The Hustler

13

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Help me up, please,” he said.

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

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

“Sure,” Eddie said. He started walking.

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

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

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

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

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

“My God,” she said.

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

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

“How… do you feel?” she said.

“I don’t know.”

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

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

There was an incredulous look on her small face, a twisted and hurt look, and abruptly he realized that she must know a great deal about this kind of thing. Her polio, and whatever wrenching of her leg it had produced, whatever strange ways it had twisted her.

“Come on,” she said, “I’ll get you to a hospital.”

There was an emergency room where the lights were too bright. The doctor was very old and had hands like a woman’s, soft and moist. An intern gave Eddie a shot in his arm before the doctor began to work. There was something indecently soft about the doctor and Eddie distrusted him, hated him when he began insistently feeling then pulling on the thumbs. But then the room started becoming smaller and dimmer and he passed out.

After that he was sitting in a chair by the wall, his body stiff and sticky, his arms numb, weightless. The back of his neck was itching. He looked down and saw two white plaster casts enclosing the sides of his hands.

Sarah and the doctor were talking and the doctor was saying, “…at least four weeks. Probably more,” and Sarah was asking about exercising the hands and the doctor said something about X-raying first, to find out about the sutures. He did not understand it, nor did he want to; but he watched Sarah, looking up at the doctor with her steady, wry look, getting all the facts straight. Sarah in this environment of white tile walls and oak chairs and steel needles and glass and the smells of alcohol and ether—another one of those strange and midnight worlds.

Finally he stood up, shakily, and said, “Let’s get out.”

She took him by the arm, gently, leading him outside….

He had to wear the casts for two weeks. They were infuriating things, hampering all the simple motions, making the feeding of himself a stupid and fumbling act, forcing him to play the woman in bed. And even more than that they were an emasculation, destroying his old sense of power and reserve, the sense that derived more than anything else from a ridiculous ability to manipulate a stick of polished wood on a table with colored balls. Perhaps that was what Turtle had wanted: to humble him, to make him atone for that one brilliant and savage performance in the nine-ball game, to make him pay what is always extracted from talent and skill when they become, as they sometimes must, infuriated and belligerent. It was not the man he had beaten who had taken revenge; it was the man who had presided over the game….

For the first several days he did not leave the apartment. He kept quiet most of the time, and did a good deal of thinking. Sometimes Sarah would talk to him—although she talked more than he wanted her to talk—telling him about her family or about some of the things she read. He put up with it, because there was nothing else to do.

She wrote a great deal. She would sit in the kitchen at the table, with her glasses on, for hours, over a portable typewriter, while he sat in the living room drinking or reading. Once, she attempted to read some of what she had written to him, but it made no sense. She explained that it was part of her thesis, something about a man named Keynes.

He was restless and he chafed at the inactivity, but he did not become morbid or really uncomfortable. Once, she rented a car and took him for a long ride and, finally, to a picnic, which she called a “surprise.” He was, properly, surprised. She had brought sandwiches and a Thermos of gin and grapefruit juice. They both got drunk on the gin, in the quick, weird, and unsatisfactory way that you get drunk in sunlight, and the afternoon was merely awkward. They wound it up by quarreling over the slow way that she drove the car back home.

After a week he began going out. He went to a few poolrooms, vaguely looking for Bert, but he did not see him. Then he started going to movies in the afternoons, and that, although it passed time, was unpleasant, giving him headaches. He picked up a whore one afternoon and bought her some drinks, but was not interested when she proposed getting a room. She probably would have been enjoyable enough—she was young and had blatantly obscene breasts—but she wanted more money than he could afford. Also, he possibly owed Sarah something, he was not certain what.

And then Sarah took him to the doctor and the doctor took the casts off. His hands came out of their cocoons pale, white, and stiff. Moving them was very painful, and he dared not try to flex his thumbs. The doctor had told him not to try putting any pressure on them for a week or more.

