by Haven Kimmel
As they approached the center of the downtown there were fewer and fewer businesses, just empty buildings. An evacuation order. Uncle Bud’s sat on the corner of Main and Railroad; it had been a drugstore fifteen years before, a low and long building with a green awning along the front windows. The windows were covered with a film that made them look silver from outside: mirrors. Jimmy pulled into one of the three parking spaces facing the back door. Behind them, on the corner of Railroad and Fifth, was a bar called Howdy’s. A sign outside advertised fifty-cent Miller drafts and a whole room devoted to darts. Other than Howdy’s, everything seemed deserted. A few faded storefronts proclaimed flyby night mechanics, flown, and body shops. Cassie had been here once, sent inside Uncle Bud’s to fetch Jimmy when Laura was so mad she couldn’t get out of the car for fear her legs would explode. The place had held Cassie in an attraction so powerful she could no longer remember the specifics, only the heart-knocking joy. She felt a shadow of it every time she went past this part of Roseville with Poppy, on the way out to the highway and to the strip of stores at the edge of Hopwood.
Jimmy rolled up the windows, reached into the back for his cue. “You’re not to bother me.”
Cassie nodded.
“I’ve come here to visit my table and get in some time, not to focus on you.”
“Okay.”
“And if Bud comes in, who is as you know an old sumbitch, and says you have to leave, then you’re going to have to skedaddle and find something else to do.”
“Okay.”
He leaned over and kissed her on the forehead. His lips were smooth and hard and cool. “You know you’re my favorite, Cassie, although God knows that ain’t saying much.” Stepping out of the car, he pulled his shirt away from his chest, fanning himself with it, then looked for the key to the back door.
The door was steel, gunmetal gray, no window. In the back room Jimmy pulled a string, and a bare bulb illuminated the rough wooden shelves covered with boxes of Master chalk, cases of crackers filled with cheese or peanut butter, new balls. On the floor were boxes overflowing with empty beer and soda cans. Against one wall was a line of cues that looked as if they were awaiting surgery. Cassie took a deep breath. This smelled better than anything in her life, better than a Christmas tree, better than the raspberry bush at the edge of the house, tangled with honeysuckle, better than Jimmy’s winter coat.
“I’m not going to entertain you, and the rules are the same as when the table was at home, you can’t touch it.”
Jimmy used another key to open an ugly green door with a frosted glass panel that seemed to have been stolen from a hard-boiled detective agency. They were in the dim main hall. Bud’s bar still looked as it had, Cassie guessed, when the building was a pharmacy—a long counter with stools, and a mirror behind it with Rx painted in vivid blue, a mortar and pestle beside it. On the shelves below the mirror were trays of balls and boxes of chalk, mostly battered, and bags of potato chips clipped to a black metal rack. A single jar held dill pickles in cloudy green brine. There were no draft beers or fountain drinks; everything was lined up squarely in a refrigerator with a glass door.
“And I’m not buying you a soda or chips and have you make a mess in here, so don’t ask.”
Cassie’s eyes glanced from surface to surface. She’d never been anywhere so clean and precise. Bud used a big old-fashioned cash register: five dollars was the last anyone had paid. On the steel counter next to the cash register was a big rectangular book with a grainy black cover, the word ACCOUNTS. The book was centered so precisely on the counter it looked like Bud had used a speed square. A sign on the bar explained that between three and six in the afternoon the tables were a dollar a person per hour, and between six and two in the morning, they were two-fifty. In one corner was a silent jukebox, and other than that just the tables.
“And don’t ask for quarters for the jukebox because I didn’t bring any.” Jimmy had taken out his cue and was screwing the joint on the butt.
Seven tables, five feet from the wall and five feet apart; a light with a green accountant’s shade hung over every table. At each end of the room was a rack with ten house cues. A shelf for drinks and ashtrays ran the length of the room, and there were four tall chairs against the wall and ten stools scattered around the room. Cassie wandered around, not quite touching anything, taking in the smell of chalk, beer, cigarettes, while Jimmy used a third, smaller key to unlock the door to the glassed-in room at the end of the hall. Inside the glass room was one table, no stool, no chair. Cassie hovered in the doorway,watched him flip the switch to the light that had formerly hung in their garage.
