Something Rising (Light and Swift) (17 page)

Gaia was angered by Uranus and called upon one of the sons, Cronos, to punish his father. Or so said Hesiod in the
Theogony
on page 165. Cronos rose up and castrated Uranus, and many were born from his severed genitals, including, Belle had carefully noted, Aphrodite. Cassie sat down in Belle's desk chair and picked up the thread. Cronos was the next ruler and swallowed his children so they wouldn't destroy him as he had destroyed his father. But one child, Zeus, was spirited by his mother to the nymphs to raise, and Cronos was given a stone to swallow.

Cassie looked out the window at the bare branches of the trees. Swallowing children, swallowing stones. There was a lot more to go through, but she thought she could see where Belle was heading. Cassie tapped her fingertips on the arm of the chair, tried to imagine Belle explaining the law of cause and effect, something so simple, to a visitor from another planet. Belle, who didn't understand the application of most practical principles, and who, even though she'd lived in the same house as Cassie,
same parents, had probably never seen one colored ball strike another.

There was a stack of paper next to the typewriter: Cassie took a few sheets and chose a mechanical pencil from the cup on the windowsill. Belle seemed to be collecting them; there were ten or twelve, all with pastel barrels and unused erasers. The room was warm, and the view from the window was actually nicer than Cassie would have expected: meandering lanes around an open grassy space. The lanes intersected periodically and led off into other directions. Belle had said in a letter a few weeks ago that she could walk as far as the library, but beyond it was a field of resistance that hit her like wind. Cassie drew the rectangle of a table on the top sheet of paper, and the Chinese characters from the hanging red lamp. She had practiced the characters many times but still found the act awkward. Belle had found someone at the university to translate their meaning:
Bird in Flight, Wish Me Luck
. She began a letter to Belle, or something like a letter. Cassie didn't know how far the library was, but she hoped for all their sakes that it was miles and miles away.

I couldn't have known
, Cassie began, that Jimmy would show up there that night. In the year after he left home for good, there were a few furtive phone calls made from gas stations or rest stops. He told Cassie he wanted to come home, but Barbara wouldn't let him. One call had been in the middle of the night, and Jimmy was drunk, said he had gassed up the Lincoln and was heading to New Orleans, did Cassie want to go. She did; she gathered a few things, wrote a note to Laura, and waited on the porch the rest of the night. He never showed.

Once he'd actually come by the house (but wouldn't come in) and left a bag for Cassie. Inside she'd found three hundred dollars in rolled quarters.

“What in the world?” Belle said.

Laura leaned over, looked inside. “Hmm. He must have ambushed a vending machine.”

What did he mean, what did he want? Laura said she thought Jimmy was probably torn. A simple thing. Or else he honestly didn't want his children but didn't want anyone to say he couldn't have them. He was like a child himself, Laura said, who ran away from Barbara, then went home when it got dark. He'd been scarce all over Cassie's life that year, even when she fought it and fought him. Uncle Bud had the locks changed, and Laura did the same, so Cassie wasn't expecting him to show up that night, she wrote, then realized she was repeating herself and erased it. Belle never erased.

She had played against Bud awhile and cleaned his clock, as Jimmy would have said, then was shooting alone. The place was busy—it was a Saturday night, and this was what Cassie wrote for Belle:
Saturday night, busy, I was alone in the room with the table. A song by Alabama was playing on the jukebox
. (Cassie had done her best to get Uncle Bud to add two or three or even
one
album she could tolerate. She had nearly sold him on Etta James, but in the end he fell back on the old argument, which was that patrons in a pool hall are by and large nostalgic and want to recall sitting on a porch swing with Grandma.) She didn't see him come in; her back was to the door. There were some bluff greetings, louder talk. What finally made her turn around was the change in atmosphere.
She turned around and he was at the bar, surrounded by cronies he had long since abandoned, men who still thought him a hero for exploits a quarter of a century gone. His black leather cue case rested against his leg.

