The Hustler (22 page)

“Tuesday was the first of the month,” he said. It occurred to him that neither of them had acknowledged the fact that he had not brought his suitcase with him.

“I got my check,” she smiled faintly, wryly. “I had to use the liquor money for tuition. The fall semester.” She looked away from him, inspecting the doorknob it seemed. “You can get a bottle of Scotch if you’d like, and we can drink it.”

“In Coca-Cola glasses?”

She did not look up. “If you want to.”

He was looking at her face, fascinated by her skin, which seemed to glow in the soft light from the living room lamp. But he felt nothing, only a simple, admiring fascination, as if he were looking at the orange clown on Sarah’s wall, the one in the white frame. The clown that had once seemed ready to tell him something. “You didn’t finish your martini tonight,” he said.

“I know.”

“Maybe it’s a good sign,” he said gently, feeling almost as if it were someone else talking to her, as if he himself were already at the hotel, in bed, alone. “You don’t make a very convincing lush.”

“No,” she said, looking up at him now. “I don’t suppose I do.” And then, “Are you going to get the Scotch?”

“No,” he said. “I’m tired. And I have a big day tomorrow.”

“Are you coming in? There’s a little left in my bottle.”

He looked at her face, the wise and hard and puzzled eyes. “I’d better be getting back to the hotel,” he said.

She looked at his eyes, for the first time that night. She did not seem to be trying to find anything in them, just looking. Then she said, “Thanks again for the watch.”

“I’m glad you like it.” He turned and began walking down the stairs.

“Good luck, Eddie,” she said, calling softly to him, “for tomorrow.”

“Thanks,” he said. He continued down the steps slowly to the landing, listening for the final sound of her door closing. He heard nothing. Then, at the landing, he turned and looked back up. Sarah was still standing there, looking at him. The light was from the open doorway behind her and he could not see her face. “Sarah,” he said, his voice soft, strange, “I came very close to buying that ring….”

She did not reply, and he stood there, looking at her, for what seemed a very long while; but he could not make out her features. Then he turned and continued down the stairs.

He took a cab to his hotel, since he did not feel like walking. When he went to bed he did not fall immediately asleep.

21

Bennington’s had not changed. It was not the kind of place that would change. It was two o’clock in the afternoon when Eddie and Bert stepped from the elevator, walked across the hall and through the huge door. Inside, the room was very quiet. No one was playing pool and there was virtually no one in the place, except for a small crowd of eight or ten men sitting and standing against one wall.

Most of the men seemed familiar to Eddie. One of them, a very big, meaty-looking man with glasses, Eddie recognized as the poolroom manager, Gordon. He did not know any of the others by name, except for one of them. In the middle of the group, sitting, speaking to no one, was Minnesota Fats. He was cleaning his fingernails, with a nail file.

Gordon had looked up when Eddie and Bert walked in, and in a moment they had all stopped talking. Eddie could hear a radio playing, faintly, but nothing else. He looked at Fats. Fats did not look up. There was a very strange sensation in Eddie’s stomach; he would not have known what to call it. A polished voice on the radio announced something and then music began to play—a love song.

Bert kept walking and found himself a seat at the edge of the group. Several of the men nodded to him and he nodded back, but no one said anything.

Eddie had stopped beside a table in the middle of the room; he stayed there and began opening his leather case, carefully. While he was doing this he watched Minnesota Fats, not taking his eyes from the moonlike face, the shiny, curly hair, and the massive belly, now covered with tight blue silk—a pale blue shirt that fit so tight across Fats’ belly that it clung to it, folding only where the flesh folded, under the narrow belt. On his small feet, Fats was wearing immaculate little brown-and-white shoes, which rested delicately against the foot rail of the chair that held his magnificent, enormous butt.

While Eddie watched him, taking his cue stick from the case and then twisting the two ends together, Fats’ face made its regular, jerking grimace, but his eyes did not look up at Eddie.

Then Fats finished what he was doing, slipped the nail file into his breast pocket, and blinked at him. “Hello, Fast Eddie,” he said, in the no-tone voice.

The stick was together now, and tight. Eddie walked to Bert, handed him the case, and then, cue in hand, he walked over to Fats, stopping in front of him.

“Well, Fats,” he said, “I came to play.”

