Haven Kimmel - Something Rising

As they approached the center of the downtown there were fewer and fewer businesses, just empty buildings. An evacuation order. Uncle Bud’s sat on the corner of Main and Railroad; it had been a drugstore fifteen years before, a low and long building with a green awning along the front windows. The windows were covered with a film that made them look silver from outside: mirrors. Jimmy pulled into one of the three parking spaces facing the back door. Behind them, on the corner of Railroad and fifth, was a bar called Howdy’s. A sign outside advertised fiftycent Miller drafts for and a whole room devoted to darts. Other than Howdy’s, everything seemed deserted. A few faded storefronts proclaimed fly-by-night mechanics, flown, and body shops. Cassie had been here once, sent inside Uncle Bud’s to fetch Jimmy when Laura was so mad she couldn’t get out of the car for fear her legs would explode. The place had held Cassie in an attraction so powerful she could no longer remember the specifics, only the heart-knocking joy. She felt a shadow of it every time she went past this part of Roseville with Poppy, on the way out to the highway and to the strip of stores at the edge of Hopwood.

Jimmy rolled up the windows, reached into the back for his cue. “You’re not to bother me.” Cassie nodded.

“I’ve come here to visit my table and get in some time, not to focus on you.”

“Okay.”

“And if Bud comes in, who is as you know an old sumbitch, and says you have to leave, then you’re going to have to skedaddle and find something else to do.”

“Okay.”

He leaned over and kissed her on the forehead. His lips were smooth and hard and cool. “You know you’re my favorite, Cassie, although God knows that ain’t saying much.” Stepping out of the car, he pulled his shirt away from his chest, fanning himself witrh it, then looked for the key to the back door.

The door was steel, gunmetal gray, no window. In the back room Jimmy pulled a string, and a bare bulb illuminaed the rough wooden shelves covered with boxes of Master chalk, cases of crackers filled with cheese or peanut butter, new balls. On the floor were boxes overflowing with empty beer and soda cans. Against one wall was a line of cues that looked as if they were awaiting surgery. Cassie took a deep breath. This smelled better than anything in her life, better than a Christmas tree, better than the raspberry bush at the edge of the house, tangled with honeysuckle, better than Jimmy’s winter coat.

“I’m not going to entertain you, and the rules are the same as when the table was at home, you can’t touch it.”

Jimmy used another key to open an ugly green door with a frosted glass panel that seemed to have been stolen from a hardboiled detective agency. They were in the dim main hall. Bud’s bar still looked as it had, Cassie guessed, when the building was a pharmacy—a long counter with stools, and a mirror behind it with Rx painted in vivid blue, a mortar and pestle beside it. On the shelves below the mirror were trays of balls and boxes of chalk, mostly battered, and bags of potato chips clipped to a black metal rack. A single jar held dill pickles in cloudy green brine. There were no draft beers or fountain drinks; everything was lined up squarely in a refrigerator with a glass door.

“And I’m not buying you a soda or chips and have you make a mess in here, so don’t ask.”

Cassie’s eyes glanced from surface to surface. She’d never been anywhere so clean and precise. Bud used a big old-fashioned cash register: five-dollars was the last anyone had paid. On the steel counter next to the cash register was a big rectangular book with a grainy black cover, the word ACCOUNTS. The book was centered so precisely on the counter it looked like Bud had used a speed square. A sign on the bar explained that between three and six in the afternoon the tables were a dollar a person per hour, and between six and two in the morning, they were two-fifty. In one corner was a silent jukebox, and other than that just the tables.

“And don’t ask for quarters for the jukebox because I didn’t bring any.” Jimmy had taken out his cue and was screwing the joint on the butt.

Seven tables, five feet from the wall and five feet apart; a light with a green accountant’s shade hung over every table. At each end of the room was a rack with ten house cues. A shelf for drinks and ashtrays ran the length of the room, and there were four tall chairs against the wall and ten stools scattered around the room. Cassie wandered around, not quite touching anything, taking in the smell of chalk, beer, cigarettes, while Jimmy used a third, smaller key to unlock the door to the glassed-in room at the end of the hall. Inside the glass room was one table, no stool, no chair. Cassie hovered in the doorway, watched him flip the switch to the light that had formerly hung in their garage.

“Ahhhh,” Jimmy said, resting his stick on the toe of his shoe. “There’s my best girl.” He spread his arms as if making a gift of the whole room to his daughter. “I ever tell you how I came into possession of this table?”

Cassie nodded, she had heard the story many times.

“It’s a vintage Brunswick, this one. Built in 1884, probably in New Orleans; moved with a family to Alabama and eighty years later was back in the Big Easy, where one James Claiborne happened to win it in a game that went on so long God wished me luck and went on to bed.” Jimmy lit a cigarette. He bent and studied the length of the table, looking for wear on the felt. “I hauled it in the back of a borrowed station wagon to the boardinghouse where I was staying—oh, don’t worry, it was a Christian boardinghouse for Christian men. The slate, rails, legs, pockets, rack, sticks, and balls, the whole shebang, I reassembled it in an abandoned tobacco warehouse on Tchoupitoulas, the key to which I happened to find upon my person after another difficult game. In an old hotel, that one. Spooky.” Jimmy rested his cigarette on the small shelf against the wall, not in the ashtray provided but on the shelf. There was a series of dark stripes in the wood, as if he’d placed burning ash there on a number of occasions. He ran his hand along the shining hardwood of the rails. “There was a single missing part, believe it or not, and I found it in a Brunswick repair shop on Frenchmen Street. It’s a civilized town, Cassie, that has a Brunswick repair shop. It’s long gone, just like old Jimmy Claiborne. I’d bet I’m still talked about, though. If I were a betting man.”

He didn’t say the table was walnut, but Cassie knew The legs were ornately carved and the pockets woven leather. It was four feet by eight feet, the measurement Uncle Bud called True. The slate had been flawless when Jimmy won the table, and remained so; Bud changed the felt, made of fine wool from somewhere in the Netherlands. Wood spun and dyed by virgins, Jimmy said. Cassie wished he would go on, she wished he would tell the story of the light, too, which she had studied for hours. The glass was deep red and imprinted with black Chinese characters, and red silk fringe hung like liquid from the bottom of the shade. She wanted to hear Jimmy say the words Colorado and mining town , which she’d long ago written in her notebook.

But he said nothing more. His cigarette sent up a ribbon of smoke against the wall. Cassie watched him rack the balls (they came from Belgium, and he would have no others), knowing she was invisible to him. She watched as she had hour after hour, sitting on a kitchen ladder in the garage. The one ball was the yellow of a sunflower; the two was the same shade as the Indiana sky on a flawless summer day, Cassie had often had the feeling they had been made for her, or that they represented, at the very least, the possibility of something beautiful. At night sometimes, unable to sleep, she would imagine the balls spread out across the green table under the red glass of the lamp: someone had stepped on a box of paints and let them fly. Ruined paints on new grass.