“Ahhhh,” Jimmy said, resting his stick on the toe of his shoe. “There’s my best girl.” He spread his arms as if making a gift of the whole room to his daughter. “I ever tell you how I came into possession of this table?”
Cassie nodded, she had heard the story many times.
“It’s a vintage Brunswick, this one. Built in 1884, probably in New Orleans; moved with a family to Alabama and eighty years later was back in the Big Easy, where one James Claiborne happened to win it in a game that went on so long God wished me luck and went on to bed.” Jimmy lit a cigarette. He bent and studied the length of the table, looking for wear on the felt. “I hauled it in the back of a borrowed station wagon to the boardinghouse where I was staying—oh, don’t worry, it was a Christian boardinghouse for Christian men. The slate, rails, legs, pockets, rack, sticks, and balls, the whole shebang, I reassembled it in an abandoned tobacco warehouse on Tchoupitoulas, the key to which I happened to find upon my person after another difficult game. In an old hotel, that one. Spooky.” Jimmy rested his cigarette on the small shelf against the wall, not in the ashtray provided but on the shelf. There was a series of dark stripes in the wood, as if he’d placed burning ash there on a number of occasions. He ran his hand along the shining hardwood of the table’s rails. “There was a single missing part, believe it or not, and I found it in a Brunswick repair shop on Frenchmen Street. It’s a civilized town, Cassie, that has a Brunswick repair shop. It’s long gone, just like old Jimmy Claiborne. I’d bet I’m still talked about, though. If I were a betting man.”
He didn’t say the table was walnut, but Cassie knew. The legs were ornately carved and the pockets woven leather. It was four feet by eight feet, the measurement Uncle Bud called True. The slate had been flawless when Jimmy won the table, and remained so; Bud changed the felt, every two years, said felts made of fine wool from somewhere in the Netherlands. Wood spun and dyed by virgins, Jimmy said. Cassie wished he would go on, she wished he would tell the story of the light, too, which she had studied for hours. The glass was deep red and imprinted with black Chinese characters, and red silk fringe hung like liquid from the bottom of the shade. She wanted to hear Jimmy say the words Colorado and mining town, which she’d long ago written in her notebook.
But he said nothing more. His cigarette sent up a ribbon of smoke against the wall. Cassie watched him rack the balls (they came from Belgium, and he would have no others), knowing she was invisible to him. She watched as she had hour after hour, sitting on a kitchen ladder in the garage. The 1-ball was the yellow of a sunflower; the 2 was the same shade as the Indiana sky on a flawless summer day, Cassie had often had the feeling they had been made for her, or that they represented, at the very least, the possibility of something beautiful. At night sometimes, unable to sleep, she would imagine the balls spread out across the green table under the red glass of the lamp: someone had stepped on a box of paints and let them fly. Ruined paints on new grass.
Jimmy stood at the foot of the table and, using a house cue left propped in a corner, took two practice strokes (never one or three), then sent the cue ball crashing into the gathered tribe. All fifteen balls careened around the table, and the 4 and the 13 fell. He was practicing straight pool, even though he’d been saying for years that the days of the great straight players were over, and that the money was now on 8-ball for hustlers and 9-ball fo
r professionals. Cassie didn’t know which he was. Jimmy moved around the table quickly, as if on a preordained path. When the table had been at their house, all those years, she had watched Uncle Bud and many other men play against Jimmy, and she knew her father had a strange and specific style related to his restless grace; he bent at the knees instead of at the waist and didn’t sight down the cue as if down the barrel of a gun. In deep concentration, he made his bottom lip so thin it vanished. She never would have told him or anyone, but she had missed this table fiercely, and even after spending her whole life with a man to whom objects gravitated and then were lost—things that came and went like the stray men Jimmy invited to dinner and a game, who would never be seen again—she had not understood what had happened, how the table went missing and ended up here at Bud’s.
