Уолтер Тевис - The Hustler

Bert pursed his lips. “It’s possible,” he said.

For the first time that day, Eddie laughed. He laughed loudly and long. Then he said, “You’re a comedian, Bert. A real comedian.”

Findlay stared at him amusedly while he laughed. When Eddie had finished he said, “Let’s play billiards, Mr. Felson.”

From the first shot Eddie knew he had him. The three balls were standing out on the green now like jewels—machined, honed and polished gems, and the feel of the balls had come to him completely. And the long table—he liked the long table now, liked the long rolls of the heavy balls, the inexorable way that he could make them roll, ponderously, down the table and across, banking off the rails and into other balls. It was a fine game, a sedate, chesslike game, and he saw it now for what it was, a game that he could understand and control and that he would, eventually, win at.

He won. And he won the next game. And, after that one, a very close and tense game, he began to hear the little reasonable voice that said, You can ease up now, it isn’t that important , and he forced the voice to shut up. And doing this, forcing himself to bear down even harder, to concentrate even more, it began to be clear to him that what Bert had said about character was only a part of the truth. There was another thing that Bert had only partly seen, had only partly communicated to him, and this was the fixed, unvarying knowledge of the purpose of the game—to win. To beat the other man. To beat him as utterly, as completely as possible: This was the deep and abiding meaning of the game of pool. And, it seemed to Eddie in that minute of thought, it was the meaning of more than the game of pool, more than the five-by-ten-foot microcosm of ambition and desire. It seemed to him as if all men must know this because it is in every meeting and every act, in the whole gigantic hustle of men’s lives.

The squirrel’s voice, the voice of his own cautious, uncommitted ego, had told him that it wasn’t important. He looked at Findlay, at the vain and sensual face, the sly, homosexual eyes; and it seemed astonishing to him now that he had not seen how necessary it was to beat this man. For it was important. It was very important.

It was important who won and who did not win. Always. Everywhere. To everybody…

After Eddie had won the third game, the third thousand-dollar game, he began to see a strange and wonderful thing: Findlay started to crumble.

He began to drink more and sit down more between shots, and when he got up to shoot there was a kind of haughty weariness in his movements. Occasionally he laughed, wryly—Sarah’s kind of laugh—and Eddie could hear in Findlay’s laugh the words, almost as if they were spoken to him, It doesn’t make any difference. It doesn’t make any difference because, no matter who wins, I’m better than he is. And Eddie knew that he was seeing now what Minnesota Fats had seen when he himself had fallen apart under pressure and self-love. It was a fascinating, a disgusting, frightening, and contemptible thing to watch. And Findlay did not quit, and Eddie knew now that it was because there was no way for him to quit, that he was being drugged, was drugging himself into playing, game after game, as if something were going to happen, as if it were going to turn out that, somehow, it was all untrue, and that he, Findlay, had somehow come out of it all serene and happy and important.

Findlay crumbled, fled, fell, oozed, and became disjointed; he became petty, vain, and ridiculous; but he did not quit for a long time. When he did quit it was almost nine o’clock in the morning and he had lost a little more than twelve thousand dollars.

Leading them upstairs, he smiled wanly at them, and said, “It’s been an interesting evening.” He looked very old, especially in the face.

Eddie looked at him for a moment, intently; and it seemed that there was something pathetic and yet eager in the faint smile on Findlay’s thin and now almost bloodless lips. Then he looked away. “It sure has,” he said.

They left the house then, walking out, shockingly, into sunlight and the smell of wet grass….

Before Bert started the car he counted off for Eddie his share of the money—three thousand dollars. The bills were beautiful with the old magical color; and Eddie, whose senses still seemed so acute that there was nothing that could not be seen by him, responded with sensitivity and depth to the fine, impeccable lines of engraving, the sharpness of detail, and the excellent, tasteful numbers in the corners of the bills. Then he put the money in his pocket.

Outside the window, in Findlay’s drive, the air was clear and cool, with a faint mist. The sun was bright, but low. There were birds, discordant, adding to the sense of unreality. Eddie could see orange and yellow tinges on the leaves of trees, and could feel an edge in the air. Summer was ending. It was a fine and strange morning, full of imminent meaning.

He looked at Bert and said, “Well?” And it occurred to him then, looking at Bert, that there was nothing more for Bert to teach him; that he had learned, in this game that his hands and arms in their soreness were still remembering, a lesson and a meaning of his own, and that there was nothing more to do with Bert except to cut loose from him, to become free of him.

And when Bert did not reply, Eddie said, pushing him, “You think I’m ready now for Fats?”

“What about the thumbs?”

“The thumbs are all right.”

They were on the road that led to town, and Bert drove them in silence for several minutes before he answered. “If you’re not ready now you never will be.”

Eddie lit a cigarette, cupping his hands against the wind. His body seemed to feel tense and relaxed at the same time, but the sun on him was warm, pleasant. “I’m ready,” he said.

For the first three hours of the trip north Eddie did not say anything. They were in Ohio by mid-morning. Traffic was very light. It was very strange to be riding in this big car in the autumnal morning, his body dimly aching from the long night’s work, his eyes grainy and yet alert, and to be driving toward Chicago. Two months before he had driven to Chicago, with Charlie Fenniger. That seemed now to have been a long time ago. What would Charlie be doing now? Opening the poolroom in Oakland, brushing the tables? Charlie had been his friend for a long time. Once, years before, he had admired Charlie, had thought Charlie was a first-rate pool player.

And Bert, what about Bert? Bert, like Charlie, was a teacher and a guide—a guide not to pool playing, but to gambling. Bert knew the wheels that turned in gambling and the wheels within the wheels. You could never really pin down a man like Bert, get hold of him, find out exactly what his meaning was. But Bert was necessary, if only because of his intelligence and strength—as, in a different way, Sarah had once been necessary, during the time that his own world had been tilted and confused. Even Sarah—weak, losing Sarah with more of her twisted than just her leg—was a tremendously necessary person. Or was Sarah a loser, or only a person who was not in the game because she did not understand the rules? But who knew the rules? Bert, if anyone.

But there was the rule—possibly the only real rule—that he had had to learn himself, the rule that Bert had not actually told him, the one that had come to him with such clarity when he had been playing Findlay, the rule that was a command: Win . And yet maybe that was what Bert meant by character—the need for winning. To love the game itself is a fine thing; it is loving the art you live by. There are many things to love in the art—the excitement of it, the difficulty, the use of skill—but to work at it only for those would be to be like Findlay. To play pool you had to want to win and to want this without excuses and without self-deception. Only then did you have a right to love the game itself. And this reached further. It seemed to Eddie now, sitting in Bert’s car, his body sore and his mind tremendously aware, that the need to win was everywhere in life, in every act, in every conversation, in every encounter between people. And the idea had become for him a kind of touchstone—or a key to the meaning of experience in the world.