The Color of Money

Chapter Six

The game was at a fairgrounds outside Albuquerque; from the parking lot came the smell of horses and straw, even on a cold November day. When Eddie got out of the taxi, Fats was at a hot-dog stand, eating a Coney Island piled with chili. In the autumnal sunlight his face had a distinct pallor.

Fats chewed and swallowed before he spoke. “I’ve seen the table,” he said. “A four-and-a-half-by-nine Gandy. It looks all right.”

“You look pale, Fats,” Eddie said.

“I was sick two weeks ago.” Fats held his cue case under his arm and finished the hot dog. He wiped his fingers and chin with a paper napkin, wadded it, dropped it in a trash bin nearby.

“Maybe you shouldn’t be here.”

“Being here is no problem. The chili dog is the problem.”

“Then stop eating chili dogs.”

“Let’s play pool, Fast Eddie.” Fats turned and started walking toward the open-air arena with a banner reading THE GREAT MINNESOTA FATS AND FAST EDDIE SHOOT OUT. He was, as always, light on his feet.

In the taxi afterward, Eddie stared out the window at the distant Rockies. He had concentrated, shot well, seen the balls clearly and lost by seven points. One fifty to one forty-three.

Fats was leaning back in his seat, his black cue case across his lap. Finally he spoke. “That was a good run.” Eddie had scored over eighty balls before missing a difficult bank shot.

Eddie said nothing. It made five matches in a row that Fats had beaten him. There would be only one more—at Indianapolis in early December. If he couldn’t beat a seventy-year-old man one game out of six, he was hopeless. He had no business trying to play pool for a living.

“Did you use the list?” Fats said.

“Most of it.” He had not tried the two towns at the bottom, although one was in driving distance of Lexington.

“It’s a good list,” Fats said. “I won money in every place on it.”

“It worked at first. I beat Billy Usho in Memphis for seven thousand. A few thousand from a man named Boomer.”

“After that?”

As the road curved, Eddie could see the eminence of Scandia Peak, snow-capped, from between two lesser mountains. “Nothing. Maybe enough to pay the hotel bill.”

“Did you find Ousley in Connors?”

“I hear it’s a terrible place.”

“Ousley has money. He owns coal mines.”

“Maybe I’ll go next week.” He looked at Fats. “Tell me something. Have you ever had a job?”

“No.”

“Have you ever played nine-ball tournaments?”

“I don’t like the kids who play them.” Nine-ball had always been a different world from the one Eddie knew, even though he had played it from time to time.

“If I don’t take a job,” Eddie said, “I’ve got to do something. There’s more money in nine-ball than there is in bars.”

Fats pursed his lips. “You might win the small ones.”

“There’s a big one in Chicago next month. And then, in the spring, there’s Lake Tahoe.”

“You won’t win those. How much nine-ball have you played?”

“Not a lot.”

“Earl Borchard could beat you at straight pool, and he plays nine-ball better. You need more experience.”

“Fats, I have experience. I was beating every player in the country when those kids were in kindergarten.”

“This is nineteen eighty-three,” Fats said.

“November.”

“That’s right. I was looking in Billiard’s Digest. There’s a tournament in Connecticut the day after we play in Indianapolis. It goes three days, and first prize is twenty-five hundred. You can practice nine-ball a few weeks and then get in it.”

“I’ve been practicing.”

“That’s right,” Fats said, “but I just beat you.”

They drove the rest of the way to the airport in silence. When the driver slowed to get in line at the Eastern Airlines terminal, Fats said, “It’s mainly a matter of growing up.”

Eddie looked at him but said nothing.

Arabella was out when he let himself into the apartment. A note by the telephone read, “Roy Skammer called twice,” and gave the number. He opened a beer and dialed.

“Fast Eddie,” Skammer said, “how would you like a job?”

“You’re full of surprises.”

“The man who runs the billiard room at the College Union is retiring, and I talked to the dean about hiring you.”

“How many tables?”

“Eight or ten. There’s Ping-Pong, and some other things. Do you know where the building is?”

“Yes.” It was the only modern building he walked by on the way to the Faculty Club.

“Why don’t you drop in tomorrow morning and look it over? The old man’s name is Mayhew.”

“I will,” Eddie said.

Arabella had been serving wine and cheese at a student art show in the university gallery; she didn’t get home until midnight. Eddie didn’t mention the job. When she asked him about Fats he said, “I still can’t beat him.”

“Maybe next time.” She had gone into the bathroom to soak her feet. “I don’t know why I agreed to run those openings. Thelma’s was more interesting.” She began filling the tub.

“Fats says I need to grow up if I want to beat the kids who play nine-ball.”

“That sounds like Heraclitus. The way up is the way down. The way forward is the way back.”

“I don’t like riddles.”

“Sorry,” Arabella said. She splashed water on her ankles and then bent to begin soaping her feet. “I don’t think I’ve ever understood growing up.”

“I was more of an adult at thirty than I am now.”

“You have to be grown-up to see that.”

“You have to be grown-up to do something about it,” Eddie said.

The first thing he saw when he came in the double doors was the row of machines: PacMan, Donkey Kong and Asteroids. They were in a basement anteroom, with a Pepsi dispenser and a row of pay phones. It was nine-thirty in the morning and no one was playing. Eddie walked past the machines, pushed open another pair of double doors and found himself in a poolroom of sorts. There were eight four-by-eight Brunswick tables in front and four Ping-Pong tables in back. Behind them was a row of a half-dozen pinball machines. To his right toward the far end of the room was a counter; behind it stood a sour-looking old man with dirty-looking white hair. He wore a striped shirt and a necktie, and he scowled at Eddie. From the ceiling hung long rows of fluorescent-light fixtures, several of which were flickering. The floor was covered with pale green plastic tile. From a radio on the desk beside the old man came the voice of the morning talk-show host Eddie had listened to, while opening up his own poolroom, for years.

After a minute the man looked in Eddie’s direction and raised his eyebrows. Eddie turned and walked out. He would rather sell used cars than work in a place like that.

The sign said FOLK ART MUSEUM, but the place he parked by looked like a junkyard. There was a fence made of rusted bedsprings, each separate frame decorated with a painted metal cutout in the middle. The one nearest the car showed a man in a sombrero holding a red guitar; next to it was a giant daisy, its yellow center sun-faded and with rust at the edges of the white petals. The entrance, Arabella said, was around at the side. She led him past more cutouts—a top hat, Popeye, a crouched tiger—to a wide gap in the bedsprings, with a giant rabbit head at each side. Eddie looked at these a moment as they went through and saw they were made from the hoods of junked Volkswagens painted pink, with the big ears cut from fenders and welded on. They were not cute rabbit heads; they had wicked grins.

Eddie and Arabella were on the road to Connors, Kentucky, where he hoped to find and play pool with the man called Ousley. This junkyard that Arabella wanted to write about was on the way there.

The area inside the fence was the size of a football field. Filling it like a mad cocktail party were dozens of metal figures, most of them life-size and quasi-human. Near him was a steel woman with an enameled face and enormous breasts; it took Eddie a moment to realize the breasts, painted flesh color, had been made from automobile headlights. The body was car bumpers, the arms were exhaust pipes, the head was a piece of a muffler, and the beehive hairdo was of wires and springs, with sequins glued to the metal. The face had a horrible grin, a grin that was both come-on and deathly. She was dressed in a black rayon slip and stood on a small pedestal made of two-by-fours. On this sat a neatly lettered card reading NEW YORK MODEL.

“What do you think?” Arabella said. There was no shade in the yard, and she squinted up at him amusedly.

“It gets your attention,” Eddie said.

At the far end was a kind of shed with an enormous amount of clutter, mostly of rusted metal car parts. Arabella led Eddie that way, past figures of brightly painted women made from manifolds or exhaust systems or fenders or what appeared to be small boilers. Each had a pedestal and a card, with names like EVERYBODY’S AUNT HILDA or KINDERGARTEN TEACHER. Some of the women had the heads of animals. One of these chillingly bore the face of a praying mantis.

As they approached the shed a shirtless man emerged from the shadowy piles of junk that filled it. He was short and squat and heavily muscled. When he came out into the light, Eddie could see that his forearms were covered with tattoos. He looked to be in his sixties and angry.

“Hello, Mr. Marcum,” Arabella said. “I’ve brought a friend.”

The man squinted at him suspiciously and then at her. “You’re the Weems lady. Did you find me a Heliarc?”

“No,” Arabella said, “I told you I couldn’t afford it. This is Ed Felson.”

Marcum, who was even shorter than Arabella, peered up at him. Then he held out a stubby and scarred hand. “She’s a good lady,” he said, nodding toward Arabella. “I can’t get nothing out of her, but she’s a good lady.”

“You make all these yourself?” Eddie looked back at the field full of metal women.

“Every goddamned one of them. You wouldn’t have a beer in that car of yours?”

“No.”

“Maybe you could get us some.”

“After a bit, Mr. Marcum,” Arabella said. “I want to show Eddie your sculptures.”

“What happened to that young man? I thought he was going to sell my things in Lexington.”

Arabella looked at him a moment and then spoke carefully. “You were asking for more money than Greg could pay. He said there would be no deal.”

“We were just haggling,” Marcum said. “He could have called me back.”

“Greg wasn’t able to invest anything near what you were asking. What I want to do, Mr. Marcum,” Arabella said clearly, “is interview you. I’ve brought a tape recorder.”

“They said I was going to be on television over a year ago but nobody came by. Maybe I wasn’t pretty enough.”

“This isn’t television. I want to do an article for Kentucky Arts magazine.”

“Is there money in it?”

“It might get some attention for you.”

“Shit,” Marcum said. “My neighbors give me all the attention I want. Money’s what I could use.” He turned to Eddie. “You can buy us some beer at the A&P. Just take a left and go two blocks.”

“Okay,” Eddie said. “What about Miller’s?”

“Get Molson’s, if they got it,” Marcum said. “Heineken’s is all right too.”

“I’ll get the recorder out of the car,” Arabella said.

As Eddie handed her the little Sony from the backseat, he said, “Who’s Greg?”

“An art dealer.”

Eddie put the key into the ignition. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

“That’s right,” Arabella said. She put the strap over her shoulder and walked back into the junkyard. Eddie drove off, remembering the youthful face of the man in the newspaper. He could visualize the two of them—Arabella and the artistic young man—fussing over Marcum’s crazy cartoon “sculptures.” He got a six-pack of Molson’s and a bag of Cheetos at the supermarket and then drove away.

