The Hustler (12 page)

“Sure thing, friend.” One side of the kid’s mouth drooped into a practiced casualness, the kind of thing picked up from pictures of hillbilly singers, practically a sneer. “Just watch who you’re kicking.”

The big man, who was now the game’s only watcher, guffawed.

Eddie remained grinning. “I always watch who I’m kicking. Helps my aim.” The big man did not laugh at this.

Eddie picked a cue out of the rack and began playing, using the awkward style that Charlie had rehearsed him in years before, playing it especially carefully this time. He had to fool the kid, because the kid was the one with the money. And to fool another hustler is not always easy. So he played poorly, but managed to make the right shot at the right time every now and then, often enough to stay even with the game. He kept his eye on the kid, who seemed to suspect nothing.

And then, after about an hour, he began acting as if he were getting hot, sweating a little, acting high and strutting—another thing that Charlie had taught him—making enough wild shots to start winning in earnest, but missing enough to make it look convincing. And the kid did as Eddie hoped, making good shots, running balls without trying so much to appear lucky, drilling the money balls in with malice and skill. He always seemed to sneer at the nine ball before he made it, as if to convince himself of his power over it. In another hour they had driven the other men, grumbling, out of the game. Eddie was about sixty dollars ahead; the kid must have won more than that, for he had continued to collect quite often. Once, when he had lost and paid off to the kid, the other man leered at him and said, “That’s tough, friend,” and Eddie thought,
You just wait, you son of a bitch
, grinning at him.

Now, when the last other player had quit and they were all standing by the big man, watching the two of them, the kid gave him the same look and said, “It’s you and me, friend.”

“Say, that’s right.” He tried to make his voice friendly. “You think maybe we ought to raise the bet?”

The kid did not hesitate. He said, “Five on the nine ball. Two on the five.”

“Okay.” Eddie said.

He let the kid score the nine twice in a row, just to salt the bet well, losing the last game by acting as if he were now, finally, playing his serious game of pool. He did this by cautiously running the balls from the one to the seven, then acting nervous and missing on the eight, making certain that he left a simple shot. This was a routine way of building confidence in the other man—to struggle through the difficult preliminaries and then choke up, letting him pick up an easy victory. It pleased Eddie to see the kid throw off his amateur game completely and try for style when he pocketed the eight and the nine.

“Say, kid,” Eddie said, “you’re one of the best.”

The other player said nothing for a moment, just stood there with the sneer, one hand in his hip pocket, the other lightly holding his cue stick, his little finger sticking out delicately. Then he said, “You quitting, friend?”

Eddie stared at him. When he spoke he was astonished by the anger in his own voice. He did not grin. “No, kid,” he said, levelly, “I’m not quitting.” And then, “Suppose we play a game of hundred-dollar freeze-out. Ten games for ten a game, winner take all. Then we’ll see who quits.”

The kid looked at him coolly.
That’s right
, Eddie thought,
you’ve got me now, boy. You smug little bastard.

“Okay, friend,” the kid said, “you’re on.”

They tossed, and Eddie won the break. And then, while the houseman was racking the balls, Eddie thought,
When I win this he’ll quit anyway
, and he set his cue stick against the wall and began rolling up his sleeves, carefully, looking around him at the cheap, filthy place he was in, and then at the little easy table. He picked up his cue, chalked it. “Okay, punk,” he said softly, “here we go.”

He stepped up to the table, slipped easily into the old, automatic, easy form, stroked smoothly and powerfully, and slugged the nine-ball in on the break, firing it into the corner pocket on a one-to-three shot. “That’s one,” he said, trying to grin, but his voice sounding strangely hard, grating, even to himself. And the sound of his voice shook him. You weren’t supposed to feel this way, not on the hustle. And it was not wise—it was never wise—to look too good, not in a place like this one. He glanced at the group that was watching. Their faces seemed to have no expressions.
I’d better remember to lose a couple.

It would be wiser not to try to make the nine on the break any more; the shot was too unreliable and showy. Instead, he would play this time for a wide spread and a second shot. He got it, slamming two balls in on the break; and then he ran the other seven off the table without pausing between shots or taking his eyes from the table. “That’s two,” he said. There was a little murmur in the group of men who were standing against the wall.

