broke the balls, and made the nine with a combination. Four-nothing. Eddie’s stomach was like ice, and his palms were wet, his lips dry. Babes flicked a glance his way and then back to the table. Eddie could hear him whisper, plainly, “By the balls.” Eddie’s heart began pounding and he gripped his cue like a weapon.

  Babes broke, made one, and began to roll. But on the four his position was off and he wasn’t able to knock apart a trio of balls that had clustered near the foot spot. He studied the lie a moment and played Eddie safe on the five, sending the cue ball to the bottom rail and the five to the top of the table. Eddie stood up as calmly as he could. A cut was barely possible on the five ball, but you didn’t go for shots like that against someone like Cooley. The thing to do was return the safety. When he got to the table he studied it a moment, more to calm himself than to decide. He could make that shot. Possibly. He had made tougher ones before. Cooley would play it safe. So would Fats. At four-nothing it would be dumb to go for it.

  Then he looked over at Cooley. Babes hadn’t even seated himself. He was expecting to shoot again in a moment. Eddie took a square of chalk from the edge of the table and chalked his cue. And then a rough, gravelly voice rang out from the stands, “Go for it, Eddie!” It was Boomer. Something relaxed in Eddie’s stomach. He set the chalk down, took his Balabushka at the balance, bent to the table. There was the five ball, eight feet away, its edge sharp in his vision. There were the three balls that would have to be broken apart if making the five would mean anything. He took a deep breath, stroked, and felt the solid hit of his cue tip against the white ball. The white ball sped down the table, clipped the edge of the five, ricocheted out of the corner and came back down to the head spot, knocking the three clustered balls apart. The five ball rolled to the edge of the corner pocket with chilling slowness and teetered on the edge. It fell in. Into the middle of the pocket. The crowd exploded in applause.

  Eddie did not look up. He did not have an easy shot on the six, and the seven was in a bad place. Best to take another chance and bank the six, so the cue ball would go naturally to the seven. He sucked in his breath again and banked it. It went into the center of the side pocket. The cue ball stopped perfectly for the seven down the rail. He made it. The eight was gone; the nine was next. Eddie made the nine. There was applause again.

  He looked up. Cooley had sat down.

  From then on it was simple. Eddie’s concentration and poise were unshakable. He made the nine twice more before a bad roll on the break forced him to play safe, and the safe he played was a mortal lock. Cooley could do nothing with it. Eddie wound up with the cue ball in hand and ran out the rack. On the next, he made the nine on the break and on the next he made it with a combination off the five ball. He was forced to play safe a few times, and Cooley managed another win, but that didn’t matter. When Eddie was breaking them, now people would shout “On the snap, Fast Eddie!” He could hear Arabella’s strong, feminine British voice among them, along with Boomer’s. “On the snap!”

  He had entered that time zone he had nearly forgotten, where his stroke was not only dead-on but where his mind could somehow arch itself above his game and see the great simplicity and clarity of what he was doing on this green table with its spinning balls. Time passed without moving, until the PA system voice said, “Ten games to four. Fast Eddie,” and the applause washed over him, bringing him back.

  He put the Balabushka away and then took his glasses off, fifty years old again. He had beaten them. He had beaten Borchard at nine-ball and now he had beaten this brash genius kid. Cooley had already left. Arabella was coming toward him from between the bleachers and so was Boomer. Boomer got there first and was hugging him, smelling of Drambuie and saying, “Those fucking kids, Eddie. Those fucking kids,” and then Arabella was coming toward him with her face glowing. He pulled himself away from Boomer and she hugged him.

  Cooley had left, but now he was coming back. As Arabella stepped away from Eddie the young man walked up to him and held out a hand. Eddie took it. “Good shooting, old-timer,” Cooley said, smiling tightly.

  “Thanks,” Eddie said, hating him.

  “Earl,” Cooley said, “will whip your ass.”

  “The last time I played Earl I beat him.”

  Cooley looked at Eddie silently for a moment, his smile unchanged. “Two brothers and a
stranger,” he said.

  ***

  The finals would be at two. It was Saturday morning. Arabella sat on a weight-lifting bench and watched while Eddie did his workout. Then they swam and got into the whirlpool together. It was 9:00 A.M.

  In the hot water she said, “Children in England learn a lot about America in school. The Grand Canyon, for instance.”

  “So do we.”

