The Hustler

6

They had to take an elevator to the eighth floor, an elevator that jerked and had brass doors and held five people. It did not seem at all right to go to a poolroom on an elevator; and he had never figured Bennington’s that way. Nobody had ever told him about the elevator. When they stepped off it there was a very high, wide doorway facing them. Over this was written, in small, feeble neon letters, BENNINGTON’S BILLIARD HALL. He looked at Charlie and then they walked in.

Eddie had with him a small, cylindrical leather case. This was as big around as his forearm and about two and a half feet long. In it was an extremely well-made, inlaid, ivory-pointed, French-leather-tipped, delicately balanced pool cue. This was actually in two parts; they could be joined for use by screwing together a two-piece, machined brass joint, fastened to the maple end of each section.

The place was big, bigger, even than he had imagined. It was familiar, because the smell and the feel of a poolroom are the same everywhere; but it was also very much different. Victorian, with heavy, leather-cushioned chairs, big elaborate brass chandeliers, three high windows with heavy curtains, a sense of spaciousness, of elegance.

It was practically empty. No one plays pool late in the afternoon; few people come in at that time except to drink at the bar, make bets on the races or play the pinball machines; and Bennington’s had facilities for none of these. This, too, was unique; its business was pool, nothing else.

There was a man practicing on the front table, a big man, smoking a cigar. On another table further back two tall children in blue jeans and jackets were playing nine ball. One of these had long sideburns. In the middle of the room a very big man with heavy, black-rimmed glasses—like an advertising executive—was sitting in an oak swivel chair by the cash register, reading a newspaper. He looked at them a moment after they came in and when he saw the leather case in Eddie’s hand he stared for a moment at Eddie’s face before going back to the paper. Beyond him, in the back of the room, a stooped black man in formless clothes was pushing a broom, limping.

They picked a table toward the back, several tables down from the nine-ball players, and began to practice. Eddie took a house cue stick from the rack, setting the leather case, unopened, against the wall.

They shot around, loosely, for about forty-five minutes. He was trying to get the feel of the table, to get used to the big four-and-a-half-by-nine-feet size—since the war practically all pool tables were four by eight—and to learn the bounce of the rails. They were a little soft and the nap on the cloth was smooth, making the balls take long angles and making stiffening English difficult. But the table was a good one, level, even, with clean pocket drops, and he liked the sense of it.

The big man with the cigar ambled down, took a chair, and watched them. Then after they had finished the game he took the cigar out of his mouth, looked at Eddie, very hard, looked at the leather case leaning against the wall, looked back at Eddie and said, thoughtfully, “You looking for action?”

Eddie smiled at him. “Maybe. You want to play?”

The big man scowled. “No. Hell, no.” Then he said, “You Eddie Felson?”

Eddie grinned, “Who’s he?” He took a cigarette out of his shirt pocket.

The man put the cigar back in his mouth. “What’s your game? What do you shoot?”

Eddie lit the cigarette. “You name it, mister. We’ll play.”

The big man jerked the cigar from his mouth. “Look, friend,” he said, “I’m not trying to hustle. I don’t never hustle people who carry leather satchels in poolrooms.” His voice was loud, commanding, and yet it sounded tired, as if he were greatly discouraged. “I ask you a civil question and you play it cute. I come up and watch and I think maybe I can help you out, and you want to be cute.”

“Okay,” Eddie grinned, “no hard feelings. I shoot straight pool. You know any straight pool players around this poolroom?”

“What kind of straight pool game do you like?”

Eddie looked at him a minute, noticing the way the man’s eyes blinked. Then he said, “I like the expensive kind.”

The man chewed on his cigar a minute. Then he leaned forward in his chair and said, “You come up here to play straight pool with Minnesota Fats?”

Eddie liked this man. He seemed very strange, as if he were going to explode. “Yes,” he said.

The man stared at him, chewing the cigar. Then he said, “Don’t. Go home.”

“Why?”

“I’ll tell you why, and you better believe it. Fats don’t need your money. And there’s no way you can beat him. He’s the best in the country.” He leaned back in the chair, blowing out smoke.

Eddie kept grinning. “I’ll think about that,” he said. “Where is he?”

The big man came alive, violently. “For God’s sake,” he said, loudly, despairingly, “You talk like a real high-class pool hustler. Who do you think you are—Humphrey Bogart? Maybe you carry a rod and wear raincoats and really hold a mean pool stick back in California or Idaho or wherever it is. I bet you already beat every nine-ball shooting farmer from here to the West Coast. Okay. I told you what I wanted about Minnesota Fats. You just go ahead and play him, friend.”

