The Hustler (7 page)

He glanced at his watch. “You’ve got almost an hour,” he said.

She nodded, and then finished the cup of coffee she had been drinking.

“How long you been waiting?” he said.

She turned her eyes up to him again. He liked the gesture; he had seen a girl in a movie do it that way once and he had liked it then. “Since four.”

There seemed nothing more to say, and they became silent. He was a little confused by the girl; he did not know whether she had been friendly or not. He would let it ride, let her open the conversation again if she wanted to. Anyway it was pointless, if she was leaving town at six o’clock.

The waitress brought his breakfast and the coffee. He ate slowly and silently; his stomach seemed acutely conscious of the food. She stirred her coffee for a long while before she began sipping at it.

When he had finished the breakfast he began to feel more alive. There was still a sense of pain in him somewhere, the scars of the knife in his stomach; but now he felt tighter, more aware of what was happening. The ache in his right shoulder remained, however—a reminder of what the night’s work had been.

He decided to try the girl again, for what she was worth. “Could I bum a cigarette?” he said.

“Sure.” She handed him the case from her pocket. “You press the button at the end.”

The case was heavy and plain; turning it over in his hand he saw the word “Sterling” stamped on its bottom. “This is nice,” he said, opening it and taking out a cigarette. He handed it back to her.

When he lit the cigarette he noticed with surprise that his fingers were still trembling. His matches said
BENNINGTON’S BILLIARD ROOM
on them, in green letters.

The cigarette tasted like tar. He coughed from it, and then looked at it more closely. On it was printed
GITANES
. “What did you give me,” he said, “marijuana?”

She smiled the faint smile again. “They’re French.”

“What for?”

She seemed to think a moment. “I don’t know,” she said, “to impress my friends, probably.”

It was a peculiar answer, but sufficient. He continued smoking, gingerly. It did not taste so bad when he inhaled it gently.

When he stubbed out the cigarette and looked at his watch, it was a quarter of six. He looked at the girl; she was absorbed in studying her coffee again, stirring the remains of it idly with her spoon. This irritated him slightly and he thought,
What the hell
. He got up and said, “Have a good trip.”

She looked up at him. “Thanks. I will.” And as he was paying the check, “Thanks for the coffee.”

Outside it was dirty, silver daylight and traffic sounds. The air was already becoming warm and moist. He felt neither sleepy nor hungry nor yet fully awake, and did not know what to do. He began walking, and a block from the bus station found a painted sign that said
HOTEL FOR MEN
. Inside, a fat Negress gave him a key to a seventh-floor cubicle. The room was surprisingly clean. He sat on the bed for more than an hour and thought and tried not to think about Minnesota Fats. This produced nothing. He did not feel like sleeping, got up finally, and went back out. There was more daylight, more traffic, more fast-walking people. He could think about Minnesota Fats—about the fat man, the pool game, and what they had all meant—later. Maybe in a few days, when he felt more like thinking it all out.

There had been a bar across the street from the bus station, closed before. It would probably be open now.

It was open, and there was a customer in it. In the back of the room, in a booth, the girl from the bus station. The lights were softer but it was the same scene, except that she was sipping a highball this time.

It seemed very strange, and for a moment it shook him. Then he walked back to her. She watched him coming, with the gesture of looking up at him. “Hello,” he said, grinning. “Have a nice trip?” She looked much better, with the softer light on her face.

“Fair.”

“Can I sit down?”

She did not smile; but her face did not seem so severe. “Why not,” she said. “Already we know each other’s secrets.”

He eased into the seat, wondering what she had meant. Then he signaled the bartender for bourbon and water. He looked back to her, noticed that her drink was almost gone, and said, “Look, if I buy you a drink will you tell me why you didn’t catch that bus?”

She looked at him a moment, and then for the first time smiled, wryly. “You can buy me a drink,” she said, “but I’d tell you anyway.”

He called to the bartender, “Another for the lady.” Then he looked back at her. “Okay,” he said, “why didn’t you catch the bus?”

