by Jeff Ross
“You won the toss, didn’t you?” I racked the balls in the triangle, keeping them perfectly set and tight. I lifted the triangle off, all under John’s watchful eye. “Look good now?” he asked.
“Perfect,” I said.
John took a step back and held an arm out toward the end of the table. I set the cue ball in the right spot, bent down low to the table and, after two quick practice strokes, hammered the cue ball. It clocked off the one, and in a matter of maybe three seconds, the two, four and six dropped.
And then the nine.
Chapter Ten
It was like all the air in the room evaporated at once. My dad had done this a couple of times in the past. There was skill involved, of course, but also a healthy dose of luck. If you could learn how to sink the nine ball off the break and endlessly do it, pool wouldn’t be much of a game. You needed to hit the one ball in just the right way, but something beyond pure skill was required to steer it into a pocket.
“Well,” John finally said. I couldn’t figure out what he was going to do next. I honestly had no idea until he opened his mouth and laughed. “Well, shit! That was a hell of a shot.” He came to me and clapped me on the back. “Was that shit luck, or did I just get sharked?”
“No sharking here,” War said, coming off his barstool fast enough to topple it.
John held a hand up, and the room froze. “Well?”
“There was some luck involved,” I said.
John leaned his cue against a chair and started gathering the balls. “Think you can get lucky twice?” he said.
“Another five,” War said.
John tightened the balls in the triangle. “This isn’t a practice hall, Warren,” he said. “Of course it will be another five.”
“Just checking.” War waited for a second and then said, “How about that first five?” I could hear John inhale from across the table. He removed the triangle, set it on its hook, then came around the table to me. He straightened to his full height and pulled a billfold from a pocket. It looked to be full of hundreds. He peeled off five and held them before me.
“Now you have something to play with,” he said. “Because if history has taught me anything, your friend came in assuming you’d win that first game.” He pressed the bills into my hand.
“I’ll hold that,” War said.
“We don’t deal with managers here,” John said, still not looking at War. “We flip for every game. No one owns the table. You okay with that?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Go ahead, Pete,” John says. “This time I call.”
Pete flipped the coin. “Tails,” John yelled.
“Tails it is,” Pete said, maybe even before it landed in his palm. I moved aside to let John break. He hammered the cue ball, sending the other nine balls into a flurry of activity.
John moved like a cat around the table. It was weird to see a man of his size creeping around the table as though sneaking up on something. The break was fairly clean, by which I mean the balls arranged themselves in an agreeable way. There were plenty of shots available. The only real issue was the four ball, which was tight to the eight, halfway up one wall. John chalked his cue and roamed the outside of the table.
He dropped the one quickly and then the two. The three had gone down on the break, leaving him on the four.
“That one’s a bit of a problem,” John said, not looking at anyone. “A real dilemma.” He glanced over at me before bending down to the side of the table. After practicing the shot a couple of times, he looked up at me and lightly tapped the cue ball. It rolled across the table and clinked off the four ball before rolling back slightly. I knew what he was going to do before he did it. He was snookering me. Or, at the very least, trying to set me up to be the one who banged the four off the wall and, very likely, failed to sink it. It was an impossible shot with the four so close to the eight. There was a chance I could get the eight and the four to drop, but the odds were low. They were too tight to one another and slightly offset.
But then I saw the angle. The nine was down the other end of the table, right on the edge of the pocket. So I had to hit the four, but if I put some major backspin on the cue ball, it could potentially roll straight back down the table and tap the nine in. The worst-case scenario would be that John ended up in about the same position I was in.
So basically I had nothing to lose.
The room had grown quiet. I leaned down at the side of the table and aimed right near the bottom of the cue ball. I knew it was going to work as soon as I hit the cue ball. It smacked into the four and came back like a pinball coming off a bumper. I stood quickly, bringing the cue up and out of the way. The cue ball rolled the length of the table and had just enough force left to tap in the nine.
John looked at me and then spit on the floor.
“Well, shit,” he said. “Son of a bitch.” He rubbed the back of his head and then threw his cue down.
“Get out of here, both of you,” he said, pulling his money clip from his pocket. Bills scattered all over the place. He gathered them up, jammed five into my hand and shoved me toward the door.
Chapter Eleven
“It’s not that you’re not welcome, War,” John said to us out behind the deli. “It’s just that no one wants you here.” He gave War a shove. There were five men behind him, and I could tell War had little interest in turning this into an event he’d absolutely come out on the losing side of.
“But you can come back whenever you want, wonder boy,” John continued. “I’d like to see some of that magic again. Next time I’ll get you to play someone else.”
“Okay,” I replied. John and the other men stepped back inside. The door shut with a slam. Something heavy and metal dropped on the other side.
“Give me the money,” War said.
“Let’s wait until we’re in the truck,” I replied.
“Give me the money now,” War said, grabbing at my jacket pocket. I backed up and pulled the bills out of my jeans pocket. He snatched them out of my hand. “Get in the truck.”
The headlights illuminated an empty street. It was getting late, and I was already tired. I didn’t know how long I’d be able to play well. If the two games against John had taken much longer, I would have started having issues.
