Although he didn’t say so, I took him to mean that he and his wife were two opposing forces, chess bishops escaping confrontation by never meeting on a mutual path.
“I have my stick out in the car,” Dunkirk said. “What do you say?”
“You haven’t even asked my name yet,” I said.
“It doesn’t matter. I just want to play a few games.”
“It’s Tony.”
His handshake wasn’t firm or resolute. Good players have a way of making a handshake more a test of strength than an expression of greeting, as though they intend to gain complete control of you even before the balls are racked. Dunkirk, it was clear, wasn’t at all into the psychology of games playing.
“I’ll get my cue. I won’t be but a minute.”
He left. I hastily finished my sandwich and chugged down the rest of my cream soda. I saw Greta roll her eyes at me as I brought my stick up from the floor. To her it was a fishing rod with which I would shortly reel in another fish.
“You got the feelin’, Tony? Yeah, I can see you got the feeling all right. Be decent and leave him with cab fare, Iceman.”
All the tables were empty. I went to the front one and slipped a quarter into the slot. My game is one-pocket, though not to the exclusion of some others when a mark begins to feel uncomfortable with a game he doesn’t play all that often. Rotation, straight pool, three-ball, nine-ball — I always let the mark pick his game. That way, he becomes disturbed that he’s picked the wrong game to play when he begins to lose, not the wrong player to play against. There’s only one pool game I won’t play a mark, and that’s eight-ball. Any near-fool or strung-out wino is liable to beat you at eight-ball, slamming those balls around the table with all those rails and pockets to catch them. Eight-ball is a hustler’s suicide.
Dunkirk came back. He took his two-piece stick out of its cloth holder and put it together. I unzipped my battered leather case, with the velvet stripped from the inside to make it look like it was picked up at a garage sale after the garage had fallen on it. I paid $200 for my stick and then beat it against walls and chairs until it looked like something you’d start a beach fire with. But it was weighted and balanced to 18 ounces. Dunkirk’s weighed a preposterous 22 ounces — as cumbersome as Nellie Fox’s baseball bat!
“Nice stick,” I told him, handing it back with mock care. A tavern stick, a bludgeon — a barkeep might slip you a five-dollar bill to walk out with it. “What’ll we play, Morris?”
“How about some eight-ball?”
“That’s kind of a boring game, isn’t it? I mean, you and me can probably play that game in our sleep. You ever play YMCA pool?”
“No, I don’t think I ever have.” Dunkirk fooled with his necktie-knot a bit. “Is it anything like rotation?”
“No, no. You don’t have to play the balls in order by number. You play them in any order. Just call the ball and the pocket. We play to a total of sixty points. When both our scores add up to sixty, the player with the lesser amount pays the other the difference at a dollar a point. For instance, if you score thirty-two points and I score twenty-eight, I owe you four bucks.”
“I think I get it,” said Dunkirk. “We count the numbers on the balls, right? If I make a nine-ball and the ten, the running total is nineteen. If you follow with the five-ball, the total goes up to twenty-four, with my score nineteen and yours five.”
“You got it, Morris.”
I coasted through the first two games. Morris won them both. I paid him six dollars. He was elated and therefore blinded to the fact that I had gone after only low-numbered balls. He bought us both a Heineken and told me to rack them up.
He was purely apples on a low tree-limb — there to be picked. To pile up point totals he began shooting at distant balls with the big numbers on them. He was behind 32–20 the next game with a fairly easy shot on the 15-ball in the side for game. He set it up and I watched the end of his stick fishtail with nervousness. It was a cut-shot and he stepped back from it twice to check the angle.
Stepping back from a shot after you’re locked in on it is the kiss of death and Dunkirk had just kissed himself twice. I could almost see the cue ball dancing under his gaze like a laser illusion. He rechalked, swigged some beer, and took a third stance over his shot. His eyes had already given it up. His stroke came in segments, like a sequence of stop-action photos of a golf-swing. The 15-ball hit the edge of the rail and ran down the table to come to rest less than six inches from an end pocket. A tap-in putt. Dunkirk sighed and handed me a twenty, a five, and two ones.
He was caught by panic now to recoup his losses. He went for outlandish shots on high-numbered balls, while I chipped away at the small. He lost the next two: $23.00 in the first, $31.00 in the next. He broke his stick down and put it back into its cloth covering, giving me a drained smile. There was no animosity in his expression, only resignation.
“I don’t have the killer s instinct,” he said when we were back at the counter for our final Heineken. “My life story, I’m pained to say, is never to be able to finish much of what I initiate. My father was like that, too easygoing, too self-effacing. When he was a young man, he was fired from a pulp mill because the foreman suspected he was after his job. Instead of fighting the dismissal, he wrote a letter to the mill owner thanking him for the work experience.”
It was almost dawn. Dunkirk finished off his beer and rose. “I’d like to play again sometime. I come into McGuire’s nearly every morning.”
“Well, I don’t play all that much,” I told him. “But if you’re around when I stop in for a pepper sandwich, we’ll play a few games.”
“I’d like that,” said Morris Dunkirk, with those bleak eyes, a man who seemed to have burned all the bridges to his world.
Four mornings later, we played again. We played four games of nine-ball, betting a five-spot on the five and ten bucks on the nine. Dunkirk had a good clean stroke. He could play angles and make cross-corner shots with real skill. It was evident he had played a good deal of pool in his youth. But when it came to the big shots there seemed to be a massive unseen barrier between him and winning. He took three five-balls; I took the other and all four nines. And Dunkirk took a thirty-dollar loss, which he paid without heavy grief or malice.
“When I was a young man,” he began, after we’d finished and had what was to be our ritualistic Heinekens at the counter, “in the early years of my marriage, I was a welfare clerk. I typed the SSI checks. It was pretty much of a dead-end job. I knew it and so did my wife. It was a point she rarely ignored when we argued about money and goals and my lack of ambition.
“We did a lot of fencing in those days — attack, parry, riposte, redouble. Polite viciousness. Nothing visceral, not the kind of fighting married couples usually do. No sparring, or boxing, or street brawling or tavern fighting. Knockdown, drag-out stuff wasn’t Margo’s style. I acquitted myself better in those days, but it was very brutal just the same.
“Anyway, we’d just had another match over why I wasn’t getting anywhere in my job. One day at work — it was noontime and everyone was across the street in the park eating lunch — I began to devise this scheme with the checks.
“I would type about two dozen of them for around $400 each, using my own name. Then I’d type Void on the carbon copies. I’d cash the checks and on the same afternoon send in the first carbons on the Daily Void List, knowing the second and third carbons wouldn’t go to the State Capitol until the end of the month.