While the balls were being racked, he glanced at the kid, who was leaning against the next table, now, a cigarette hanging from his mouth.

He won the next game by making an easy combination of the nine on his second shot. He ran out the balls, one through nine, in the fourth game. And when he did that something told him that he should not have, that he should not have looked that good. He would miss a ball the next game.

And then, when he was beginning to break, as the winner always does in nine ball, as he was drawing back his cue, he heard the insolent voice, almost drawling, “You better not miss, friend,” and he stopped his stroke, stared up at the kid and, then, laughed, coldly.

“I don’t rattle,” he said. “And, just for trying, I think I’ll beat your ass flat.”

It was simple. It was astonishingly simple. And fast. With the drop pockets and the little table and the quiet fury that he felt even in his cue stick he ran the next six games without even coming close to missing, making every shot perfectly. He slugged them in and eased them in and knifed them in, with dead-ball position.

When it was over the kid’s sneer was gone and there was a buzzing—a fine, exalted buzzing—in Eddie’s ears. When the kid threw the wadded-up bills out on the table, Eddie glanced at them, not picking them up, and said, “Are you quitting now, friend?”

The kid turned away from him and racked his cue. “Hell, yes, I’m quitting,” trying, feebly, to shrug it off. Then he walked out of the poolroom, and Eddie suddenly remembered a time only a few weeks before when he had walked out of a poolroom himself, beaten and staggering and sick in his bowels; and he knew why he had despised, had hated, the snot-nosed, cheap, hustling kid who had seemed to be the same age as himself.

And then he looked up from the table to the five men who had been watching and knew, instantly, that he had made a mistake.

He was standing so that the table was behind him and the row of men in front. All of them had, it seemed, moved closer to him, and one of them, the one nearest the door, had shifted his position so that it would have been impossible to pass by him. They were all watching him closely. In the direct light from the two vibrating, bare bulbs their eyes seemed to flicker over him.

For a long while no one spoke. They seemed to be holding a position in a tableau. Then, not knowing what to do, Eddie broke it, pulling a cigarette from his pocket and putting it in his mouth—a weak gesture, but the only one he knew to make. Somewhere he was saying, wordlessly,
You goddamn fool
, saying it to himself. But that, too, was weak and meaningless. Something was about to happen, and only that had any meaning. He could hear the fan turning, shuddering its blades at each revolution, trembling the light bulbs on their black strings.

Then one of the men, an old man with pale eyes, said, his voice gurgling and obscene, “You’re a pool shark, ain’t you, boy? A real pool shark?”

Eddie said nothing. He let his eyes move to where the thick man, Turtle; was standing, his heavy lips in a pouting expression, his piglike eyes now malicious, staring at him contemptuously, and past him at the table. Then Turtle said, softly, “There’s your money,” nodding his head toward the table.

For a moment Eddie hesitated, wondering if this, the open, malicious contempt, was the only thing those piggish eyes were considering. He hesitated, and Turtle said again, “There’s your money, boy,” and then Eddie turned and reached out for the bills and before he had them in his hand—so quickly that he could not see it happen—the hot, stubby fingers were clamped around his wrist and the broad, ugly face was in his and the sentence that the man had only started was being finished with, “…you pool shark son of a bitch”—a private utterance, said deep in the throat and coming out into his face with the smell of hot, avid breath and the thick emphasis of hate.

He did not have time to be frightened before someone had taken the other arm and was pulling him, and Turtle was saying, now in a public voice, “Wait a minute. Let’s give the son of a bitch his money.” And then Turtle was, incongruously, tucking the bills into his, Eddie’s, shirt pocket and saying, “We pay what we lose around here, boy,” and peering at him from what seemed to have become a panorama of faces which he, Turtle, dominated in ugliness and in power. “But we don’t like pool sharks,” saying this now privately, confidentially, his face close, tucking the bills into the shirt pocket, tamping them down with his fingers, as if afraid they would be lost, as if Eddie might somehow ejaculate them from his pocket back on the table. “We got no use at all for pool sharks.” Softly, wanting to make it perfectly clear.