She leaned back against the plastic upholstery of the seat. The seat was high-backed, and against it she looked like a child on a large sofa. She reached a small hand forward and stirred her drink. “I wasn’t waiting for a bus,” she said.

The man brought them their drinks and Eddie sipped at his. It tasted delicious; the bourbon cold and clean, like a mild antiseptic.

“Then why go to the bus station?” he said.

“The same reason you went there, probably. At five in the morning you don’t have much choice.” It was either the liquor or the lights or the fact that she seemed to have accepted his presence: her face had become more relaxed, although there was still no act, no assumption of any particular relationship. Eddie wondered, briefly, what would happen if he got up and went to sit beside her, patted her on the butt or something. Probably nothing. She looked as if she could handle herself.

“Besides,” she said, “I only live three blocks from here.”

Was that an invitation of some sort? He looked at her closely. Not likely.

“And you like bus stations?”

“No. I hate bus stations.” She made a small gesture with her hand. “Sometimes I wake up and I can’t get back to sleep—not without a drink. And this bar doesn’t open until six o’clock.”

He liked the way she talked. Her voice was soft, yet the words were precise and well enunciated. There was something in the sound of her voice that, like the plain silver cigarette case, felt of natural class—a quality that Eddie liked very much.

“You always drink in the mornings?” he said.

“No. Only when I’m broke and have to wait for the bars to open so I can charge a drink. Otherwise I usually have a bottle at home. In which case I sleep very well.”

This seemed ridiculous. She liked talking that way about herself. If she were really a lush she probably wouldn’t talk about it.

He looked back at her and it struck him, suddenly, that she was pretty. Why not make a quick try, the fast hustle? “Look,” he said, “I can buy us a bottle….”

Her expression hardly changed; but her voice was like a wall. “No,” she said.

“Say, a fifth of Scotch.”

She leaned forward, “Look,” she said, “we were doing fine here. Come off it.” She took a draw from her cigarette. “Anyway, I’m not your type.”

What she had said was instantly right and he grinned at her. “All right,” he said. “You win. Sorry I brought it up.”

“That’s okay,” she said, leaning back again. “A proposition is supposed to be flattering, even from a man who picks you up in a bus station. And I like Scotch—you made the right offer.”

“Glad to hear it,” he said. He finished off his drink and then said, “One more?”

“No,” she said, “I’m sleepy now.” She got up from her seat. He stood up too and saw how short she was, smaller than she had looked to be, sitting down. “I’ll walk you home,” he said.

“If you want to. But you won’t earn anything by it.”

This irritated him slightly. “Maybe I wasn’t trying to earn anything,” he said.

She walked ahead of him when he stopped to pay the check and he noticed that she had a slight limp, her left foot hesitated gently against her stride. She kept her hands in her pockets. They walked in virtual silence, and when they came to her place—a faceless building in a long row of faceless buildings—she said “Thanks” and went inside before he had a chance even to attempt a foot in the door.

It took him a half hour of walking to find a liquor store. Before he found it he passed a poolroom, closed. He bought a fifth of Scotch, took it back to his hotel room with him and, before he went to bed, set it, unopened, on the green metal dresser.

8

He awoke, sweating from the heat in his room, at seven-thirty that evening. After dressing, he went downstairs, out to the bus station, getting his suitcase from the locker but putting in another dime and leaving the pool cue. He would not be needing that for quite a while. It might be several weeks before he would want to advertise himself.

Before he left he looked, on a long-odds gamble, into the lunchroom. The girl was not there. Then he went back to his room, shaved, and changed his clothes. Coming out he left a bundle of dirty shirts with the woman in the lobby, telling her to send them out for him. He made a mental note to buy himself some new socks and underwear. He hadn’t brought enough.

Then he went looking for a poolroom.

***

He found one on a street named Parmenter, a hole in the wall called Wilson’s Recreation Hall, the kind of place with green paint on the windows. There were three beat-up pool tables, green-shaded incandescent lamps, and an old man to rack the balls. There were a bar and a back room—for booking race bets or for a card game. The door was open and he could see a round table and some chairs, but nobody was in the back room. Up front a small, indecently wrinkled man was sitting behind an ancient cash register that squatted, its sides decorated in phony rococo, on the bar. He looked up as Eddie came in.