Fats’ face made the heavy, ambiguous movement that resembled a smile. “That’s good,” he said.

Not saying anything, Eddie turned around and began racking the balls on the empty table in front of the sitting men. When he had finished he began chalking his cue quietly and said, “Straight pool, Fats? Two hundred a game?”

From somewhere in the heavy mound of silk- and leather-wrapped flesh in the chair came a kind of short, softly explosive sound, a brief travesty of a laugh. And then, blinking, Fats said, “One thousand, Fast Eddie. One thousand dollars a game.”

It figured. It figured immediately; but it was a shock. Fats knew him now. Fats knew his game, and Fats was not going to fool with him, was going to try to put him down fast, on nerve and on capital. It was a good move.

Not answering, Eddie bent down and began tapping the cue ball with his cue stick, gently shooting it across the table and back. He kept his hands busy with the cue stick, to keep the fingers from trembling. He kept shooting the cue ball, back and forth across the table, and he thought of the two-and-a-half thousand dollars in his pocket, the dim pain in the fingers of his hands, the stiffness in the joints of his thumbs and in his wrists. And he thought about the money and nerve and experience and skill backing the grotesque and massive man who was sitting behind him now, jerking his chin, watching.

If he played him, he would be bucking the odds. Immediately he thought of Bert again. Bert would never buck the odds. Suddenly he looked up and over at Bert. Bert sat, squat and secure, looking down at him from the high chair, his face clouded, his eyes registering disapproval. No, Bert would never buck the odds.

Eddie stood up from the table and, not looking at anyone, said, “Flip the coin, Fats. Let’s see who breaks….”

Fats broke, and he was beautiful. His stroke was lovely; his command of the game miraculous; and the graceful movements of his giant, disgusting body were a compound of impossibility and of genius. He beat Eddie. Fats beat him not just once, but three times in a row.

The scores were close, but it happened so fast that Eddie felt he did not have any control of what happened. Balls had bounced and slipped and rolled and fallen into pockets, and, as before, Fats had seemed to be everywhere, shooting fast, never looking, playing his obscure concerto with his fiddlebow of a cue and his musician’s hands with emeralds on the fingers.

For the last twenty minutes of the final game Eddie did nothing but watch while Fats edged and sliced and nursed and coaxed balls to perform for him, making a run of ninety-three and out. When he gave him the thousand, the last thousand, Eddie’s hands were sweating and he was still staring fixedly at the table. There was a ringing sound somewhere in his head. Then, still hardly aware of what had happened to him, he looked up.

He was in the middle of a crowd. People were sitting all around the table, all of them watching him. Nobody else was playing pool. It was late afternoon now. There was slanting autumn sunlight in the big room, and everything was very quiet, except for the radio, which seemed to be tinkling and buzzing.

He could not distinguish individual faces in the crowd very well at first, but they began to come into focus. He was looking for Bert; he did not know exactly why. He should not want to see Bert, but he was looking for him. And then he saw Charlie.

He blinked. It was Charlie, no one else, sitting in a chair by the wall, pudgy, bald at the temples, and with no expression on his face. He started to walk to Charlie, to ask him where he had appeared from, what he was doing there; but he stopped, struck in the face by an insight.

Charlie had come to smirk at him, to see him beaten again. Charlie, like Bert, one of the in-turned and self-controlled—one of the cautious, smirking men. Maybe Fats was like that too, maybe the three of them were brothers under the pink flesh, delighting quietly in the downfall of the fast and loose man, finding the weak spot—suddenly it seemed to Eddie that he himself was a Lazarus of sore, weak spots—and then, having found the place where it hurts, gently probing and pushing and twisting until their mutual enemy, the man with all the talent, was lying on the floor vomiting on himself.

Looking at Charlie he could see himself now as a man crucified, and Charlie as his Judas. He could have wept, and he made fists out of his hands and tightened them until he felt that he would scream with the pain. And then the edge of his vision caught sight of Bert, and immediately he came to his senses and saw what he was doing, playing the loser’s game with himself, the game of self-pity, the favorite of all the multitude of indoor sports….

Charlie eased himself up from the chair and waddled over. His face was serious, his voice quiet. “Hello, Eddie,” he said. “I just got word you were playing up here.”

