From a Dead Sleep (15 page)

He wasn’t sure what exactly had dredged up that memory, years later as he sat in a lonely bar in the middle of nowhere, but he thought it might have something to do with the fear of setting himself up once again for a crushing defeat.

The loud, abrupt collision of pool balls from a sharp break echoed across the small room and commanded Sean’s attention like a dog who’d just heard his name called. His head spun in its direction.

“That’s right bitches!” the loudmouth yelled in triumph.

His curly haired friend, standing beside his buddy at the table, expressed an apologetic glance to the bouncer who seemed a bit torqued by the profanity. Curly shrugged his shoulders and shook his head in assurance that the term
bitches
was directed at him alone and not anyone else in the establishment. The loudmouth couldn’t have cared less and was oblivious to the exchange of body language as a cigarette dangled from his mouth.

Sean had noticed the table when he’d first come in, as he did anytime a pool table was in his vicinity, but it had been vacant. He watched the two play with some interest as he finished his beer. If the loudmouth was half as good at pool as he was at trash-talking, he could have gone pro. Though he was pretty average, he was still better than Curly and sunk the eight-ball after ten minutes to win the game.

“Slap it down there, bitch!” he howled with a cackle.

Curly jammed a hand into his pocket and retrieved a ten-dollar bill that he then laid across the edge of the table. Sean’s eyebrow rose along with his pulse. The loudmouth snatched up the bill and shoved it in his own pocket.

Sean watched them play another game with the same outcome. Ten down. The loudmouth’s cockiness and intrusive laughter stirred Sean’s competitive juices. He knew he needed to make his money last for the trip, but an opportunity had been dropped right in his lap to thicken that wallet. The loudmouth was no Moses Jones. It was a sure bet.

He felt his body fending off fatigue with adrenaline as he rose from his chair and crossed the room. Curly noticed him first and met him with a curious gander. The loudmouth noticed him, too, but pretended not to.

“Let a new player in?” Sean asked politely.

The loudmouth grinned widely and flashed a wink through his shades to his buddy that went unnoticed by Sean. After scissoring his cigarette with his fingers and prying it from between his lips, he turned to greet the much larger man.

Smoke escaped his mouth as he spoke. “Well, that depends. Will you give me a better game than this jackass?” He motioned to his friend whose eyes rose to the ceiling.

“Oh, I think so. Twenty bucks? Eight-ball?”

The loudmouth twisted his eyes and mouth into an expression of feigned bedazzlement that hinted to Sean that he was being mocked. It made him want to wrap his hand around the twerp’s throat and squeeze some seriousness back into his face. He kept his cool though.

He opened his mouth to speak, but the loudmouth cut him off. “Okay, man. Twenty it is.” He placed his finger on Sean’s chest and added, “You rack ‘em.”

Sean didn’t like being touched, but he just smirked and went to work. After laying a twenty and his beer along the top of a small, round cocktail table beside them, he snagged a wooden triangle rack from a coat hook on the nearby paneled wall. He formed the balls tightly along the well-worn burgundy felt that lined the table.

The loudmouth chalked his stick, broke, and immediately sunk a solid, which incited a toothy grin in the direction of his comrade. He missed the follow-up shot, which opened the door for Sean to sink three stripes in a row. Despite his tiredness, his game was clean and he made short work of his opponent, dropping the eight while three solids still rested on the table. The loudmouth had quieted down a bit, but to Sean’s surprise, he didn’t let the loss deflate his spirit.

“How about double or nothing?” he asked with a chortle. He glanced at his friend as if he were confirming that his ride could stay a bit longer. Curly didn’t seem to be in a hurry and just shrugged his shoulders.

Sean was eager to increase his winnings and motioned to his competitor to rack up. The loudmouth seemed a bit sharper on the second game, and Sean grew nervous after his streak of four sunken balls in a row. The game had commanded the attention of the others inside. The young couple leaned forward in their seats, occasionally offering words of encouragement to both players, and the bartender even crept out from behind her perch a few times to follow the action. The bouncer showed little interest, watching from afar while he sipped from his warm mug and greeted a couple of truckers who arrived separately.

The loudmouth’s cigarette smoke played games with Sean’s weary eyes, but he wasn’t going to complain about it. Someone had punched in some Ted Nugent on the retro jukebox near the entrance and the rhythm of the song “Stranglehold” accompanied the smooth, crisp flow of Sean’s ownership of the table. When he sunk the game-ender in a corner pocket, he earned a smatter of applause from one of the young couple. He wasn’t sure which.