Eddie walked around the yard in sunshine, drinking a beer from the bottle and looking at the statues as though they were people at a party. The materials they were made of were appropriate to the looks on their faces, to the insolent way they stood and stared forward. He felt an affinity for the anger of the old bastard, banging and welding his gallery of bitches in this dead-end coal-mining town. Arabella was back in the shade sitting on a rusted boiler interviewing Marcum. It was one of those surprisingly warm November days when the odd gust of wind could chill you while the open sun made you perspire. Eddie finished his beer, stared for a while at a chromium woman with a chromium dog on a real leash, and then walked back to the shed.

Arabella stood up at he came near. Apparently she had finished. Marcum was opening another beer for himself. “I saw you looking at the woman with a dog,” Arabella said. “I’m trying to buy it from Deeley.”

For some reason this irritated him. “Where would you put it?”

“By the door to the bathroom. I like the New York Model, but she’s awfully heavy and big. What do you think?”

“Buy what you want,” Eddie said. “We can carry it in the backseat.” He walked over and got the last beer.

“I’m going to take another look,” Arabella said.

When she had left, Marcum spoke to him. “How do you like my girls?”

“I like mine better.”

The old man laughed. “She’s a peach, all right. She your wife?”

“I don’t have a wife.”

“That’s the best way. Why buy a cow when you can get milk free?”

“I don’t know anything about cows,” Eddie said. “It looks like you don’t care much for women.”

“People say that. I just call ’em the way I see ’em.”

“You must have seen some mean ones.”

The old man shrugged. “If I could get the right kind of welding equipment. A Heliarc.” He looked at Eddie thoughtfully. “That young man she was here with before you, when they came in on a motorcycle. He said you could buy a used Heliarc in Lexington.”

“I don’t know anything about welding either,” Eddie said. “What kind of man was that young man?”

Arabella was out in the yard, bending over to look at the legs of the chromium woman.

Marcum peered up at him thoughtfully. “I didn’t like him.” He indicated Arabella—now standing with her hands on her hips—with a forward motion of his bald head. “She liked him plenty, though.”

Eddie said nothing. He took a long drink from the beer bottle. Arabella came back over to them. “Look,” she said to Marcum, “I’d like to have the woman and dog, but I don’t have a lot of money.”

Marcum shrugged. “I couldn’t let it go for less than four thousand.”

“I just don’t have it, Deeley.”

“A fellow from Chicago offered me six.”

“You should have sold it,” Eddie said.

“It’s worth ten,” Marcum said. “That piece makes a statement and it’s got good, clean welds.”

Eddie nodded. He had seen the welds, and they were irregular and gapped. There was rust on the woman’s feet where they touched the ground. It would take no more than two days to make that thing, including the dog. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the cash he had brought for pool. He counted off ten fifties, holding the money so Marcum could see it, slipped the rest of the roll back in his pocket and set the five hundred on a grinder table beside them. “I’ll give you this for it,” he said.

“That’s a work of genuine American folk art,” Marcum said. “There’s thousands taken pictures of that piece and tried to buy it.” Marcum’s livelihood consisted of charging people a dollar to see his “museum” and take snapshots.

“You can make another in two days,” Eddie said. He looked hard at Marcum.

“It wouldn’t be the same.”

“Eddie,” Arabella said, “you don’t just…”

He kept looking at Marcum. “Maybe better.” He looked at the piles of scrap metal that virtually surrounded them. “You’ve got enough bumpers here to make forty.”

Marcum looked at him angrily. “I couldn’t take less than a thousand.”

Eddie shrugged, picked up the bills and put them in his pocket.

“Just a minute,” Marcum said softly, “just a goddamned minute…”

“I had no idea you carried so much cash,” Arabella said. She was holding the metal dog in her lap as though it were a real puppy. The chromium woman lay on the backseat.

“Cash brings things into focus.”

“It seems wicked.”

“The man’s broke. Five hundred will keep him in Molson’s Ale till the Fourth of July.”

“Poor Deeley,” Arabella said. “Poor Deeley.”

It took them another hour, going eastward along Interstate 64, to reach Connors. During the election campaign there had been a flood of Democratic television commercials showing shuttered factories and dying mill towns; Connors looked like one of those commercials. Eddie turned off the four-lane, rounded the cloverleaf, pulled up at a stop sign, and there it was: tin storefronts embossed to resemble stone, Kay’s Luncheonette—a converted ranchhouse with dusty African violets in its picture window; small buildings of sooty concrete block bearing neon—BURTON’S DRIVE-IN LIQUORS, BILLY’S PACKAGE STORE, IRENE AND GEORGE’S BAR AND GRILL. As seen from the highway, the town’s periphery was shut-down coal tipples and gray factories with empty parking lots; its center was the four-way stop sign where Eddie’s car now sat.

He pressed the accelerator and went through the intersection.

“It might be fun,” Arabella said.

Eddie said nothing, and drove along the main street until he saw the sign directing them to the motel. He followed the route grimly and found the motel at the edge of town, with a view of the interstate highway they had just left. The Bonnie Brae Inn—TV, Pool, $22.00 DBL. He pulled into the near-empty parking lot, by the sign saying “Office.”

“This is it?” Arabella said.

“Unless we go to Huntington, West Virginia.”

“And you’d commute. Is there anything interesting in Huntington?”

“There’s a Chinese restaurant.”

“Let’s try it here,” Arabella said cheerfully.

The room wasn’t too bad. Eddie carried her Selectric in from the car, set it on the round table by the window and plugged it in. There was a straight-back chair by the dresser, and she brought that over, put a sheet of paper in the typewriter and typed a few lines. “It’ll be fine,” she said, looking up at him.

“I’ll get the other things.” He took the box from the car trunk with the Vesuviana, the can of espresso, the loaf of bakery rye, the cups and spoons and the hot plate, the half-dozen books and the big bottle of dry white wine. Then he brought in the woman and dog made from car bumpers and set it by the window. The view was of a barren field with dark hills in the distance, but the light was good. He began checking things out. The television worked; the mattress was firm; the carpet underfoot was thick. Arabella had taken off her shoes and was walking around.

“I ought to carpet my apartment, Eddie,” she said. “It’s fun to go barefoot.”

“The statue looks good,” Eddie said. “I’ll give you a call if I’m going to be late.”

The bar at the Palace had one of those big-screen projection TVs; a quiet row of men in working clothes were watching a Rock Hudson movie on it as he came in. He stood at the bar, ordered a beer and looked around. Behind him sat two coin-operated tables, with no players.

“I’m looking for a man named Ousley,” he said when the bartender gave him the bottle.

“Ousley?”

“He plays pool for money.”

The old man sitting next to Eddie looked up. “If it’s Ben Ousley you want, he’s gone to California. Two years back.”

“You a pool player?” the man on the other side said, reaching out shakily to touch Eddie’s cue case.

“I’m looking for a game.”

“Used to be some big games in here,” the first old man said.

A younger man down at the end of the bar spoke up. “Norton Dent,” he said clearly. “He’ll play you.” Eddie did not like the tone of his voice.

“Fine,” Eddie said. “Where is he?”

“He might be in tonight,” the young man said, looking down the bar at Eddie. “Maybe tomorrow.”

“Can you call him?”

The young man looked away. “No. You’ll have to wait.”

Eddie shrugged. There was a quarter change from his beer. He put it in the table, racked the balls, opened his cue case and took out his cue. When he was screwing it together he looked up to see that most of the men at the bar were ignoring the movie; they had swiveled in their seats to watch him. It was somehow unnerving, being stared at by these lean old men in blue and gray shirts. They watched impassively from small eyes set in seamed faces, like a photograph from the Great Depression.

He broke the rack and began to shoot, banking the balls. The table was easy. His stroke was smooth and certain and he made clean shots, bringing them sharply off the cushions and into the pockets. It was a matter of getting the feel of the table under pressure, and keeping it. He had almost forgotten that, over the years. He ignored the men watching him, neither grandstanding for them nor missing deliberately to deceive them; and he banked the balls in prettily with his glossy Balabushka. It was reassuring to come into a strange place like this, with its dim hostility, and fall immediately into perfect stroke.

He came to the bar and got two dollars’ worth of quarters. The movie was still on, but no one was watching. They were all looking at him. He got the change and went back to the table.

By six in the evening, the bar was full of men, but no one wanted to play. There was a grubby washroom, and he cleaned the table grime from his hands as well as he could before taking his cue apart and putting it back in the case.

The young man was still at the end of the bar, still drinking Rolling Rock beer. He didn’t turn around when Eddie came up to him. “I’ll be back at eight-thirty,” Eddie said. “If your friend comes in, tell him I’m looking for him.”

“He’s no friend of mine,” the man said, staring at his beer bottle.

“Eight-thirty,” Eddie said.

The young man turned around and looked up at him with a cold, inward stare. “I’ll tell him your name. If you’ll tell it to me.”

“Ed Felson,” Eddie said. “I’m called Fast Eddie.”

The young man turned back to his beer.

“I did eight pages on Deeley and watched ‘Search for Tomorrow.’ Or maybe it was ‘Search for an Abortionist,’ considering the overall tone.”

“You had a better day than I did.”

“It wasn’t bad. I took a walk down the road and found a drive-in movie.”

“Maybe we can go tonight. The man I’m waiting for may not show up.”

“Debbie Does Dallas,” Arabella said. She was pouring them each a glass of white wine from the big bottle, using the motel’s plastic glasses. “I suspect it’s about oral sex.”

“Sounds like a winner.” Eddie seated himself on the bed next to a pile of Arabella’s papers and took the wineglass. “We’ll stay through tomorrow. The player I was looking for, the one Fats told me about, isn’t in town, but there’s one other. He’ll be in tonight or tomorrow.”

Dent was there when he came in. He was a huge, soft-looking man in his thirties, with sideburns and a gray T-shirt with the words EAT ME. He was shooting balls on Eddie’s table, using a cheap jointed cue with a scarlet butt. The young man was still sitting at the bar. The TV was off. On the jukebox Bobbie Gentry sang “Ode to Billy Joe.” A couple of the old men had their heads on folded arms at the bar. “Here he is,” the young man said coldly to the big man at the table. “Fast Eddie.”

The big man went on shooting. He was drilling the balls straight in, and he looked good at it. When he had finished the table, slamming the last ball the long diagonal into the far corner pocket, he looked up at Eddie. His face was pale and treacherous-looking, with a pout to the thick lips. He had the weedy beginnings of a mustache. Bobbie Gentry finished and Johnny Cash started, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” Eddie did not like the looks of the man nor the feeling in the buzzed-out barroom, but decided to heed Cash’s words and go with it.

“I heard of you,” Dent said.

Eddie nodded noncommittally. “Do you want to play eight-ball?”

