“Fats is dead,” he said as soon as he had set his bag and cue case down. “He made it to Indianapolis but he died before the match.” He went into the kitchen and got himself a beer.
“It’s a shock,” Arabella said. “A real shock.”
Eddie poured beer into a glass and watched the foam settle. “Even dead,” he said, “the son of a bitch looked good.”
Arabella smiled faintly. “I wish I’d met him.” She hesitated a moment. “Something came while you were gone.” She walked to the Korean chest in the living room and took a large, thin package from it.
It was postmarked Miami. In the upper left was a return address but no name. Eddie opened it and slid out a big color photograph. He held it near a lamp and looked.
Against matted trees on a white beach two roseate spoonbills stood on alarmingly thin legs. One of them had begun to hunch its wings up from its body. Its bill inclined upward; its eyes looked toward the sky. The other bird, slightly behind, watched, as if waiting to see what would happen when those pink-tipped wings began to beat the air.
Babes Cooley was a small young man, thin-hipped and thin-wristed, but his nine-ball break was like a sledgehammer. Balls spun themselves, ricocheted, caromed off rails; three fell in. He looked at the spread with contempt, thought a moment and began to mop them up. He nudged the one into the side, clipped the two into the far corner, sliced the five down the rail. His position for each was impeccable. When it came to the nine, he drilled it into the nearby corner pocket as though with a rifle. There was applause. As the woman referee racked them up, Babes looked at the man he was playing and said, “Your troubles have just begun.” The man looked away.
Eddie sat on the top row of the three-level bleachers, his cue on his lap, watching. Beside him an old black man was chuckling at Cooley’s arrogance, clearly liking it. Four games were going on at the tables below, with the first eight players having their first round. There were four rounds this opening day; each of the thirty-two entrants was slated for one match of ten nine-ball games. By midnight sixteen would be in the losers bracket and sixteen in the winners. It started again the next day at noon, with losers playing losers; after two rounds of that, eight men would be permanently out of the tournament. Then, after dinner, the winners from this evening would begin their matches. The system was called double elimination; it required a man to lose twice before he was out of it.
This was the first pool tournament Eddie had entered in his life. When he was young, the great hustlers—Wimpy Lassiter, Ed Taylor, Fats—would not have dreamed of going public. Nine-ball tournaments hadn’t even existed. Straight pool for coverage by newspapers had been left to the Willie Mosconis and Andrew Ponzis, superb players too, who donned evening dress and played in hotel ballrooms in New York or Chicago. They made a living from that and from a few endorsements, from a salary as showmen for the Brunswick Company, from giving exhibitions in colleges, publishing slim books with titles like Championship Pocket Billiards. While they tried to dignify the game of pool, to obliterate the memory of whatever smoky rooms they had learned it in—rooms that were always in the worst part of the worst towns—another network of professionals known only to a few had moved around some of those very rooms and others like them, in affable anonymity, men capable of as much pool-table dazzle as their tuxedoed counterparts, but dressed in brown suits like salesmen or in laborers’ dark green, travelling, looking for action. Eddie had joined that incognito fraternity and had, for a brief time in his life, been its finest player.
In front of him, Babes Cooley moved from shot to shot with tight-lipped assurance, lit by bright fluorescents set into a ceiling of gritty Celotex. Babes was dressed gorgeously in a slick blue nylon running outfit, with red racing stripes on the pants and blue Nike shoes, as though he were a basketball player warming up. His opponent was a stolid local man in a brown sweater; he seemed assiduously to ignore the flash of his opponent as he sat in a chair against the far wall and waited to shoot. From the looks of Babes’ game he would have a while to wait.
On each side of this table, other matches were in progress. Two intense young men in tight blue jeans were at one; at the other, a weary man, older than Eddie, watched a youngster in his late teens who was taking a maddeningly long time between shots. The older man had looked familiar when the players were drawing their first-round positions a half hour before, and Eddie saw now with a start that he knew him. It was Gunshot Oliver from Kansas City, a legend from Eddie’s earliest days. When Eddie was fifteen, Gunshot had come through Oakland and played for two nights at Charlie’s; he was the first travelling hustler Eddie had ever seen. This man, waiting with a kind of bleak irritation for the high-strung younger man to shoot, was the first player Eddie had ever seen who exerted the professional’s quiet control over the cue ball, easing it off rails and ducking it between other balls to arrive at position in new and shocking ways. The way he bent to shoot and the steadiness of his stroke had opened Eddie’s eyes. Oliver shot all night against the best local hustler, a man Eddie would not be able to beat for another year, and by three in the morning was playing him at odds of one fifty to a hundred balls. By that time, Gunshot’s name was being spoken reverently by the dozen people watching and Gunshot himself was running seventy or eighty balls at a time with unwearied precision. It had thrilled Eddie’s young, ambitious soul.
The kid playing Gunshot now finally shot the three ball down the rail and missed. He shook his head and grimaced, probably blaming the table or the cloth or the lights, telling himself one of the weary stories of how he had been cheated of the ball. Oliver stood and walked slowly over to the table, limping slightly. When he bent to shoot, his back was to the bleachers; his unshined black shoes were run over at the heels; and there was a small hole in one of his socks. The kid had been lucky and left him safe. Oliver tapped the three ball lightly, trying to snooker the other player behind the five. But the tap was too strong, and the white ball bounced off the rail and out from behind the five, leaving the other man open on the three. Oliver scowled and seated himself.
Suddenly Eddie remembered something. That night in Oakland thirty-five years ago, after Gunshot Oliver had collected the last of the fifty-dollar bills—had broken the bank, such as it was—the man who lost to him said, “You shoot the best straights I’ve ever seen,” and Oliver had smiled faintly at him. “Have you ever seen Minnesota Fats?” he asked quietly. It was the first time Eddie had heard the name.
“I’ve heard of him,” the loser said.
“The best in the country,” Oliver said.
Fats was dead. It had seemed impossible then that a player like Gunshot Oliver—a man who calmly pocketed balls that Eddie had thought could not be made, a man who played position by moving the cue ball around as though it were a chess piece to set where he wanted it—would, by invoking a name, imply a level of play even beyond his own. Eddie had never played Oliver, had never seen him since that time, but in a few years he had moved beyond him, had learned to make his own chessman of the cue ball. Oliver was right about Fats. There were levels above levels, and Fats was at the top. Now he was in a fresh grave near Miami, probably under a headstone that read GEORGE HEGERMAN and gave dates, with no indication of the lovely stroke that had died with him.
Babes Cooley clipped the nine into the side, making it register in the pocket. He looked innocently at the seated man whom he was playing and said, “It just keeps on getting worse.”