The big man went on shooting. He was drilling the balls straight in, and he looked good at it. When he had finished the table, slamming the last ball the long diagonal into the far corner pocket, he looked up at Eddie. His face was pale and treacherous-looking, with a pout to the thick lips. He had the weedy beginnings of a mustache. Bobbie Gentry finished and Johnny Cash started, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” Eddie did not like the looks of the man nor the feeling in the buzzed-out barroom, but decided to heed Cash’s words and go with it.
“I heard of you,” Dent said.
Eddie nodded noncommittally. “Do you want to play eight-ball?”
“I expect you mean for money,” Dent said in a drawl, “being as they say you’re a hustler.”
“I started hustling pool thirty years ago,” Eddie said. “I’ll play you eight-ball for fifty a game if you want to play.”
“Shit,” the man said, “you sound mean as a snake, Fast Eddie. Maybe you’re just too good for me.”
Eddie shrugged. “Maybe I am.”
“I’ll try you for fifty.”
“Fine,” Eddie said. He took his glasses from the pocket of his leather jacket and put them on.
They tossed a coin for the break. The other man won it, broke the balls wide and ran half the solids before dogging a thin cut into the corner. Eddie played it carefully and had him beaten in five minutes. He was nervous but he had no trouble controlling the game. The room was silent when he finished. Dent reracked the balls. Then he reached up with the tip of his cue and slid a wooden bead along the string near the back wall, over a big Miller’s High Life poster.
Eddie looked at him.
“Break the balls,” Dent said.
“You owe me fifty dollars.”
“On the string,” Dent said, looking back over his shoulder toward it. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a clump of bills fastened with a money clip in the shape of a naked woman, and flashed it for Eddie. “Okay?”
“It’s the way we do it here,” the young man at the bar said.
Eddie shrugged, stepped to the table and broke the balls. He ran four of the solids and then missed deliberately, leaving Dent an easy shot on two stripes. Dent ambled heavily up to the table and began shooting; he made all the stripes and then pocketed the eight. Eddie felt annoyed at himself for making it that easy. The man was good enough without help. He would play it straight and not throw off; he would beat this man, with his dangerous baby face, his hostile, shifting eyes, until he quit.
It was difficult at first. Dent shot eight-ball well, but Eddie bore down and beat him, gradually adding beads to the string. His stroke was better than it had been for years, better even than during the long run against Fats at Albuquerque; he bent and shot, bent and shot, and the balls kept falling in. He won six in a row before Dent set his cue against the wall and took a huge sheepskin coat from a hook near it. He put the coat on, his back to Eddie.
Eddie looked up at the string. There were twelve beads pushed over to his side of it. He looked toward Norton Dent, even huger in the coat, and began taking his cue apart.
“You owe me six hundred dollars, Norton,” Eddie said.
Dent turned slowly. His voice was soft, almost amiable. “You’ve got to collect it.”
Eddie had the cue in two pieces now. He set the smaller one, the shaft, on the table. He took off his glasses and set them beside it. “Is that how you pay what you owe, Norton?” he said levelly. The danger was palpable, but he ignored it, did not care about it. He wanted to kill this oaf.
Dent took a step closer. Behind him, every man in the room was staring at them, waiting.
“I don’t pay what I don’t have to pay,” Dent said, “you pool-shark piece of shit.”
For a moment Eddie felt a horrible weariness, heard an old voice saying Do I have to do all this? He gripped the small end of the cue butt, stepped forward and swung hard, going for the side of the man’s head.
Dent was young, and faster than he looked. He ducked and turned; the stick fell across the collar of his coat. With his free arm Eddie rammed him in the stomach, cursing the coat that would soften the blow and knowing it wasn’t going to work, that he was going to get hurt. Maybe the others at the bar would stop the man.
Immediately Dent’s weight was on him, wrapping him in a bear hug, the greasy smell of the coat in his face. He dropped the cue butt and got in one solid punch against the side of the man’s nose before the sheer weight on his body held him down and a blow crashed against his neck and seemed to explode intolerably in his head.
He came to as some men were putting him into the backseat of his car. He was numb and could not see well. The men had been talking, and one of them was saying, “You can follow us and pick me up.” It was the young man, the one who had been presiding over this whole thing from the start. He was talking to a man in a red baseball cap. “Where to?” the man in the cap said.
The young man seemed friendly and sympathetic now. His coldness had gone. “You’ll be all right,” he said to Eddie in a confidential tone of voice. “Have you got a place to spend the night?”
“The Bonnie Brae.”
“Give me his pool stick and glasses,” the young man said to the one in the baseball cap. An older man was standing next to him, watching with solicitude. Eddie was sitting in the car, with the door beside him closed and the window down. The young man climbed into the driver’s seat. The man in the cap put Eddie’s cue case through the window and Eddie took it. He followed with the glasses. “Let me have your keys,” the young man said. Everything seemed friendly, well-organized. It was as though they did this every day of their lives. Eddie felt his face for blood, but there wasn’t any. He reached into his jacket pocket, found the keys, handed them up to the driver. “Pump the gas pedal first,” he said.
“You got him in the eye,” the old man said. “He’s a rough son of a bitch.”
Eddie leaned back in his seat, beginning to feel the pain in his body. He worked his hands a minute. They were all right. Nothing broken.
“My god!” Arabella said. “Did you get drunk?”
“I got beaten up.”
“I think you bloody did.”
It was after midnight, but she was able to get a first-aid kit from the motel office and put Bactine and Band-Aids on the cuts across his back, from the poolroom floor. He had bruises, but there was nothing to do about them. A blotchy place was developing on the side of his neck, and there was a smaller bruise on his forehead. He hurt badly in three places and his head throbbed. He was still dizzy. In the bathroom mirror his face looked terrible. “That gross son of a bitch,” he said. “I’d like to go back there and break his thumbs.”
“How horrible,” Arabella said.
“It would hurt like hell.” He came into the bedroom, limping slightly. His right leg was getting stiff. Arabella’s typewriter sat on the table with a stack of paper and the coffee-maker beside it. The plastic curtain over the closed window had the same design of boomerangs that the restaurant table had. On the dresser next to the TV sat the wine bottle. He poured himself a glassful carefully, using the hand that was the least sore, and then took a long swallow. He turned to look at her sitting against the bed pillows. “When we go back,” he said, “I’ll take the job.”