“I expect you mean for money,” Dent said in a drawl, “being as they say you’re a hustler.”

“I started hustling pool thirty years ago,” Eddie said. “I’ll play you eight-ball for fifty a game if you want to play.”

“Shit,” the man said, “you sound mean as a snake, Fast Eddie. Maybe you’re just too good for me.”

Eddie shrugged. “Maybe I am.”

“I’ll try you for fifty.”

“Fine,” Eddie said. He took his glasses from the pocket of his leather jacket and put them on.

They tossed a coin for the break. The other man won it, broke the balls wide and ran half the solids before dogging a thin cut into the corner. Eddie played it carefully and had him beaten in five minutes. He was nervous but he had no trouble controlling the game. The room was silent when he finished. Dent reracked the balls. Then he reached up with the tip of his cue and slid a wooden bead along the string near the back wall, over a big Miller’s High Life poster.

Eddie looked at him.

“Break the balls,” Dent said.

“You owe me fifty dollars.”

“On the string,” Dent said, looking back over his shoulder toward it. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a clump of bills fastened with a money clip in the shape of a naked woman, and flashed it for Eddie. “Okay?”

“It’s the way we do it here,” the young man at the bar said.

Eddie shrugged, stepped to the table and broke the balls. He ran four of the solids and then missed deliberately, leaving Dent an easy shot on two stripes. Dent ambled heavily up to the table and began shooting; he made all the stripes and then pocketed the eight. Eddie felt annoyed at himself for making it that easy. The man was good enough without help. He would play it straight and not throw off; he would beat this man, with his dangerous baby face, his hostile, shifting eyes, until he quit.

It was difficult at first. Dent shot eight-ball well, but Eddie bore down and beat him, gradually adding beads to the string. His stroke was better than it had been for years, better even than during the long run against Fats at Albuquerque; he bent and shot, bent and shot, and the balls kept falling in. He won six in a row before Dent set his cue against the wall and took a huge sheepskin coat from a hook near it. He put the coat on, his back to Eddie.

Eddie looked up at the string. There were twelve beads pushed over to his side of it. He looked toward Norton Dent, even huger in the coat, and began taking his cue apart.

“You owe me six hundred dollars, Norton,” Eddie said.

Dent turned slowly. His voice was soft, almost amiable. “You’ve got to collect it.”

Eddie had the cue in two pieces now. He set the smaller one, the shaft, on the table. He took off his glasses and set them beside it. “Is that how you pay what you owe, Norton?” he said levelly. The danger was palpable, but he ignored it, did not care about it. He wanted to kill this oaf.

Dent took a step closer. Behind him, every man in the room was staring at them, waiting.

“I don’t pay what I don’t have to pay,” Dent said, “you pool-shark piece of shit.”

For a moment Eddie felt a horrible weariness, heard an old voice saying Do I have to do all this? He gripped the small end of the cue butt, stepped forward and swung hard, going for the side of the man’s head.

Dent was young, and faster than he looked. He ducked and turned; the stick fell across the collar of his coat. With his free arm Eddie rammed him in the stomach, cursing the coat that would soften the blow and knowing it wasn’t going to work, that he was going to get hurt. Maybe the others at the bar would stop the man.

Immediately Dent’s weight was on him, wrapping him in a bear hug, the greasy smell of the coat in his face. He dropped the cue butt and got in one solid punch against the side of the man’s nose before the sheer weight on his body held him down and a blow crashed against his neck and seemed to explode intolerably in his head.

He came to as some men were putting him into the backseat of his car. He was numb and could not see well. The men had been talking, and one of them was saying, “You can follow us and pick me up.” It was the young man, the one who had been presiding over this whole thing from the start. He was talking to a man in a red baseball cap. “Where to?” the man in the cap said.

The young man seemed friendly and sympathetic now. His coldness had gone. “You’ll be all right,” he said to Eddie in a confidential tone of voice. “Have you got a place to spend the night?”

“The Bonnie Brae.”

“Give me his pool stick and glasses,” the young man said to the one in the baseball cap. An older man was standing next to him, watching with solicitude. Eddie was sitting in the car, with the door beside him closed and the window down. The young man climbed into the driver’s seat. The man in the cap put Eddie’s cue case through the window and Eddie took it. He followed with the glasses. “Let me have your keys,” the young man said. Everything seemed friendly, well-organized. It was as though they did this every day of their lives. Eddie felt his face for blood, but there wasn’t any. He reached into his jacket pocket, found the keys, handed them up to the driver. “Pump the gas pedal first,” he said.

“You got him in the eye,” the old man said. “He’s a rough son of a bitch.”

Eddie leaned back in his seat, beginning to feel the pain in his body. He worked his hands a minute. They were all right. Nothing broken.

“My god!” Arabella said. “Did you get drunk?”

“I got beaten up.”

“I think you bloody did.”

It was after midnight, but she was able to get a first-aid kit from the motel office and put Bactine and Band-Aids on the cuts across his back, from the poolroom floor. He had bruises, but there was nothing to do about them. A blotchy place was developing on the side of his neck, and there was a smaller bruise on his forehead. He hurt badly in three places and his head throbbed. He was still dizzy. In the bathroom mirror his face looked terrible. “That gross son of a bitch,” he said. “I’d like to go back there and break his thumbs.”

“How horrible,” Arabella said.

“It would hurt like hell.” He came into the bedroom, limping slightly. His right leg was getting stiff. Arabella’s typewriter sat on the table with a stack of paper and the coffee-maker beside it. The plastic curtain over the closed window had the same design of boomerangs that the restaurant table had. On the dresser next to the TV sat the wine bottle. He poured himself a glassful carefully, using the hand that was the least sore, and then took a long swallow. He turned to look at her sitting against the bed pillows. “When we go back,” he said, “I’ll take the job.”

Arabella was no longer a faculty wife, but she was still invited to faculty parties. The first time she suggested he go, Eddie declined; but he was bored at the apartment watching television alone, and he went with her the next weekend. For an hour or so he felt uneasy with the professors and their talk of tenure and department cutbacks. He was painfully conscious of his own lack of education. The home he was in, with canvases on the walls painted by the professor who had invited them, with its plain, expensive furniture, represented an entirely different scale of life from the house he had lived in with Martha, with its cheery wallpaper in the kitchen. The kitchen here was white and austere; the men who stood around in it with drinks in their hands were all professors of art or English or history. Eddie read books but he knew nothing about those disciplines; nothing, from experience, about college.

But he did not live with Martha anymore. The elegant British woman in the silk dress, the woman with the curly silver hair and bright, intelligent eyes who looked right at men when she talked to them and who moved around with these people as more than an equal, was his woman. And he did not live in a suburban house with asphalt shingles on its sides; he lived in a high-ceilinged, white-walled apartment with folk-art paintings, downtown on Main Street.

Standing in the kitchen near the refrigerator, he listened to three art professors across the room. They were discussing next year’s raise in salary. One of them changed the subject to the Cincinnati Bengals’ chances for the Superbowl. No one was talking about art. No one had talked about art or literature or history in the hour he had been in the house. He looked at their clothes; not one of them was dressed as well as he. He took a sip from his Manhattan, walked over to the group and joined in. They talked about the scarcity of good quarterbacks. After a while, Eddie introduced himself. There was nothing to it.

The bedroom overlooked a garden that separated the building from the back of a clothing store. There was a kitchen with white countertops, a dining alcove, and a big living room overlooking Main Street. They would have to buy a dining table and bedroom furniture. It was on the second floor and the view from the living room was not as broad as the view from Arabella’s other apartment, but they were still downtown. Arabella had just started her editorial job with the journal and she was too busy to take more than a quick look; but when he told her it was three sixty a month, she said, “Take it, Eddie.” He signed the lease and gave two months’ rent as a deposit. Then he called a moving company.

“Eddie,” Skammer said, “I’d drop it all and go on the road. I don’t care about tenure. If I could shoot pool like you shoot pool…. Shit, if I could play the oboe, or learn to be a chef….” They were in the Skammers’ big kitchen.

“Roy signed up for a cooking school in France,” Pat said, “but we backed out at the last minute.”

“Lost my nerve.” Skammer plucked the onion from his Gibson and held it between thumb and forefinger for a moment.

“Lost your deposit money too,” Pat said.

Skammer shrugged and popped the onion into his mouth.

“It’s hard to make a change,” Eddie said.

“You’re doing it,” Arabella said.

He looked up from the couch at her. “It was handed to me. The judge gave the poolroom to Martha.”

“Some have greatness thrust upon them,” Skammer said.

Eddie looked back to him. Skammer wore perfectly fitting beige corduroys, beige Saucony running shoes and a white cotton boat-neck sweater that fit him loosely. “What’s wrong with teaching history?”

“Grading the papers,” Skammer said immediately.

“You complain a lot about departmental meetings,” Pat said, “and about living in Kentucky.”

“Camouflage,” Skammer said. “I give lecture courses in world history, and I enthrall the students with my enlightened chatter. I point to maps and I tell anecdotes about the wives of generals. I describe political factions and frown over conditions in the cities.”

“It sounds fine to me,” Eddie said.

“You love it,” Pat said levelly. “You love the sound of your own voice.”

“Maybe I do. But when I read the humbug they write in exam books with their blue Bics, I want to cut my throat.”

“You and your exquisite sensibilities,” Pat said. “Sit down and I’ll serve the salad.”

“You’re changing the subject,” Roy said. “Every time I read their papers I want to resign.”

“Maybe it’s because there’s no show business in grading papers,” Pat said.

“You and your damned insights,” Roy said, cheerfully.

The Skammers lived in a farmhouse on the Old Frankfort Pike. All of the rooms were austere except for the kitchen, which had a brick fireplace and a white sofa. The high-tech table and chairs were lit by track lights, and the floor was scarred pine, varnished and bare. A big window looked on a field with patches of snow and a barn in the distance.

Arabella put the salad bowl on the table and carried the wooden fork and spoon to Roy. “Toss the salad,” she said. “Maybe you don’t want feedback from your students.”

“That’s the truth,” Roy said. He went over to the table and slipped the implements under the mound of lettuce leaves in the wooden bowl. “Maybe I just want to show off.”

“There are worse things than that,” Eddie said.

Roy began agitating the leaves expertly. “I’d rather shoot pool,” he said.

“In front of an audience,” Pat said.

“Honi soit qui mal y pense,” Roy said, lifting the leaves and letting them drop back into the bowl.

“The trouble with shooting pool,” Eddie said, “is that it’s no good if you don’t win.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” Skammer said.

“Let’s eat,” Pat said. “The roast’ll be ready in ten minutes.”

When they were driving home Eddie asked Arabella how much money the Skammers made.

