After the match Eddie shook Boomer’s hand.
“Son of a bitch,” Boomer said. “Bastard blew past me like a monsoon.”
Eddie went back to a practice table and began to shoot. Watching Borchard, he had noticed some things about the way the younger man played position, shooting the cue ball without English and at medium speed, letting the cushion control the rolling far more than a straight-pool player would. He wanted to try it himself. It was tricky; it violated things Eddie had learned thirty years before; but he kept it, thinking if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, and shooting the cue ball without English and at medium speed, trying to kill it in corners and off the side rail. It took awhile but he was getting it.
He practiced three hours before going to lunch. On his way to the French restaurant he stopped at a blackjack table for twenty minutes and won six hundred dollars, drawing the right card every time he hit. It was luck again, and he was wise enough to know it was only luck, since the odds of the game were against him. He took his money and had the best lunch on the menu, drinking Perrier instead of wine. He wanted his head clear for practice afterward. He was getting a grip on nine-ball; he could feel it in his stomach. He wanted to keep shooting, watching the way he could make the cue ball set itself down for position on the next ball, and the next.
On his way back to the ballroom he walked past the blackjack tables without looking for a seat, and as he approached the final gambling area on his way to the tournament he heard a familiar gravelly voice shout, “On the come, Sweet Jesus!” and looked over at a crap table and there was Boomer throwing the dice, putting his whole body into it.
Eddie stopped. Boomer was no longer wearing his nine-ball clothes. The silk shirt and tight pants were gone; he had on wrinkled brown corduroys, a tan work shirt and scuffed lumberjack boots. On his head was an olive drab Aussie hat—an Anzac hat with a safety pin in the side of the brim. His sleeves were rolled up over hairy arms and his broad, ugly face was fervid. “Do me now!” he shouted as the dice came to rest, and then his face twisted sourly. “Craps,” said the man in the tuxedo behind the table. “Pass the dice.” Eddie went on to the ballroom.
He racked the balls and broke them as hard as he could, going for the nine. It moved only a few inches. He racked them again, broke again. The nine went to the side rail and bounced, then stopped. He racked again and broke, and then again. This time the nine fell in. The swing had to be controlled and yet be as strong as he could make it. He broke with top English and with draw, and with no English at all, and kept breaking until he felt he had the stroke right. In a game of straight pool you would never hit anything that hard, but this wasn’t straight pool. After getting the break down to where he wanted it, he began spreading the balls wide with his hand, setting them up for a run that required the cue ball to make a tour of the table. He was weak there too, because you didn’t play three-rail position in straight pool, chasing colored balls from one end to the other and back again. He kept at this until eight o’clock. His shoulder was killing him, but he had learned something. He looked up as he was taking his cue apart and there was Boomer, wearing his nine-ball clothes again and carrying his cue stick. Boomer’s silk shirt was electric blue and his pants were white. The hat was gone.
“You’re a virtuous son of a bitch,” Boomer said. “You been here all day. Or night, or whatever it is.”
“How’d you do?”
“Let’s have a drink.”
Eddie felt his right shoulder. “I need the Jacuzzi.”
“They got one of those?”
Eddie nodded.
“Let’s get a drink and go to the Jacuzzi.”
As they went through the casino Eddie said, “I saw you shooting craps.”
“So did the whole fucking world. I make a god-damned spectacle of myself at a crap table. Always did. I was born to be an engineer. Gambling is no work for a man of my gifts.”
“How’d you do?”
Boomer stuffed his hands into his pockets. “I got eliminated.”
“At craps or at pool?”
“At both.” He nodded his head contemptuously toward the crap table they were passing. “That Makepiece, the one you had sitting on his hands, shot nine-ball against me like a fucking sorcerer.” He shook his head. “I’m broke.” They headed down the hallway that led to the pool. “When they play against me they play like demons. I’d do better assembling radios.”
Eddie reached in his pocket and took out two of the hundreds he had won at blackjack. “Here. You can pay me back next time.”
“Thanks,” Boomer said, scowling.
“I owe you,” Eddie said. “You were right about nine-ball.”
They had the whirlpool bath to themselves. Boomer was wiry, hairy and pale, and he got into the water with finicky care. They leaned against the tiles side by side with a few feet of space between them, and Boomer drank Drambuies one after the other while Eddie nursed a single Manhattan. The water eased Eddie’s shoulder and the drink helped relax him.
After his third drink Boomer had cheered up a bit. He stretched out his legs under the frothy water, stuck the toes up out of it and began wiggling them. “I need to quit this life,” he said, “this goddamned gambling foolishness. I’m too old for it.”
“How old are you?”
“Thirty-seven.”
“I’m fifty, Boomer.”
Boomer rolled his head over to look at Eddie. He was still wiggling his toes. “We’re different,” he said. “I like gambling, but winning isn’t all that much to me. I like to fool around.”
“What about me?”
“Well,” Boomer said, “you may not be comfortable with it, but you’re a winner.”
Eddie looked at him a moment. “Have another Drambuie,” he said.
The next morning he lost. He did as he had the day before; slept soundly, worked out, swam, ate breakfast and arrived at the ballroom feeling strong and ready. The young man he was paired with was named Willy Plummer; he was the third-place winner from last year and the titleholder of this year’s West Coast Nine-Ball Open. He was small and thin, and he shot pool like a machine. He seemed unable to miss. Eddie played a better game of nine-ball than he had played before in his life and he lost the match ten-seven. There was nothing to do but shake the man’s small hand and then go to the chart on the wall behind the bleachers and see where his name came up on the losers’ bracket.
He would have one match that evening against someone named Hastings, and then, if he was still in it, three more the next day. And three after that. He took a deep breath. He had been pushed back into the swamp; he would have to fight his way out to get back in the air. A lot of people like Boomer had been eliminated, and all the easy marks were gone, even from the losers’ bracket. It would be uphill all the way, and very tight at the top.
Chapter Nine
He lay back and tried to focus his attention on the hot water coursing across his shoulders and on the bank of ferns along the wall in front of him, but the memory of the lost match would not go away; it was in him like an infection. He could see Willy Plummer at the table making shot after shot, in control of the game, imperturbable, while he himself sat at the little table a few feet away and watched helplessly. He had never heard of Willy Plummer before. Willy Plummer was not the player that Earl Borchard or Babes Cooley were, and he dressed like a pimp. Green sharkskin pants and a gray silk shirt with brown squares on it. Narrow Italian shoes. Pale cheeks and pale hands. Plummer made the nine once on a combination that brought the bleacher crowd to its feet applauding; he made bank shots and kick-ins, sent his cue ball flying around the table to stop on a dime.