“Son of a bitch!” the loudmouth shouted.

The smirk and the stylin’ were dwindling. The Miami Hurricane had dissipated, and Sean chuckled as two crisp twenties were added to his coffer. The only thing that would have made the moment better was if Roy Hughes from
The Winston Beacon
was there and forced to document the victory. Forty bucks wasn’t anything to do an end zone dance over, but at that very moment in Sean’s life, it was a small fortune—enough for the last gas fill-up he’d need to get him the rest of the way to his destination.

The loudmouth pulled his partner aside and seemed to be consulting with him in the corner of the room. The reflective material of his jacket danced under the dim rays of a couple of dome lights above as he angrily pleaded with Curly about something. Sean figured he was trying to borrow more money from his quiet friend to continue on. His instincts told him to walk away, urging him not to ruin a good thing, but he was caught up in the moment of an impressed group of peers and the sensation of rare success. He held a chalk block up to the tip of his cue stick and ground it loudly, signaling that he was game if his adversary was. The bartender brought him a fresh beer. He nodded to her in acknowledgment but forked over no money, opting to settle up later. He could sense annoyance in her conduct, but he didn’t care.

When her boyfriend retreated to the restroom, Sean caught the young girl from the table flash him an approving smile. She was trim with long, blonde hair and blue eyes, and she was a real beauty. She was in a different league than her boyfriend and the town itself, in Sean’s opinion. Her brief gaze reminded him of the looks he used to get when he played football back in high school. Back then, it wasn’t so much that he was handsome, because he wasn’t, but there was a brand that came with being a winner that got people to take notice, and more importantly take him seriously.

“One hundred dollars!” he heard the loudmouth shout from across the room, as if he were placing a bid on an auction item.

The sharp proposal yanked Sean from his haze of nostalgic daydreaming and dragged him back into the realm of current day reality. He felt the hair on the back of his neck stand at attention. Those words were not at all what he was expecting to hear. He’d even doubted there’d be another game, but the loudmouth had somehow convinced his reluctant cohort to pool their money together for one last hurrah. He felt every eye in the bar bearing down on him. The reasoned approach would have been to walk away forty ahead and not risk losing the remainder of his cash. He knew this and he thought of the devastating loss to Moses Jones that, though still fresh in his mind from two days ago, seemed like ancient history.

His gaze wandered to the cute blonde whose eyes looked electric and seemed to be urging him to accept. He dug into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet, thumbing through the bills and adding the amount to his earlier winnings. His thumb rubbed the irritated spot on the back of his head.

“I only got ninety-eight dollars,” he dryly replied to the loudmouth and his friend.

“Yo, my man’s only got ninety-eight dollars!” he sung out like a court jester trying to create a spectacle for a royal audience, raising his arms and tilting his head to the side with a grin.

Scorn could be read in Sean’s eyes as he glared at the obnoxious sideshow being put on by the jive-talking clown, sure he was ridiculing him.

“Don’t you worry, brah,” he added as he self-assuredly stepped up close to Sean. He patted the palm of his lanky hand on Sean’s bloated chest and continued in softer, more precise tone. “We’ll make that work.”

The guy’s cigarette was dangling dangerously close to Sean’s face and the potency of the smoke and the condescending pat drew his blood to a boil.

Sean grabbed the loudmouth’s insulting hand and twisted his wrist at a sharp angle. An intense, almost sadistic grin forged across his mouth as he took delight in watching the loudmouth’s face contort in pain and his cigarette drop to the floor from his open jaw.

Across the room, the bouncer’s eyebrow arched and he was on his feet in no time.

Sean wasn’t deterred. He pulled the loudmouth in even closer to where their foreheads were nearly locked together like combating bighorn sheep. The room was silent other than a twangy country song now blaring from the jukebox.

With his concentrated glare burning a cauterized hole right through his challenger, Sean said, “Rack ’em.”

When he released the loudmouth’s wrist, the bouncer’s composure returned. His hawkish eye remained on Sean, but he lowered himself back down to his stool.

“Okay, okay, brah. There’s no need for none of that,” the loudmouth backpedaled as he shook his wrist and straightened his body. “We’re all playahs here.” He traded glances with his friend before retrieving the triangle from the wall.