Eddie laughed. Not scornfully, but with amusement—amusement at the other man and at himself. “All right,” he said, laughing. “Just tell me where I find him.”

The big man pulled himself up from the chair with considerable effort. “Just stay where you are,” he said. “He comes in, every night, about eight o’clock.” He jammed the cigar in his mouth and walked back to the front table.

“Thanks,” Eddie called at him. The man didn’t reply. He began practicing again, a long rail shot on the three ball.

Eddie and Charlie returned to their game. The talk with the big man could have rattled him but, somehow, it had the effect of making him feel better about the evening. He began concentrating on the game, getting his stroke down to a finer point, running little groups of balls and then missing intentionally—more from long habit than from fear of being identified. They kept shooting, and after a while the other tables began to fill up with men and smoke and the clicking of pool balls and he began to glance toward the massive front door, watching.

And then, after he had finished running a group of balls, he looked up and saw, leaning against the next table, an extremely fat man with black curly hair, watching him shoot—a man with small black eyes.

He picked up the chalk and began stroking his cue tip with it, slowly, looking at the man. It couldn’t have been anyone else, not with all of that weight, not with the look of authority, not with those sharp little eyes.

He was wearing a silk sport shirt, chartreuse, open at the neck and loose on his wide, soft-looking belly. His face was like dough, like the face of the full moon on a free calendar, puffed up like an Eskimo’s, little ears close to his head, the hair shiny, curly, and carefully trimmed, the complexion clear, pinkish. His hands were clasped over the great belly, above a small, jeweled belt buckle, and there were brightly jeweled rings on four of his fingers. The nails were manicured and polished.

About every ten seconds there was a sudden, convulsive motion of his head, forcing his chins down toward his left collar bone. This was a very sudden movement, and it brought an automatic grimace to that side of his mouth which seemed affected by the tic. Other than this there was no expression on his face.

The man stared back at him. Then he said, “You shoot pretty good straights.” His voice had no tone whatever. It was very deep.

Eddie, somehow, did not feel like grinning. “Thanks,” he said.

He turned back to the table and finished up the rack of balls. Then when the cashier, the man with the black-rimmed glasses, was racking them up, Eddie turned back to the fat man and said, smiling this time, “You play straight pool, mister?”

The man’s chin jerked, abruptly, “Every once in a while,” he said. “You know how it is.” His voice sounded as though he were talking from the bottom of a well.

Eddie continued chalking his cue. “You’re Minnesota Fats, aren’t you, mister?”

The man said nothing, but his eyes seemed to flicker, as if he were amused, or trying to be amusing.

Eddie kept smiling, but he felt his fingertips quivering and put one hand in his pocket, holding the cue stick with the other. “They say Minnesota Fats is the best in the country, out where I come from,” he said.

“Is that a fact?” The man’s face jerked again.

“That’s right,” Eddie said. “Out where I come from they say Minnesota Fats shoots the eyes right off them balls.”

The other man was quiet for a minute. Then he said, “You come from California, don’t you?”

“That’s right.”

“Name of Felson, Eddie Felson?” He pronounced the words carefully, distinctly, with neither warmth nor malice in them.

“That’s right too.”

There seemed nothing more to say. Eddie went back to his game with Charlie. Knowing Fats was watching him, adding him up, calculating the risks of playing him, he felt nervous; but his hands were steady with the cue and the nervousness was only enough to make him feel alert, springy, to sharpen his sense of the game he was playing, his feel for the balls and for the roll of the balls and the swing of the cue. He laid it on carefully, disregarding his normal practice of making himself look weak, shooting well-controlled, neat shots, until the fifteen colored balls were gone from the table.

Then he turned around and looked at Fats. Fats seemed not to see him. His chin jerked, and then he turned to a small man who had been standing next to him, watching, and said, “He shoots straight. You think maybe he’s a hustler?” Then he turned back to Eddie, his face blank but the little eyes sharp, watching. “You a gambler, Eddie?” he said. “You like to gamble money on pool games?”

Eddie looked him full in the face and, abruptly, grinned. “Fats,” he said, grinning, feeling good, all the way, “let’s you and me play a game of straight pool.”

Fats looked at him a moment. Then he said, “Fifty dollars?”

