Уолтер Тевис - The Hustler

They stopped along the road for hamburgers and coffee, and Eddie had a quick drink, although Bert declined one. Afterward, in the car he looked at Bert and said, wanting now to talk, “What do they play in Kentucky, what’s the big game?”

Bert, as always, thought for a moment before he spoke. “They play bank pool,” he said, “and one-pocket.”

“Good,” Eddie said. “I like that about one-pocket. What does Findlay play?”

Bert paused again. “I don’t know. I never saw him play. I only know him from his poker days.”

Eddie grinned. “You must have a lot of confidence in me.”

“I don’t.”

“Then how do you know he won’t beat me? How do you know he won’t shoot better pool than I do?”

“I don’t know that. And I don’t have much confidence in you. But I got confidence in Findlay.”

“What does that mean?” Eddie withdrew a cigarette from his pocket and lit it.

“It means I got confidence that Findlay’s a loser, all the way a loser. And you happen to be only about one-half loser, the other half winner.”

“How do you figure that?”

Bert stretched himself behind the wheel and then allowed himself to relax slightly, although he continued to watch the road carefully as he spoke. “I told you,” he said. “I already watched you lose—watched you lose to a man you should of beat.”

Bert was beginning to take the old line again, and Eddie did not like it. “Look,” he said. “I already told you…”

“I know what you already told me,” Bert said. “And I don’t want to hear it again, not right now.” And then, when Eddie did not reply to this, Bert took a breath and said, “What I’m thinking about is you and Findlay personally—not the game of pool you’re going to play. Any way he shoots pool he probably shoots good enough to beat you if you want to let him and if he’s got the character for it. But he hasn’t, that’s the point.”

Bert drove silently for a few minutes, pushing the big car along at a steady sixty-five. Then he said, “Unless you’re in a game with a sap or a drunk, when you’re playing for the large money you play the man himself more than you ever play the game. Like in poker, in a really worth-while poker game, everybody knows how to play the odds, everybody knows how it stands with filling straights and flushes, with figuring the pot and counting out the cards—I knew all that when I was fifteen. But the man who wins the games is the man who watches for the big money and pulls his guts together and gives himself character enough to stare down five other men and make the bet that nobody else would think of making and follow through with it. It’s not luck—there’s probably no such thing as luck, and if there is you can’t depend on it. All you can do is play the percentages, play your best game, and when that critical bet comes—in every money game there is always a critical bet—you hold your stomach tight and you push hard. That’s the clutch. And that’s where your born loser loses.”

Eddie thought about this a minute. Then he said, “Maybe you’re right.”

“But you got to know when the clutch in the game is,” Bert said, his voice becoming more insistent now. “You got to know and you got to bear down, no matter what kind of voice is telling you to relax. Like when you were playing pool with Minnesota Fats, when you had him beat and you were so tired your eyeballs were hanging out, and when something was gonna have to give somewhere—either you or Fats.” Bert stopped a minute, and when he spoke again his voice was hard, direct and certain. “You know when that was? When it was that Fats knew he was gonna beat you?”

“No.”

“Okay, I’ll tell you. It was when Fats went to the toilet and you flattened out in a chair. Fats knew the game was in the clutch, he knew he had to do something to stop it, and he played smart. He went back to the john, washed his face, cleaned his fingernails, made his mind a blank, combed his hair, and then came back ready. You saw him; you saw how he looked—clean again, ready to start all over, ready to hold tight and push hard. And you know what you were doing?”

“I was waiting to play pool.”

“That’s right,” Bert said. “Sure. You were waiting to get your ass beat. You were flattened out on your butt, swimming around in glory and in whiskey. And, probably, you were deciding how you could lose.”

For a moment Eddie did not answer, feeling an unreasoning anger, a kind of wild irritation…. Then he said, “What makes you know so goddamn much? What makes you know what I think about when I shoot pool?”

“I just know,” Bert said. And then, “I been there myself, Eddie. We’ve all been there….”

Eddie did not say anything, but sat, the irritation still tight in his stomach and the slight, irritating, itching pain in his hands. He wanted to fight something, to hit out at something, but he did not know what. He watched the road ahead of them, and after a while he began to feel calmer.

And then, after more than an hour, Bert said, “That’s what the whole goddamn thing is: you got to commit yourself to the life you picked. And you picked it—most people don’t even do that. You’re smart and you’re young and you got, like I said before, talent. You want to live fast and loose and be a hero.”

“Be a hero? Who the hell said what I want?”

“I did. You and any decent goddamn gambler wants to be a hero. But to be a hero you got to sign a contract with yourself. If you want the glory and the money you got to be hard. I don’t mean you got to get rid of mercy, you’re not a con man or a thief—those are the ones that can’t live if they got mercy. I got it myself. I got soft places. But I’m hard with myself and I know when not to go weak. Like when you give the business to a woman; you got to give it; don’t hold back. Do your second-guessing afterward. Or before. But with a woman you make a contract—I don’t know what all the words are in the contract but it’s there and if you don’t know about it you’re not human, I don’t care what all the slobs and the bastards and the free love people say. And when you give it to the woman or when you make the contract that says, ‘I’m gonna beat your ass in this game of pool,’ you don’t hold back. Don’t let the little squirrel on your back that says, Keep free of it; don’t give yourself away, talk you into anything. Make the squirrel shut up. Don’t try to kill him; you need him there. But when he starts telling you there wasn’t any contract, make him shut up. And when you come to that certain time in the game he says, Don’t stick your neck out. Be smart. Hold back , not because he wants to save your money for you, but because he doesn’t want to lose you, doesn’t want to see you put your goddamn heart into the game. He wants you to lose, wants to see you being sorry for yourself, wants you to come to him for sympathy.”

Eddie looked at him. “And if you lose?”

“Then you lose. When you’re a winner, it hurts your soul to lose. But your soul can take being hurt.”

Eddie was not certain of what it all meant. But after a while he said, “Maybe you’re right.”

“I know I’m right,” Bert said.

They passed through Cincinnati late in the afternoon, a crowded, gray city, and crossed a bridge into Kentucky. After a while there were a great many fields of a tall, broad-leafed kind of plant and, passing one of these fields, Eddie said, “What is that stuff, cabbage?”

Bert laughed. “That’s tobacco.”

Eddie looked at the big plants for a moment, a huge field of them. “What do you know?” he said. The leaves of the plants were shiny—sticky-looking.