Уолтер Тевис - The Hustler

Charlie eased himself up from the chair and waddled over. His face was serious, his voice quiet. “Hello, Eddie,” he said. “I just got word you were playing up here.”

“Why aren’t you in Oakland?”

Charlie attempted a smile. The attempt was a failure. “I was. Last week I started getting worried about you and flew back. I been hunting you. Around the rooms.”

“What for?” Eddie stared at him; there was something strained about the way Charlie was talking to him. “What do you want me for?”

Not answering at first, Charlie fumbled in his hip pocket and withdrew what looked like a folded-over checkbook and held it out to him. “This is yours,” he said.

Eddie took the book and opened it. It was full of traveler’s checks, in denominations of two hundred fifty each. “What the hell…?” he said.

Charlie’s voice was back to its customary lack of expression, like that of a comic miniature of Minnesota Fats. “When you were drunk up here before and hit me for the money, I held out on you. This is what I held out. A little under five thousand.” And then, abruptly, his face broke into one of his extremely rare smiles, which lasted only for a moment, “Minus my ten per cent, of course.”

Eddie shook his head, letting his thumb run over the thick edges of the blue checks. It figured; it figured, but it was hard to believe: he had just come back from the grave. “So why give it to me now,” he said. “So you can watch me lose?”

Charlie’s voice was soft. “No,” he said. “I been thinking. Maybe you’re ready to beat him now. Maybe you were ready before—I don’t know. Anyway, you ought to find out.”

“Okay,” Eddie said. He grinned at Charlie, the old grin, the charm grin, fast and loose. “We’ll find out.”

He glanced at Fats, who seemed only to be waiting, and then counted the money. There was four thousand five hundred in traveler’s checks, and he had about seven hundred in cash. His whole kitty. Well, here we go. Fast and loose.

Then he looked at the fat man and said, “Fats,” thinking, you fat bastard , “let’s play a game of pool for five thousand dollars.”

Fats blinked at him. His chins jerked, but he said nothing.

“Come on, Fats,” he said, “five thousand. That’s a hustler’s game of pool. It’s my whole bankroll, my life’s savings.” He flipped again through the book of checks, not feeling the pain that doing this caused, and then looked for a moment at Charlie. Charlie’s face showed nothing, but his eyes were alert, interested, and Eddie thought, wonderingly, he’s going along with it . Then he looked at Bert and Bert was smiling thinly, but approvingly; and this too was astonishing and lovely.

“What’s the matter, Fats?” he said. “All you got to do is win one game and I’m gone back to California. Just one game. You just beat me three.”

Fats blinked at him, his face now very thoughtful, controlled, and his eyes as always a kind of obscene mystery.

“Okay,” he said.

Having changed the bet they tossed for the break again, and Fats lost again. He chalked his cue carefully, stepped sideways up to the table, set his hands on the green, the rings flashing, and shot.

The break was good, but not perfect. One ball, the five-ball, was left a few inches out from the rack, unprotected, down at the foot of the table. The cue ball was frozen to the end rail, the table’s length from it. It was an odds-off shot, a nowhere shot; and Eddie’s first reaction was automatic, play it safe, don’t take a chance on leaving the other man in a place where he can score a hundred points. The proper thing to do would be to ease the cue ball down the table, nudge one of the corner balls, and return it to the end rail, letting the other man figure it out from there. That would be the right way to play it—the safe way.

But Eddie stopped before getting ready to shoot and looked at the ball and it occurred to him that although it was a very difficult shot it happened to be one that he could make. You cut it just so, at just such speed and with just so much spin and the ball would fall in the pocket. And the cue ball would split open the rack and the ball game would suddenly be wide open.

It would be smarter to play safe. But to play safe would be to play Bert’s game, to play Fats’ game, to play the quiet, careful percentage. But, as Bert himself had once said, “There’s a lot of percentage players find out they got to work for a living.”

He chalked his cue lightly, with three deft strokes. Then he said, “Five ball in the corner,” bent down, took careful, dead aim, and shot.

And the cue ball—for a moment an extension of his own will and consciousness—sped quickly down the table and clipped the edge of the five-ball, then rebounded off the bottom rail and smacked firmly into the triangle of balls, spreading them softly apart. And while this was happening, the little orange ball with the number 5 in its center rolled evenly across the table, along the rail, and into the corner pocket, hitting the bottom with a sound that was exquisite.

The balls were spread prettily, the cue ball in their center, and Eddie looked at this loose and lovely table before he shot and thought of how pleasant it was going to be to shoot them into the pockets.

And it was a pleasure. He felt as if he had the cue ball on strings and it was his own little white marionette, darting here and there on the green baize as he instructed it by the gentle prodding of his cue. Watching the white ball perform, watching it nudge balls in, ease balls in, slap balls in, and hearing the soft, dark sounds the balls made as they fell into the deep leather pockets gave him a voluptuous, sensitive pleasure. And in operating the white marionette, putting it through its delicate paces, he was aware of a sense of power and strength that was building in him and then resonating, like a drumbeat. He pocketed a rack of balls without missing, and then another and another, and more, until he had lost count.

And then, when he had finished cleaning off the table and was standing, waiting for the rack man to put the fourteen balls back together in their triangle, he realized that the balls should be already racked but they were not, and an absurd idea struck him: he might have already won the game. Fats might never have had a shot.

He looked over to the chair where Bert was sitting. Fats was standing there, beside Bert. He was counting out money—a great many hundred-dollar bills. Fats seemed to be taking an impossible amount of money from his billfold. Eddie looked at Bert’s face and Bert peered back at him, through the glasses. Someone in the crowd of people coughed, and the coughing sounded very loud in the room.

Fats walked over and set the money on the edge of the table, his rings flashing under the overhead lights. Then he walked to a chair and sat down, ponderously. His chin jerked down into his collar for a moment, and then he said, “It’s your money, Fast Eddie.” He was sweating.

He had run the game. He had made a hundred twenty-five balls without missing, and had shot in nine racks of fourteen balls each, making and breaking on the fifteenth ball each time.

Eddie walked to the money, the silent, bulky money. Instinctively, he wiped some of the dust from his hand on the side of his trousers before handling it. Then he took it, rolled up the green paper, pushed it down into his pocket. He looked at Fats. “I was lucky,” he said.

Fats’ chins dipped quickly. “Maybe,” he said. And then, to the rack boy, “Rack the balls.”

Out of the next four games Eddie won three, losing the one only when Fats, in a sudden show of brilliance, managed to score a magnificent ninety-ball run—a tricky, contrived run, a run that displayed wit and nerve—and caught Eddie with less than sixty points on the string. But Fats did not sustain this peak; he seemed to fight his way to it by an effort of will and to fall back from it afterward, so that his next game had even less strength than before.