That night they got drunker than usual, to celebrate, and he tried, carefully and persistently, to form a pool bridge—the circle of curved forefinger and thumb that guides the thin end of the cue shaft—but it was impossible. This enraged him for a time. Sarah said nothing, but watched curiously as he attempted the manipulation. Then, when he grimaced once at a sudden stab of pain, she said, “You’d better leave it alone for a while. It hurts too much.”

“How do you know how much it hurts?” he said, and then immediately realized that she had an answer for that one.

But she did not use the answer. What she said was, “It shows on you.”

After a few days he found that he was able, after a fashion, to hold and swing the cue, at least on Sarah’s kitchen table. He had to use the open-hand bridge—with the palm flat on the table, the thumb slightly raised, and the cue’s end sliding in the groove between thumb and forefinger—and he held the big end of the stick just behind the balance with only the cupped fingers of his right hand, his thumb not supporting any weight. It was awkward, but he felt that he would be able to accomplish something that way.

One morning he was doing this, practicing on the table, trying to build up some kind of wrist action, to get flexibility into his stroke, which was still very painful. He had been doing this for more than an hour when Sarah came in, carrying a book, her thumb marking the place where she had stopped reading.

She sat and watched him silently for several minutes, and he paid no attention to her. Finally she said, “You look as if you know what you’re doing with that… stick.”

“I do,” he said.

She watched him for another few minutes, and then she said, “How long have you been playing pool, Eddie?”

Her tone of voice was light enough; but he did not like it.

“Since I was about fourteen.”

“Were you always good?”

“I started winning money when I was fifteen. Two—three dollars a day. Sometimes more.” He grinned. “Sometimes I lost too.”

“But not often.”

“No.” He swung the stick smoothly at an imaginary cue ball. “Not often…”

At Wilson’s he practiced for three hours before the pain in his hands made him stop. He was crude and awkward, and even his stroke, the pendulum-like motion of his right arm, had suffered; but he could make balls. He kept lining them up and shooting them in, one after another.

He did not go back to Sarah’s, but to a restaurant and then to a movie. The movie had to do with a deep-sea diver, and he watched it distractedly, not able to keep himself in spite of the pain from flexing his fingers, cautiously, carefully working his thumbs around, back and forth.

After the show he walked, through tired old residential avenues, along a honky-tonk street of bars, tattoo parlors and a penny arcade, and through streets where there seemed to be nothing but stores where women could buy clothes. He thought about buying something for Sarah, a silk nightgown or something, but then thought better of it. He had barely forty dollars—and nobody had said anything yet about the doctor bills.

When he got back to Sarah’s she had already finished dinner: her dishes were piled, dirty, in the sink. She was in the living room, writing, the typewriter on her lap, when he came in.

He went into the kitchen, washed out a frying pan, and fried himself a frozen steak. He put this on a coffee saucer—one of the few remaining clean dishes in the cabinet—poured himself a glass of milk, got two slices of bread, stale, from the box on top of the stove, came into the living room, and sat beside Sarah on the couch. He made a sandwich with the bread and meat and began eating.

When he finished he looked at Sarah, grinned, and said, “Women, they tell me, are supposed to be real good at washing dishes.”

She didn’t look at him. “Is that right?” she said.

“That’s right. And cooking too.” He set the saucer down, reached over and patted her on the butt.

“Well, not this woman,” she said. “And I wish you’d quit patting my rear. It doesn’t thrill me in the least.”

“It’s supposed to,” he said. “Maybe you’re just different.” And then, “You’re funny, Sarah. Are all the women in Chicago like you?”

“How should I know? I don’t know all the women in Chicago.” She finished pecking a line out on the typewriter, and then looked at him, peering up over her glasses, her arms crossed over the typewriter in her lap. “I’m probably different, I suppose,” she said, “‘a horrible example of free thought.’”

“That sounds bad.”

“It is. Fix me a drink.”

He got up and poured her a glass of Scotch and water. He did not make one for himself. Then, when he gave it to her, he said, “I’ll see you around,” and headed for the door.