“He’s an associate professor,” she said. “Twenty-six thousand, probably. She’s an assistant and makes about twenty.”

“They’re doing all right.”

Arabella was quiet for a minute. Then she said, “I think he really does hate it. He doesn’t have the strength to leave.”

“It sounds like a good life to me.”

“He tried to kill himself. A couple of years ago.”

“Come on….” Eddie said.

“With pills. He took a sabbatical to write a book and he didn’t write anything. Just hung around the house and tinkered with the plumbing. One morning he didn’t wake up and Pat took him to the hospital. They pumped him out.”

Eddie shook his head. “I wouldn’t have thought he was the type.”

“Well,” Arabella said, “there’s a lot of it going around.”

The second drugstore he tried had dental plaster. He bought two cartons of the large size, along with a deck of plastic playing cards, and put them in the backseat. The next morning he drove out to the old poolroom.

The windows were boarded up, but the key still opened the front door. There were no workmen around. He had never seen workmen, only the sporadic effects of their presence. The carpet was gone now, and the counter had been torn out and lay against the wall like a passed-out drunk. He ignored all this and walked to the back wall where the closet door stood by the men’s room, still bearing its Employees Only sign. Nothing in it had been touched. He took down a large roll of cloth wrapped in clear plastic and labeled SIMONIS, easing it from the top shelf and putting it into an empty toilet-paper box. On another shelf was the tenon lathe, like an oversize pencil sharpener; he set it carefully next to the roll of cloth and then got the magnetic tack hammer, the four-foot level and a stack of roofing shingles. From a low shelf he took a small carton labeled TWEETEN ELK MASTER and a cardboard box filled with white plastic cylinders. He took those and then looked around himself. After the familiarity of the supplies closet, the devastated poolroom was a synchronistic shock, moving him instantaneously from the way things had been to the way they were now. The effect was not altogether unpleasant; there was no love in him for this place. He could have torn it apart himself. He looked at his watch. It was seven-thirty. The college Rec Room didn’t open until nine.

He got there a little before eight and locked the door behind him for privacy. Mayhew’s supplies closet was at the end of the room facing the pinball machines; he got from it a brace with a fork bit, a hex wrench and a screwdriver.

In ten minutes he had the rails off number eight and was removing the old cloth, using the screwdriver to pry loose the staples that held it. When he was finished he folded the faded and worn fabric and put it in the trash. The three-piece slate underneath was a mess; he cleaned out the loose plaster and then picked the rails up from the floor and set them on it. By the time he had the feather strips pulled and the old cloth off the cushions, it was nine. He stopped working, turned on the rest of the lights and opened up. Three students were at the door, all of them in down coats, waiting to play the arcade machines. He got quarters for them from the cash register and went back to work, ignoring the dim electronic threats from the machines and the voices of the students.

You had to level the table itself first; if you did it after patching the slate, the patches would crack. He used the center slate for a benchmark, setting the level across it and then tapping a shingle under one of the table legs to bring the bubble to center. He switched the level to right angles, checked it and slipped in another shingle. It took several minutes to get it right, placing the level the long way, the short way, and diagonally, choosing between thick and thin shingles. Three black students came in to play nine-ball; he gave them the balls and the diamond-shaped nine-ball rack, ticketed their table for the time. The clock punched out 11:42 on the card. The lunchtime crowd would be in at about twelve-thirty; he would be too busy to finish the table. He hurried back to it, wanting to get the three pieces of slate leveled and patched before that happened.

It went pretty fast. It was years since he had done any of this, but he had forgotten none of it. There was something deeply satisfying about doing it and doing it right. Not many people knew how. Clearly, Mayhew—or whoever did it for him—did not. Eddie got the rest of the old plaster off the slates and leveled them, sliding playing cards between the big slabs of slate and the wooden joists that held them, raising one end and then the other by the thickness of two aces or a jack, until they were all three perfectly aligned. He sighted down each end of the table and then used the level. With a whiskbroom he swept the plaster dust away; he went back to the closet, took an empty coffee can and began mixing the dental plaster.

The joints of the slates were patched in twenty minutes, along with the countersink holes for the heavy screws that held the slates in place. By the time he was finished, the lunchtime crowd began to come in and he let the plaster dry while he marked time cards and handed out balls.

He had to stay behind the counter for the next hour and a half, keeping an eye on things, making change and taking in money. During a short break he clamped the tenon machine to the countertop; then he took a few cues that were in need of repair and began replacing their ferrules. The Elk Master tips would go on later. One cue was too warped to be worth the effort; he put it in the trash with the worn-out cloth from Table Eight.

At two the crowd slacked off abruptly, leaving for classes. It would be slow until three-thirty or so, when Mayhew came in. They would work together to handle the crowd until Eddie left at five. By two-thirty, a dozen cues had new white ferrules and leather tips. He went back to Table Eight and sanded down the plaster, using progressively finer paper, until the joints were silky and rock-hard. He checked the bed one final time with the level and then unrolled the Simonis cloth. At first he planned to save this one superb billiard cloth for last; now he had decided to start out with it. He had been saving it for several years, for a rainy day. His rainy days had come, and maybe gone. He got shears out and began to cut the strips for the six rails. It took him two hours to get the cloth cut, trimmed, pulled tightly over the rubber cushions and held in place with the feather strips. But the material was a pleasure to work with. It was virgin wool from Belgium—fine, smooth, tightly woven and a dazzlingly bright green. By four o’clock he had the rest of it cut, stretched across the slate table bed and fitted around the six pockets. He was kneeling beside the table putting in the last of the number-three tacks with the tack hammer when Mayhew came in.

Eddie had said to him several days before that he planned to work on the equipment; Mayhew had nodded curtly and muttered, “Go ahead.” Now he ignored Eddie and went behind the counter and turned the radio on, to his gospel show. Eddie gritted his teeth and spit the last of the tacks out onto the peen of the hammer. The show would go on two hours, with sanctimonious music, a sermon and letters. It was infuriating, but there was nothing to do about it except wait for spring, when Mayhew would leave for good, retiring from his twenty-year job of running this half-assed poolroom. After a few minutes, during a commercial for Preparation H, Mayhew walked back to the men’s room, passing Eddie but not looking at him. Eddie had the first rail in place and was fastening it to the slate bed with a hex wrench. When Mayhew came back a few minutes later, he stopped and looked over the freshly covered table. Eddie finished one of the rails and set the wrench down. “These Gold Crowns are solid,” he said. “Good slates and rails.”

Mayhew looked at him a moment. “There was a lot of wear left in that old cloth.”

They had all the pictures hung, but there were still Arabella’s books in boxes. They spent that evening putting them into the built-in bookcases in the dining room. “You haven’t said much about your job,” Arabella said.

“There’s not much to say about it.”

“How’s Mayhew?”

“I can stand him till spring.”

“Do you shoot any pool?”

“I don’t have the time. How do you like editing?”

She didn’t answer for a moment but worked on the books, getting them alphabetized onto the shelves. “I ought to read these Chekhov stories,” she said after a while. “I’ve had the books a dozen years. Editing an academic journal’s a bore.”

“Maybe you’ll find something better.”

“It isn’t likely.”

“What we need,” Eddie said, “is a drink.”

Arabella put the last of the Chekhov volumes neatly on their shelf, stood back and looked at them. “A drink,” she said, “and then a movie.”

During the next week, he covered Tables Six and Seven, using Peerless rubber-backed cloths this time. They were less elegant than the Simonis on Number Eight, but were durable and certainly better than what they replaced. The cloths had been sitting in a stack on the top shelf of Mayhew’s supply closet; Eddie saw them there on his first day. They were covered with a layer of dust.

After doing the tables he went to work in earnest on the rest of the cues, throwing out a half-dozen warped or split ones, re-tenoning some, putting new white plastic points and fresh tips on all of them, sanding and buffing the leather edges so they fit perfectly and would not bulge out in use. It was tough work, but it satisfied something in him that needed satisfaction. He had not worked this hard since the first month of owning his own poolroom.

Mayhew made no further comments and Eddie spoke to him only when necessary. There was usually a dead hour after the lunch crowd left, and now Eddie spent the time practicing, taking his Balabushka in its case from under the counter. He used Number Eight, enjoying the smooth, long roll the Simonis gave to the balls. He had cleaned the light fixtures over the tables and polished all eight sets of balls, had thrown away all the used chalk and put fresh blue cubes out. The light was clear and bright; the balls shone crisply on the green; Eddie drilled them into pockets with quiet precision. What he was practicing, for the first time in his life, was nine-ball.

He would rack the balls into the little diamond with the yellow-striped nine in its center, blow them apart with his strongest break shot and then run them in rotation, starting with the one and working up to the money ball—the nine. It was different from the straight pool he knew: you had to make tougher shots, and play position differently, running them out in the numbered sequence. Maybe the most important thing was that you had to work the entire green. A good straight-pool player kept the balls at the bottom of the table and did most of his scoring on tight shots. In nine-ball you had to go from one end to another, sometimes making the cue ball travel by two or three cushions to settle down for position. He would miss some of those long, difficult shots, or get so badly off-angled that he couldn’t give himself position on the next ball. The pressure built as you approached the nine. If you missed on the seven or eight it would give the game away.

Arabella worked from nine to five at the magazine’s office on campus. Her salary was twelve hundred a month, only slightly less than Eddie’s; it came from a government grant. With her salary, her alimony and his paycheck, they were well off. They ate dinner out most evenings, did not entertain, and went to every new movie in town. They made an odd couple—a former faculty wife and a former pool hustler—but their oddness was consonant with the times; they were invited to a lot of parties. Eddie drove them through snowy streets to suburban houses or to duplexes in older neighborhoods to drink with professors of sociology, history or art. His lack of education did not inhibit him. People talked about tenure or declining SAT scores among the students; at the homes of younger professors, pot was smoked ceremonially as a kind of testament to youth. Eddie would pass the joint without inhaling. He preferred bourbon. J. T. S. Brown.

At one of these parties Eddie was talking to Arabella near the kitchen door of someone’s house when he saw her staring toward the other end of the room. He looked over to see a couple who had just come in. The man was tall and youthfully middle-aged; he wore a gray turtleneck under his parka. The girl with him was much younger. She wore tight faded jeans and a sweater like the man’s, also under a parka. The man’s boyish face looked familiar to Eddie; he was noisily stamping packed snow from his hiker’s boots and did not seem to mind the commotion he was making. “It’s Harrison,” Arabella said softly.

“Who’s the girl?”

“Some graduate student.”