  “It’s not as exotic for you. In Third Form we had a picture of Lake Tahoe in our text. I remember it well.”

  “I understand it’s right outside,” Eddie said, nodding toward the far wall.

  “It’s the most spectacular mountain lake in the world. Thousands of feet deep, and the water extraordinarily clear.” She was sitting next to him on the whirlpool’s underwater ledge, and now she put her hand on his arm. “There’s a house called Vikingsholm at the edge of it. I’d like to go. Maybe we could have a picnic lunch.”

  He had forgotten the lake itself over the past few days. When he looked out the window of his room, it was only to see the lights from the Hotel Sahara or the sky; the small patch of blue from the lake no longer registered.

  “I want to be back at one,” he said.

  “Of course. Can we go?”

  “How far is the house?”

  “I don’t know. The whole lake is seventy miles around.”

  “Maybe you can get a brochure at the desk.”

  “They don’t have brochures at the desk. They don’t want you going anywhere.”

  ***

  It was a twenty-mile drive along a winding road. Several times Arabella cried out at glimpses of the lake itself, through dense pines and redwoods. He pulled over in a wide place and they got out to look. The water was bluer than the sky, and the sky, here where Nevada and California joined, was intensely blue. Snow gleamed on the mountains behind the water. The trees were so green they were almost black. The surface of the lake was like glass beneath them, a hundred or so yards down. Eddie, still thinking of Borchard, lit a cigarette and watched Arabella watch the lake. The air was thin and cold; he jammed his hands into his pockets, puffed on his cigarette and waited. It was a shock to be outdoors. It was a shock that this lake was here, was this big, this perfect. Somehow he felt threatened by it; it seemed less real than the casino at Caesar’s Tahoe, less real than the blackjack tables and the slots. Lakes like this belonged on postcards, with the pines, the cloudless sky, the snow on the mountains. He finished his cigarette, ground it out on the gravel at the edge of the road, looked down toward the water—at its uncluttered cold stillness—and thought of the blue Gulf of Florida and of Minnesota Fats. Fats had died a winner. It could be done. It was a question of balls.

  Arabella came back from the turnoff’s edge, her cheeks red from the cold air. “It’s every bit as lovely as the textbook claimed,” she said, and put her arm through Eddie’s for a moment. Then she looked up at his face. “Let go of it for now, Eddie. Think about it later.”

  It was too early for the tourist season, and the sign at the little parking lot saying VIKINGSHOLM had a smaller sign below it: CLOSED TO VISITORS. “Let’s ignore that,” Arabella said. They climbed over the chain and headed down the trail to the lake’s edge a half mile below. It was getting warmer now and the smell of the pines was strong. Every now and then they would pass a place near a turn in the trail where water gushed down the dark granite. Spring thaw. The way the lake was made. Two chipmunks scuttled along a fallen log, through ferns. Eddie and Arabella came around a turn and, below them, surrounded by enormous trees, was a house of stone and timber with a high, gabled roof. Fifty yards in front of it Lake Tahoe began.

  “Sweet Jesus!” Arabella said, “I want it.”

  The water, colorless except for the glitter of pyrites in the sand, lapped the shore with exquisite gentleness. They turned toward the house. To the right of the doorway, a row of casement windows overlooked the lake. “You could have breakfast in there and just look out,” Arabella said.

  Eddie said nothing.

  “It was built by a woman,” Arabella said.

  “A woman with a rich husband.”

  She looked at him. “Two rich husbands.”

  There was a simple bench under a redwood a few yards from the house. They sat there and had Swiss-on-rye sandwiches, doughnuts and coffee. She had brought two beers, but Eddie refused his, wanting to keep his head clear. He leaned against the bark of the tree and tried to relax—tried to get pool balls and the bright green of the table out of his head, the feel of the Balabushka out of his right hand, the knot out of his stomach.

  “When we started together,” Arabella said, “I think I was a help to you. You were low and you didn’t trust yourself. You didn’t want to tell me what you did for a living. It turned out I liked you shooting pool, and that helped you, didn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “The problem with me, Eddie, is that I’m good with men but not with myself. When I left Harrison, I was terrified.” She looked over at him, holding her plastic coffee cup. “Terrified. I’d had an easy marriage and enough comfort and I stayed in it for years after I ceased to give a damn about Harrison. Then I was in love with Greg for a while and that gave me a lift. Just to be able to attract a man as young and as bright as Greg. And then there was the accident.”

