by Haven Kimmel
“He knows a great deal,” Miss Sophie said. “He has knowledge from some other life,many books. It’s private. Tell me more about playing pool.”
Cassie looked at Thomas, and as she told Miss Sophie about how gambling had moved to the big cities and behind the scenes at professional tournaments, about how the life of the road hustler was too dangerous, too expensive, about money men, she looked at him. She told Miss Sophie she’d found no first-rate pool hall in New Orleans, a surprise. Laura’s life, Emmy’s life, all the lives of all the mated women she knew had been warning enough for her, and yet Cassie looked at Thomas and she loved him. She was in love with him, it had happened because her guard was down, she hadn’t been prepared. No one in the world would ever feel half as good to her again, and that knowledge made her so sad she had to take a drink of tea and ask to be excused. The red and pink tiles on the bathroom floor and walls made her head swim. She splashed her face with cold water and wished fervently for deliverance. She wished at least to emerge from the day without saying something that would give her away.
They asked her to stay, but she explained there was something she needed to do that night, and Thomas said he’d drive her back. After she’d said her good-byes to Miss Sophie, Cassie walked out to the gardener’s shed to get her pack while Thomas helped with the dishes.
She looked around, memorizing the details. His books, his dishes, the dents in the quilt where their bodies had been. The photograph of Thomas and the little girl. Cassie picked it up, stared at his face, at the flooded, familiar yard. Without even realizing she was doing it, she slipped the back off the frame and looked at the back of the picture, and there, written in fading blue ink: Big Rains. Taos and Langston, June 1973. She reassembled the frame and put it back on the nightstand. So he wanted to be called Thomas; she’d call him that.
“Scoot over here next to me,” Thomas said, patting the middle of the bench seat.
She did so, imagining the two of them driving down the back roads of Hopwood County, listening to country-and-western music and watching for drivers with only one headlight. Cassie would say perdiddle, and Thomas would kiss her every time, that was the rule. Sometimes she passed middle-aged couples in Chevy trucks with oversize tires—the woman with her long hair in braids, the man unshaven—who looked to be sharing the same seat belt. Often there was a dog involved, and a gun rack.
“If I hit your knee with the gearshift, you might be crippled and have to stay.”
She imagined them at the reservoir late at night, cooking bluegill and listening to Muddy Waters, then back at the house with Belle, who would secretly think Thomas hung the moon. Thomas in Cassie’s bed, facing the west window, the thick afternoon light, the pure scent of him gathered against her.
They said almost nothing on the trip back, but she leaned against him and turned her face in toward his neck, let the tip of her nose touch his ear, his cheek, he was her new-found land.
“How can you leave this Gulf breeze, I ask you?”
She could tell the truth, that all she had left was a sister, a thin, dry-skinned, chapped-lipped woman who was alone and would always be alone. But that would sound like an excuse, or a confession.
In New Orleans they passed a man who looked like Jesus, driving a horse-drawn carriage, and a lot of very normal-looking people window-shopping, picking up beignet mix and crab boil to take home to Nebraska as proof of their adventures, and a man who seemed to be seven feet tall with long black dreadlocks. Thomas pulled up in front of the guest house and left the engine running. He took something out of his pocket, a slip of paper, then looked at Cassie a long time. Cardplayers train themselves to control their blood pressure, their respiration; they watch for nervous tics like sudden blinking, they never tap their cards. Some players tend to give away a losing hand, some can’t control the news of a royal flush. She could tell him that a law of game theory is that any game allowing for a bluff will eventually give rise to a bluff. She looked back at him without expression.
“This is Miss Sophie’s address and phone number. She would make sure I got any message, and she always knows how to reach me.”
Cassie took the piece of paper and slipped it into the back pocket of her blue jeans. She had never pursued a man, had never called a man just because she loved him.
“That’s all I’m going to say, Cassie.”
She leaned over then and kissed him lightly, moving her lips back and forth across his. She didn’t know his last name, and he didn’t know hers. The truck was still idling at the curb, he was still watching, as she opened the door of the blue guest house and went inside.