“Hey!” she said, and he turned. She was still looking up at him over her glasses. Her skin, in the light, seemed very white, transparent. Her blouse was thin, and beneath it he could see the outline of her small bosom, moving gently as she breathed.

“What is it?” he said.

She took a sip of her drink. “You’ve been out all afternoon.”

Immediately he felt a thin edge of irritation in his voice. “That’s right.”

“So why go out now?”

He hesitated a moment, and then said, “So why not?”

She looked at him thoughtfully, a little coldly—there was a hardness that could come into her eyes—and then she said, softly, “No reason at all. Good night.” She went back to the paper she was typing.

“Don’t wait up for me,” he said, going out the door….

It was getting late when he walked into Wilson’s, and there were only a few men there. On the back table was a very tall, elderly man, a straight-backed, white-haired man with a double-breasted gray suit. He was practicing and Eddie, standing at the counter in the front of the room, watched him for several minutes. The man shot stiffly—he looked to be at least sixty years old—but he was good. He was practicing at straights, and he knew the game; Eddie could tell from the way he controlled the cue ball, making it lie down when he wanted it to without any wild English or long, haphazard rolls. He did not seem to have the stroke of a real first-rate player, for he lacked the smoothness and the gentle, precise wrist action; normally he would have been considerably below Eddie’s league.

Eddie asked the withered man behind the counter for a package of cigarettes, and when he got them asked quietly who the man on the back table was.

The old man grinned like a conspirator and wheezed, in the obscene voice that some old men have, “That man’s a real pool hustler,” he said. “That’s Bill Davis from Des Moines. Probably just come from up at Bennington’s. He’s one of the real big boys.”

Eddie had heard of him somewhere; he was supposed to be, as well as he could remember, a small-time hustler.

“What’s his game?” he asked.

“How’s that?”

“What’s his best game? What does he play?”

“Oh.” The man behind the counter bent closer to him. “Straights,” he said. “Straight pool.”

That’s nice, Eddie thought, walking back toward where the man was practicing. But then you had to be steady to play good straights. He was not certain that he could trust his hands that much yet. Maybe it would be smarter to try getting him into a game of one-pocket. In one-pocket you depend more on brainwork and on patience—qualities that you don’t have to rely on your hands for. And every straight pool hustler plays one-pocket; the old man was sure to know the game. And, then, that made Eddie wonder, suddenly, if the tall man would know him, Fast Eddie Felson, by reputation, or had seen him play somewhere else. The thought of it, of losing his first chance for a good, workable game in weeks, made him suddenly feel tight, even nervous. But in a moment he laughed at himself; he was thinking as Bert must think, analyzing, planning out the angles, figuring the odds. It amused him to think of little, tight, lip-pursing Bert, sitting on one of those stools back there, eating potato chips and telling him how he had everything figured out. But then, Bert did drive a new car. Every year.

He leaned against the near table and watched Bill Davis shoot out a rack of balls. When Davis finished he racked up the fourteen of them into the triangle and attempted a straight-pool break shot off the fifteenth, banking the colored ball into the side of the triangle and trying to make it skid off into the near corner. The ball hit the rail a few inches short of the pocket. Davis worked with great intensity at the shot, bending over the cue ball grimly, and then swooping down on it like a hawk. When he had missed he let out his breath in a great gasp, and began wiping his forehead.

Eddie tried to look sympathetic. “That sure was a tough one,” he said.

The man turned around, facing him, looked at him a moment, and then grinned. His teeth were huge, white and even. Eddie wondered if they were false. “You sure right,” the man said. His voice practically boomed, and he spoke with a thick accent. “That shot is sure one tough shot of pool.” His voice was loud and he spoke with what sounded like great conviction, earnestness.

Eddie smiled at him. “You can’t make ’em all.”

“That’s right. You sure can’t make ’em all.” The voice and the grin were both enormous, and Eddie was a little dumbfounded by them. “I only wish you could. I been playing this goddamn game fifteen years and I sure don’t know one man yet make all those goddamn balls, I sure don’t.” The man’s voice was softer now, and Eddie was relieved, although he still was not certain what to make of him. It struck him that perhaps Davis should be a con man of some kind; he seemed to be one of the most trustworthy types Eddie had ever seen—his voice vibrated with honesty and seriousness.

