Уолтер Тевис - The Hustler

Eddie did not like the word “billiards” when it was used to mean pool. But he smiled at the other man. “When?” he said.

Findlay smiled coldly. “You’re very direct, Mr. Felson.”

“That’s right,” Eddie said, grinning. “When?”

“Well,” Findlay withdrew a cork-tipped cigarette from a black case and tapped it gently on the back of one hand. “Would you like to come out tonight? Eight o’clock?”

Eddie turned to Bert. “What do you think?”

Bert stood up, and then placed his chair back under the edge of the table. “We’ll be there,” he said….

Findlay’s house on the outside was like an Old Fitzgerald advertisement—the kind of a quasi-mansion that the word “aristocrat” means to some people. You had to drive a long way from the road before you could get to it, a big, dark brick box, with giant white columns in front supporting nothing, and shrubbery all over the place. By the black-top drive was a small, quaint metal statue of a Negro, in jockey uniform, holding out an iron ring toward a pair of white iron benches, fashioned to appear light and lacy and fooling no one, all very suggestive of the Old South, to which Kentucky had never belonged. The quaint metal statue was an ornament.

Inside, the place was more like an advertisement for Calvert’s Reserve, the kind where a man who is graying at the temples sits in a leather chair and holds a glass of whiskey preparatory to swilling it. Going through toward the back, Eddie could see into a room filled with books and paintings, with several leather armchairs that would easily have made Findlay a man of distinction in any company. He began to wonder how his host would look bending over a pool table. It was an interesting thought.

The basement was veneered with mahogany on the walls, which struck Eddie as looking terrible, even worse than the shiny knotty pine that was the badge of something or other these days. In the back of the room was an ill-concealed furnace—it looked like a huge mahogany squid with metal arms—and next to this was a bar. In front of the bar sat the pool table, its green hidden by a gray dust cover. Over the table hung a row of shaded lamps, but these were not turned on yet.

They sat at the bar and Findlay fixed them all Scotches with soda. On Eddie’s end of the bar was a wooden statue, about two feet high, of a man and woman engaged in one of the favorite indoor sports. Eddie looked at this with some interest, wondering briefly if it could really be accomplished that way. He decided that it would be possible, but fatiguing. Over the bar there hung a picture, also obscene, but not as imaginative. This was framed in white and appeared to be Japanese. The Scotch was very good, the best. Which figured.

Findlay had been keeping up a light patter of conversation, most of it aimless. He became quiet now, absorbed for the moment in his drink, and Eddie began to open his leather case. He took the cue out and screwed it together, checking it for tightness. Then he felt of the tip, which seemed to be a little too hard and slick, the leather battered down by innumerable tappings. He looked at Findlay. “You got any sandpaper? Or a file?”

Findlay smiled, almost eager to be of assistance. “Certainly. Which?”

“A file.”

Obligingly, the other man went to a cabinet that was built into the wall, opened it, and withdrew a jointed cue of his own and a file, which he handed to Eddie.

Eddie took it and began carefully tapping the side of it against the tip of his cue, roughing it up a little to restore its springiness and to permit it to take chalk better. He glanced at his host, busily checking his own cue for tightness and straightness, sighting down it carefully. It seemed amusing, the two of them. Like a couple of gentlemen politely preparing their weapons for a duel. Which, in a sense, was what was happening.

When Findlay had finished performing his rites, Eddie said, “Let’s play,” and he stood up.

“By all means.”

The minute they threw one corner of the dust cover back Eddie saw something that shook him. There were no pockets. It was a billiard table. He looked immediately at Bert. Bert had seen it too; he was pursing his lips.

Eddie looked at Findlay. “I thought you played pool.”

Findlay raised his eyebrows with amusement. “I do. But not here, I’m afraid.”

Eddie did not answer that but went on with him, folding up the cover and then putting it away on a shelf that had been built in for it, on the near wall. He weighed what was happening rapidly. He knew how to play billiards; and the game overlapped with pool anyway: both of them required a good stroke more than anything else, and a knowledge of what a ball would do. But the differences were great: the balls were slightly bigger and heavier; playing safe had an entirely different strategy to it; and most important, it was mainly a cue ball game—you did not concern yourself very much with where the ball you shot at went but with precisely what your cue ball did afterward. It was not easy for a pool player to get used to. And it was a tight game, a chesslike game, depending on brains and nerve and on knowing the tricks.

He looked at Findlay again. “What kind of billiards do you play?”

“Oh—three cushion?”

That sounded better. In three cushion there were some things that Eddie knew. And, in any event, it was not a runaway game; he could not get beaten without knowing what was happening to him. Unless Findlay was very damn good.

He looked at Bert. Bert was shaking his head “No.”

Eddie grinned at him slightly and shrugged his shoulders.

Then he looked at Findlay and said, “And what do you figure is a good price for a game of three-cushion billiards? Say, twenty-five points?”

Findlay smiled, running his hand gently through his hair, which was thin. “A hundred dollars?”

Eddie looked at Bert. “How does that sound?”

Bert’s face was tight. “Not very good. I don’t think you ought to play.”

“Why not?”

“What kind of billiard player are you? You probably never shot a game in your life.”

“Oh, now,” Findlay said, “I’m sure Mr. Felson knows what he’s doing, Bert. And certainly you can afford a hundred dollars to find out?”

“Sure he can,” Eddie said. He began setting the white balls up for the lag and placing the red ball on the spot at the other end of the table. When he was through he looked over at Bert.

Bert’s face showed nothing. Eddie chalked his cue tip.

“Well,” he said to Findlay, “let’s play.”

They lagged for the break and Eddie lost, by a large margin. The balls seemed big and heavy, and he realized that they were made of ivory—bigger than the composition balls he was used to, and trickier to handle. They might be a problem at first; it would take a while to get used to them.

And the table—the table was too big. He had heard, somewhere, that they had used tables as long as sixteen feet, back when the game first was invented, in Europe. This one was a five by ten, but looking down it, it seemed to be at least sixteen feet. And the rails were strange, tight; and the cloth seemed different, a finer weave. He did not like it. When he shot into the white ball it felt big and heavy and seemed to resist the pushing of his cue, as though the bottom of the ball were sticking to the cloth.

Having won the lag, Findlay took the opening shot. His thin mouth frowning in elegant concentration, he stood, hands on hips, and sighted at the ball very carefully before he bent down to shoot. He made his bridge elaborately, letting the little finger on his left hand flutter several times before settling it down on the green. His preparatory strokes seemed to attempt gracefulness, but were merely wild swoopings for he held his cue too high at the butt and too far back, and the movement of his arm was irregular, jerky. But when he finally shot the cue ball, it hit the red ball, banked off the three proper rails, and hit the other white ball neatly. One point.