Cassie's breath quickened, and she could hear her heartbeat. Jimmy still evoked elation and dread—she wanted to run to him before he got away, and she wanted to run past him and have it over with. Behind the bar Uncle Bud stood with his arms crossed. He glanced at Cassie, and she lowered her cue and rested it on top of her boot. She suspected, and Bud probably did, too, that Jimmy and Barbara had had a fight, and he was here to prove something. Uncle Bud shook his head, took a deep breath; he hated drama, his look said. Jimmy said something to him with a laugh, fellow feeling, and Bud didn't move; finally, he turned and got Jimmy a beer from the cooler.

Cassie studied her father. He was wearing a pale pink shirt so finely woven that the fabric looked shiny, with gray slacks and the black wing tips he'd had for years. She wrote these details for Belle because they both knew the shoes, for a while had been forced to shine them on Sunday mornings, as if Jimmy were on his way to a church that prized such care. Cassie loved doing it, Belle was made so angry by the task that she sometimes broke out in hives. That night Cassie was still wearing the clothes from her weekend job, painter's pants on which she'd wiped the residue from twenty different colors, a John Deere T-shirt, one of Poppy's old flannel button-downs. Jimmy drank his beer, talked to his friends, made his way slowly back to the glassed-in room that held his dearest conquest. He looked like a model for a certain kind of father; Cassie looked like a vagrant. When his eyes met hers, he let his gaze flicker over her face, and she knew why he was there.

“Cass?” he said, coming through the door.

“Hey.”

“How's my girl?” He kissed the side of her head. “You're dusty.”

“Drywall,” Cassie said, running her hand over the grit on the back of her neck.

“Well, don't get it on my table.” Jimmy put his beer on the shelf and began unzipping his cue case.

“Okay.”

“You've worked yourself up a good game, I hear.”

Cassie shrugged, looked back at Bud, who remained behind the bar, watching her. He would stop this if she asked.

“Your mom's okay? Bella?”

Cassie shrugged again; he was wrong to ask. She noticed then that his hand shook as he tried to screw in the butt of his cue, a gesture she'd seen him make a thousand times. It was possible he was drunk; with Jimmy it was hard to tell. He gave nothing away in his gait, the whites of his eyes, his speech. He simply grew more malignant around the edges, and then he was gone.

Cassie leaned back in Belle's desk chair, stretched out her fingers. It had been two years since she'd seen Jimmy, and two years since Belle left home, and in that time she'd written more than in all her years of school. Neither she nor Laura liked to talk on the telephone; Belle didn't, either, really, so they wrote and wrote. It didn't come naturally to Cassie and she didn't enjoy it and it made her fingers ache. But Laura said it would come in handy if Cassie were ever arrested and forced to write a jailhouse confession. Cassie said they could
break
her fingers, she'd never confess to anything, and Laura nodded.

*    *    *

Jimmy racked the balls without bothering to ask Cassie if she was done with her game, and then he pulled a roll of money from his pocket. “You want to show your old dad what you're made of?” Smiling.

Maybe she imagined it, or maybe it happened internally, but the whole establishment grew unusually quiet. Then Bud leaned his head in the doorway. “Cassie? Talk to you a minute?”

She walked with Bud behind the bar as Jimmy used her cue to break and to take his practice shots.

“How much do you have on you?” he asked.

“One-fifty. My paycheck.”

“All right, look.” Bud kept his eye on the room where Jimmy was playing alone. “There's five, six hundred in the till, two or three thousand in the safe. Use it all.”

“Okay.”

“Lose it, let him bury himself. He's not carrying that much. You drop below, say, four thousand, we'll talk options. Lose the lag.”

“Okay.”

“Don't play this hotheaded. You go in and beat him every game, he'll make an excuse and walk. Or worse, he'll beat you. You—”

“He's not going to beat me.”

“You bring Laura into this, Belle, Poppy, he'll beat you.”

“He's not going to beat me.”

Bud leaned in close, tapped her chest with his finger. “You bring your history into this, he'll beat you. Because you feel it and he doesn't.”

“You best back that finger up.”

Bud gripped his temples. “See? This is what I mean about you, you are your own worst—”

“Cassie?” Jimmy stepped away from the table. “Bud trying to talk you out of a friendly wager?” He shook his head. “Far as I can tell, he doesn't own you yet.”