Then they dragged him to the wooden toilet at the back of the room and two other men held him while Turtle carefully broke his thumbs. First the left one and then the right, taking them firmly on either side of the knuckle and bending them backward until the small bones in them broke.

Along the middle of the wall behind Eddie there was a two-by-four, to which the wall boards were nailed. On this was a row of empty bottles, and several of these fell to the floor from the jarring, jerking movements of Eddie’s body, pinned against the wall. When the bottles hit they tinkled and jangled noisily; but Eddie did not hear them because of the overriding—yet distant, detached, far-off—sound of his own screaming.

13

He was sitting on a step, his arms hanging at his sides. The step was cold, damp, and he was staring at it, at the dark triangle of concrete between his legs. Actually, he could not see it very well, for the light from the lamp at the street corner was weak. But this did not make any difference. Somebody had hit him in the side of the face, very hard, and now he was sick. The side of his face was sore, but his hands did not seem to feel anything, no pain at all, nothing.

Abruptly, he heard himself speak aloud. What he said was,
Anyway, it wasn’t my wrists
. He was astonished, for he seemed to have been crying. He remembered now; but he did not lift his hands to look at them. He continued sitting on the step, in front of the door of Arthur’s poolroom. He had beat on the door with his elbows and knees, his shoulders; he remembered all that. And some men had come out, suddenly, and hit him….

After a while he heard someone coming down the street, but he did not look up. And then, in a moment, there was a voice, deep and resonant. “You go home now, boy. They closed.”

He looked up. The man was a young Negro, perspiring and dressed gorgeously in a blue suit, looking at him strangely. He did not say anything and the Negro said, “Boy, you hurt. You go to the doctor.” The man seemed to be swaying gently, and there was a worried look on his dark, shiny face. “Here, maybe you ought to have a drink.” There was something ridiculously like a businessman about the way he pulled a pint bottle from his breast pocket. He opened it and held the bottle while Eddie took a long pull. Eddie wiped his mouth with his sleeve, careful not to look at his hand as he did this.

“Look, mister,” the other man was saying, softly. “You better let me get you to a doctor. You been in some rough company.”

The drink made him feel better. He was uncertain how to stand up; he did not want to push himself up with his hands.

“Help me up, please,” he said.

The Negro helped him up, silently. “I’m all right,” Eddie said. “Thanks.”

The man squinted at him but did not protest. “You go get a doctor. Hear?”

“Sure,” Eddie said. He started walking.

It seemed to be a very long time before he found a taxi. After he got in he had to think for a minute before he told the driver where to take him. Then he gave Sarah’s address. The driver was a young man, and not talkative.

It was a long drive, and when they came into the more brightly lighted part of the city they stopped for a few moments at an intersection. In the weak light that came from the street corner, Eddie lifted his hands to his lap and looked at them.

Oddly, the surprise of them was only slight. They were twisted grotesquely, and the thumbs were askew. Above the knuckle of his right thumb there was a broken piece of bone showing, white, tinged with dark brown along one edge. There were a few blots of brown blood on his shirt sleeve and there was blood, like dried and cracking glue, on his wrist.

But they seemed to be someone else’s hands, not his own. Or like so much ruined meat. And there was no pain in them….

***

He thought at first that Sarah was going to cry out when she saw him. She was reading when he came in, wearing her glasses and frowning, probably very drunk; but when she saw him her eyes flew wide.

“My God,” she said.

He sat down. And suddenly he felt a tenseness in his stomach; it was beginning to start in his hands. The pain. “Get me a drink,” he said.

“Sure.” She got up quickly, no sign of drunkenness in her movement, poured a tumbler half full of bourbon and brought it to him. He did not have to tell her to hold it for him. He drank half of it and told her that was enough.

“How… do you feel?” she said.

“I don’t know.”

Her eyes had the puzzled look, and she was studying his face strangely. “What happened to you?”

“A lot of things.” He was beginning to feel lightheaded now, and bodiless. And, somehow, he was calm, calmer than he ever remembered having been. Nothing was very real. “I got beat up.” Even his own voice sounded as if it were imaginary. “They broke my thumbs.”