It was a crummy place, a filthy, crooked-looking place, but Eddie felt at home in it. There were probably ten thousand poolrooms in the country, identical, down to the back room and the old man with the corrugated face, to Wilson’s Recreation Hall on Parmenter Street in Chicago, and Eddie felt as if he had played in at least half of them.

There was one game going on. On the front table two men were playing one-pocket, a desultory, early-evening game of one-pocket. Eddie sat and watched them for almost an hour before one man quit and Eddie, grinning his very best, most personable grin, invited the remaining man to play for a while with him. Maybe for a half dollar on the side, just to pass the time…

***

And thus, easily, with hardly a second thought, Eddie Felson came full circle, starting where he had begun, scuffling, charming himself into a fifty-cent game of pool. He won seven dollars. He worked for that; spending three hours at it, in hope of getting the man to raise the bet, trying to prod him into playing for a dollar a game, or, with luck, two dollars. But the man quit and left him with seven dollars and in an empty poolroom. Eddie shrugged his shoulders. You have to start somewhere….

He found a restaurant and ate a steak. Then he wandered in search of another poolroom. This one he found by recognizing the familiar dull crash of a rack of balls being broken open as he walked by it on the street. The place was on the third floor of a building, above a hardware store; and he would have missed the small
BILLIARDS
sign if it hadn’t been for the sound of the balls.

He did not have to wait long before he got into a game of snooker with three petty tout types, at five cents a point. Snooker is a game played with small balls and on a table with very tight and bouncy pockets; it is impossible to play it in a fast, loose style—Eddie’s style—the balls will not stay in the pockets unless they are shot with care and precision. It was not Eddie’s kind of game, but the other players were so poor that he had to hold himself back in spite of this.

The other men were feeling good and Eddie mixed with them, buying a few rounds of drinks and telling an occasional joke. They seemed to think he was a great fellow. His feeling for them was not exactly contempt—although he knew they would have robbed him if they had a chance—but he found no remorse in taking them for forty dollars. It would have been more if the poolroom hadn’t closed at two in the morning.

He figured his profit, after the drinks, at about thirty-two dollars. It would pay the rent; but he wasn’t worried about the rent.

He was worried about at least a thousand dollars, which he needed very badly. He needed a thousand dollars so that he could get his little leather satchel out of the locker at the bus station and walk—no, take a taxicab—over to Bennington’s Billiard Room and play straight pool with Minnesota Fats. Not with Jackie French or George the Fairy, but with Minnesota Fats, the fat man with the jerky chin, the little eyes, the rings, the ballet steps, the curly hair, and six thousand dollars of Eddie Felson’s money. And all of Eddie Felson’s pride.

Eddie put his cue stick in the rack. As he left, the proprietor said, “Come back, mister,” but he did not reply to this. He figured that he would be back, however.

He was not accustomed to staying up all night; but he had got his hours badly twisted. He would have to get the landlady at the hotel to wake him earlier next time; maybe in three or four days he could get on some kind of reasonable schedule. He could start hustling around the rooms at noon, try and get to bed by three in the morning.

Also he would have to make some contacts, try finding ways of getting some bigger money; he would get nowhere by scuffling indefinitely. And once he got himself a reputation as a winner, in the circuit of local small poolrooms, winning even thirty or forty dollars would become hard to do. He could not go back to Bennington’s, not without capital. Probably no one there would play him anyway, no one except Fats. They had already seen him play his best stick, knew what he could make happen on a pool table. He was not certain yet what he had already done, in the first, staggering game at Bennington’s—but, whatever it was, he would have to make money. And, not only that, he would have to find some action, some important, high-money action. That was something he needed, in many ways.

For this night, now that the poolrooms were closed and there was nothing for him to do, he had already dimly formulated the framework of a plan involving something else that interested him: the girl. Thinking about her he had become aware of possibilities. He needed a girl, and he was beginning to feel that he needed this one.