Уолтер Тевис - The Hustler

He looked at her, tried to grin at her—the old, meaningless, automatic grin, the grin that made everybody like him—but he could not. “That’s great,” he said, and it came out with more irritation than he had intended.

She closed the book, tucked it beside her on the couch. She folded her arms around her, hugging herself, smiling at him. “I guess this isn’t your night, Eddie. Why don’t we have a drink?”

“No.” He did not like that, did not want her being nice to him, forgiving. Nor did he want a drink.

Her smile, her drunk, amused smile, did not change. “Then let’s talk about something else,” she said. “What about that case you have? What’s in it?” Her voice was not prying, only friendly, “Pencils?”

“That’s it,” he said. “Pencils.”

She raised her eyebrows slightly. Her voice seemed thick. “What’s in it, Eddie?”

“Figure it out yourself.” He tossed the case on the couch. She picked it up, fumbling with and then opening the buckle at the top. When she pulled out the silk-wound butt end she said, “Interesting,” and then pulled out the other, thinner piece. “How do you work it?”

“It screws together.”

She looked at it with frowning concentration for a moment, then deftly—in spite of her drunkenness—put the pieces in place and twisted them together. She ran her hand lightly over the silken end, holding the cue in her lap. Suddenly she said, raising her eyes, puzzled, “It’s a pool stick!”

“That’s right.”

“It’s like a fancy cane. All these inlays…” Then it seemed to hit her and she said, “Are you a pool shark, Eddie?”

He had never liked that term, and he did not like her tone of voice. “I play pool for money,” he said.

She took a gulp of her drink, shuddered under it, and then laughed self-consciously. “I thought you were a salesman. Or maybe a confidence man…” She smiled at him. “I don’t know. It seems strange….”

He looked at her a minute, carefully, before he spoke. Then he said, “Why?”

She looked back to the cue in her lap. “I never knew a pool shark before. I thought they all wore double-breasted suits and striped shirts….”

He started to answer this, but did not. She bit on her fingernail for a moment, and then said, “Why play pool?”

He had heard this before, several times. And always from women. “Why not?”

She was trying to sound serious, but her voice was still drunken. “You know what I mean. Do you make a living at it?”

“Sometimes. I’ll do better.”

This seemed to exasperate her. “But why pool ? Couldn’t you do something else?”

“Like what?” He noticed for the first time that she had light freckles at her elbows, and this discovery irritated him vaguely.

“Don’t be cute about it,” she said. “You know what I’m driving at. You could… sell insurance, something like that.”

He looked at her for a moment, wondering whether he should take her to bed, work up a little action. “No,” he said. “What I do I like fine.”

He decided that it wouldn’t be worth the effort. He stood up from the couch, stretched, and then went into the bedroom to the dresser mirror and began combing his hair. The mirror, like the clown in the living room, had a white frame. He combed his hair carefully, patting it on the left side and then patting down the slight wave. He needed a haircut. Which was always a nuisance.

Sarah spoke to him from the chair in the living room. “I’ve heard that pool can be a dirty game,” she said.

He put the comb back in his pocket. “People say that,” he said. “I’ve heard people say that myself.”

“You’re being comical,” she said, trying to make her voice sound dry. And then, “ Is it dirty?”

He walked back into the living room and, not looking at Sarah, looked instead at the clown. The clown looked back, sad and mean, holding the wooden staff. His fingers were painted in only sketchily, but they were graceful and sure of themselves. The clown was, apparently, unhappy, but was not to be pushed around; a good, solid clown and a figure to be respected. Eddie stretched again, his back to Sarah, still looking at the picture. “Yes. It’s dirty.” He felt of his face, which needed a shave. “Anyway you look at it, it’s dirty.”

Then he walked into the bathroom and began undressing, hanging his clothes over the edge of the bathtub. On the back of the toilet Sarah kept a turtle in a glass bowl. At present, it was probably asleep. Eddie did not investigate this; but he thought about the turtle. A self-contained, cautious, withdrawn creature. Solid and reliable, like Bert—withdrawn, now, into its two houses: one given it by God, the other by the five-and-ten. The turtle asked no questions, and was required to give no answers.

Eddie put his pajamas on and went to bed. Before he turned the bedroom lights out, he saw that Sarah was still in the living room, staring at the wall. He rolled over and fell immediately asleep.

The ride was a long one. The cab took him through a district of warehouses, of loud, dirty kids in the streets, of oculists and liquor stores and lady fortune tellers. The wooden building with the faded sign that said ARTHUR’S was in the middle of a block, with a decaying heap of a warehouse on one side and a vacant lot on the other. It was early Saturday night and through the open window of the cab he could hear loud talk and hillbilly music coming from the bar. An ancient and greatly stooped man was shuffling down the street, near the sidewalk, muttering loudly to himself.

Eddie almost told the driver to take him back; he did not know this kind of place and it made him uneasy to be in it. But he needed money and he needed action and he got out of the cab. There was no movement of air and the air itself was very warm, tinged faintly with the smell of garbage. The door of the poolroom was open, and the clicking sounds of the balls seemed louder, out in the street, than he was used to hearing them sound inside.

Inside, the poolroom was very small, hot, smelling of creosote and, faintly, of stale urine. In the middle of the room was a large overhead fan with flat, black blades. From the center of this hung a curled streamer of flypaper, dotted with black. There was a cuspidor by each wall, sitting on the plank floor, and by each of these was a cluster of empty bottles—whiskey, Coca-Cola, and 7-Up.

Five men were playing nine ball on the front table. Besides the rack man, with the triangle hanging in the crook of his arm, there was only one spectator, a heavy, porcine man with a crushed felt hat, its brim turned up and fastened in front with a safety pin. Over the table two bare incandescent bulbs hung on frayed cords from the ceiling. They trembled with the vibration from the fan. Tied between the cords was a smudged cardboard sign that read OPEN GAME; and below this someone had written in pencil, PLAY AT YOUR OWN RISK.

The men were wearing overalls or khaki pants and either white T-shirts or the kind of slick-surfaced sport shirt that is translucent, outlining the underwear beneath it. There was one thin-faced young man—a man of about Eddie’s age—whose face was pale and who, in spite of the khaki pants and sport shirt, had a dapper, sharp-eyed look—the B-movie version of the hustler: the pool shark.

He leaned against the wall and watched several games. No one seemed to notice him—the men were very intent with playing—and he was glad he had made a point of not wearing a coat. The pale young man seemed to be doing most of the winning. His style looked good, and he had a nice way of making the money balls, which he did so well that the other players called him “lucky”—for a good hustler the finest of compliments. Once, when the kid made what seemed a too obvious combination bank on the nine, Eddie looked closely at the face of the big man with the safety-pin hat—the others had called him Turtle—but the broad face showed no surprise or awareness when one of the men said, “You lucky punk,” to the kid.