Уолтер Тевис - The Color of Money

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.