Eddie laughed, looked at Charlie and then back again, “Hell, Fats,” he said, “you shoot big-time pool. Everybody says you shoot big-time pool. Let’s don’t be chicken about this.” He looked at the men standing by Fats. Both of them were bugged, astonished. Probably, he thought, nobody’s ever talked to their big tin god like this before. He grinned. “Let’s make it a hundred, Fats.”

Fats stared at him, his expression unchanging. Then, suddenly, with a great moving of flesh, he smiled. “They call you Fast Eddie, don’t they?” he said.

“That’s right.” Eddie was still grinning.

“Well, Fast Eddie. You talk my kind of talk. You flip a coin so we see who breaks.”

Eddie took his leather case from where it was leaning against the wall.

Someone flipped a half dollar. Eddie lost the toss and had to break the balls. He took the standard shot—two balls out from the rack and back again, three rails on the cue ball to the end cushion—and he froze the cue ball on the rail with only a bare edge of a corner ball sticking from behind the rack, to shoot at. Then Fats walked very slowly, ponderously, up to the front of the poolroom, where there was a green metal locker. He opened this and took out a cue stick, one joined at the middle with a brass joint, like Eddie’s. He picked a cube of chalk up from the front table and chalked his cue as he walked back. He did not even appear to look at the position of the balls on the table, but merely said, “Five ball. Corner pocket,” and took his position behind the cue ball to shoot.

Eddie watched him closely. He stepped up to the table with short, quick little steps, stepping up to it sideways, bringing his cue up into position as he did so, so that he was holding his cue, standing sideways to the table, out across his great stomach, the left-hand bridge already formed, the right hand holding the butt delicately, much as a violinist holds his bow—gracefully but surely. And then, as if it were an integral, continuous part of his approach to the table, his bridge hand settled down on the green and almost immediately there was a smooth, level motion of the cue stick, effortless, and the cue ball sped down the table and clipped the corner of the five ball and the five ball sped across the table and into the corner pocket. The cue ball darted into the rack, spreading the balls wide.

And then Fats began moving around the table, making balls, all of his former ponderousness gone now, his motions like a ballet, the steps light, sure, and rehearsed; the bridge hand inevitably falling into the right place; the hand on the butt of the cue with its fat, jeweled fingers gently pushing the thin shaft into the cue ball. He never stopped to look at the layout of the balls, never appeared to think or to prepare himself for shooting. About every five shots he stopped long enough to stroke the tip of his cue gently with chalk; but he did not even look at the table as he did this; he merely watched what he was doing at the moment.

He made fourteen out of the fifteen balls on the table very quickly, leaving the remaining ball in excellent position for the break.

Eddie racked the balls. Fats made the break shot, shooting effortlessly but powering the cue ball into the rack so that it scattered balls all over the table. He began punching them in. He was good. He was fantastically good. He ran eighty balls before he got tied up and played Eddie safe. Eddie had seen and made bigger runs, much bigger; but he had never seen anyone shoot with the ease, the unruffled certainty, that this delicate, gross man had.

Eddie looked at Charlie, sitting now in one of the big, high chairs. Charlie’s face showed nothing, but he shrugged his shoulders. Then Eddie looked the shot over carefully. It was a good safe, but he was able to return it, freezing the cue ball to the end rail, leaving nothing to be shot at. They played it back and forth, safe, leaving no openings for the other man, until Eddie made a small slip and let Fats get loose. Fats edged up to the table and started shooting. Eddie sat down. He looked around; a crowd of ten or fifteen people had already formed around the table. A neat man with pink cheeks and glasses was moving around in the crowd, making bets. Eddie wondered what on. He looked at the clock on the wall over the door. It was eight-thirty. He took a deep breath, and then let it out slowly.

He had known he would start out losing. That was natural; he was playing a great player and on his own table, in his own poolroom, and he figured to lose for a few hours. But not that badly. Fats beat him two games by one hundred and twenty-five to nothing and in the third game Eddie finally got one open shot and scored fifty on it. It was not pleasant to lose, and yet, somehow, he was not deeply dismayed, did not feel lost in the brilliance of the other man’s game, did not feel nervous or confused. He spent most of each game sitting down and each time Fats won a game Eddie grinned and gave him a hundred dollars. Fats had nothing to say.

At eleven o’clock, after he had lost the sixth game, Charlie came over, looked at him, and said, “Quit.”

He looked at Charlie, who seemed to be perspiring, and said, “I’ll take him. Just wait.”