“That was a good bump,” War said. “A quick grand. Let’s hit this next place, then see if we can find another backroom game for when the halls close.”
“I’m getting tired,” I said.
“You’ll be fine,” War replied. “Get you a coffee or one of those stupid energy drinks kids love.”
I didn’t want coffee or an energy drink. But I also didn’t want to talk to War, so I just sat there, quietly trying to wake myself up.
We drove through town to a different hall. This one was packed. Not a free table in sight. You had to win your way onto a table. War leaned on me as we stepped between two tables. On one a fifty-dollar bill sat beside the corner pocket, and on the other, a ten-dollar bill.
“We walk up to the tables and you go to the one with the fifty. I’ll go to the ten. Then when we spot the bills, we’ll pretend we made a mistake. And laugh it off. These guys are going to eat it up.” I did as he said. The two at my table were looking to play doubles.
“You even old enough to be in here?” one of them asked.
“No one told me I couldn’t be,” I said.
“Name’s Ron,” the guy said. He was short, shorter than me, but had a fantastic beard and bright brown eyes.
“You old enough to play a fifty-dollar game?” Ron’s friend asked.
“Shit,” War said. “I went to the wrong table.”
“Hey,” the second guy said. “You can swap.”
“No,” War said. “Fair’s fair. Go ahead, son.” He gave me a wink to let me know I could win if I wanted. It was actually a challenge. Ron was really good. Tight. But I still had an edge on him. The hardest part of it all was snookering him when he went for the eight ball and I still had
one on the table. For once I had to figure out a strategy to not win, exactly, but make him lose. When it was done, I sat there with a hundred dollars in my pocket.
“Not bad,” Ron said. “You play nine-ball?”
I was tired, and, as I’d yet again proved to myself, nine-ball takes way less time than eight.
Especially if you can sink the nine on the break.
“Sure,” I said.
He racked up a game of nine-ball.
“I don’t enjoy losing,” Ron said in a kind of singsongy voice. He smelled of Old Spice, even in the stink of the hall. He was chewing a giant wad of gum. His buddy had a wad of chewing tobacco in his lip.
“Not many people do,” I said.
Ron pulled out a crisp hundred-dollar bill and put it on the table. “Double or nothing,” he said.
I looked at it. Hundred on the table. Hundred in my pocket.
Ron noticed my hesitation. “What? You were willing to lose fifty—may as well be willing to lose one hundred.”
This was the kind of mentality that made me never want to gamble. It wasn’t even close to logical. If you’d lost it once, you could lose it again. I glanced at War, who was pretending to be completely into the ten-dollar game.
“Okay,” I said. “I guess.”
“You guess?” Ron said. He looked at his buddy. “You think we’re getting sharked here?” His buddy laughed and spit a wad of tobacco into an empty bottle.
“You never know, Ron.”
“Winner breaks,” Ron said, looking back at me.
After the break, it looked easy enough. Everything could be lined up. I mapped out the table. Where to move. How to bring the cue ball back each time. The only difficulty was going to be the seven, which was sitting in the middle of the table. But I figured it should be easy enough to crack it into a corner eventually. I took my time between shots, chalking my cue as I went. In the end, it was as easy as I thought it was going to be. The seven was a bit of a challenge, but once it dropped, the eight and nine were set up perfectly. I cleared the table and took a seat.
“Yup,” Ron said. “That’s how you play nine-ball.” I could tell he was trying to decide if he should play again. He watched me put the two hundred in my pocket.
“The balls were lined up nicely,” I said.
“I guess they were.” He leaned his cue against the table. “Let’s do it again. Five hundred this time.”
War jumped in. “Whoa! What’s this?”
“He has two hundred in his pocket,” Ron said. He suddenly looked mean. “I want to put five hundred on the next game.”
“What’s the game?” War asked.
“Nine-ball.”
War leaned back against his table. Sniffed. “What do you think, son?”
I hated the way he called me son. It filled me with a rage I had to fight to control.
“Whatever,” I said.
“How was the last game?”
“He cleared the table. I didn’t get a chance to play,” Ron said.
War kept watching me. “You ran the table?”
I nodded. Ron stared at War, never looking at me.
“It’ll be my money, not his,” War said, and Ron shrugged. “His game, his break.”
Ron popped in a new piece of gum. Stared at me. Then looked back at War. “I can abide by that,” he said.
“Let’s do it then,” War said.
I almost wanted to fail at this game just to make War angry. Just to have him lose. He looked so confident. But he was like a sports fan cheering on his team, yelling at the opposition’s fans as if he’d actually done something other than just watch a game. He could be confident in my winning, but in the end the win was mine—even if he got to take the money.
I broke and made it as far as the four before running into a problem. The five was up behind the eight, and although I bounced the cue ball off two walls, the five came up short. Luckily, the cue landed behind the six, meaning it would be almost impossible to get the five. Ron spent a long time rubbing his beard and then setting up his shot before sending the cue ball careening up the table. I watched as it came back, clacked into the five and set it into a corner pocket.