Eddie had seen him on television years before. It seemed he had worn the same sweater, the same boots, while talking about disadvantaged children or New York artists or whatever it was. He was tanned and muscular-looking; his shoes and sweater looked expensive, as did his heavy corduroy pants and the long, matching scarf. He had one of those faces that manages to appear modest and smug at the same time, as if he knew he was important and did not want to imply that he knew it.

A half hour later Eddie found himself talking with him. Arabella was not in the room at the time. Frame just came up and said, “You’re Felson, aren’t you?” and Eddie said, “That’s right,” and they talked casually for about five minutes. It was simple; neither mentioned Arabella. They talked about the recession.

For the occasion, Arabella had bought Italian white wine and California Burgundy, together with a quarter-wheel of Brie—the runniest Eddie had seen. During his first weeks with Arabella he had felt he was finally entering the modern world of American style and had responded to it happily enough: dry wine, French cheese, English biscuits to put the cheese on, Perrier, rare lamb, sushi. Sometimes Arabella cooked osso bucco or couscous—dishes he had never heard of before. He had not shown any surprise at this kind of living; it went with her appearance, her accent. Sometimes she put liver pâté on whole-wheat English muffins for breakfast and served them with espresso from her stout little Vesuviana, in white cups with baroque silver spoons. It was like a certain kind of movie, or pages seen in Arabella’s New York magazine or the magazine section of her Sunday Times.

One of the striking things about university life was its amiable ostentation of taste, and not just in food. It included furniture, paintings, bric-a-brac—glass ashtrays from Venice, nineteenth-century prints showing views of Brussels, antique chess sets. Not everyone was involved in this; some were either oblivious to it or scorned it. Their apartments were furnished cheaply and their cuisinary embellishments were those of the early sixties: flaky Cheddar, mushrooms, and pepper mills. But half the homes Eddie had seen were exemplars of careful, au courant taste, mixing antiques with high tech. If the apartment you were in for Sunday brunch had track lights over a walnut highboy and a piece or two of industrial metal furniture, you knew there would be croissants—served with unsalted butter on a plain white dish from Scandinavia—and the eggs would be undercooked.

The best thing about all this was Arabella’s ease with it. It was as though she knew her British accent and the delicate, clear structure of her facial bones gave her an edge. There was no strain on her part and no uncertainty; she knew without hesitation which cheeses, which fresh pasta and which wines to order, just as she had known what spare, simple pieces of furniture to buy for the new apartment. She was sure, swift and without snobbery. Coming from a world of backyard barbecues, Eddie slipped with surprising ease into this ambience, pleased with Arabella’s confidence, pleased with the way she never talked about such things.

Roy and Pat were delayed; by the time they got out of their duffel coats and were handed glasses of wine by Eddie it was four o’clock. He wheeled Arabella’s little Sony in front of the sofa and turned it on. Arabella put the cheese and the Carr’s wafers on the high-tech coffee table; Roy Skammer held his wineglass aloft and said, “To the champ himself!” and the television picture shifted from a movie preview to a rack of pool balls in close-up and the superimposed words, THE GREAT SHOOT OUT—DENVER. An overhead shot showed Fats breaking the rack. The cue ball caromed into the bottom and the side rail; its path, seen from above, was like a geometric diagram. A voice-over began, calling the two players “legendary” and the game “demanding the most a player can give.” It was mercifully short and it mercifully omitted saying that Eddie had already lost three matches in the series. Now Eddie, seen from overhead, stepped up to play safe. Pat and Roy applauded. Now in profile, Fats made a shot, and then another. His run would be in the twenties. This was the game where Eddie made sixty-three, but Fats had the floor now. A whispered commentary—whispered needlessly, since it had been added after the game—spoke of the difficulty of shots that were not difficult and passed over ones that were; the tape had been edited so it all went faster than in reality. Every now and then the camera picked up Eddie wearing his glasses and sitting in his chair waiting for Fats to miss. When Fats did miss, Eddie stepped up and went to the table. It was a relief to see it: he was far less slow and uncertain than in the Miami game on Enoch’s monitor. He looked all right, even with the glasses. Eddie watched himself pocket a dozen balls and then play safe. His stroke was sharp and smooth.

Much of the midgame was cut; while Arabella was pouring more wine the tape abruptly segued to Eddie’s big run—already thirty balls into it. He was shocked to see the change in himself on the screen. His stroke had been good before, but now it had a control that was visible even on television. His body was relaxed. His movements were as graceful as those of Fats or of Billy Usho. He looked sharp in his clothes. He could remember the good, near-dead stroke he had felt at the time of the run, could recall the sense of inevitability in the way the balls fell in, but he had no idea that he looked so good.

“Eddie,” Pat Skammer said, “you look wonderful” and some obscure, uncertain part of himself assented. It was a revelation. He looked as good as any pool player he had ever seen. The small Eddie Felson in front of him pocketing pool balls with precision and flair, walking confidently from shot to shot, was him. He sipped his white wine and watched himself. He would lose the game 150–112, but he could have won it.

“Do you play any more matches?” Roy asked.

“One. Next week.”

“What about ‘Wide World of Sports’?” Arabella said.

“Nothing.”

Finally Eddie missed, on the Sony in front of them. “Aww!” Pat Skammer said. Fats stepped up and began what would be his final run.

“I’ll beat him in Indianapolis,” Eddie said. “I’ll beat his ass.”

On Monday in the Rec Room, several of the players said they watched the game on TV and he looked great. One of them remembered shots that had been especially impressive. But when Mayhew came in and a student asked, “Did you see Mr. Felson on TV Saturday?” Mayhew scowled at him.

“I see more games in here than I want to see,” he said.

The airplane landed in a hush of snow—airport runway snow not yet soiled. Even the passengers were muted by it, waiting in wombish quiet for permission to stand and retrieve their luggage, then standing mute in the aisle as though the white outside the plane’s baby windows had charmed them to silence. This mood remained until assaulted by the Formica, Orlon and Muzak cheeriness inside the terminal building, bright as a liar’s smile. Eddie tucked his cue case under his arm, walking through this fluorescent limbo to Baggage Claim. Through windows framed in pitted aluminum, he saw giant toys of airplanes bearing familiar heraldry—Trans World, Delta, United—being tended in a field of white. He hurried. It was December 12; he was to meet Fats in two hours. He found his bag on the carousel, and then a taxi.

Despite the gray slush in the parking lot and the dense rows of cars whose owners filled the mall, his driver zipped along without delay. Eddie was over an hour early. The driver stopped at the entrance to an enormous J. C. Penney’s; on his way there he passed a restaurant with a sign reading TONY’S PIZZA—COCKTAILS. Eddie carried his bag and stick through Christmas-crowded aisles and tinkling music to the side of the store that faced the mall itself, a wide gallery with huge Christmas trees and an artificial creek. On the other side of an enormous aviary was a sign that read PARCEL CHECK and a row of lockers; he walked past sleeping macaws and a cockatoo, the floor of their cage littered with yellow popcorn, and put his things in a locker. Far down to his right, above the heads of a shifting multitude, a banner read FAST EDDIE MEETS FATS. He was pleased to see the top billing. This time he was ready. He would lock up Fats with safeties; and when he got a shot, would bear down on him as he had not borne down on him throughout this tour. Eddie turned and headed toward Tony’s. Fats was no unbeatable genius, no benevolent father either; he was an old man and, like anyone else, he made mistakes. Eddie would beat him.

Tony’s tables were full of women and the bar was empty. Eddie sat in the middle of it and ordered a Bloody Mary. There was, fortunately, no music in Tony’s; it smelled pleasantly of oregano and hot bread dough. The bartender was a good-natured young woman in a red sweater. He had drunk nothing on the airplane, and the pepper from the Bloody Mary burned pleasurably on his tongue. He liked the warm, pungent anonymity of this American place—liked being unidentifiable among middle-aged women. He sat in a suburb of Indianapolis but could have been anywhere at all; there was probably a Tony’s Pizza in Bangor, Maine, or in Honolulu that would be indistinguishable from this, with no character but what its designer had given it and a manufactured ambience that could have made it all: the women with their children in booths eating pizza, the Budweiser clock on the wall over the bar, the red-sweatered blonde who served him drinks—part of some jolly TV commercial for, say, the telephone company.

In his jacket pocket was a page torn from a Rec Room copy of Billiards Digest that morning. He took it out now, spread it on the bar in front of him and read over the ad:

He would show it to Fats and ask him what he thought. He finished his drink and ordered another, letting the sweet warmth in his stomach spread, thinking of pool.

He was whistling when he got his cue case from the locker. He began moving through the crowd of Christmas shoppers down toward the banner.

When he arrived it was time to start, but Fats wasn’t there. The table was set up and ready—a Brunswick table for a change, with an honest green cloth. At least a hundred people were seated in the stands and another hundred were hanging around waiting for something to happen. But time passed and Fats did not show up. Eddie called the Ramada Inn and they rang Fats’ room, but no one answered. The shopping-mall manager tried Enoch Wax’s office in Lexington; Enoch had heard nothing from Fats. Eddie waited an hour, shooting a few trick shots to hold the audience and to give himself something to do. At three-twenty there was still no Fats and the bleachers were nearly empty. Eddie told the manager he was leaving, went back to Tony’s, had a drink and called a taxi to take him to the Ramada Inn.

“Mr. Hegerman checked in about noon,” the clerk at the desk said.

“Could you let me in the room?” Eddie said. He had tried the house phone and let it ring five times. Then he checked the bar, the restaurant, the coffee shop and came back to the desk.

“You’re Mr. Felson?” the clerk said. “Mr. Hegerman’s partner?”

“Yes. Could I have a key?”

“Sheryl will let you in, Mr. Felson.”

Sheryl, it turned out, was the woman with dyed hair at the cashier’s window. Eddie followed her across the lobby and down a long hallway. At Room 117 he took the key from her and opened the door himself.

Fats was in bed. He was dressed and in a sitting position, with his eyes open and his face frozen like that of an elegant waxwork. He was clearly dead.

On the plane back to Lexington, Eddie had four Manhattans. When he arrived at the apartment he was drunker than he had been in years, even though it didn’t show. When Arabella let him in it was after midnight and she was wearing the white panties and T-shirt she sometimes slept in.

“Fats is dead,” he said as soon as he had set his bag and cue case down. “He made it to Indianapolis but he died before the match.” He went into the kitchen and got himself a beer.

“It’s a shock,” Arabella said. “A real shock.”

Eddie poured beer into a glass and watched the foam settle. “Even dead,” he said, “the son of a bitch looked good.”

Arabella smiled faintly. “I wish I’d met him.” She hesitated a moment. “Something came while you were gone.” She walked to the Korean chest in the living room and took a large, thin package from it.