“Don’t be too sure.” Charlie went back to his chair, on the other side of the table.

Then Eddie started winning. He felt it start in the middle of a game, began to feel the sense he sometimes had of being a part of the table and of the balls and of the cue stick. The stroke of his arm seemed to travel on oiled bearings; and each muscle of his body was alert, sensitive to the game and the movement of the balls, sharply aware of how every ball would roll, of how, exactly, every shot must be made. Fats beat him that game, but he had felt it coming and he won the next.

And the game after that, and the next, and then another. Then someone turned off all the lights except those over the table that they were playing on and the background of Bennington’s vanished, leaving only the faces of the crowd around the table, the green of the cloth of the table, and the now sharply etched, clean, black-shadowed balls, brilliant against the green. The balls had sharp, jeweled edges; the cue ball itself was a milk-white jewel and it was a magnificent thing to watch the balls roll and to know beforehand where they were going to roll. Nothing could be so clear or so simple or so excellent to do. And there was no limit to the shots that could be made.

Fats’ game did not change. It was brilliant, fantastically good, but Eddie was beating him now, playing an incredible game: a gorgeous, spellbinding game, a game that he felt he had known all of his life, that he would play when the right time came. There was no better time than this.

And then, after a game had ended, there was noise up front and Eddie turned and saw that the clock said midnight and that someone was locking the great oak door, and he looked at Fats and Fats said, “Don’t worry, Fast Eddie. We’re not going anyplace.”

Then he pulled a ten-dollar bill out of his pocket, handed it to a thin nervous man in a black suit, who was watching the game, and said, “Preacher, I want White Horse whiskey. And ice. And a glass. And you get yourself a fix with the change; but you do that after you come back with my whiskey.”

Eddie grinned, liking the feel of this, the getting ready for action. He fished out a ten himself. “J. T. S. Brown bourbon,” he said to the thin man. Then he leaned his cue stick against the table, unbuttoned his cuffs, and began rolling up his shirt sleeves. Then he stretched out his arms, flexing the muscles, enjoying the good sense of their steadiness, their control, and he said, “Okay, Fats. Your break.”

Eddie beat him. The pleasure was exquisite; and when the man brought the whiskey and he mixed himself a highball with water from the cooler and drank it, his whole body and brain seemed to be suffused with pleasure, with alertness and life. He looked at Fats. There was a dark line of sweat and dirt around the back of his collar. His manicured nails were dirty. His face still showed no expression. He, too, was holding a glass of whiskey and sipping it quietly.

Suddenly Eddie grinned at him. “Let’s play for a thousand a game, Fats,” he said.

There was a murmur in the crowd.

Fats took a sip of whiskey, rolled it around carefully in his mouth, swallowed. His sharp, black eyes were fixed on Eddie, dispassionately, searching. He seemed to see something there that reassured him. Then he glanced, for a moment, at the neat man with glasses, the man who had been taking bets. The man nodded, pursing his lips. “Okay,” he said.

Eddie knew it, could feel it, that no one had ever played straight pool like this before. Fats’ game, itself, was astonishing, a consistently beautiful, precise game, a deft, quick shooting game with almost no mistakes. And he won games; no power on earth could have stopped him from winning some of them, for pool is a game that gives the man sitting down no earthly way of affecting the shooting of the man he is trying to beat. But Eddie beat him, steadily, making shots that no one had ever made before, knifing balls in, playing hairline position, running rack after rack of balls without his cue ball’s touching a cushion, firing ball after ball into the center, the heart of every pocket. His stroking arm was like a conscious thing, and the cue stick was a living extension of it. There were nerves in the wood of it, and he could feel the tapping of the leather tip with the nerves, could feel the balls roll; and the exquisite sound that they made as they hit the bottoms of the pockets was a sound both there, on the table, and in the very center of his own soul.

They played for a long, long time and then he noticed that the shadows of the balls on the green had become softer, had lost their edges. He looked up and saw pale light coming through the window draperies and then looked at the clock. It was seven-thirty. He looked around him, dazed. The crowd had thinned out, but some of the same men were there. Everybody seemed to need a shave. He felt his own face. Sandpaper. He looked down at himself. His shirt was filthy, covered with chalk marks, the tail out, and the front wrinkled as if he had slept in it. He looked at Fats, who looked, if anything, worse.

Charlie came over. He looked like hell, too. He blinked at Eddie. “Breakfast?”