Better-dressed women play better pool, it was a fact Cassie had disputed for years and finally gave in to. She showered, then changed into a pair of black cotton pants that fit closely through the waist and hips and loosely through the legs, and a silky white cotton shirt with French cuffs, tucked at the waist. She carried a thin black sweater. Her ankle-high boots, black, had been polished before she left home, but she went over them again. The two-inch heel was clunky but gave her extra height she needed.
It was early for a game, so she wandered into the Quarter, finally stopping at a café on the water for a coffee to go. There were a lot of people on the street, and every twenty feet or so, a musician or a mime. She stopped at the edge of a crowd watching a group of acrobats, six young men from Jamaica wearing nothing but red shorts and tennis shoes, performing breathtaking gymnastic feats. A portable stereo was playing Michael Jackson’s Thriller, and the five-gallon buckets being passed through the crowd were filled with money.
“Here, sweetheart, have a seat.”
Next to her a clown had scooted over to make room. She sat down, then looked at him. He was a fat, sad old clown. His makeup wasn’t sad, his actual face was, and he was wearing a pale yellow one-piece clown suit that billowed out in the middle, as if a hula hoop had been sewn in, but it was really his stomach.
“Are you married?” he asked, presenting her with a flower made from a twisted green balloon.
“Depends on who you ask.”
“Would you like to marry me?”
“Our careers would clash.”
He nodded. “My last wife felt the same.” They watched the acrobats leap over one another and over members of the audience.
“Have you always been a clown?”
“No, no. I used to be a plumber. Then I lost my license and became a pimp.”
“A pimp. A ghetto sort of pimp? Did you have diamonds, big hats?”
“Ha! I was a pimp in Oklahoma City. I looked pretty much like I do now, but without the balloons. Had thirty girls at my peak, then I fell in love with one of them.”
“That’s no good.”
“It wasn’t. My wife left me and took our kids, and I moved in with the girl, Serena, and she got me hooked on cocaine. Then I became a dealer.”
“And all your profit went up your nose, and you fled here.”
“You couldn’t be more right. So I got here and looked around, and this seemed to be the best option.”
Cassie nodded. The clown sat slumped over his big stomach.
“All those girls, thirty girls. All of them dead or missing now, it breaks my heart.”
His makeup had funneled into his wrinkles, his face was a moonscape. One of his eyeteeth was missing.
“Can I ask you something?” Cassie said, pulling five dollars from her pocket and placing it in the bucket as it passed her. “Back when you were married and a plumber, did you see a clown in your future?”
He shook his head. “Absolutely not. I never would have guessed it.”
They sat in silence. The crowd began to clear.
“So you’re saying that any one of us could become a clown? It could be waiting for any of us?”
“I guess that’s what I’m saying.” He smiled, sighed, then dabbed at one of his eyes with a purple silk handkerchief he produced out of nowhere. “Spring,” he said.
She gave the cabdriver the addre
ss of the old hotel; he drove a long way from the Quarter, far enough that she lost her sense of direction. The driver, a middle-aged man who looked like a leprechaun, asked if she knew someone there.
“Not really.”
“You know it ain’t a hotel? People lives there now.”
Cassie shook her head. “I didn’t know.”
The three-story brick building had probably been anonymous when it was built at the turn of the century, but it had aged into a hulking grace. Whatever had been around the hotel in its heyday had vanished, replaced by warehouses and dark factories. Cassie paid the driver and asked his name. “Eddie.”
“Eddie, if I place a call to this cab company and request you, will you come straight here immediately, even if you have another passenger?”
“You’re asking me to.”
“I’m asking you to.”
He wrote his name and a phone number on the back of a receipt. “This is my cell phone right here. Don’t call the dispatcher.”
