“Okay.” Billy picked up the chalk again, ran it lightly over the tip of his cue, bent to the table and smashed the rack of balls open.
Eddie took a deep breath and watched, not sitting, keeping his back to Arabella. The five ball fell in; that gave Billy the solids. Eddie kept his eyes on the table and not on Usho’s clothes or his smooth, youthful face.
None of the solids was in an easy position, and the cue ball was frozen to a side rail. Billy studied the lie for a long time before he played safe. The cue ball stopped between the eight and the four, out of line with all the striped balls. Eddie would have to keep his nerves steady and his balls tight just to get a decent safety out of it. The cue ball would have to be banked rail-first into the eleven. It was a pisser.
Just then the waitress came in with their drinks. Eddie gave her a ten, took his Manhattan and turned back to the table. If he shot it hard, the eleven might go in the side; it was a foot and a half away from the pocket and in a direct line with it. But, Jesus, to thump that big cue ball off the cushion and try for a perfect hit on the eleven was a killer. He looked at Billy’s Japanese face, his almost pretty face, for a moment and thought, To hell with him. He took a long swallow from the sweet drink, set it down, not looking at Arabella, and walked over to the table. He could make the eleven ball.
He did it quickly, spreading the fingers of his left hand over the eight, elevating the cue stick, stroking once and then tapping the cue ball. He could feel the purchase on the big, clunky ball that roughing the leather of the tip had given him. He watched the white ball pop off the rail and hit the eleven dead center, watched the eleven roll into the side pocket. The cue ball stopped in position for the thirteen. Eddie chalked, took three steps over and pocketed the thirteen. Then the nine, the fifteen, the fourteen and the twelve. The black eight sat four inches from the lower corner and his cue ball ten inches from the eight. He plunked the eight ball into the pocket and went back to his Manhattan. Billy paid him silently and racked the balls.
At midnight Eddie raised the bet to a thousand and Billy brought in two backers. One wore a dark suit and looked like a banker. The other could have been a rodeo cowboy. He chewed tobacco, drank Rolling Rock beer, and paid Eddie in worn-looking hundred-dollar bills from what seemed an inexhaustible supply.
At one in the morning, Eddie put Arabella in a taxi and sent her back to the Holiday Inn. She kissed him sleepily before getting in the cab. “I’m glad you started beating him.”
“You know what I’m going to do tomorrow?” Eddie said to her. “I’m going to buy some new clothes.”
After they closed the bar at two-thirty, a crowd of a dozen diehards stayed to watch. Someone kept feeding quarters into the jukebox in the other room; the muted voices of Conway Twitty and Merle Haggard came through the open doorway. Billy’s face was no longer unlined, and his hair no longer neatly combed. There was a smear of talcum powder near the lapel of his blue jacket, and his narrow eyes were narrower.
Eddie was reaching a place he had almost forgotten, where the nerves of his arms and fingertips seemed to extend through the length of the Balabushka to the glossy surfaces of the balls themselves, to the napped green of the table. There were no aches in his feet or shoulders, and his stroke was unruffled, pistonlike, and dead-accurate. He could not miss. There was no way he could miss. The whole fatty accumulation of his middle-class life had fallen away from him, and his movements at the table were both fully awake and dreamlike. The visual clarity was astounding. The click of his cue tip against the cue ball, the click of the cue ball against the ball he was tapping in or easing in or nudging in or powering in was like the click of oiled machinery. He was silent and loose; in some newly awakened reach of his mind he was dazzled by himself.
Billy did not quit for a long time. It was amazing that he didn’t quit. He shot fine pool, better than he had played at the beginning, and he even won games. There was no way to prevent him from winning games. But he had no real chance. By three o’clock in the morning it must have been clear to everyone in the room, as it was to Eddie, that he had no chance; but he kept on playing and his backers kept handing money to Eddie.
With the rail-first bank on the eleven ball, he had lost his clumsiness with the cue ball; and now he made it dance for him, still sluggish though it was. He had found the string for it and his control was flawless. He even felt a certain fondness for the big white ball, like the fondness he had felt for Billy Usho; but now he was in command of both. There was nothing in life like this. Nothing. To stroke and hit the cue ball, to watch the colored ball roll with the certitude that he himself imposed on it, to see and hear the colored ball fall into the pocket he had chosen, was exquisite.
Coming into the room, he tried not to wake her, but she stirred when he closed the door. A moment later she turned the bedside light on. She was squinting at the clock radio, her hair disheveled and her breasts bare. She didn’t look at him. “Dear God!” she said. “It’s five o’fucking clock.”
“A quarter after,” Eddie said.
“Maybe you should play tennis.”
“No I shouldn’t.” He set the cue stick in the closet and began unbuttoning his shirt. He took it off and laid it across the back of a chair. “I’m going to take a shower.”
“Come on to bed.”
“After the shower.”
“All right,” she said, sitting up and rubbing her eyes. “I missed you last night. How much did you take him for?”
“Take him for?”
“Isn’t that what you say?”
He grinned at her, a bit dreamily. He felt thoroughly tired. His arms and legs, his chest and back, felt warm and relaxed, and the dull ache in his insteps and in his right arm—his stroking arm—was more a comfort than a pain. He reached into his right pocket and pulled out a handful of bills. He dropped it on the bed at her side and then pulled out another handful. Hundreds had a special shade of green on their backs, and the numbering that read “100” was curved pleasantly at the corners, the engraving baroque and substantial. He had always loved them. He dropped the second beside the first, then pulled out more, along with a fistful of loose bills. Arabella had become wide-eyed. She stared at the money and then up at his face. He felt deeply relaxed and yet alert; if someone attacked him he would respond like a drowsy leopard, like a great white shark, lazy and deadly.
“Good god in heaven!” Arabella said softly, looking at the money beside her.
He dug deeper and found another dozen of them in that pocket. Then he shifted to the other pocket, where there was a roll, pulling it out with thumb and forefinger. On the bed the roll uncoiled itself like a living thing, to become a sheaf. More bills were beneath it. He slipped them out a few at a time. The pile of green bills next to Arabella now filled up the space from her knees to her elbows, covering about a foot’s width of the bed. She reached down, scooped up a double handful and held them against her cheeks as a child might hold a beloved doll. “Where have you been all my life, Eddie?” she said.
“Who cares?” Eddie said. “I’m here now.”
The next day Arabella drove to Thelma’s with him at noon and played a pinball machine while he waited around for someone to come in. He got a handful of quarters at the bar and practiced, but none of the people who walked into the bar for an afternoon beer came back to the room where Eddie, feeling like a house hustler, was banking balls up the rails. By late afternoon it had gotten to him. During his years in Lexington he had come to hate these long days with pool tables and the endless, desultory shooting. There were games going on at the other tables now, but not for money. The excitement of the night before was gone. By the time they had their supper at the bar, his arm was tired and his feet ached.