Eddie sat down, in one of the now-empty chairs by the table. “Yeah,” he said. “Sure.” He fished in his pocket, pulled out a five.

“Thanks,” Charlie said. “I don’t need it. I been keeping the money, remember?”

Eddie grinned, weakly. “That’s right. How much is it now?”

Charlie stared at him. “You don’t know?”

“I forgot.” He fished a crumpled cigarette from his pocket, lit it. His hands, he noticed, were trembling faintly; but he saw this as if he were looking at someone else. “What is it?” He leaned back, smoking the cigarette, looking at the balls sitting, quiet now, on the table. The cigarette had no taste to it.

“You won eleven thousand four hundred,” Charlie said. “Cash. It’s in my pocket.”

Eddie looked back at him. “Well!” he said. And then, “Go get breakfast. I want a egg sandwich and coffee.”

“Now wait a minute,” Charlie said. “You’re going with me. We eat breakfast at the hotel. The pool game is over.”

Eddie looked at him a minute, grinning, wondering, too, why it was that Charlie couldn’t see it, never had seen it. Then he leaned forward, looked at him, and said, “No it isn’t, Charlie.”

“Eddie…”

“This pool game ends when Minnesota Fats says it ends.”

“You came after ten thousand. You got ten thousand.”

Eddie leaned forward again. He wasn’t grinning now. He wanted Charlie to see it, to get with it, to feel some of what he was feeling, some of the commitment he was making. “Charlie,” he said, “I came here after Minnesota Fats. And I’m gonna get him. I’m gonna stay with him all the way.”

Fats was sitting down too, resting. He stood up. His chin jerked, down into the soft flesh of his neck. “Fast Eddie,” he said tonelessly, “let’s play pool.”

“Break the balls,” Eddie said.

In the middle of the game the food came and Eddie ate his sandwich in bites between shots, setting it on the rail of the table while he was shooting, and washing it down with the coffee, which tasted very bitter. Fats had sent someone out and he was eating from a platter of a great many small sandwiches and link sausages. Instead of coffee he had three bottles of Dutch beer on another platter and these he drank from a pilsner glass, which he held in a fat hand, delicately. He wiped his lips gently with a napkin between bites of the sandwiches and, apparently, paid no attention whatever to the balls that Eddie was methodically pocketing in the thousand-dollar game that he, sitting in the chair and eating his gourmet’s breakfast, was playing in.

Eddie won the game; but Fats won the next one, by a narrow margin. And at nine o’clock the poolroom doors were opened again and an ancient colored man limped in and began sweeping the floor and opened the windows, pulling back the draperies. Outside the sky was, absurdly, blue. The sun shone in.

Fats turned his head toward the janitor and said, his voice loud and flat, across the room, “Cut off that goddamn sunshine.”

The black man shuffled back to the windows and drew the curtains. Then he went back to his broom.

They played, and Eddie kept winning. In his shoulders, now, and in his back and at the backs of his legs there was a kind of dull pain; but the pain seemed as if it were someone else’s and he hardly felt it, hardly knew it was there. He merely kept shooting and the balls kept falling and the grotesque, fat man whom he was playing—the man who was the Best Straight Pool Player in the Country—kept giving large amounts of money to Charlie. Once, he noticed that, while he was shooting and the other man was sitting, Fats was talking with the man with the pink cheeks and with Gordon, the manager. The pink-cheeked man had his billfold in his hand. After that game, Fats paid Charlie with a thousand-dollar bill. The sight of the bill that he had just earned made him feel nothing. He only wished that the rack man would hurry and rack the balls.

The aching and the dullness increased gradually; but these did not affect the way his body played pool. There was a strange, exhilarating feeling that he was really somewhere else in the room, above the table—floating, possibly, with the heavy, bodiless mass of cigarette smoke that hung below the light—watching his own body, down below, driving small colored balls into holes by poking them with a long, polished stick of wood. And somewhere else in the room, perhaps everywhere in the room, was an incredibly fat man, silent, always in motion, unruffled, a man whose sharp little eyes saw not only the colored balls on the green rectangle, but saw also into all of the million corners in the room, whether or not they were illuminated by the cone of light that circumscribed the bright oblong of the pool table.

At nine o’clock in the evening Charlie told him that he had won eighteen thousand dollars.

Something happened, suddenly, in his stomach when Charlie told him this. A thin steel blade touched against a nerve in his stomach. He tried to look at Fats, but, for a moment, could not.