  “I know.”

  “I don’t know if you do, Eddie. His chest was crushed. His family hated me and I wasn’t asked to the funeral. For several months, with my knees bandaged, I felt that I could not leave Harrison, no matter what.”

  Eddie was lighting a cigarette. “Let me have that,” she said, and took it. “I didn’t have any bloody money. I had a C D worth three thousand dollars. There was four hundred in my checking account. It took a year to work up the courage to walk out. I’m scared to death of not having money.”

  Eddie lit another cigarette. “Me too,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “Do you want to run the folk-art business, while I travel?”

  “Are you going to travel?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “After tonight things will be clearer. Right now I’m unsure.”

  “About pool?”

  “I still don’t know if I can make a living at it, by playing tournaments.” He looked at her sitting by him, at her cheeks, bright red from the cold. “I’m not sure about us.”

  She frowned and blinked. “I wasn’t sure either, until I bought the airplane ticket to Reno.”

  “And you’re sure now?”

  “I threw those newspapers away.”

  He thought a long moment before he spoke. “If I had some, I’d throw them away too.”

  She looked at him. “It sounds like a deal.”

  Even from the doorway, with the bleachers between him and the one pool table, it was different. The lights were twice as bright as before; and when he pushed through the crowd that packed the space between bleachers, he could see the reason for the lights: television. There was a twenty-foot steel boom above the playing area, with a camera and floodlights hanging from it. Two strangers stood talking to each other by the table, oblivious of the waiting crowd. They both wore blue nylon jackets with a shoulder patch circle reading ABC. It was “Wide World of Sports.” They had never picked up the show with Fats, but here they were now. The sons of bitches. Three cameras sat on wheels around the table, each with a man in a nylon jacket by it. On the speakers’ table was a row of TV monitors.

  He did not see Borchard. It was one-fifty. Arabella had asked Cooley’s girl to save her a seat, and she went to it now. Eddie walked out to the table, squinting as he came under the warm spotlights. Clearly the TV people weren’t ready, but it might be good to get used to the brightness. The men in blue jackets ignored him. The two at the table were bent over a clipboard; when Eddie came near they looked up and then back, preoccupied. He was just getting annoyed when he saw Borchard pushing through the crowd between the bleachers. People began to applaud. The TV men stopped what they were doing. One of
them waved at Borchard and the two walked over to him and huddled in conversation. The applause became louder. Eddie opened his case and got out the Balabushka.

  Twenty minutes passed, during which Eddie seated himself in one of the two swivel chairs set up for the players, drank a glass of water and tried to be calm. The TV people in their glossy jackets acted as though they were the stars. Their boom, their rubber-wheeled mounts with the heavy gray cameras on them, their thick rubber cables, their monitors and their clipboards had become the show. Eventually one of the jacketed men came over to him and checked the pronunciation of his last name, and then said, “It’s Fast Eddie, right?” Eddie said yes. The boom was only a few feet above the table. The young man in jeans stood by the supports at each end; they began cranking metal handles. The boom slowly rose higher, as if readying for a circus act. After it stopped a foot below the ceiling, someone at the desk worked controls and the camera moved, pointing its lens down toward the table. Borchard, who looked like a stagehand himself in his jeans and workshirt, had been talking with some women in the front row of the bleachers; he came over now and sat on the swivel chair by the little table that held water, two towels, an ashtray and pool chalk. He did not look in Eddie’s direction.

  The camera on the boom began wiggling, pointing off toward the wall. Eddie looked at his watch. Two-thirty.

  The PA sputtered and came on. “We apologize for the delay. The television people tell me their overhead camera must be replaced and we won’t be able to start for about an hour. We’re sorry for the inconvenience.”

  “Shit,” Borchard said.

  Eddie stood up. Arabella climbed down from her seat and walked over. “Let’s get a cup of coffee,” she said.

  Eddie looked at her. “I need to be alone for a while.” She shrugged. “Sure. I’ll get a drink.”

  There were about a dozen people in the swimming pool and more working out in the gym, but the whirlpool was empty. Eddie eased himself into it, rested his back along the edge, let his chin lie on his chest and gently closed his eyelids. It didn’t work. He still felt the knot in his stomach, the sense of powerlessness. It was the TV people, with their preoccupation and delays, their arrogant busyness. They were only technicians. They weren’t taking any risks, putting themselves on the line. The sons of bitches. His head ached with it.