Уолтер Тевис - The Color of Money

Eddie felt a tightness in his stomach. “I’d appreciate it.”

“Son of a bitch!” Boomer said when he saw Eddie’s Balabushka. “I was dragged from the comfort of my home to play a man with a stick like that. May the Lord deliver me!” He took a red bandanna handkerchief from his back pocket and blew his nose loudly. “Protect me from men with Balabushka cue sticks.” He looked at Eddie’s face for the first time, squinting at him. “I bet you do trick shots.” His face was broad and red and heavily lined; he looked like some kind of wild-eyed field hand. A drug-crazed sharecropper. He wore a faded tan military shirt with epaulettes, and baggy corduroys that fell over the creased insteps of cowboy boots. It was hard to tell what his age was—anywhere from thirty to fifty—but he had a potbelly and wrinkles around his eyes. The eyes were a pale, unreal blue, and cold as ice. “I bet that Balabushka makes them balls dance around like agitated molecules.”

“It’s no better than the man behind it,” Eddie said.

“Jesus Christ,” Boomer said, “you look serious.” A few people in the crowd laughed. In the hour since the bartender called, fifteen or twenty people had gathered.

“Why don’t you get your stick out,” Eddie nodded toward the leather case Boomer was carrying, “and we can shoot pool.” He held his cue in one hand and had the other in his pocket; he hoped fervently that his nervousness didn’t show. He had forgotten how it was to play a man on his home table with his home crowd around him. And Boomer had taken possession of the tavern the moment he came in, with his loud voice and his boot heels clacking on the Kentile floor.

“If this stick don’t wilt for shame when it sees yours,” Boomer said. He opened the top of the case and slid out a two-piece cue. It looked plenty good enough—a Huebler or a Meucci. Probably a three-hundred-dollar cue. When he screwed it together he did so deftly, with a light and accurate touch that contradicted the roughness of his appearance. Eddie had seen that before in the old days. Rough-looking country men with soft hands and, when they bent over a pool table, the light touch of a jeweler.

“Eight-ball is what we play here,” Boomer said.

“A hundred dollars a game.”

“Oh my god,” Boomer said, “I am lying in my king-sized bed watching a rerun of ‘Magnum PI’ and the telephone rings and now here I am talking to a stranger with an upscale cue stick who wants to play pool for a hundred dollars. There’s no comfort in life.”

“Do you want to play?” Eddie said quietly. The man was getting what he wanted; Eddie was beginning to feel rattled.

“Wayland,” Boomer said to the bartender, who had been watching all this attentively, as had everyone else in the place. “Let me have a Drambuie on the rocks and a dish of potato salad.” Then, to Eddie: “Put a quarter in the table.”

They flipped a coin for the break and Boomer won it. He used a heavy house cue to smash the balls open, the way Charlie had taught Eddie to when he was a kid, and pocketed three of them. Then he switched to the jointed and ran the balls out. Eddie handed him two fifties. It was six o’clock. The crowd was getting larger; they leaned against the rails of the tavern’s other two tables and stood in the space behind them. The bar stools had filled with men who were now turned toward them, watching.

Boomer shot quietly, as Eddie expected he would, and almost as gracefully as Fats. His stroke was eccentric, swooping the cue stick over a long, wavering bridge, but he hit them solidly. And he was used to the heavy cue ball; on one shot he drew it back lightly by three feet.

“Winner breaks,” Boomer said, and went to the bar for a mouthful of potato salad and a drink. He came back wiping his mouth with a paper napkin, jammed the napkin into his hip pocket, took his cue and broke the balls. The table was three and a half by seven; after a solid break shot, the balls were distributed evenly all over it. Eddie had never played on a table like this before; he wasn’t sure how many games a man could run on it.

Boomer bent and sank his first ball, and then looked at the crowd around him. “I got to keep making these little fuckers,” he said. “If I give that Balabushka a chance, it’ll put me in the County Home.”

“It’s only a pool cue, Boomer,” somebody in the crowd said.

“Don’t sweet-talk me ,” Boomer said. “That cue has radar and microcircuits in its tip. With a cue like that a man can stay in bed and send the cue stick out on Saturday nights. ‘Bring in five hundred, Balabushka’ is what you say. I know about them high-technology pool cues, come from Silicon Valley with a college degree.” He shook his head, bent and shot, cutting the seven ball into the side. His cue ball rolled a few feet for perfect position.

Eddie remained silent. He had seen routines like this before. The best thing to do was stay loose and not try to enter the spirit of it or make a fool out of yourself. So far, it was impossible to tell just how good Boomer was. Fats had said there were three or four professionals in this town—men who made their-livings entirely by hustling on bar tables—and apparently Boomer was the best among them. Eddie leaned against the empty table a few feet from the one Boomer and he were playing on, and tried to relax. Boomer was funny; but there was threat in the way he talked, and in the cold-eyed look he flicked toward Eddie from time to time. Eddie watched, and kept quiet, and waited for him to miss.

When Boomer had two more balls to make, he overshot a long cut and his cue ball rolled too far, leaving him out of position. He shrugged, banked at one of the remaining balls, missed it and rolled the white ball into a perfect safety. It was an “if-I-miss” shot of the kind Fats had demonstrated back in Denver.

Eddie tightened his cue stick and looked at Boomer. “What’s the house rule if I don’t hit one?”

“I get the cue behind the line,” Boomer said. “Same as a scratch.”

That was a pisser. If Eddie didn’t hit one of the stripes, Boomer would have an easy run out. And the cue was snookered behind the six. He studied it a moment. The thing to do was bank off the near rail and try to tap into the eleven ball and hope for a safety. It was the only smart thing to do.

But the twelve, down at the far end of the table, was a few inches from the corner pocket. The cue ball could be banked two cushions out of the corner, down the long diagonal. A very difficult shot. If he missed it, Boomer would own the table. It was a one-in-ten shot, a two-rail kick-in. Eddie looked at the bartender. “Let me have a Manhattan, on the rocks,” he said. He stepped up to the table, adjusted his glasses, carefully spread the fingers of his left hand in a high bridge over the snookering six ball, elevated the back of his cue, looked once behind him at the twelve ball and shot, hard, smooth, and angry.

The cue ball bounced out of the corner, rolled the diagonal of the table and clipped the twelve ball sharply. The twelve rolled briskly into the pocket. “Son of a bitch!” Boomer said. “Goddamned microchips.”

“Printed circuits,” Eddie said, going to the bar for his drink. The men on the bar stools stared at him silently. He waited while the bartender put the cherry in, took a long swallow and came back to the table feeling, at last, relaxed.

Boomer was good, but nowhere as good as Fats. He couldn’t bank well, and his main strength was in easy runs. He would have been a good straight-pool player if hustlers played straight pool anymore, and he was certainly good enough to make a living at eight-ball in barrooms. Eddie held himself steady, and by ten o’clock he was seven hundred dollars ahead.