“Ho, shit, this dude can play,” he said, as if he were a spectator watching himself play. It’s always weird to me when people refer to themselves in the third person. It seemed to pump him up, though, because soon enough he was strutting around like Tom Cruise in The Color of Money. The six and seven were set up tight to one another. Ron spent a long time trying to figure out how to play it, his beard getting another complete work-over. A crowd had formed, drawn in by the bills on the table. This was the last thing War and I wanted. You need to keep away from these high-profile games. You want to be mentioned but not well known. Ron managed to hit the six, but it bounced off the edge of the hole and just sat there, waiting for an easy tap in.
“Fucker,” he said, banging his cue against the floor.
I got the six and the seven with ease. The eight was in a bad spot though. But the angles started to form on the table for me like vibrant glowing lines. I knew I could do it. I sent the cue ball down and tapped the eight perfectly into a corner pocket. It was an impressive shot, one my dad had taught me years before. In pool there are shots you can make if you know how to hit the cue ball, how to give it some spin. And then there are shots you’ll never get until you’ve tried them a thousand times. This was one of those shots. It was the kind of shot someone could only make if they’d devoted far too much of their life to this game.
The nine was right beside a corner pocket. I took my time, chalking my cue and snapping my neck. My cue didn’t really need chalk and my neck was fine, but I wanted to draw this out a little. I wanted to make War wait. I guess, in the end, I needed a little drama. Something to make it feel like I’d defeated some great competitor. I lined the shot up, tapped the cue ball and dropped the nine lightly into a pocket.
“What the fuck?” Ron said. “I’ve never seen a shot like that in my life.” He looked really angry. He was, of course, talking about the eight ball, not the nine. But he was decent enough to hold back his anger until I’d calmly sunk the nine.
“Calm down, buddy,” War said.
“This is bullshit.”
“He hasn’t lost a game yet,” War said. “What made you think he was suddenly going to suck?”
“He was good in the other games, maybe even great,” Ron said. “But that shot on the eight? That was beyond impossible.”
“Listen, buddy—” War said.
“Don’t call me buddy.”
War held his hands up. The atmosphere in the room had changed. It’d turned ugly. These guys were obviously regulars. A couple of real hotshots. “What is he, some kind of junior champ?” Ron demanded.
“Listen,” War said. “What do you think is happening here?”
“I think I’m getting sharked.”
“To me it looks more like you’ve just lost.” We were up quite a bit. But that was the problem with sharking. We were up, which meant someone else had to be down.
Ron turned to his friend. “You saw him?”
“Yeah,” his friend said.
“Buddy,” War said. “He never lost. To be sharked you need to be reeled in. Your opponent has to lose a couple of games, make you think you’re top shit. That’s not what happened here. All that’s happened is that you lost, thought you could beat him, didn’t, still believed in yourself and lost again.” I could see War eyeing the door, considering his escape. He didn’t want to be there much longer. This place was burned. We were up over two grand. Another three or four places and we’d make the eight he needed, and War would be out of my life. That was all I could think while standing there staring at the green felt of the pool table. Another few wins, and War would be out of my life.
“Listen, let’s forget about it,” I said. “Let’s go.”
“Now you’re going to leave?” Ron said.
“You want another game?” War replied. “Five
hundred dollars. That’s what you set.”
Ron looked at me. Pointed his finger in my face. “Fuck you,” he said. He turned to War. “Fuck you too. Come in here sharking people.”
“He. Hasn’t. Lost,” War said. He sounded insulted. As if we hadn’t come into the pool hall looking to shark people. As if, somehow, we’d actually been wronged. “If anyone is being sharked, it’s us.”
I didn’t want any part of it. I mean, I knew I could take this guy. But I didn’t like all the aggression around it.
“I’m not playing him again,” I said to War. “Forget it.”
“There you go,” War said. “It’s over. Let’s go, son.” We dropped our cues on the table and walked to the door. People parted to let us through. We made it all the way up the stairs to the door. I opened the door, and a rush of noise from a truck on the street swept in, which I guess is why we didn’t hear Ron coming up the stairs behind us. When the truck had passed, the next sound I heard was a cue hitting the back of War’s head. Someone tried to grab me. I shrugged him off and darted out the door. Someone yelled at me. I bounced side to side, trying to figure out what to do. But then I just started running.
I must have gone three blocks before I spotted a bus slowing for a stop. When the doors opened I hopped on, flashing my pass as I ran past the driver and into a seat. I pulled my hoodie over my head and then sat there trying to get my breathing under control. Trying to figure out what had happened and what the hell I was going to do next.
Chapter Twelve
War wasn’t at my house the next day, and I immediately began to wonder what had happened to him. I wasn’t worried. Whatever happened to him he had coming. Either he’d weaseled his way out of a confrontation or had his ass handed to him. In the end, I didn’t feel it had anything to do with me.
I had a great day hanging out with my mom and sister. We watched a movie together that night, all curled up on the couch, something we hadn’t done in years. It wasn’t until Sunday morning, right around the time I started thinking War was gone for good, that there was a hammering on the door. I looked out my window and saw War’s pickup out in the street. Wendy was awake, standing in my room.