“Why aren’t you in Oakland?”

Charlie attempted a smile. The attempt was a failure. “I was. Last week I started getting worried about you and flew back. I been hunting you. Around the rooms.”

“What for?” Eddie stared at him; there was something strained about the way Charlie was talking to him. “What do you want me for?”

Not answering at first, Charlie fumbled in his hip pocket and withdrew what looked like a folded-over checkbook and held it out to him. “This is yours,” he said.

Eddie took the book and opened it. It was full of traveler’s checks, in denominations of two hundred fifty each. “What the hell…?” he said.

Charlie’s voice was back to its customary lack of expression, like that of a comic miniature of Minnesota Fats. “When you were drunk up here before and hit me for the money, I held out on you. This is what I held out. A little under five thousand.” And then, abruptly, his face broke into one of his extremely rare smiles, which lasted only for a moment, “Minus my ten per cent, of course.”

Eddie shook his head, letting his thumb run over the thick edges of the blue checks. It figured; it figured, but it was hard to believe: he had just come back from the grave. “So why give it to me now,” he said. “So you can watch me lose?”

Charlie’s voice was soft. “No,” he said. “I been thinking. Maybe you’re ready to beat him now. Maybe you were ready before—I don’t know. Anyway, you ought to find out.”

“Okay,” Eddie said. He grinned at Charlie, the old grin, the charm grin, fast and loose. “We’ll find out.”

He glanced at Fats, who seemed only to be waiting, and then counted the money. There was four thousand five hundred in traveler’s checks, and he had about seven hundred in cash. His whole kitty.
Well, here we go. Fast and loose.

Then he looked at the fat man and said, “Fats,” thinking,
you fat bastard
, “let’s play a game of pool for five thousand dollars.”

Fats blinked at him. His chins jerked, but he said nothing.

“Come on, Fats,” he said, “five thousand. That’s a hustler’s game of pool. It’s my whole bankroll, my life’s savings.” He flipped again through the book of checks, not feeling the pain that doing this caused, and then looked for a moment at Charlie. Charlie’s face showed nothing, but his eyes were alert, interested, and Eddie thought, wonderingly,
he’s going along with it
. Then he looked at Bert and Bert was smiling thinly, but approvingly; and this too was astonishing and lovely.

“What’s the matter, Fats?” he said. “All you got to do is win one game and I’m gone back to California. Just one game. You just beat me three.”

Fats blinked at him, his face now very thoughtful, controlled, and his eyes as always a kind of obscene mystery.

“Okay,” he said.

Having changed the bet they tossed for the break again, and Fats lost again. He chalked his cue carefully, stepped sideways up to the table, set his hands on the green, the rings flashing, and shot.

The break was good, but not perfect. One ball, the five-ball, was left a few inches out from the rack, unprotected, down at the foot of the table. The cue ball was frozen to the end rail, the table’s length from it. It was an odds-off shot, a nowhere shot; and Eddie’s first reaction was automatic, play it safe, don’t take a chance on leaving the other man in a place where he can score a hundred points. The proper thing to do would be to ease the cue ball down the table, nudge one of the corner balls, and return it to the end rail, letting the other man figure it out from there. That would be the right way to play it—the safe way.

But Eddie stopped before getting ready to shoot and looked at the ball and it occurred to him that although it was a very difficult shot it happened to be one that he could make. You cut it just so, at just such speed and with just so much spin and the ball would fall in the pocket. And the cue ball would split open the rack and the ball game would suddenly be wide open.

It would be smarter to play safe. But to play safe would be to play Bert’s game, to play Fats’ game, to play the quiet, careful percentage. But, as Bert himself had once said, “There’s a lot of percentage players find out they got to work for a living.”

He chalked his cue lightly, with three deft strokes. Then he said, “Five ball in the corner,” bent down, took careful, dead aim, and shot.

And the cue ball—for a moment an extension of his own will and consciousness—sped quickly down the table and clipped the edge of the five-ball, then rebounded off the bottom rail and smacked firmly into the triangle of balls, spreading them softly apart. And while this was happening, the little orange ball with the number 5 in its center rolled evenly across the table, along the rail, and into the corner pocket, hitting the bottom with a sound that was exquisite.