On the hotel doors, the brass handles—the sort that run vertically, nearly the length of the inner edge of double doors—were tarnished, but the door opened with a cushioned smoothness, and the leaded glass was thick, inset in maple. Cassie paused and ran her hand up the flat edge. Silk. These doors had probably been made by craftsmen who charged a fortune, did nothing else and took their time, were arrogant and proud. The lobby wasn’t disappointing, although Cassie could see in it, too, the lost fortune. The wide silk rug was threadbare, the horsehair sofas looked beaten; even glancing at them was uncomfortable. But a gas fire still burned in the fireplace—the gentle fire of gas, rather than a tree being consumed—and the seascape oil paintings on the paneled walls had grown deeper with age. The counter was curved, smooth wood with pillars at either end, and there were individual mail slots behind the hotelier, carved out of pine and marked with tarnished brass numbers. Perhaps twenty of the forty or so held mail.
A man came around the corner and noticed Cassie. He was middle-aged, bald on top, and lean, with the long fingers of a cardsharp. His features were exaggerated: wide blue eyes with thick black lashes; a snub nose too snubbed; a wide mouth, dimples. He wore a blue dress shirt and khakis and could have been anywhere, doing anything.
“Can I help you?” He seemed friendly enough, but that was his job, the reason he was up front. She could be a cop, a vengeful wife, she could work for a bail bondsman or be serving a subpoena.
“I’m here to see Jackson LaFollette.”
“Is he expecting you?”
“Not so much.”
The man nodded, looked as if he were about to disappoint her. “Do you have some business with him?”
“I’m actually just looking for a game.”
“I’ll call him. How about you wait here?”
Cassie wandered through the sitting area and into the formal dining room. The pocket doors dividing the two rooms must have been eight feet tall; Cassie pulled the inset brass handle of one, and it slid out soundlessly. The dining room itself was lit by gas lamps, all wood and red rugs, dark furniture, old photographs. She knew pool halls: in her mind there existed twelve distinct categories, including Obsessed With Wheels (subcategories Trucks, Motorcycles); Frank Sinatra (seedy, thin white men drinking martinis); Hank Williams, Sr. (seedy, thin white men drinking whiskey); Cell Division (mostly for the desperate-to-wed); Closeted (gay, unaware of it); and Graduate School (owned by the deadly serious and catering to those with aspirations toward the PBA). But this was new. If she were betting, she’d say that somewhere in this building was the remnant of a genuine speakeasy, not a simulacrum built for investment bankers and their fishy girlfriends but the real thing. Her heart rate climbed, and she closed her eyes and took deep breaths to try to calm it. She loved this place, she loved finally standing in the world where the real rules applied, the rules of form, composure, conversation. She had taken thousands of dollars out of the hands of men who spent game after game trying to get her to bed. Losing and still trying. Periodically she would even say, You’re never going to win this way; I’m going to reject you, and then I’m going to beat you, but it didn’t matter. And then there were men who were violently afraid of losing to a woman, the scariest men in the world. They became dictators, heads of state, bureaucrats, men with deadly weapons, they were everywhere. Sometimes she could pick one out with a look, but they were often charming, they had to have the power to attract in order to dominate.
“You can come this way.”
They walked through a door on the opposite end of the sitting room and into a long, dim hallway. On the left were room doors, regularly spaced, flocked wallpaper fading. Everything was quiet. On the right were three doors: one at either end of the hallway, a set of double doors in the middle. They opened those: a ballroom. In the normal course of her life, Cassie never had to struggle to take in her surroundings, because the structure and the trappings were a reflection of the crowd, and the crowd was the same every night: overdressed girls just out of high school, smoking and trying to look tough; young men tattooed with spiders and reptiles, answering calls on cell phones about where they were and when they’d be home; groups of Hispanic housepainters still in work clothes; long-married couples dingy with cigarette smoke and familiarity. There were college kids who tried to distinguish themselves from the regulars with loud, erudite misstatements and exclamations about the equipment; the neophytes, who self-consciously rolled their cues across the table and scraped the chalk over the tips as if scrubbing the bottom of a filthy pan.
