“I don’t know if you do, Eddie. His chest was crushed. His family hated me and I wasn’t asked to the funeral. For several months, with my knees bandaged, I felt that I could not leave Harrison, no matter what.”
Eddie was lighting a cigarette. “Let me have that,” she said, and took it. “I didn’t have any bloody money. I had a C D worth three thousand dollars. There was four hundred in my checking account. It took a year to work up the courage to walk out. I’m scared to death of not having money.”
Eddie lit another cigarette. “Me too,” he said.
“I know.”
“Do you want to run the folk-art business, while I travel?”
“Are you going to travel?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “After tonight things will be clearer. Right now I’m unsure.”
“About pool?”
“I still don’t know if I can make a living at it, by playing tournaments.” He looked at her sitting by him, at her cheeks, bright red from the cold. “I’m not sure about us.”
She frowned and blinked. “I wasn’t sure either, until I bought the airplane ticket to Reno.”
“And you’re sure now?”
“I threw those newspapers away.”
He thought a long moment before he spoke. “If I had some, I’d throw them away too.”
She looked at him. “It sounds like a deal.”
Even from the doorway, with the bleachers between him and the one pool table, it was different. The lights were twice as bright as before; and when he pushed through the crowd that packed the space between bleachers, he could see the reason for the lights: television. There was a twenty-foot steel boom above the playing area, with a camera and floodlights hanging from it. Two strangers stood talking to each other by the table, oblivious of the waiting crowd. They both wore blue nylon jackets with a shoulder patch circle reading ABC. It was “Wide World of Sports.” They had never picked up the show with Fats, but here they were now. The sons of bitches. Three cameras sat on wheels around the table, each with a man in a nylon jacket by it. On the speakers’ table was a row of TV monitors.
He did not see Borchard. It was one-fifty. Arabella had asked Cooley’s girl to save her a seat, and she went to it now. Eddie walked out to the table, squinting as he came under the warm spotlights. Clearly the TV people weren’t ready, but it might be good to get used to the brightness. The men in blue jackets ignored him. The two at the table were bent over a clipboard; when Eddie came near they looked up and then back, preoccupied. He was just getting annoyed when he saw Borchard pushing through the crowd between the bleachers. People began to applaud. The TV men stopped what they were doing. One of them waved at Borchard and the two walked over to him and huddled in conversation. The applause became louder. Eddie opened his case and got out the Balabushka.
Twenty minutes passed, during which Eddie seated himself in one of the two swivel chairs set up for the players, drank a glass of water and tried to be calm. The TV people in their glossy jackets acted as though they were the stars. Their boom, their rubber-wheeled mounts with the heavy gray cameras on them, their thick rubber cables, their monitors and their clipboards had become the show. Eventually one of the jacketed men came over to him and checked the pronunciation of his last name, and then said, “It’s Fast Eddie, right?” Eddie said yes. The boom was only a few feet above the table. The young man in jeans stood by the supports at each end; they began cranking metal handles. The boom slowly rose higher, as if readying for a circus act. After it stopped a foot below the ceiling, someone at the desk worked controls and the camera moved, pointing its lens down toward the table. Borchard, who looked like a stagehand himself in his jeans and workshirt, had been talking with some women in the front row of the bleachers; he came over now and sat on the swivel chair by the little table that held water, two towels, an ashtray and pool chalk. He did not look in Eddie’s direction.
The camera on the boom began wiggling, pointing off toward the wall. Eddie looked at his watch. Two-thirty.
The PA sputtered and came on. “We apologize for the delay. The television people tell me their overhead camera must be replaced and we won’t be able to start for about an hour. We’re sorry for the inconvenience.”
“Shit,” Borchard said.
Eddie stood up. Arabella climbed down from her seat and walked over. “Let’s get a cup of coffee,” she said.
Eddie looked at her. “I need to be alone for a while.” She shrugged. “Sure. I’ll get a drink.”
There were about a dozen people in the swimming pool and more working out in the gym, but the whirlpool was empty. Eddie eased himself into it, rested his back along the edge, let his chin lie on his chest and gently closed his eyelids. It didn’t work. He still felt the knot in his stomach, the sense of powerlessness. It was the TV people, with their preoccupation and delays, their arrogant busyness. They were only technicians. They weren’t taking any risks, putting themselves on the line. The sons of bitches. His head ached with it.
He would have to be back there in forty minutes, and he did not want to go back. For a moment he lay in the whirlpool feeling frightened and old. The hot water gushed and foamed over his body. Gradually the knot in his stomach eased a little. He listened to the water surging, began to hear the music from ceiling speakers, let his body go limp, feeling himself bob to the movement of the water. For a few minutes, miraculously, he fell asleep—or so near to sleep that he would not have known where he was.
When he walked back into the ballroom, the nine balls were in the wooden rack and the referee had put the lag balls out. Borchard was standing by the table. As Eddie took out his cue and put it together, the announcer introduced them to the crowd. Eddie barely listened to the words. His hands with the cue were steady.
His lag was perfect and his break overwhelming. The nine came off the bottom rail and rolled the length of the table. Although it did not go in, two other balls did. As he studied the layout a cameraman wheeled closer, while another kneeled a few feet away, pointing a camera up at Eddie’s face. Eddie ignored them. He ran the balls and pocketed the nine. The crowd was huge and its applause loud. Eddie lit a cigarette, watching the referee rack. Borchard was seated, looking at nothing in particular. Arabella sat in the stands, her face intent on the table; up above her, in the back row of the bleachers, sat Boomer. Eddie put his cigarette in the ashtray, picked up the twenty-three-ounce cue, and broke. The nine fell in the corner pocket. He went back to his cigarette while the referee racked. If you hit the balls right, they fell into the pockets. He broke and ran the rack, sending the cue ball around the table when necessary the way the younger men had done, not worrying about the speed of it or the possibility of a scratch. It stopped each time exactly where he wanted it to stop. Three-nothing.
But on the fourth break, though his power was there and the balls rolled energetically, nothing fell into a pocket. Nothing. Even worse, the cue ball stopped where the one ball was easy. Eddie stared at the table for a moment. There was nothing to do about it. He walked over to the chair and seated himself. Borchard got up.
The thing about pool was that no matter how up you were for it, no matter how ready your soul—as Eddie’s soul was ready—and no matter how dead your stroke, if the other man was shooting it made no difference. His arm ached to be making the balls himself but he had to sit, had to watch another man play pool.
And the other man’s game was inspired. Borchard—that delicate, quiet Eastern country boy with his heavy, drooping mustache and his crepe-soled shoes—seemed to have the balls on a string. He didn’t look at the crowd or the referee or at Eddie, but bent his entire attention on the nine balls and eased them one after another into the pockets with his cue ball always stopping exactly where it should stop. He chalked after every shot and his small eyes never left the table. The cameramen danced their slow dance in and out and around him and the table; the audience applauded louder and louder after each sinking of the nine ball; and Borchard’s expression and concentration did not change. He made the nine six times before a bad roll on the break made him play safe. The score was six-three. Borchard needed only four games. Eddie needed seven. Eddie stood up.