It was postmarked Miami. In the upper left was a return address but no name. Eddie opened it and slid out a big color photograph. He held it near a lamp and looked.

Against matted trees on a white beach two roseate spoonbills stood on alarmingly thin legs. One of them had begun to hunch its wings up from its body. Its bill inclined upward; its eyes looked toward the sky. The other bird, slightly behind, watched, as if waiting to see what would happen when those pink-tipped wings began to beat the air.

Babes Cooley was a small young man, thin-hipped and thin-wristed, but his nine-ball break was like a sledgehammer. Balls spun themselves, ricocheted, caromed off rails; three fell in. He looked at the spread with contempt, thought a moment and began to mop them up. He nudged the one into the side, clipped the two into the far corner, sliced the five down the rail. His position for each was impeccable. When it came to the nine, he drilled it into the nearby corner pocket as though with a rifle. There was applause. As the woman referee racked them up, Babes looked at the man he was playing and said, “Your troubles have just begun.” The man looked away.

Eddie sat on the top row of the three-level bleachers, his cue on his lap, watching. Beside him an old black man was chuckling at Cooley’s arrogance, clearly liking it. Four games were going on at the tables below, with the first eight players having their first round. There were four rounds this opening day; each of the thirty-two entrants was slated for one match of ten nine-ball games. By midnight sixteen would be in the losers bracket and sixteen in the winners. It started again the next day at noon, with losers playing losers; after two rounds of that, eight men would be permanently out of the tournament. Then, after dinner, the winners from this evening would begin their matches. The system was called double elimination; it required a man to lose twice before he was out of it.

This was the first pool tournament Eddie had entered in his life. When he was young, the great hustlers—Wimpy Lassiter, Ed Taylor, Fats—would not have dreamed of going public. Nine-ball tournaments hadn’t even existed. Straight pool for coverage by newspapers had been left to the Willie Mosconis and Andrew Ponzis, superb players too, who donned evening dress and played in hotel ballrooms in New York or Chicago. They made a living from that and from a few endorsements, from a salary as showmen for the Brunswick Company, from giving exhibitions in colleges, publishing slim books with titles like Championship Pocket Billiards. While they tried to dignify the game of pool, to obliterate the memory of whatever smoky rooms they had learned it in—rooms that were always in the worst part of the worst towns—another network of professionals known only to a few had moved around some of those very rooms and others like them, in affable anonymity, men capable of as much pool-table dazzle as their tuxedoed counterparts, but dressed in brown suits like salesmen or in laborers’ dark green, travelling, looking for action. Eddie had joined that incognito fraternity and had, for a brief time in his life, been its finest player.

In front of him, Babes Cooley moved from shot to shot with tight-lipped assurance, lit by bright fluorescents set into a ceiling of gritty Celotex. Babes was dressed gorgeously in a slick blue nylon running outfit, with red racing stripes on the pants and blue Nike shoes, as though he were a basketball player warming up. His opponent was a stolid local man in a brown sweater; he seemed assiduously to ignore the flash of his opponent as he sat in a chair against the far wall and waited to shoot. From the looks of Babes’ game he would have a while to wait.

On each side of this table, other matches were in progress. Two intense young men in tight blue jeans were at one; at the other, a weary man, older than Eddie, watched a youngster in his late teens who was taking a maddeningly long time between shots. The older man had looked familiar when the players were drawing their first-round positions a half hour before, and Eddie saw now with a start that he knew him. It was Gunshot Oliver from Kansas City, a legend from Eddie’s earliest days. When Eddie was fifteen, Gunshot had come through Oakland and played for two nights at Charlie’s; he was the first travelling hustler Eddie had ever seen. This man, waiting with a kind of bleak irritation for the high-strung younger man to shoot, was the first player Eddie had ever seen who exerted the professional’s quiet control over the cue ball, easing it off rails and ducking it between other balls to arrive at position in new and shocking ways. The way he bent to shoot and the steadiness of his stroke had opened Eddie’s eyes. Oliver shot all night against the best local hustler, a man Eddie would not be able to beat for another year, and by three in the morning was playing him at odds of one fifty to a hundred balls. By that time, Gunshot’s name was being spoken reverently by the dozen people watching and Gunshot himself was running seventy or eighty balls at a time with unwearied precision. It had thrilled Eddie’s young, ambitious soul.

The kid playing Gunshot now finally shot the three ball down the rail and missed. He shook his head and grimaced, probably blaming the table or the cloth or the lights, telling himself one of the weary stories of how he had been cheated of the ball. Oliver stood and walked slowly over to the table, limping slightly. When he bent to shoot, his back was to the bleachers; his unshined black shoes were run over at the heels; and there was a small hole in one of his socks. The kid had been lucky and left him safe. Oliver tapped the three ball lightly, trying to snooker the other player behind the five. But the tap was too strong, and the white ball bounced off the rail and out from behind the five, leaving the other man open on the three. Oliver scowled and seated himself.

Suddenly Eddie remembered something. That night in Oakland thirty-five years ago, after Gunshot Oliver had collected the last of the fifty-dollar bills—had broken the bank, such as it was—the man who lost to him said, “You shoot the best straights I’ve ever seen,” and Oliver had smiled faintly at him. “Have you ever seen Minnesota Fats?” he asked quietly. It was the first time Eddie had heard the name.

“I’ve heard of him,” the loser said.

“The best in the country,” Oliver said.

Fats was dead. It had seemed impossible then that a player like Gunshot Oliver—a man who calmly pocketed balls that Eddie had thought could not be made, a man who played position by moving the cue ball around as though it were a chess piece to set where he wanted it—would, by invoking a name, imply a level of play even beyond his own. Eddie had never played Oliver, had never seen him since that time, but in a few years he had moved beyond him, had learned to make his own chessman of the cue ball. Oliver was right about Fats. There were levels above levels, and Fats was at the top. Now he was in a fresh grave near Miami, probably under a headstone that read GEORGE HEGERMAN and gave dates, with no indication of the lovely stroke that had died with him.

Babes Cooley clipped the nine into the side, making it register in the pocket. He looked innocently at the seated man whom he was playing and said, “It just keeps on getting worse.”

Eddie wanted to shout at the arrogant young bastard, imagining him for a moment in his brash blue nylon playing straight pool against Minnesota Fats, being ground to helplessness by age and skill and experience. He sat there on the narrow bleacher seat, crowded in by a rapt audience of men, furious at Fats for being dead.

Cooley slammed the nine in on the break, said, “Ohhh yes!” and broke again after the balls were racked. He pocketed two on the break, but the one ball took a bad roll and froze itself to the bottom rail. The cue ball stopped at the top of the table. The one was nine feet away and the cut required was paper-thin. He would have to go for a safety. Okay, you son of a bitch, Eddie thought.

Cooley frowned, stepped to the end rail, set his bridge hand down on the wood, set the cue down decisively and stroked. The concentration of his thin body was sudden and remarkable. He took one practice stroke and then speared the cue ball. It flew down the table, whispered against the one ball and flew back up, dying in a cluster of balls. The one slid along the bottom cushion and plopped into the corner pocket. Someone in the crowd whistled and then there was loud applause. Eddie did not clap; he merely gripped his cue case harder. He would have avoided that shot and Fats might have missed it.

On the other table, Gunshot Oliver had begun to shoot. Eddie turned his attention back to that game. Oliver ran the four, five and six. When he made the six he brought the cue ball off the cushion and split the nine ball away from the seven beautifully, setting it up for the run-out. It was a straight-pool player’s shot, the kind of thing Eddie himself did almost instinctively. Oliver pocketed the seven, eight and nine. There was polite applause. But on the eight and nine his stroke lacked something; the cue ball, though it found places where the next shot could be made, did not have the sureness of movement that Eddie remembered from Oakland. Oliver stroked stiffly and the ball looked somehow dead as it rolled into positions that were barely adequate.

The referee began to rack the balls. Abruptly Eddie rose and stepped down from the bleachers. He tucked his cue case under his arm and walked away.

“The kids make me nervous,” he said into the phone. He lay on the freshly made bed in his Holiday Inn room, by his unopened suitcase.

“They don’t have your experience,” Arabella said.

He hesitated. “I’m fifty years old, Arabella. I watched Babes Cooley playing a half hour ago and I wanted to kick his punk ass. I’m old enough to be his father.”

“You’re still upset about Fats, aren’t you?”

She was right. “I thought I was going to learn some things from him.”

“Maybe he didn’t have anything more to teach you.”

“Maybe not.”

The poolroom was something like his own had been, but larger. It sat between a Big Bear supermarket and a fabric store in a faded shopping center directly across the interstate from the Holiday Inn. You drove over a cloverleaf, parked in front of the supermarket and pushed through glass double doors. On a gray, cigarette-burned carpet sat two rows of eight pool tables. In the aisle between them, three rows of temporary bleachers had been erected to face the tables on the right. The two tables at the far end were for the players to warm up on; the two near ones were covered with heavy plastic. The four in the middle were where the tournament games were played.

The eight tables on the left as you came in were in regular service, with the poolroom’s ordinary customers shooting their games and pretending to ignore the men who came in the door with expensive cue cases and sharp clothes. The tournament tables had a white card on the side of each, facing the bleachers. Most of the evening spectators were crowded in the bleachers near the table whose card displayed a “1”; Eddie’s first game was on Number Four. Eddie took his Balabushka out, slipped the empty case under the table and began to warm up. One bleary-eyed old man watched him dispassionately; no one else paid any attention.

After five minutes a clean-shaven young man with glasses and a white shirt came pushing through the space between the bleachers. He held out his hand to Eddie. “I’m Joe Evans,” he said politely. “You must be Mr. Felson.”

Eddie shook the hand. “Do you want to warm up?”

“A little,” the young man said.

There was a wooden chair for each of the players against the wall, separated by a small table that held a pitcher of water, an ashtray, a plastic shaker of baby powder and a towel for sweating hands, and a few fresh cubes of chalk. Eddie sat in one of the chairs and watched Evans.

The young man spread out the balls and began to run them in rotation, starting with the one. He was not very good; that was apparent immediately from his tight stroke and the self-conscious grimace on his face when he missed. He was playing as if for an audience, although no one was watching except Eddie and the old man in the bleachers. Eddie had seen this kind of player before: Evans’ emotional concentration was on not making a fool of himself. He was not thinking about winning, only about looking good. It would be simple to beat him.