Eddie watched him rack the balls and then he said, “You like to play a game or two?”

“Sure, I like to play. What game?” He slammed the rack on the table and began piling the balls fiercely into it. His hands were huge, strong-looking, and rough, and he handled the balls as if they were golf balls.

“Is one-pocket all right?”

“Fine.” The man fished vigorously in his pocket and withdrew a half dollar. He threw this in the air, over the table. “Which side comes up?” he said.

“Tails.”

It came up heads; Davis would break. In one-pocket, unlike straight pool, the break is an advantage; with it you can nudge a good many balls over to the side of the table where your scoring pocket is, and if you know how to do it right you can invariably leave the other man perfectly safe—without a possible shot.

The man began chalking his cue and said, “You want to play for some money? A few dollars?”

Eddie grinned. “Ten?”

The old man raised his eyebrows, which were gray and very shaggy. “Fine.”

When he got up to the head of the table to break the balls he bent down stiffly, pumped his cue stick vigorously several times, stopped, aimed, pumped again, and then shot. His concentration was so great that a large soft vein, purplish, stood out on his forehead. The break was very good, although not perfect.

Eddie decided that, from the start, there would be no point in playing down his own game. He was not certain, anyway, that he would be able to win even by playing his best. There would be no point in throwing off, underplaying himself, just to set up a big game or two that he might lose.

So he played carefully, using his open-hand bridge and his awkward hold on the cue, and shot the best that he could. Any ten-dollar bills that he could pick up he could use. He played cautiously, making most of his shots defensive, trying for a ball only when he was certain he could make it, and he beat the man by a close score—eight to six.

They played another and Eddie won that. The man was good, but wild—and not smart enough. He lost the third, but won the one afterward. When they had finished that game, Davis grinned at him and said, “How come you shoot flat hand? You sure too goddamn good to shoot like that all the time.”

“I hurt my hands. In an accident.”

They kept on playing and after a few hours Eddie had won ninety dollars. But his hands were beginning to ache, and he began to shoot stiffly, afraid that he would put pressure on one of his thumbs and the pain would stab through it. The old man’s vigor did not abate: he was one of the professionals like Minnesota Fats—although not nearly as good—in his tireless, consistently good game. And he was funny. Once, in the middle of a game, Davis was bending rigidly over the cue ball at the end of the table, concentrating, his forehead vein purplish, on a difficult shot, when suddenly he drew back and stood erect, his great hands on his hips, staring toward the center of the table. Eddie looked and saw a small black insect walking unconcernedly across the green, in the line of the old man’s shot. The thing was the size of a gnat, with no wings.

Davis was staring at it, his eyes bulging apoplectically. Finally, the bug stopped, turned around, and began walking back the way it had come.

Davis glared. “You little black son of a bitch,” he said, “You had your goddamn chance, you sure had.” Then, suddenly, he swooped forward, and with the small end of his cue stick extended, delivered a very rapid series of short taps, as if trying to hammer the bug through the table. Then he bent forward and, with deliberation, flicked the corpse off the table, using a massive thumb and forefinger. “That’s teach you good, you son of a bitch,” he said.

And playing him, Eddie slowly became aware of something he had not been aware of about himself for a long time: of how much he enjoyed playing pool. Things of that kind, things that simple, can be forgotten easily—especially in all of the questions of money and gambling, talent and character, born winner and born loser—and they can come as a shock. Eddie loved to play pool. There was a kind of power, a kind of brilliant co-ordination of mind and of skill, that could give him as much pleasure, as much delight in himself and in the things that he did, as anything else in the world. Some men never feel this way about anything; but Eddie had felt it, as long as he could remember, about pool. He loved the hard sounds the balls made, loved the feel of the green wool cloth under his hand, the other hand gently holding the butt of his cue, tapping leather on ivory.

