Andrew Vachss - Dead and Gone

Then I went through the fundamentals, concentrating on the relationship between the cue ball, the object ball, and the pocket.

Not once did she demonstrate any impatience.

I lined up a bunch of balls in a fan around the corner pocket and put the cue ball a couple of feet back, at the midpoint of the fan, and Gem started to practice.

Her first shot went in, but the cue ball followed right behind. I showed her how placing the tip of the cue slightly below center would stop the white ball at the point of contact. The first time she tried it herself, the ball hopped. I caught it on the fly, not surprised.

“Was that a good trick?” she asked, smiling.

“It’s a good trick if you can control it,” I told her.

“I think I can …” she said, and, before I could say anything, hopped the white ball right off the table again.

“Uh, that’s a pretty advanced move,” I said. “Maybe we should wait until you’ve had a few more games under your belt, okay?”

“Yes,” she said, narrowing her eyes in concentration.

It took maybe half an hour for Gem to get the concept of angles. She had a delicate touch with the cue stick, chalking up after each shot as I’d shown her, forming the bridge with her left hand carefully each time. Except for two guys on a nearby table who didn’t even pretend to play whenever Gem bent over and took a long time to line up a shot, we might as well have been alone.

Never once did Gem ask to play an actual game. She just went through each exercise I showed her, focusing hard.

“You are very patient,” she said, echoing my own thoughts.

“How do you mean?”

“Well, it cannot be much fun for you, to watch me and not play yourself.”

“It’s a great pleasure to watch you.”

Her creamy beige cheeks took on a sprinkling of cinnamon. “You know what I meant,” she said.

“Sure. But I wasn’t kidding. You’re really learning. And it is a pleasure to watch.”

After a while, we played an actual game. I started her with straight pool. It’s the hardest version to play, because you have to call each shot, but it’s the best one for learning how things work on a table. I missed most of the shots I took, not pretending it wasn’t on purpose, setting up various opportunities so Gem could have a look at them.

I’d expected the lack of depth perception to affect my game, but it didn’t seem to—the balls went where I wanted them to go.

We didn’t keep score.

One of the men on the next table strolled over, said to me, “You interested in playing for a little something?”

“No thanks.”

“Come on. Your girlfriend can watch you in action, what do you say?”

“No thanks.”

“My buddy and I, we’ve been watching you. Looks like you really know the game. I figured, maybe I could learn something, you know?”

“No thanks.”

“Hey, man. Is that all you know how to say?”

I let the prison yard come into my eyes, told him, “I can say, ‘Step the fuck off,’ pal. You like that better?”

But he’d been raised so far away from prison yards that he didn’t get it. His hand whitened around the pool cue he was holding. “You got a problem?” he challenged.

His buddy rolled up, stood behind the first guy’s right shoulder.

I guessed the fancy tables and the middle-class music didn’t mean so much after all.

“No problem,” I assured the guy with the pool cue. “In fact, we were just leaving.”

When I said “we,” I glanced over at where Gem was to make sure she understood. She was gone. I had a flame-tongue flicker of fear, but then I spotted her—standing off to the side of the two men, feet spread, knees slightly bent. And a clenched fist at her hip.

“You want to take this outside?” the guy with the cue asked, his voice more confident than his hands.

I stepped in close to him, the red three-ball I’d snatched from the table when they’d first closed in cupped in my fist. “No,” I said softly. “And neither do you.”

It took him a couple of heartbeats, but he finally matched the music to the lyrics. “Punk!” he sneered … as he was turning his back to walk away.

“What style?” I asked Gem in the car on the way back to the hotel.

“I do not understand.”

“Martial arts. What style do you study?”

“Me? I am no martial artist. Why would you think so?”

“Back there. When you made a fist. You put your thumb on top of your clenched fingers, not bent over the side, the way people usually do.”

“It is better that way?” she asked, innocently.

“The way you do it? Sure. You can feel the difference in the muscles of your forearm. And you won’t break your thumb when you strike that way, too.”

“So!”

“Are you trying to tell me you make a fist that way naturally?”

“No. It is true, someone showed me how to do that. But that is all they showed me. It was a long time ago. I was just a small child. I always did as my elders instructed me.”

“Didn’t … whoever showed you, didn’t they show you any more?”

“It was only that one night,” Gem said, nothing in her voice. “The next day, she was gone.”

I let it go. Some locks shouldn’t be picked.

“You can never slam the window closed,” she said later, in bed.

“When you try, it only opens wider.”

I lay there, wondering if it would ever be any different.

“It only opened a little this time, isn’t that true?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said, wondering how she knew.

“And then you tried to concentrate so hard on what you … what we were doing?”

“Yeah.”

“And that opened the window more, do you see?”

“Then how can I—?”

“This is something you cannot fight by fighting. By fighting, you invoke it.”

“Invoke it? It just popped—”

“No,” she whispered, as if telling me a deep secret. “You expect it. And your desire to battle it brings it forth.”

“What do I do, then? Surrender?”

“Not surrender. Accept. Sometimes the window will open. And sometimes it will not. You feel as if you cannot … lose yourself in … this,” she said, her hand cupping my testicles, thumbnail gently scraping under the root. “But you can. Not by trying. By not trying. Go to sleep, Burke. There are no windows in your sleep. It will only be your body then.”

“But if I’m asleep …?”

“I will not be,” Gem said, thumbnail resting against my root, sending a tiny tremor to where I thought was dead.

I was … maybe … afraid to ask Gem anything the next morning. Her eyes were shining, but I figured that was from the waffles with maple syrup, double-side of bacon and home fries, and the two chocolate malts she called breakfast.

She went out for a while. Came back with the Sunday paper. The Oregonian . Must be statewide, with a name like that, I figured.

We sat on the couch and read the paper quietly. By the time we finished, Gem was hungry again.

“You mind going over it one more time?” I asked her. “Tomorrow’s the meet, and …”

“Of course,” she said.

“I’ll page Byron. No point doing it in pieces.”

It took Byron less than an hour to show up. He greeted Gem almost formally, taking his cue from her. I wished I had his manners. Or maybe just his natural grace.

I drew a sketch of the plaza and the surrounding streets. Explained I’d be there first, and Gem should take whatever spot looked best to her. We couldn’t script it any closer than that—no telling what other actors would be on the stage.

“You’ve got the tricky part,” I told Byron.

“And I’ve got help,” he said.

“We can’t—”