“Don’t sweet-talk me,” Boomer said. “That cue has radar and microcircuits in its tip. With a cue like that a man can stay in bed and send the cue stick out on Saturday nights. ‘Bring in five hundred, Balabushka’ is what you say. I know about them high-technology pool cues, come from Silicon Valley with a college degree.” He shook his head, bent and shot, cutting the seven ball into the side. His cue ball rolled a few feet for perfect position.
Eddie remained silent. He had seen routines like this before. The best thing to do was stay loose and not try to enter the spirit of it or make a fool out of yourself. So far, it was impossible to tell just how good Boomer was. Fats had said there were three or four professionals in this town—men who made their-livings entirely by hustling on bar tables—and apparently Boomer was the best among them. Eddie leaned against the empty table a few feet from the one Boomer and he were playing on, and tried to relax. Boomer was funny; but there was threat in the way he talked, and in the cold-eyed look he flicked toward Eddie from time to time. Eddie watched, and kept quiet, and waited for him to miss.
When Boomer had two more balls to make, he overshot a long cut and his cue ball rolled too far, leaving him out of position. He shrugged, banked at one of the remaining balls, missed it and rolled the white ball into a perfect safety. It was an “if-I-miss” shot of the kind Fats had demonstrated back in Denver.
Eddie tightened his cue stick and looked at Boomer. “What’s the house rule if I don’t hit one?”
“I get the cue behind the line,” Boomer said. “Same as a scratch.”
That was a pisser. If Eddie didn’t hit one of the stripes, Boomer would have an easy run out. And the cue was snookered behind the six. He studied it a moment. The thing to do was bank off the near rail and try to tap into the eleven ball and hope for a safety. It was the only smart thing to do.
But the twelve, down at the far end of the table, was a few inches from the corner pocket. The cue ball could be banked two cushions out of the corner, down the long diagonal. A very difficult shot. If he missed it, Boomer would own the table. It was a one-in-ten shot, a two-rail kick-in. Eddie looked at the bartender. “Let me have a Manhattan, on the rocks,” he said. He stepped up to the table, adjusted his glasses, carefully spread the fingers of his left hand in a high bridge over the snookering six ball, elevated the back of his cue, looked once behind him at the twelve ball and shot, hard, smooth, and angry.
The cue ball bounced out of the corner, rolled the diagonal of the table and clipped the twelve ball sharply. The twelve rolled briskly into the pocket. “Son of a bitch!” Boomer said. “Goddamned microchips.”
“Printed circuits,” Eddie said, going to the bar for his drink. The men on the bar stools stared at him silently. He waited while the bartender put the cherry in, took a long swallow and came back to the table feeling, at last, relaxed.
Boomer was good, but nowhere as good as Fats. He couldn’t bank well, and his main strength was in easy runs. He would have been a good straight-pool player if hustlers played straight pool anymore, and he was certainly good enough to make a living at eight-ball in barrooms. Eddie held himself steady, and by ten o’clock he was seven hundred dollars ahead.
When Boomer gave him the last pair of fifties, he looked at Eddie coldly and said, “If you want to play me anymore, my friend, you’re going to have to give me some weight.” He had dropped the wild-country-boy act and spoke quietly.
Eddie was finishing his supper—a bacon and tomato sandwich. He took the paper plate over and set it on the bar and then came back. The crowd silently made way for him. “What do you need?”
“I’ll take the break,” Boomer said.
Eddie looked at him, at his strange face with the look of crazy, mean intelligence; the veiled threat in his cool eyes; the small hands now holding his thin, delicate cue. “I won’t give you the break but I’ll bank the eight ball. If we play for five hundred a game.”
“I’ve heard of guys like you,” Boomer said.
“I bet you have, Boomer.”
Boomer stared at him a moment and then gave a small grin. “I’ve got to make a phone call.”
“Go ahead.”
He went to the pay phone at the end of the bar while Eddie got himself a cup of coffee. His shoulder had begun to ache, and now that Boomer was calling his backer or whatever, he felt the tightness in his stomach again. That was something else he had forgotten over the years: the goddamned fear.
The backer showed up surprisingly soon. He was a small man in a tight gray suit and dark necktie. The men leaning against one of the empty tables made room for him and he stood there, not leaning, and watched while Eddie racked up the balls and Boomer broke them. He made one on the break. It was going to be tough. For a moment Eddie felt like a fool giving such odds. Banking the eight could be ruinous. You couldn’t afford to miss against a player like Boomer and on tables like this. Boomer ran three of the stripes and then played safe. Eddie did not try anything fancy this time but played a safety back. It went back and forth like that for several shots, but then on a draw shot, Eddie did not pull the heavy cue ball back as far as he had meant to and he left Boomer a piece of the eleven. Boomer said nothing, but zeroed in and cut it into the side. He ran out. Eddie took five hundred out of his wallet. Boomer nodded over toward the man in the suit and said, “Just pay my friend.” Eddie walked over and handed the little man the bills. He took them silently, smoothed them out and began counting. Eddie walked back over to the table and racked the balls. Then he went to the bar and finished his coffee, watching the table as he drank. Boomer swung his bat of a cue into the break ball and spread the rack. A stripe and a solid dropped in. He began running the solids. Eddie walked back over to the table. His feet and his shoulder were hurting, and the coffee hadn’t really helped. What was he doing, saying he would bank the eight on this man’s own table, with his own crowd, here in some town in North Carolina whose name he had already forgotten? Haneyville. That was it—the first name on the list from Fats. “Some high rollers there,” Fats had said. Well, there one of them was, making balls like a machine. Plop, plop they went, into the big pockets of the little table. Plop. The last was the eight ball. Eddie got another five hundred and gave it to the dapper little man. He was now, after four hours of pool, three hundred dollars behind. And quite a few quarters. He put another quarter in, telling himself he had better bear down; when the balls came rolling through the chute he took them out and racked them, eight ball in the center, for Boomer.
And Boomer boomed them open, dropping three. He was getting hot now. Maybe he had been holding back before. Eddie watched him, for a moment feeling some of the helplessness he had felt against Fats in Miami and Cincinnati, with a tight, painful sensation in his stomach. Boomer was moving around the little table faster now, sliding balls into pockets quietly while the whole crowded barroom full of men in working clothes watched him, fascinated. The gray smoke above the cone of light over the table was nearly solid; men sipped their drinks silently; no one played the jukebox or talked. The sound of Boomer’s boot heels when he moved from shot to shot was like footsteps in a library. He made all the striped balls, shot the eight in the side, and Eddie paid the man in the suit.
“I may never find out if you can bank that eight ball,” Boomer said as Eddie was bent near him, getting the balls from the rack.
Eddie froze and stared at him a moment. “Let’s play for a thousand,” he said. He had twelve hundred dollars with him.