“It’s been over twenty years,” Eddie said. “The kids never heard of us. All the big old places are torn down and they play eight-ball on coin tables in bars. It’s all different.”
“Don’t tell me about it.”
“How do you make it now?”
“Investments. Money-market funds and double-A bonds.”
“You’ve got room in here for a pool table.”
“I don’t want a pool table,” Fats said. “Walking around a pool table hurts my feet.”
“You shot the best straights I ever saw,” Eddie said.
“You beat me.”
“I should have stayed with Bert Gordon, even if he wanted half the money.” Eddie looked away toward the wall where a half-dozen large photographs of shore birds hung. “I scuffed in the little places for a few years and then I bought the poolroom and got married. It was stupid. But they’d have broken my arms if I’d played anything important, and I wasn’t going to give them half my money.”
“It’s drugs and prostitution now,” Fats said, “and the Teamsters.”
Eddie leaned forward. “I want to do this, Fats. I want to get back in it again.”
Fats looked at him a moment and then spoke. “I’ll do it for eight hundred a game and ten dollars more on the meals.”
“It would have to come out of my share.”
“That’s right.”
Chapter Two
It was so hot when he unlocked the front door and walked in that he had to go back out to the parking lot after turning on the air conditioner. He waited in Freddie’s Card Shop next door for ten minutes and then went back into the poolroom. The twelve tables were covered with gray plastic. The ad would be in the paper tomorrow. The fat son of a bitch was going to get two hundred dollars of his money for every game of straight pool they played. And these good Brunswick tables with green wool baize on them were going to be sold. He had brushed the surface of each one carefully every morning for years; now they would wind up in the basements of doctors’ houses or in fraternity game rooms at the university. Nobody would ever tip the cues properly again and sandpaper the edges of the tips and then rub them with leather to keep them from spreading out. People didn’t know how to do that kind of thing anymore. He had been forced to put the last new baize on the tables himself with a tack hammer and a cloth stretcher, because the old man who did it before had died and there was no one to replace him. A damned shame. And now it was half Martha’s, along with the apartment and the car. But no alimony; she had known him too well to go for that. First Martha, then Minnesota Fats; he could not seem to keep a grip on what was his. Bert had called him a born loser twenty years ago, and Bert as usual was right. For all he knew he was the best pool player ever to pick up a cue, and here he was at fifty, nearly broke.
He stood for a long moment looking around at the heavy tables, the cue racks on the walls, the metal talcum dispensers, the brown Olefin carpeting bought when half-drunk and never installed right, the Coke machine, cigarette machine, a stain on the green of Number Three, worn pockets on Seven, a loose cushion on Four, the table where a long roll on the right always had the ball curving off toward the rail. Behind the desk were a cash register; a Metropolitan Museum of Art calendar bought by mail by Martha and displaying a masterpiece on every page; four unread paperbacks, one by Graham Greene. On the desk sat an electronic time clock with a digital readout for each table and a by-the-hour setting that had gone up steadily for a dozen years; it was set now for two dollars an hour. The whole room was a rectangular box, its walls of yellow concrete block, its floor brown, its ceiling made of smoke-stained Celotex squares—all of it as familiar as the palm of Eddie’s right hand, as familiar as a divorced wife.
He lifted the hinged part of the desk by the cash register and went back to the near-empty rack of private cues along the back wall above the radio. He got the key from his pocket and unlocked the middle one. It was a nine-hundred-dollar Balabushka with a linen-wrapped butt and a flawless maple front end. Its long ivory point was perfectly tipped in French leather; its center joint was polished steel. The cue felt good in his hand. It strengthened him. He unscrewed it carefully, found its snakeskin case under the desk, slid the two pieces in and strapped the cover down with its brass buckle. He turned off the air conditioner and the lights, and left carrying his cue. He did not look back.
His plane was late and he had to go directly to the shopping center, with the cue case and nylon bag beside him in the cab. The air conditioner didn’t work properly; by the time the driver pulled into the huge parking lot, Eddie’s shirt was stuck to his back with sweat and he was coughing from too many cigarettes. It was one forty-five; they would begin at two. Above the entrance to a huge Sears store hung a banner reading GRAND OPENING. Below it was a smaller banner: FAST EDDIE MEETS MINNESOTA FATS! And under this, TWO P.M. THURSDAY. ADMISSION FREE.
The table sat right out on the parking lot, on a wooden platform a foot high. It was surrounded by temporary bleachers with a few people in them. Four small black girls sat on the platform looking somber. In the bleachers were more kids, mostly black, climbing around and shouting. Eddie’s stomach sank. There was a canvas canopy over the table to protect from rain or direct sun, but there was no protection from kids, from the sounds of traffic, from the unsettling oddness of daylight. The table was like a toy in the bright light. A little four-by-eight with a stupid red cloth. A woman’s table.
A television camera on a rubber-tired dolly sat at the side of the table, and another at the end. The contract had said three but there was no third in view. Eddie looked at his watch. Five till two. Fats was nowhere in sight. He walked up to the platform. The black girls stared up at him, their eyes wide. There was a man standing there wearing a brown suit and a sports shirt. “I’m Felson,” Eddie said.
“Fast Eddie?” The man looked at his watch.
“Yes.”
“Where’s your partner?”
“He’ll be here.” Eddie set his cue case on the table and then felt the cloth with his fingertips. It was slick and thin, at least fifty-percent synthetic. But he’d played on worse. The wooden platform was wide enough to hold the cameras and keep them out of the players’ way, but there were heavy black cables. They ran across a few feet of asphalt to a green panel truck parked at a corner where the bleachers met. The truck had big letters reading WKAB—MIAMI. A man sitting in the cab waved at him and smiled. Eddie had seen none of these people before and had no wish to talk to them. People had been drifting in ever since his arrival, but the bleachers were still mostly empty. He glanced at his watch. Two o’clock. He looked past the panel truck at the shopping-mall lot. A long gray limousine had just pulled in from the highway and was coming toward them. There was another open space between sets of bleachers on the other side; the limousine drove through this and pulled up in front of the platform. A chauffeur in gray uniform got out, walked around and opened the door. A beautifully dressed, enormously fat man stepped out. It was Fats. He wore a dark blue cotton suit that fit him perfectly, a white shirt and a red tie. There was applause from the stands. With his cue case under his arm in the way a British banker might carry a rolled newspaper, Fats stepped nimbly up on the platform, nodded pleasantly to Eddie. He held his hand out to the man in the brown suit and the man shook it. The limousine pulled away slowly. Fats opened his case and took out the two pieces of his cue. “Let’s shoot pool, Fast Eddie,” he said.
The man in the brown suit was clearly some kind of manager, but he merely stepped off the platform when Fats spoke. He crossed the empty space of asphalt and seated himself in the second row of bleachers. The stands were about a third full now, and everyone was quiet—even the children. The black girls had moved from the platform and were sitting in a row on the second bleacher seat. They wore pinafores and had bright ribbons in their hair; they looked absorbed in what was about to happen.