Уолтер Тевис - The Color of Money

“I’m glad you’re off to a good start,” Arabella said.

“The kid was terrible.”

“He must have been good enough to get the entry fee.”

“I’ve got someone named Johannsen tomorrow. I don’t know who he is, but he’ll be tougher. How’re things at the magazine?”

“There isn’t much to do right now. I spend a lot of time with the secretary, drinking coffee.”

“It sounds better than typing.”

“Eddie,” she said, “I wish I had a talent like you have. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life working in an office doing what some man tells me to do.”

“I’ll teach you how to play nine-ball.”

“It isn’t funny, Eddie. If I could shoot pool like you, I’d be rich.”

Somehow that annoyed him. “Buy yourself a cue stick,” he said.

“I mean it, Eddie. You sat on your talent for twenty years.”

“I’m not sitting on it now.”

There was silence on the line for a moment. Then she said, “Beat that man tomorrow, Eddie. Beat him bad.”

Johannsen was chubby and wore a plum-colored sweater over blue jeans; he appeared to be about thirty. During the warm-up he was unself-conscious and accurate. It was two in the afternoon, and they were playing on Table Three, with a dozen people watching when the referee stopped the practice, racked up the nine balls and put two extra balls out for the lag. Eddie won the break by lagging his ball to within a quarter inch of the cushion, but when he smashed them open nothing went in. From behind him he heard a whispered voice in the stands say, “Straight-pool player,” and he knew, grimacing, what it meant: in straight pool you never had occasion to hit the balls that hard. It took practice to learn to do it. He turned to look at the man now breaking in the match starting on their right; the young player drew his cue back, hesitated, and slammed his whole body forward against the table as he rammed the stick into the cue ball. The diamond of nine balls flew apart so hard that the nine, from the center of the rack where it was always placed, spun off two cushions and narrowly missed a pocket before coming to a stop. On Eddie’s break the nine ball had barely moved; and Johannsen, despite the cluttered position of the balls, ran them out.

It looked for a minute to Eddie—furious with himself and able to do nothing but wait—that he would run out the next rack, but he made a mistake on the seven ball and missed it, dogging it into the rail near the bottom corner.

Eddie stepped up icily and ran the seven, eight and nine. On the break he tried to slam them harder, but only one ball fell in and the nine barely moved. But the way it moved left it lined up dead with the three ball for the corner pocket, and Eddie took advantage of that. He ran the one and two, and made the nine on a combination. That got him applause. On the next break he hit harder, ending with his belly against the table and his cue stick extended in front of him; this time the nine stopped near the corner pocket, with the four a few inches on the other side of it. He felt better about the break shot now. But the two ball was at the far end of the table; and when he came off the one, his position on it was wrong. He bent, stroked twice, and slammed into it, giving the stick a forward fillip with his wrist, for strong drawing English. And crammed the two ball into the pocket and back out again, dogging it. Eddie turned away, to see Babes Cooley on Table Four pocketing the nine-ball to applause. He sat down and looked at the floor. He heard Johannsen getting up to shoot, heard the tap that would send the two ball into the pocket and the cue ball back down to a simple position on the three, heard Johannsen shoot the three ball in, and looked up in time to see him line up the four and nine and make the easy combination—scoring the nine ball, winning the game and the break. Johannsen had him three to two and had the break coming up. It was a son of a bitch, especially because this imperturbable man in the sweater was one of the weaker players in the tournament. He had won a college nine-ball championship somewhere once in the Midwest, and that was it. If Eddie couldn’t blow him away, he had no business being here.

He had come to see that there were only four or five serious contenders in this tournament: Babes Cooley and a few other young men who played the circuit. The others—some of them lured by the spread-out prizes that went as far as two hundred dollars for twelfth place, and some of them wanting to play for once in their lives against the top players—had no real hope of winning. If Eddie had a problem it should be with Cooley and his near-equals—not with people like this aging college boy who played nine-ball as though he were in a library.

But the aging college boy was persistent; he capitalized on Eddie’s mistakes and after an hour was ahead by eight to six. Cooley was finished by that time, with a score posted ten-three in his favor, and some of the spectators came down to Eddie’s table.

It was a critical point and Eddie was sweating it. Johannsen was in the middle of a wide rack; if he ran this one out, it would give him nine and the momentum to win the match. The one hopeful sign was that he’d begun taking a long time between shots, was being studiously careful, frowning now over even a simple position and chalking up with great care. He might be beginning to choke.

He made the seven ball with agonizing deliberation, getting good position on the eight. All he had to do with that was shoot the eight straight in and stop his cue ball; the nine sat near the opposite pocket and would only require a simple cut. But Johannsen was sweating it. He frowned and shot the eight in with a lot of draw. The cue ball rolled too far; he still had a shot on the nine, but not as easy as what simply killing the cue ball would have given him. Eddie heard him speak for the first time. “Shit!” he said morosely, “I don’t deserve that.” Eddie looked up at him; he might just miss the nine, with that kind of crap in his head.

Johannsen bent to shoot, frowning in concentration. He cut the nine ball so badly it was embarrassing; it bounced off the rail a foot from the pocket. The cue ball went around the table and came back, leaving a simple shot. Eddie looked away from Johannsen, got up and carefully shot it in. Eight-seven.

From then on, Eddie knew he had him. He let himself loosen up a bit, ran the next game out as though it were part of a rack of straight pool. He stroked the nine into the pocket with a firm click . There was applause. Eight-eight.

This time, he slammed them harder and made three on the break, leaving the nine near the side pocket and the four nearby. He ran the two and three and left the cue ball exactly right for the carom shot. He glanced at Johannsen’s face before moving up to the shot; the man looked like a sulking child. Eddie bent, took very careful aim, and stroked. The cue ball hit the four ball, bounced off it and tapped the nine. The nine ball rolled over twice and fell in the side pocket. The applause was loud. Johannsen got up, came over, and with a forced smile shook his hand. Eddie unscrewed his cue.

The pairings were posted by the cashier’s desk where you first entered the room. Eddie stopped to check it when he was leaving. It took him a moment to figure out the difference between the losers’ brackets, on the left, and the winners’, on the right. He had never done this kind of thing before and it still seemed strange to him. While he was studying it, the tournament manager came up with a felt-tip pen. “Here you go, Mr. Felson,” he said, and printed FELSON on one of the empty lines to the right—the top half of a bracket with the bottom empty.