But this: the salmon-colored walls ascending into a gold dome, the floor-to-ceiling windows draped in green velvet, the springy dance floor, this was new. Sound—the murmuring of voices, the jazz quartet playing in the corner—seemed to rise above the scene and hover like a cloud. Cassie felt she could ascend and polish out the voices one by one, every note of “All of Me”; vague, menacing laughter. There were five tables, all vintage Brunswicks, covered in the finest Belgian wool dyed vivid green—the color, as Walter Tevis wrote, of money. A heavy wooden beam ran the width of the room over each table, and from these beams hung lamps in green shades. They illuminated every inch of the table.
The bar was at the end of the room, magnificent, mirrored, lined with bottles of liquor and crystal glasses.
“That’s Jack, there, in the brown sweater.”
She was faced with the wide back of the man, who appeared to have his arms wrapped around the drink in front of him, as a man might nurture his fatal flaw. She thanked her guide and started across the dance floor, taking in and deflecting the stares of the men at the tables, older men, all, and dressed well. The floor felt buoyant; surely the tables were leveled every day. And the air was dry—the humidity that can so affect a game had been removed. She took a seat at the bar, leaving one stool between herself and Jack, and ordered a gin gimlet from the bartender, a young black man who barely met her eye. Jack ignored her, too, giving her time to look at the cue he had propped against the bar; she was surprised to see that it was new, and one she admired, the Meucci Gambler. Black dice and red playing cards were inset in the butt: it was a flashy piece.
“You were looking for me?”
“I was,” Cassie said, tasting the cold gimlet.
“Do I know you?”
“We know some of the same people.”
“Is that right.” Jack hadn’t yet turned in her direction. “That’s my table behind us.”
Cassie carried her drink over to the shelf next to the house cues, CueTecs, fairly new. She took her time choosing, then chalked, tied her sweater around her waist, waiting for Jack to rise, to move at all. Waves of hostility surrounded him; he had the posture of a mean drunk. When he finally struggled off his stool, she saw that he was at least six feet four and weighed well over three hundred pounds, most of which he carried around his middle. He was wearing creamy linen trousers, tailored. Cassie could not abide a wide-assed man, and she decided to beat him regardless of the greater cost. His face, when h
e finally looked at her,was another shock: underneath the weight he could have been a Barrymore, so finely were his bones composed. And his gray hair, still streaked with black, was wavy and combed away from his face, like a screen idol from his youth. Laura had written of his villain’s smile, and there it was, and his gold fraternity ring, the crucifix he wore on a thin gold chain.
“Hundred a game.”
Cassie agreed, then lost the lag on purpose. She would know how to proceed from his break. After racking for 9-ball, he took his place, breaking with his new cue; that was one story. She also saw that he was very strong, very drunk. The cue ball broke the rack violently, harder than was necessary for this game, sending the balls flying all over the table. Everything was wide open. The 5 fell; the 1 rolled downtable and the 2 up, with the cue well placed for both shots. Cassie plotted how she would shoot all the way to the 9, given the chance. Jack swayed slightly, pulled a cigarette from his breast pocket and lit it, then let it hang from his lower lip as he bent and sank the 1 without sending the cue up far enough for an easy shot on the 2. He took no practice strokes, and he barely leaned toward the table. Many fat men played as he did, high above the shot. He had a long way to go for the 2 and would have to make it on a thin slice, but soon enough the 2 was gone, he made the 3 on a combination, he sank the 4 even though he’d stroked too hard. The 5 was already gone, and the 9 was in front of a side pocket, flanked by the 6. He made the 9. Cassie glanced at her watch. He’d won the game in seven minutes.
She took her stake out of her pocket and peeled off a bill.
“Thank you, darlin’,” he said, walking toward the bar. A cocktail waitress, a young black woman with a stoic expression, met him halfway there. “Where you been?” Cassie heard him ask the woman, in a tone that bore the contemptuous edge of intimacy. Cassie gathered the balls and racked again as he ordered himself a whiskey and a second gin gimlet for her; she had barely touched the first and wouldn’t finish it. When he handed her the cocktail, she thanked him, turned to put it on the shelf.