Cassie looked Bud hard in the eye. “No,” she said. “He doesn't.” But just before she walked away from Bud, she offered him Jimmy's half-wink, and he opened the till. Then she turned to the table where her father waited, a slight man with a swing in his step. She was going to give him what he wanted: she was going to play like a girl. And then she was going to kick his ass.

To her sister she wrote:
Bud backed me
.

Cassie put the pencil down, turned her attention back to the desk. There were articles on chaos theory, fractal geometry, astrology. A small book-length collection of French surrealist parlor games. An introduction to Sufism. An article from a group called Solarplexus, which promised to lead the reader to an alchemical paradise at the edge of the sun. Nearly at the bottom, the sort of thing Cassie thought she might find: a blurry photocopy of an article on billiards and the law of reflection. At the top Belle had written,
A ball in motion on a pool table behaves like a light ray reflecting off a mirror
.

Cassie sighed. This was just like Belle.
In truth
, Cassie wrote in the margin,
the velocity at which the ball strikes the rubber rail determines the angle of reflection. The law applies only if the ball is moving slowly. A ball in motion on a pool table behaves like a ball in motion on a pool table
. But the accuracy of the physical hypothesis wasn't what interested Belle, and Cassie knew it. What interested Belle was the mirror.

*    *    *

Jimmy called fifty bucks a game, and Cassie chose 9-ball. There were some things she'd let float in the interest of the outcome, and a couple things she wanted made clear from the outset. Through the first game Jimmy kept up a steady stream of talk, all vaguely hostile, as Cassie said nothing. She'd seen him do it at home, knew it threw some men off. It was a miracle Jimmy still had all his organs, the way he sharked. She lost the first game, the second. Jimmy drank, became giddy with victory. She lost barely, and only at the last possible second, on thin slices and long shots, letting Jimmy think she was playing at the edge of her skill. After the third game she took a bathroom break and picked up the money Bud had left for her there, along with a note: Lose one more, then come back for two. Then double the bid. In the bathroom Cassie flushed the note, tucked the money in her pocket. There was money in this, she'd realized. Jimmy's roll was all hundred dollar bills. He'd either mortgaged something of Barbara's or had a handsome accident. Either way there was plenty in it for her, for Laura and Poppy and Bud. But she already knew, though she wasn't ready to say it yet, that she didn't care much about the money. She wanted something else of his, and it was simply a matter of pushing him to lose it.

Jimmy claimed the cue was an original Balabushka, which was no doubt Jimmy talking. George Balabushka had been dead for twelve years, and if Jimmy weren't lying, the cue was worth twenty-five thousand dollars. It still had the original ferrule and finish, the original Irish linen wrap, Balabushka's signature burned into the butt. She didn't believe, and Bud didn't, either, that even Jimmy would use it if it were authentic. But they'd both held it, Cassie only once, and they agreed that there was something
unusual in the balance. It seemed to have its own heat, more like a fast horse or a gun. The cue was the last artifact in Jimmy's possession of that fateful night in New Orleans, and Cassie thought maybe some things should be restored as a set. The table, the lamp, the cue. Whatever else he'd stolen and hadn't advertised.

“There she is,” Jimmy said as Cassie walked back out into the hall. “You're a good sport. This is a tough lesson, I know. Don't take it too hard.” He smiled his crooked smile at her. His shoulders, the line of his chest under his pink shirt, made Cassie want to cry.

“I'll try not to.”

She won two games, dropped the third, let herself look desperate. She was exhausted from working all day and from straining against her inclinations all evening. A small and silent crowd gathered as the night wore on, and the phone rang repeatedly, but Bud ignored it. “A hundred a game,” she said as Jimmy racked the balls.

“You're on,” he answered, without even glancing her way.

To her sister she wrote:
I raised the stakes
.

Barbara arrived around midnight, and threats were issued. A friend of Bud's from the sheriff's department sat outside in his car, keeping her at bay. At two in the morning Bud locked the doors. Jimmy was down thirty-seven hundred and out of cash.

“This is unacceptable, Cassie,” he said, lighting a cigarette with shaking hands. His pink shirt was unbuttoned, his T-shirt drenched with sweat. “You and that sumbitch Bud set something up and scoured me, and you'll pay for it.”