She had been standing in one spot, watching her father, for so long that when she heard another key rattle in the ugly green door, she awoke as if from a dream. Uncle Bud stepped in, gently closing the door behind him. As he passed the glass room where Jimmy played, Bud barely gave him a glance, and there wasn’t the comfort of old friendship in the look, either; Jimmy rarely earned such a thing. Uncle Bud had been Jimmy’s childhood companion, they had a long history. And there were a few dark moments in the past two dark years when Bud had stepped into their house in Laura’s name, had roughly set things right.
He was tall and dense,with arms the size of hams and an enormous head on a thick neck. Bud kept his hair, which was going gray, cut so short he looked like he’d gone missing from some secret branch of the military, and he dressed in T-shirts and blue jeans and motorcycle boots and wore a wide belt with a Harley Davidson buckle. But he didn’t own a motorcycle. There was a wide gap between his two front teeth and his eyebrows sprouted wild. He had a tattoo of Donald Duck on his forearm, the origin of which he would not discuss, and he had formerly smoked cigarettes but had given them up for cigars; Cassie liked the smell. On the whole Cassie faced the world of men with the wariness of the repeatedly betrayed child—Poppy was the only man she trusted—but long ago she had taken to Bud and felt safe in a room he was in. He kept his distance from her.
“Cassie,” he said, surprised to see her. “What are you doing here?”
She shrugged.
“Well, come help me carry these boxes up front.”
The cases of soda were heavy, but in Bud’s arms and against his stomach, they looked like matchboxes. As she passed the glass room for the third time, Jimmy stuck his head out. “Keep her workin’, Bud. That’s why I had children, although I thought they’d be sons.”
Bud ignored him.
Jimmy came out and sat down at the bar. “Give me a cold something.” He turned to Cassie, winked. “I ever tell you how I came into possession of that table?”
Bud sighed, stopped at the refrigerator door as if he might not open it.
“Okay, okay. I may have mentioned the adventure a time or two. Let me say that I stole so much from that man that night, pretty much everything he held dear, that if we’da kept it up, I woulda left with one of his kidneys.”
Bud relented and got Jimmy the beer.
“I’m back at it,” Jimmy said. “Bud, if she bothers you, send her scootin’.”
Cassie watched him go, accepted the cold Coke that Bud offered her. “You want to play, Cass? I’ve got some bookkeeping to do.”
“I can’t. I’m not allowed.”
“Who says? Jimmy? This is my pool hall, those are my tables, including the one he’s playing on, which he keeps insisting is his.” Bud shook his head. “Nothing to be done about him.” He took a tray of balls off the rack and dropped a cube of chalk in the middle. “He never taught you to play?”
Cassie shook her head. “But I’ve watched a lot.”
“I know you have. Jimmy loves an audience. Well, come here, then.”
Bud took down a house cue and examined its tip, then chose another. He said ferrule, scuffer, shaper, mushrooming. He put the cue in Cassie’s hand. She had sometimes snuck Jimmy’s cue out and looked at it, but there was a space that Cassie had never crossed between contraband and the legitimately held thing. She crossed it. The cue felt more formidable than she would have guessed, heavy at the bottom like a weapon, and delicate at the top, just a stem. Bud showed her how to rack the balls for 8-ball, 9-ball, straight pool, which she already knew, then taught her the difference between an open and a closed bridge, then taught her how to sight and where to hold the cue with her rear arm. He said head spot center spot foot spot corner pocket long string foot string center string headstring. Kitchen. Head rail side rail foot rail side rail, and for the next four hours, as they lined up shots and hit them, he said a thousand things that Cassie fought hard to remember. When the tip of the cue strikes the cue ball, the forearm of your rear arm should be at a ninety-degree angle to the floor. Play begins here. This is a foul, and this is a foul, and this is also a foul; one of your feet must remain on the floor at all times. This is a mechanical bridge and there is no shame in using it. Chalk your tip before every shot but not until your opponent has missed because it’s rude not to wait. A slice, a thin slice, an impossible slice. The ghost ball, or phantom ball, the ghost table acting as a mirror. Bank shots and combinations and the massé and jumps. Sharking. Speed of stroke, hold the cue lightly, deadstroke. How to will deadstroke, or if it’s always a gift from God. On the cue ball: the vertical axis, the follow, right English, 3:00, low right, the draw, 6:00, left English, 9:00, high left.