It was simple. A few times during their match Evans had opportunities, but he blew them. Eddie could see his mind working from watching his face, trying to talk himself into shots, trying not to think about what he was leaving for Eddie if he missed, generally letting his head get in the way. A few times Eddie felt genuinely sorry for him, at the way he beat himself; but most of the time he was annoyed. Eddie played him methodically, shooting nine-ball as though it were straight pool; he beat him ten to four. During the last few minutes, a half-dozen latecomers, unable to get seats near the hot game on Table One, came to the bleachers near their table and watched. There was mild applause when Eddie won the tenth game. That was it until tomorrow; he was now one of the sixteen winners.

“I’m glad you’re off to a good start,” Arabella said.

“The kid was terrible.”

“He must have been good enough to get the entry fee.”

“I’ve got someone named Johannsen tomorrow. I don’t know who he is, but he’ll be tougher. How’re things at the magazine?”

“There isn’t much to do right now. I spend a lot of time with the secretary, drinking coffee.”

“It sounds better than typing.”

“Eddie,” she said, “I wish I had a talent like you have. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life working in an office doing what some man tells me to do.”

“I’ll teach you how to play nine-ball.”

“It isn’t funny, Eddie. If I could shoot pool like you, I’d be rich.”

Somehow that annoyed him. “Buy yourself a cue stick,” he said.

“I mean it, Eddie. You sat on your talent for twenty years.”

“I’m not sitting on it now.”

There was silence on the line for a moment. Then she said, “Beat that man tomorrow, Eddie. Beat him bad.”

Johannsen was chubby and wore a plum-colored sweater over blue jeans; he appeared to be about thirty. During the warm-up he was unself-conscious and accurate. It was two in the afternoon, and they were playing on Table Three, with a dozen people watching when the referee stopped the practice, racked up the nine balls and put two extra balls out for the lag. Eddie won the break by lagging his ball to within a quarter inch of the cushion, but when he smashed them open nothing went in. From behind him he heard a whispered voice in the stands say, “Straight-pool player,” and he knew, grimacing, what it meant: in straight pool you never had occasion to hit the balls that hard. It took practice to learn to do it. He turned to look at the man now breaking in the match starting on their right; the young player drew his cue back, hesitated, and slammed his whole body forward against the table as he rammed the stick into the cue ball. The diamond of nine balls flew apart so hard that the nine, from the center of the rack where it was always placed, spun off two cushions and narrowly missed a pocket before coming to a stop. On Eddie’s break the nine ball had barely moved; and Johannsen, despite the cluttered position of the balls, ran them out.

It looked for a minute to Eddie—furious with himself and able to do nothing but wait—that he would run out the next rack, but he made a mistake on the seven ball and missed it, dogging it into the rail near the bottom corner.

Eddie stepped up icily and ran the seven, eight and nine. On the break he tried to slam them harder, but only one ball fell in and the nine barely moved. But the way it moved left it lined up dead with the three ball for the corner pocket, and Eddie took advantage of that. He ran the one and two, and made the nine on a combination. That got him applause. On the next break he hit harder, ending with his belly against the table and his cue stick extended in front of him; this time the nine stopped near the corner pocket, with the four a few inches on the other side of it. He felt better about the break shot now. But the two ball was at the far end of the table; and when he came off the one, his position on it was wrong. He bent, stroked twice, and slammed into it, giving the stick a forward fillip with his wrist, for strong drawing English. And crammed the two ball into the pocket and back out again, dogging it. Eddie turned away, to see Babes Cooley on Table Four pocketing the nine-ball to applause. He sat down and looked at the floor. He heard Johannsen getting up to shoot, heard the tap that would send the two ball into the pocket and the cue ball back down to a simple position on the three, heard Johannsen shoot the three ball in, and looked up in time to see him line up the four and nine and make the easy combination—scoring the nine ball, winning the game and the break. Johannsen had him three to two and had the break coming up. It was a son of a bitch, especially because this imperturbable man in the sweater was one of the weaker players in the tournament. He had won a college nine-ball championship somewhere once in the Midwest, and that was it. If Eddie couldn’t blow him away, he had no business being here.

He had come to see that there were only four or five serious contenders in this tournament: Babes Cooley and a few other young men who played the circuit. The others—some of them lured by the spread-out prizes that went as far as two hundred dollars for twelfth place, and some of them wanting to play for once in their lives against the top players—had no real hope of winning. If Eddie had a problem it should be with Cooley and his near-equals—not with people like this aging college boy who played nine-ball as though he were in a library.

But the aging college boy was persistent; he capitalized on Eddie’s mistakes and after an hour was ahead by eight to six. Cooley was finished by that time, with a score posted ten-three in his favor, and some of the spectators came down to Eddie’s table.

It was a critical point and Eddie was sweating it. Johannsen was in the middle of a wide rack; if he ran this one out, it would give him nine and the momentum to win the match. The one hopeful sign was that he’d begun taking a long time between shots, was being studiously careful, frowning now over even a simple position and chalking up with great care. He might be beginning to choke.

He made the seven ball with agonizing deliberation, getting good position on the eight. All he had to do with that was shoot the eight straight in and stop his cue ball; the nine sat near the opposite pocket and would only require a simple cut. But Johannsen was sweating it. He frowned and shot the eight in with a lot of draw. The cue ball rolled too far; he still had a shot on the nine, but not as easy as what simply killing the cue ball would have given him. Eddie heard him speak for the first time. “Shit!” he said morosely, “I don’t deserve that.” Eddie looked up at him; he might just miss the nine, with that kind of crap in his head.

Johannsen bent to shoot, frowning in concentration. He cut the nine ball so badly it was embarrassing; it bounced off the rail a foot from the pocket. The cue ball went around the table and came back, leaving a simple shot. Eddie looked away from Johannsen, got up and carefully shot it in. Eight-seven.

From then on, Eddie knew he had him. He let himself loosen up a bit, ran the next game out as though it were part of a rack of straight pool. He stroked the nine into the pocket with a firm click. There was applause. Eight-eight.

This time, he slammed them harder and made three on the break, leaving the nine near the side pocket and the four nearby. He ran the two and three and left the cue ball exactly right for the carom shot. He glanced at Johannsen’s face before moving up to the shot; the man looked like a sulking child. Eddie bent, took very careful aim, and stroked. The cue ball hit the four ball, bounced off it and tapped the nine. The nine ball rolled over twice and fell in the side pocket. The applause was loud. Johannsen got up, came over, and with a forced smile shook his hand. Eddie unscrewed his cue.

The pairings were posted by the cashier’s desk where you first entered the room. Eddie stopped to check it when he was leaving. It took him a moment to figure out the difference between the losers’ brackets, on the left, and the winners’, on the right. He had never done this kind of thing before and it still seemed strange to him. While he was studying it, the tournament manager came up with a felt-tip pen. “Here you go, Mr. Felson,” he said, and printed FELSON on one of the empty lines to the right—the top half of a bracket with the bottom empty.

“Who do I play next?” Eddie said.

“You’re not going to like this,” the man said. He reached out and printed the name in the blank space: COOLEY.

No one answered when he called Arabella, even though he waited until five-thirty, when she was usually home. He did not feel like eating out and ordered a hamburger with coffee from Room Service. He turned on the television. But he didn’t watch and didn’t finish the overcooked hamburger. His head ached and his palms were sweaty. He felt jumpy. If only Fats were around, or somewhere where he could be called. He would like to talk to Fats about Babes Cooley.

Eddie’s lag was very good, but Cooley froze his ball to the end rail and won the break. They were on the first table, and every seat in the bleachers was filled, with a row of standing men craning to watch from behind the bleachers and another row squatting in front.

Babes Cooley wore shiny black pants that fit his narrow butt as tight as elastic, draping with a Las Vegas crease to the tops of alligator shoes. His shirt was collarless and of pale blue silk; around his neck hung a slender gold chain. His black hair was feathery from blow-drying; his face electric from cocaine. He stepped up to break and, just before swinging his cue, looked over at Eddie, who stood leaning against the covered table next to theirs. “This is a privilege, Fast Eddie,” he said, and slammed into the cue ball. The break was magnificent: four balls fell in and the yellow-striped nine ricocheted completely around the table. Babes was thin and small; it was astonishing to see such power coming from his body.

“Thanks,” Eddie said. Some people in the stands laughed.

“It seems rude,” Babes said, “to do this to a living legend.” He made the remaining five balls with elegant dispatch, firing the nine ball into a corner pocket with finality. The referee racked the balls and Babes smashed them open again, made three this time, ran the rest. His body seemed to be wired with a quiet, electric arrogance, and his position play was immaculate. Eddie stood and watched, knowing that to seat himself would be weakness.

In the middle of the third rack, with the score two-nothing, Babes got an unlucky roll on the five ball and was forced to play safe. He did it neatly, leaving Eddie snookered behind the seven with the five completely out of sight. Eddie walked to the table; it was his first shot of the evening and he would be lucky just to hit the ball. What he had to do was clear: the cue ball must be banked off two rails, through a cluster of balls and into the five. Eddie bent and shot it and—to his surprise—did it perfectly. When the white ball hit the five it sent the orange ball up the table and stayed where it was. There was applause. He had not only avoided giving Cooley the ball in hand but had played him safe.

Cooley raised his eyebrows but said nothing. He stepped up and shot a safety without hesitation, leaving eight feet of green between cue ball and five. The five might be cut in, but it was a killer. Eddie sucked in his gut and stepped up to shoot it, not wanting to but knowing he had to. He could not go on playing safe, not on a shot like this, without giving Cooley control of the game. He had to spring for it.

Eddie adjusted his glasses, took his stance behind the end rail, glared at the distant five ball and stroked hard. The cue ball clipped the five and the five arrowed into the center of the pocket. The white ball continued to carom around the table, coming to rest in position for the six. The bleachers behind burst into applause.

“A legend in his own time!” Babes Cooley said.

“You got it.” Eddie bent and shot in the six. Then the seven and eight, giving himself a cinch on the nine. He drove it into the pocket without hesitation and waited, through applause, for the referee to rack the balls.

But on the break he could not get the power he wanted and no balls fell in. There was nothing to do but stand back and watch Babes size up the layout. It was terrible to dog the break, to lose his momentum; that was one of the infuriating ways this game differed from straight pool. In straights, if you were hot you kept right on going; in nine-ball you had to get over this goddamned hump of a break shot.

Babes had a tough lie on the one, but he made it and sent the cue ball around the table in a way that Eddie would never have thought of, for position on the two. From there it was simple; he had to separate the six and eight, frozen together near the side pocket, but he tapped them apart on a carom and then cleaned up, firing the nine in smartly and then stopping to tuck his shirt in while the referee racked them. He looked over at Eddie and smiled faintly, with cold eyes.