Across the room, the kid returning to his chair from the restroom whistled at the drama of the night’s unfolding entertainment and the promise of a new contest. His girlfriend’s exuberant smile eclipsed her face, brandishing an appetite for the rise in stakes. One of the truckers, wearing a straight-billed baseball cap and filthy windbreaker that might have been gray, watched curiously from his barstool with his thin arms crossed in front of his chest.

Despite the pressure, Sean felt good. The loudmouth’s games hadn’t impressed. He was a mediocre player at best. After insisting that Curly lay the bills on the cocktail table alongside his, Sean was feeling even better.

He chalked the edges of his cue, giving it a few extra turns, which left a plume of fine blue powder hovering in the light of the three-bulb billiard lamp that hung from above. The coated wood of the base of the stick felt like a natural extension of his hand. He gripped it tightly and paced over to the far end of the table. He kept an eye on the loudmouth’s placement of the balls in the triangle, making sure the front ball was on the table dot and the formation was at a straight angle. It looked clean. He felt the warmth of the bulbs above as he leaned over the table and worked on his cue ball placement. He rarely centered the ball. He liked to come at it a bit from the left. His eyes narrowed as he lined up a shot with the ball out about a foot from the edge nearest him.

If he hadn’t been completely focused on preparing to break, Sean might have noticed the fleeting exchange of mischievous, smug glances between his opponent and his quiet, curly-haired investor. It was the kind of transaction that suggested that this wasn’t the first time the two had conned some bar-room stranger into an innocent wager contested along the top of a pool table. It was the kind that suggested that they all too well understood the psychology of luring a hapless victim into a false sense of confidence by throwing the first two games before raising the stakes and schooling the poor casualty. It was the kind that suggested they understood how a little trash talk could provoke a competitive spirit and dull better judgment.

With his fingers guiding his aim dead center at the cue ball, Sean bobbed his stick in and out a few times before holding his breath and unloading with a wicked release.

A split-second was all it took for him to realize that something hadn’t quite gone right. As if some unseen force had nudged his shoulder at the exact moment of contact, he didn’t hit the cue ball square. Still, the sharp crack of the break sounded like a string of firecrackers igniting. Balls bounced fiercely off every edge, colliding and spreading out along the table.

He watched intently with his eyes blitzing the trajectory of every movement on the table. His pulse accelerated when he spotted the eight-ball crisscross the cue ball at a speed far too brisk for comfort. As if he were watching his own heart being yanked from his chest, the eight-ball dropped into a corner pocket with a dull thud while the cue ball proceeded at a more gradual pace toward the opposite corner of the table. The hole there suddenly appeared much larger than it was—a gaping abyss affirming its dominance by drawing in the ball with magnetic pull.

A gasp could be heard from somewhere behind Sean, and nearly every occupant of the room found themselves steadily drawn into a loose huddle around the table to witness the epilogue of the shot. The ball was slowing, as was the world around Sean, who felt paralyzed and powerless. Its fate let it dangle on the edge of the pocket for a moment before it disappeared, the sight of which commanded complete silence from every stunned witness.

“Holy fuck!” the loudmouth screamed exuberantly with bulging eyes behind his aqua-visors and his spread-open hands holding an imaginary sphere in front of his face. He exploded into high-pitched, hideous laughter.

He was the only one speaking or making any noise, jumping sloppily up and down as if he was attached to a large spring that had just been freed from a giant, tin box. The rest of the onlookers had trained their attention on the face of the man who’d defied astonishing odds to actually lose a game of eight-ball on the opening break.

Sean’s legs wobbled under him as if the floor beneath him was opening up. He placed a hand on the edge of the table to stabilize himself. His stomach turned, and he feared he was about to puke up the beers he’d just downed. Pondering the meaning behind whatever kind of sick, divine intervention had just repaid him for a past act or thought, he found himself hostage to his own lifeless gaze that panned the room. The expressions on the faces of the young couple nearly mirrored each other. Both displayed a mixture of awe and sympathy. The trucker with the hat was shaking his head in disbelief, probably just thankful that it wasn’t him for whom the bad luck had befallen. Curly almost looked frightened, taking a few steps back with his head lowered submissively as if he were half expecting Sean to implode into a nervous breakdown. The bartender was visibly agitated, most likely due to a hunch that the adrift loner hadn’t bothered to factor in his bar tab before placing the lost wager.