In the taxi afterward, Eddie stared out the window at the distant Rockies. He had concentrated, shot well, seen the balls clearly and lost by seven points. One fifty to one forty-three.
Fats was leaning back in his seat, his black cue case across his lap. Finally he spoke. “That was a good run.” Eddie had scored over eighty balls before missing a difficult bank shot.
Eddie said nothing. It made five matches in a row that Fats had beaten him. There would be only one more—at Indianapolis in early December. If he couldn’t beat a seventy-year-old man one game out of six, he was hopeless. He had no business trying to play pool for a living.
“Did you use the list?” Fats said.
“Most of it.” He had not tried the two towns at the bottom, although one was in driving distance of Lexington.
“It’s a good list,” Fats said. “I won money in every place on it.”
“It worked at first. I beat Billy Usho in Memphis for seven thousand. A few thousand from a man named Boomer.”
“After that?”
As the road curved, Eddie could see the eminence of Scandia Peak, snow-capped, from between two lesser mountains. “Nothing. Maybe enough to pay the hotel bill.”
“Did you find Ousley in Connors?”
“I hear it’s a terrible place.”
“Ousley has money. He owns coal mines.”
“Maybe I’ll go next week.” He looked at Fats. “Tell me something. Have you ever had a job?”
“No.”
“Have you ever played nine-ball tournaments?”
“I don’t like the kids who play them.” Nine-ball had always been a different world from the one Eddie knew, even though he had played it from time to time.
“If I don’t take a job,” Eddie said, “I’ve got to do something. There’s more money in nine-ball than there is in bars.”
Fats pursed his lips. “You might win the small ones.”
“There’s a big one in Chicago next month. And then, in the spring, there’s Lake Tahoe.”
“You won’t win those. How much nine-ball have you played?”
“Not a lot.”
“Earl Borchard could beat you at straight pool, and he plays nine-ball better. You need more experience.”
“Fats, I have experience. I was beating every player in the country when those kids were in kindergarten.”
“This is nineteen eighty-three,” Fats said.
“November.”
“That’s right. I was looking in Billiard’s Digest. There’s a tournament in Connecticut the day after we play in Indianapolis. It goes three days, and first prize is twenty-five hundred. You can practice nine-ball a few weeks and then get in it.”
“I’ve been practicing.”
“That’s right,” Fats said, “but I just beat you.”
They drove the rest of the way to the airport in silence. When the driver slowed to get in line at the Eastern Airlines terminal, Fats said, “It’s mainly a matter of growing up.”
Eddie looked at him but said nothing.
Arabella was out when he let himself into the apartment. A note by the telephone read, “Roy Skammer called twice,” and gave the number. He opened a beer and dialed.
“Fast Eddie,” Skammer said, “how would you like a job?”
“You’re full of surprises.”
“The man who runs the billiard room at the College Union is retiring, and I talked to the dean about hiring you.”
“How many tables?”
“Eight or ten. There’s Ping-Pong, and some other things. Do you know where the building is?”
“Yes.” It was the only modern building he walked by on the way to the Faculty Club.
“Why don’t you drop in tomorrow morning and look it over? The old man’s name is Mayhew.”
“I will,” Eddie said.
Arabella had been serving wine and cheese at a student art show in the university gallery; she didn’t get home until midnight. Eddie didn’t mention the job. When she asked him about Fats he said, “I still can’t beat him.”
“Maybe next time.” She had gone into the bathroom to soak her feet. “I don’t know why I agreed to run those openings. Thelma’s was more interesting.” She began filling the tub.
“Fats says I need to grow up if I want to beat the kids who play nine-ball.”
“That sounds like Heraclitus. The way up is the way down. The way forward is the way back.”
“I don’t like riddles.”
“Sorry,” Arabella said. She splashed water on her ankles and then bent to begin soaping her feet. “I don’t think I’ve ever understood growing up.”
“I was more of an adult at thirty than I am now.”
“You have to be grown-up to see that.”
“You have to be grown-up to do something about it,” Eddie said.
The first thing he saw when he came in the double doors was the row of machines: PacMan, Donkey Kong and Asteroids. They were in a basement anteroom, with a Pepsi dispenser and a row of pay phones. It was nine-thirty in the morning and no one was playing. Eddie walked past the machines, pushed open another pair of double doors and found himself in a poolroom of sorts. There were eight four-by-eight Brunswick tables in front and four Ping-Pong tables in back. Behind them was a row of a half-dozen pinball machines. To his right toward the far end of the room was a counter; behind it stood a sour-looking old man with dirty-looking white hair. He wore a striped shirt and a necktie, and he scowled at Eddie. From the ceiling hung long rows of fluorescent-light fixtures, several of which were flickering. The floor was covered with pale green plastic tile. From a radio on the desk beside the old man came the voice of the morning talk-show host Eddie had listened to, while opening up his own poolroom, for years.
After a minute the man looked in Eddie’s direction and raised his eyebrows. Eddie turned and walked out. He would rather sell used cars than work in a place like that.
The sign said FOLK ART MUSEUM, but the place he parked by looked like a junkyard. There was a fence made of rusted bedsprings, each separate frame decorated with a painted metal cutout in the middle. The one nearest the car showed a man in a sombrero holding a red guitar; next to it was a giant daisy, its yellow center sun-faded and with rust at the edges of the white petals. The entrance, Arabella said, was around at the side. She led him past more cutouts—a top hat, Popeye, a crouched tiger—to a wide gap in the bedsprings, with a giant rabbit head at each side. Eddie looked at these a moment as they went through and saw they were made from the hoods of junked Volkswagens painted pink, with the big ears cut from fenders and welded on. They were not cute rabbit heads; they had wicked grins.
Eddie and Arabella were on the road to Connors, Kentucky, where he hoped to find and play pool with the man called Ousley. This junkyard that Arabella wanted to write about was on the way there.
The area inside the fence was the size of a football field. Filling it like a mad cocktail party were dozens of metal figures, most of them life-size and quasi-human. Near him was a steel woman with an enameled face and enormous breasts; it took Eddie a moment to realize the breasts, painted flesh color, had been made from automobile headlights. The body was car bumpers, the arms were exhaust pipes, the head was a piece of a muffler, and the beehive hairdo was of wires and springs, with sequins glued to the metal. The face had a horrible grin, a grin that was both come-on and deathly. She was dressed in a black rayon slip and stood on a small pedestal made of two-by-fours. On this sat a neatly lettered card reading NEW YORK MODEL.