“How old are you?” he asked.
“Ten.”
“You need to get an Introduction to Physics textbook. No one in Hopwood County is going to teach you physics at this age. Also you’ll need to know something about geometry. Your fool father will say he’s good at this game because he thinks in geometry, but he’s lying. He never even learned geometry, they didn’t go that far in reform school. And this game is about physics, so do that, get a book.”
Cassie nodded. She wished she had her notebook.
“And grow. You’re too short to see what’s happening on the table.”
“Okay.”
“Cassie,” Jimmy said, standing at the bar with his cue taken apart and stowed back in the case, “I’m leaving. Put this stuff away and tell Uncle Bud thank you for the lesson.”
“You’re out of here early,” Bud said, crossing his arms across his wide chest. “I thought you’d still be here when the late crowd arrived.”
“You were wrong.” Jimmy pulled his keys out of his pocket. “Get in the car, Cass.”
“You go on, Jimmy. I’ll take her home.”
“Or I’ll call Edwin,” Cassie said, shocked as she heard herself say it.
“Get in the car, Cassie.”
Bud took a step toward Jimmy. “I’ve got an idea, how about you head on wherever you were going, which was surely not home where you belong, and I’ll take care of getting Cassie back. Sound good?”
The muscles in Jimmy’s face tightened and relaxed; Cassie had seen this many times, he did it when he was furious, as lions yawn before they attack. His whole body was tense. But he said, smiling at the end, “Whatever. Save me the trip.” He walked over and kissed Cassie on top of her head. “Don’t let Bud talk you into playing for money.” He strolled out the front door, unlocked now, even though leaving by a door you didn’t enter through is very bad luck, Cassie almost said something.
“All right, come here now,” Bud said, setting up the 3-ball in front of a side pocket. “I want you to take this shot a hundred times, I’m going to stand here and count. If you make it fifty times you can come back tomorrow.”
It was an easy shot in some ways; she was shooting from the side of the table, and she didn’t have to reach. The 3 was eighteen inches from the pocket at what Bud said was about a thirty-degree angle. But Cassie had seen right away that this was a game in which mysterious forces seemed to be at work, which meant that sometimes things might go well and that was a surprise, and sometimes everyt
hing went wrong and that was also a surprise. Bud said there were an infinite number of variables to consider, and Cassie didn’t understand what that meant but remembered the phrase so she could ask Belle. He said take the best shot available to you, and if there isn’t one, go safe. If you practice a shot many times, you add it to a repertoire until you own the table. He said don’t go for the slice beyond ninety degrees, because when you do, you’re pushing hard against the spectrum of possible outcomes.
Other people began to trickle in, a middle-aged couple who looked like they’d just woken up and eaten fried eggs. A thin bald man playing alone. Cassie barely registered them. She made the shot sixty-two times, told Bud he could go about his business, then lined the balls up and started all over, and she did that right up until Edwin Meyer touched her on the arm and told her it was time to go home.
They got in Edwin’s car, a clean, modest Dodge that smelled like nothing but an unfolded map, and headed home. Edwin was younger than Jimmy but had started school at four and skipped two grades, so they ended up in the same class. Unlike Uncle Bud’s, Edwin’s life had diverged early from Jimmy’s, when Poppy wanted Jimmy to work at the hardware store and he refused. Edwin took the after-school job and stayed right there, no ladder to move up, just more responsibility to take on, longer hours to work, until Poppy decided to retire and sell, and Edwin bought the place. He’d been at Public Hardware twenty years now, Cassie guessed, and he was so much entwined with the building and the smell of nails in wooden bins, the creaking of the old floor, that if the store didn’t exist, Edwin wouldn’t, either. He’d go thinner and thinner until finally he couldn’t be seen, couldn’t be remembered. Cassie forgot him all the time. Laura said he felt responsibility for them all, as if, when he purchased Poppy’s business, he also purchased his failings; Jimmy was clearly a failing. Someone, Edwin was fond of saying, had to keep everything in working order. He had no family of his own.