Just as he stepped up to the head of the table and drew back his cue for the break, someone in the stands shouted, “On the snap, Babes!” and Babes, his face distorting with the effort, slammed into them like a sledgehammer, bellying up to the table as the balls rolled crazily. The nine, heading sideways into a rail, was pursued by two balls. They hit into it and seemed to shepherd it toward the corner pocket where, almost out of power, it hesitated a moment and then fell in. Eddie looked away. The score was three-one.

As Babes got ready for the break the same voice shouted, “One more time!” and Babes rammed them open just as hard but the nine did not fall. Two others did, though, and the one ball stopped near the side for an easy shot. Eddie watched with furious impotence as Babes took them off the table one at a time. It was not like straight pool; Babes played a kind of position that was extravagant and unfamiliar, sometimes stopping his cue ball for surprising angles on the next shot. But the positions made sense and they worked. He ran out without even getting close to trouble. Four-one. Eddie sat down.

The whole crowd was clearly with Babes, and he flirted with them between shots, going to one person or another and whispering something brief, with a tight smile, looking at them boldly while they applauded. He was like the MC of the game and Eddie himself only one of the minor performers. Eddie saw it and felt it and could do nothing about it. Babes kept making balls, avoiding trouble, playing elaborate and deadly positions. He moved around the table fast and certain, as though his small feet hardly touched the carpeted floor, sometimes running the fingers of one hand through his fluffy black hair. Eddie overheard someone in the stands say, as Babes was doing this, “He sure is pretty.” It was said with admiration.

Babes was pretty, and his nine-ball game was more than pretty. It was beautiful and lethal. The next time Eddie had the table, the score was eight-one and the shot was unmakable. Wanting to kill somebody, Eddie held his breath and played it as safe as he could; but the safety Babes came back with was devastating, and on his return Eddie missed the object ball. Babes took the cue ball in hand, palmed it a moment, looked at Eddie and said, “Coup de grace city.”

“Shoot the balls,” Eddie said.

“On my own time, my legendary friend,” Babes said, “on my own time.” Someone in the crowd laughed.

Babes set the cue ball down and made the shot, and then another. He ran them out as easily as breathing, not even bothering to chalk his cue or study the table, plunking in the nine ball at the end of it as though it were child’s play. Eddie’s feet hurt and his shooting arm was tired, but he was hardly aware of these things. He was being beaten remorselessly; he would have given his soul for Babes to miss.

“One more time, Babes honey!” It was the same voice. Babes shotgunned the rack apart like a clay pigeon. The nine careened around the table but did not fall in. However, the three, five, seven and eight did fall. The one ball had to be banked across the side. Babes did not hesitate; he rifled it in, stopped cold for position on the two and had the two ball pocketed before the applause from the bank shot had died out. He could not be stopped except by a miracle, and no miracle occurred. He tapped the remaining balls in, hesitated a moment before shooting the nine, looked behind him at the bleachers and then back to the nine ball. He drove it in hard, stopping the cue ball dead. The applause was very loud.

Ten-one. Eddie kept a tight hold on himself, walked up to Cooley and extended his hand. Cooley took it. “You shoot better than I expected,” Eddie said.

“My friend, I always do.”

“I felt like a fucking fool,” Eddie said on the phone. He lay on the bed with his cue beside him and a Manhattan in his hand.

“He’s the best nine-ball player in the country, Eddie.”

“If they came any better I’d cut my throat.”

“You still have a chance to come back.”

Eddie wasn’t sure he wanted to come back from the losers bracket and play Cooley again, but he did not say that. “I play in an hour. If I lose I’m out of the tournament, and if I win there’s another game at noon tomorrow.”

“Then take a shower and relax. It’s no disgrace to lose.”

He did what she said and showered. Then he put on fresh clothes, drove across the interstate and arrived exactly on time to play Gunshot Oliver.

Oliver clearly did not recognize him, and Eddie did not identify himself. The older man seemed to be in some kind of meditative daze, coming out of it only for the time it took him to shoot. He shot well, but his break was weak and he seemed to have disdain for the game.

During the middle of the match Oliver set his cue stick against the wall and walked slowly back to the men’s room. Eddie sat down, poured a glass of water and waited. On all four tables, losers’ games were being played and the crowd watching was slight. Eddie waited a long time, not really caring, until the old man came out again, looked around himself and ambled back toward the tables. But he hesitated at the first one he came to, where Evans was playing, watched a moment and then, shockingly, sat down in the empty chair at the wall behind that table, waiting to play. The old son of a bitch didn’t even know who his opponent was. He sat there in his baggy brown pants with his belly hanging over the leather belt and his lined face puffy, watching Evans play pool with a kind of weary disregard. He looked as though he’d just got out of bed.

The referee was standing near Eddie. Eddie touched his elbow and said, “You’d better get Oliver,” and pointed to him.

“Jesus!” the referee said. “He’s really out of it.”

The referee had to lead him to the table like a seeing-eye dog. Oliver looked lost and angry, and when he came close Eddie could smell whiskey on him as strong as perfume. It was his turn to shoot. He made two simple shots, missed the third and sat down with a sigh. Eddie looked away. The score was five-three in Eddie’s favor. He finished off the table, broke hard and ran the rack. He felt uncomfortable and wanted to get this over with; he bore down carefully and won four of the next five games, getting scattered applause when the match ended. Ten-four. Oliver just sat there. Finally he got up and shambled off without shaking Eddie’s hand.

His game the next day was with a young black man named Cunningham. Eddie bore down hard, but the man was good. He was the third-rated player in the tournament, the man Cooley had beaten just before beating Eddie, and he controlled the game. His position play was like Cooley’s—elaborate and sweet—and although he fought him hard, Eddie knew by the middle of the match that he was being outplayed. The man did not make any better shots than Eddie did, was in fact a shade less accurate; but he knew his nine-ball. And Eddie was being forced to see that there was a lot to know in nine-ball. Cunningham won the match ten to eight. That was the end of it. He could pack up and go home or wait and watch the semifinals and the finals.

As he was unscrewing his cue stick, he looked up to see Babes Cooley elbowing through an aisle between the bleachers, screwing his cue together. Babes nodded curtly in his direction and stepped up to the table Eddie had just lost on. He began to warm up for the semifinal match.

Eddie slipped his cue stick into its case, pushed through the crowd and left. There was a plane from Hartford to Cincinnati at ten-thirty, and a flight to Lexington at midnight. He could take his time and eat dinner in Hartford. For a moment he felt as though he should stay, should watch Cooley and study the ways he played position. But it didn’t make any difference; nine-ball was a young man’s game.

Eddie handed her a cigarette and she lit it from his, tilting her head back to blow the smoke toward the ceiling. They were in the living room. She had waited up after he called from Hartford. “I know it’s upsetting,” she said, “but coming in fifth isn’t the end of the world.”

His prize money was four fifty—enough to pay the entry fee and the hotel bill, but not the airplane tickets and rented car. “It was a second-rate tournament.”

“It was your first tournament, Eddie.”

“And last.”

“You’ll feel better in the morning.”

But he didn’t feel better. When he got to the Rec Room and saw he had to begin the day by sweeping up, he felt worse. He cleaned up the bathroom, polishing the chromium and the two small mirrors with Windex. It was eleven o’clock by then, and still no customers had come in. This was the week before Christmas break, and there probably would be few students around anyway. He decided to cover another table with a rubber-back cloth. If he was going to be doing this for a living from now on, he might as well do it right.

By the time Mayhew came in Eddie had the rails off Number Five and was working on the slate. Mayhew said nothing; when Eddie stood up from his work the old man was behind the counter looking bleakly around the near-empty game room. Eddie turned back to the slate he was leveling.

For twenty years of his life there had been no excellence. Working for himself, running his own business, he had never worked as he was working now for the grim, detached Mayhew and for the college students with whom he almost never spoke. There was desperation in his covering of the tables, repairing the split cues, getting the faucet washers replaced in the men’s room, installing brighter bulbs in the light fixtures. Arabella asked him once why he worked so hard at such a job, and all he could say was, “I need it.” It was true. He needed something right about his life—if only a properly covered pool table, its fresh green cloth tight and clean, its rubber cushions firm, its surface level. By starting to play again, to put his skill and nerve on the line, he had awakened something in his soul that was not easy to stifle.

Sometimes in bed with Arabella, he found himself making love with energy close to ferocity; but the release when it came was never adequate to the demands he was making on himself, on his fifty-year-old body. Once she said, “Take it easy, love. It’s not a contest.” Finished with sex, he would fall back in bed with his heart pounding and his mouth dry, satisfied and not satisfied. It had never been that way with Martha, as he had never run his own business with the energy he was putting into this anonymous, university recreation room. Only as a young man playing pool all night for money had he been able to find what he wanted in life, and then only briefly.

People thought pool hustling was corrupt and sleazy, worse than boxing. But to win at pool, to be a professional at it, you had to deliver. In a business you could pretend that skill and determination had brought you along when it had only been luck and muddle; a pool hustler did not have the freedom to believe that. There were well-paid incompetents everywhere living rich lives. They arrogated to themselves the plush hotel suites and Lear jets that America provided for the guileful and lucky far more than it did for the wise. You could fake and bluff and luck your way into all of it: hotel suites overlooking Caribbean private beaches; blow-jobs from women of stunning beauty; restaurant meals that it took four tuxedoed waiters to serve, with the sauces just right, the lamb or duck or terrine sliced with precise and elegant thinness, sitting just so on the plate, the plate facing you just so on the heavy white linen, the silver fork heavy, gleaming in your manicured hand below the broadcloth cuff and mother-of-pearl buttons. You could get that from luck and deceit, even while causing the business or the army or the government that supported you to do poorly at what it did. The world and all its enterprises could slide downhill through stupidity and bad faith, but the long gray limousines would still hum through the streets of New York, of Paris, of Moscow, of Tokyo, though the men who sat against the soft leather in back with their glasses of twelve-year-old Scotch might be incapable of anything more than looking important, of wearing the clothes and the haircuts and the gestures that the world, whether it liked to or not, paid for and always had paid for.

Eddie would lie in bed sometimes at night and think these things in anger, knowing that beneath the anger envy lay like a swamp. A pool hustler had to do what he claimed to be able to do. The risks he took were not underwritten. His skill on the arena of green cloth—cloth that was itself the color of money—could never be only pretense. Pool players were often cheats and liars, petty men whose lives were filled with pretensions, who ran out on their women and walked away from their debts; but on the table, with the lights overhead beneath the cigarette smoke and the silent crowd around them in whatever dive of a billiard parlor at four in the morning, they had to find the wherewithal inside themselves to do more than promise excellence. Under whatever lies might fill the life, the excellence had to be there. It had to be delivered. It could not be faked. But Eddie did not make his living that way anymore.