At ten-thirty, after winning one and then losing one, Minnesota Fats went back to the bathroom and Eddie found himself sitting down and then, in a moment, his head was in his hands and he was staring at the floor, at a little group of flat cigarette butts at his feet. And then Charlie was with him, or he heard his voice; but it seemed to be coming from a distance and when he tried to raise his head he could not. But Charlie was telling him to quit, he knew that without being able to pick out the word. And then the cigarette butts began to shift positions and to sway, in a gentle but confusing motion, and there was a humming in his ears like the humming of a cheap radio and, suddenly, he realized that he was passing out, and he shook his head, weakly at first and then violently, and when he stopped doing this he could see and hear better. But something in his mind was screaming. Something in him was quivering, frightened, cutting at his stomach from the inside, like a small knife.

Charlie was still talking but he broke him off, saying, “Give me a drink, Charlie.” He did not look at Charlie, but kept his eyes on the cigarette butts, watching them closely.

“You don’t need a drink.”

Then he looked up at him, at the round, comic face dirty with beard and said, surprised at the softness of his own voice, “Shut up, Charlie. Give me a drink.”

Charlie handed him the bottle.

He turned it up and let the whiskey spill down his throat. It gagged him but he did not feel it burn, hardly felt it in his stomach except as a mild warmness, softening the edges of the knife. Then he looked around him and found that his vision was all right, that he could see clearly the things directly in front of him, although there was a mistiness around the edges.

Fats was standing by the table, cleaning his fingernails. His hands were clean again; he had washed them; and his hair although still greasy, dirty looking, was combed. He seemed no more tired—except for the soiled shirt and a slight squinting of the eyes—than he had when Eddie had first seen him. Eddie looked away, looking back at the pool table. The balls were racked into their neat triangle. The cue ball sat at the head of the table, near the side rail, in position for the break.

Fats was at the side of his vision, in the misty part, and he appeared to be smiling placidly. “Let’s play pool, Fast Eddie,” he said.

Suddenly, Eddie turned to him and stared. Fats’ chin jerked, toward his shoulder, his mouth twisting with the movement. Eddie watched this and it seemed, now, to have some kind of meaning; but he did not know what the meaning was.

And then he leaned back in his chair and said, the words coming almost without volition, “I’ll beat you, Fats.”

Fats just looked at him.

Eddie was not sure whether or not he was grinning at the fat man, at the huge, ridiculous, effeminate, jeweled ballet dancer of a pool hustler, but he felt as if something were going to make him laugh aloud at any minute. “I’ll beat you, Fats,” he said. “I beat you all day and I’ll beat you all night.”

“Let’s play pool, Fast Eddie.”

And then it came, the laughing. Only it was like someone else laughing, not himself, so that he heard himself as if it were from across the room. And then there were tears in his eyes, misting over his vision, fuzzing together the poolroom, the crowd of people around him, and the fat man, into a meaningless blur of colors, shaded with a dark, dominating green that seemed, now, to be actually being diffused from the surface of the table. And then the laughing stopped and he blinked at Fats.

He said it very slowly, tasting the words thickly as they came on. “I’m the best you ever seen, Fats.” That was it. It was very simple. “I’m the best there is.” He had known it, of course, all along, for years. But now it was so clear, so simple, that no one—not even Charlie—could mistake it. “I’m the best. Even if you beat me, I’m the best.” The mistiness was clearing from his eyes again and he could see Fats standing sideways at the table, laying his hand down toward the green, not even aiming. Even if you beat me…

Somewhere in Eddie, deep in him, a weight was being lifted away. And, deeper still, there was a tiny, distant voice, a thin, anguished cry that said to him, sighing, You don’t have to win. For hours there had been the weight, pressing on him, trying to break him, and now these words, this fine and deep and true revelation, had come and were taking the weight from him. The weight of responsibility. And the small steel knife of fear.

He looked back at the great fat man. “I’m the best,” he said, “no matter who wins.”

“We’ll see,” Fats said, and he broke the balls.

When Eddie looked at the clock again it was a little past midnight. He lost two in a row. Then he won one, lost one, won another—all of them close scores. The pain in his right upper arm seemed to glow outward from the bone and his shoulder was a lump of heat with swollen blood vessels around it and the cue stick seemed to mush into the cue ball when he hit it. And the balls no longer clicked when they hit one another but seemed to hit as if they were made of balsa wood. But he still could not miss the balls; it was still ridiculous that anyone could miss them; and his eyes saw the balls in sharp, brilliant detail although there seemed to be no longer a range of sensitivity to his vision. He felt he could see in the dark or could look at, stare into, the sun—the brightest sun at full noon—and stare it out of the sky.