And then, after he had won three games in a row, the big man grinned broadly, toothily, at him and said, “I quit you now. You too goddamn good.”

“Sure,” Eddie said, grinning. He took the final ten from him and, putting it in his billfold, hardly noticed the tugging of acute pain in his hands. Everything, it seemed, about this game had been perfect: they had even quit at the right time. He was not certain; but he figured that he had won at least a hundred and a half. He could use it.

“You want a drink?” he said to the other man, affably. They had drunk nothing but coffee during the playing.

“Sure.” His voice boomed out again, like it had done at first, “You buy me a martini?”

“Be glad to,” Eddie said.

They went to the back room and washed their hands, getting the grime and chalk off them. The big man washed as he did everything else, like a zealot. “What’s your name, anyway?” he said. “You shoot so goddamn good I should know your name. For next time.”

Eddie laughed. “Felson,” he said. “Eddie Felson.”

“Eddie Felson?” The big man thought about this for a moment. “Sure.” In the little washroom, his voice could have broken mirrors, cracked porcelain. “Somebody told me about you. Fast Eddie, is that it?”

“That’s it.”

“Say” He held out a huge hand. “My name’s Bill Davis. From Des Moines, Iowa.”

Eddie took the hand apprehensively, afraid the man would squeeze it. But he shook gently, aware, apparently, of the soreness. “You’re one damn fine pool player. When you get your hands fixed up you must be one of the best.”

“Thanks,” Eddie said.

“Maybe I should buy you a drink.”

“That’s okay, I can afford it,” Eddie said, grinning.

The martini glass seemed lost in Davis’ hand. He gulped it and then set the glass down on the counter. For a moment Eddie was afraid he would slam it down as he had the pool triangle, slivering glass everywhere. “You know,” he said, “if I had the chance to learn how to shoot pool when I was a boy I would be one damn fine good pool player myself.”

“You shoot good right now,” Eddie said.

“Sure. Sure, I shoot good. I beat most people I play. But I’m an old man. I was an old man first time in my life I saw a pool table. Fifteen years ago. First year I come to the States to live.”

“You mean there aren’t any pool tables where you come from?”

“I don’t know. Maybe some. But in Albania—I come from Albania fifteen goddamn years ago—I’m always a working man. Mechanic. I save my money and come here to buy a business. I buy a garage. No goddamn good—nobody makes money in a garage. So I buy a poolroom, cheap, in Des Moines, Iowa. Now I’m sixty-eight years old and I’m just learning to play this goddamn game of pool.” Then he grinned, his big, horsy teeth flashing, “But I like it. It’s the best goddamn game there is.”

It seemed impossible that the man could be sixty-eight. He should be tired, if he were, or vague. But the deep lines in his face, like ruts, and the thousands of tiny, fine lines between the heavy ones were the kind that took years to grow. The man was impossible, some kind of natural phenomenon.

Abruptly he got up, slapped Eddie on the back, said, “You sure a goddamn pool player, Eddie Felson.” Then he walked out the door, taking big strides, his back stiff, erect, his arms swinging, stiffly, at his sides….

By the time Eddie got home he felt great. He had stopped in a drugstore to pick up a box of candy for Sarah, and when he got there he woke her up and handed the box to her.

“What in hell is that?” she said, her voice thick with sleep and liquor.

“Candy,” he said. “Whole damn box full of it. For you.”

She was sitting up, slumped, in bed, her hair falling over her forehead and her eyes gluey. She blinked, “What in hell’s the idea?”

“A present. A gift.”

She tossed it loosely down to the foot of the bed, and then fell over on her side, away from him. “Just what I need,” she said. And then, “Where have you been? Shooting pool?” He could not tell if it were sleepiness or bitterness in her voice, but the tone of it was dead.

“That’s right.”

Abruptly, she rolled over and looked at him, balefully. “Eddie…” and then she rolled back. “Never mind. You wouldn’t know what I was talking about.”

His voice had become very cold. “I probably wouldn’t,” he said.