He did not miss; but when he played safe, now, the cue ball did not always freeze against the rail or against a cluster of balls as he wanted it to. Once, at a critical time in a game, when he had to play safe, the cue ball rolled an inch too far and left Fats an open shot and Fats ran sixty-odd balls and out. And later, during what should have been a big run, he miscalculated a simple, one-rail position roll and had to play for defense. Fats won that game too. When he did, Eddie said, “You fat son of a bitch, you make mistakes expensive.”

But he kept on making them. He would still make large numbers of balls but something would go wrong and he would throw the advantage away. And Fats didn’t make mistakes. Not ever. And then Charlie came over after a game, and said, “Eddie, you still got the ten thousand. But that’s all. Let’s quit and go home. Let’s go to bed.”

Eddie did not look at him. “No,” he said.

“Look, Eddie,” he said, his voice soft, tired, “what is it you want to do? You beat him. You beat him bad. You want to kill yourself?”

Eddie looked up at him. “What’s the matter, Charlie?” he said, trying to grin at him. “You chicken?”

Charlie looked back at him for a minute before he spoke. “Yeah,” he said, “maybe that’s it. I’m chicken.”

“Okay. Then go home. Give me the money.”

“Go to hell.”

Eddie held his hand out. “Give me the money, Charlie. It’s mine.”

Charlie just looked at him. Then he reached in his pocket and pulled out a tremendous roll of money, wrinkled bills rolled up and wrapped with a heavy rubber band.

“Here,” he said. “Be a goddamn fool.”

Eddie stuffed the roll in his pocket. When he stood up to play he looked down at himself. It seemed grossly funny; one pocket bulging with a whiskey bottle, the other with paper money.

It took a slight effort to pick up his cue and start playing again; but after he was started the playing did not seem to stop. He did not even seem to be aware of the times when he was sitting down and Fats was shooting, seemed always to be at the table himself, stroking with his bruised, screaming arm, watching the bright little balls roll and spin and twist their ways about the table. But, although he was hardly aware that Fats was shooting, he knew that he was losing, that Fats was winning more games than he was. And when the janitor came in to open up the poolroom and sweep the floor and they had to stop playing for a few minutes while he swept the cigarette butts from around the table, Eddie sat down to count his money. He could not count it, could not keep track of what he had counted; but he could see that the roll was much smaller than it had been when Charlie gave it to him. He looked at Fats and said, “You fat bastard. You fat lucky bastard,” but Fats said nothing.

And then, after a game, Eddie counted off a thousand dollars to Fats, holding the money on the table, under the light, and when he had counted off the thousand he saw that there were only a few bills left. This did not seem right, and he had to look for a moment before he realized what it meant. Then he counted them. There was a hundred-dollar bill, two fifties, a half-dozen twenties and some tens and ones.

Something happened in his stomach. A fist had clamped on something in his stomach and was twisting it.

“All right,” he said. “All right, Fats. We’re not through yet. We’ll play for two hundred. Two hundred dollars a game.” He looked at Fats, blinking now, trying to bring his eyes to focus on the huge man across the table from him. “Two hundred dollars. That’s a hustler’s game of pool.”

Fats was unscrewing his cue, unfastening the brass joint in its center. He looked at Eddie. “The game’s over,” he said.

Eddie leaned over the table, letting his hand fall on the cue ball. “You can’t quit me,” he said.

Fats did not even look at him. “Watch,” he said.

Eddie looked around. The crowd was beginning to leave the table, men were shuffling away, breaking up into little groups, talking. Charlie was walking toward him, his hands in his pockets. The distance between them seemed very great, as though he were looking down a long hallway.

Abruptly, Eddie pushed himself away from the table, clutching the cue ball in his hand. He felt himself staggering. “Wait!” he said. Somehow, he could not see, and the sounds were all melting into one another. “Wait!” He could barely hear his own voice. Somehow, he swung his arm, his burning, swollen, throbbing right arm, and he heard the cue ball crash against the floor and then he was on the floor himself and could see nothing but a lurching motion around him, unclear patterns of light swinging around his head, and he was vomiting, on the floor and on the front of his shirt…