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He looked back at the great fat man. “I’m the best,” he said, “no matter who wins.”

“We’ll see,” Fats said, and he broke the balls.

* * *

When Eddie looked at the clock again it was a little past midnight. He lost two in a row. Then he won one, lost one, won another—all of them close scores. The pain in his right upper arm seemed to glow outward from the bone and his shoulder was a lump of heat with swollen blood vessels around it and the cue stick seemed to mush into the cue ball when he hit it. And the balls no longer clicked when they hit one another but seemed to hit as if they were made of balsa wood. But he still could not miss the balls; it was still ridiculous that anyone could miss them; and his eyes saw the balls in sharp, brilliant detail although there seemed to be no longer a range of sensitivity to his vision. He felt he could see in the dark or could look at, stare into, the sun—the brightest sun at full noon—and stare it out of the sky.

He did not miss; but when he played safe, now, the cue ball did not always freeze against the rail or against a cluster of balls as he wanted it to. Once, at a critical time in a game, when he had to play safe, the cue ball rolled an inch too far and left Fats an open shot and Fats ran sixty-odd balls and out. And later, during what should have been a big run, he miscalculated a simple, one-rail position roll and had to play for defense. Fats won that game too. When he did, Eddie said, “You fat son of a bitch, you make mistakes expensive.”

But he kept on making them. He would still make large numbers of balls but something would go wrong and he would throw the advantage away. And Fats didn’t make mistakes. Not ever. And then Charlie came over after a game, and said, “Eddie, you still got the ten thousand. But that’s all. Let’s quit and go home. Let’s go to bed.”

Eddie did not look at him. “No,” he said.

“Look, Eddie,” he said, his voice soft, tired, “what is it you want to do? You beat him. You beat him bad. You want to kill yourself?”

Eddie looked up at him. “What’s the matter, Charlie?” he said, trying to grin at him. “You chicken?”

Charlie looked back at him for a minute before he spoke. “Yeah,” he said, “maybe that’s it. I’m chicken.”

“Okay. Then go home. Give me the money.”

“Go to hell.”

Eddie held his hand out. “Give me the money, Charlie. It’s mine.”

Charlie just looked at him. Then he reached in his pocket and pulled out a tremendous roll of money, wrinkled bills rolled up and wrapped with a heavy rubber band.

“Here,” he said. “Be a goddamn fool.”

Eddie stuffed the roll in his pocket. When he stood up to play he looked down at himself. It seemed grossly funny; one pocket bulging with a whiskey bottle, the other with paper money.

It took a slight effort to pick up his cue and start playing again; but after he was started the playing did not seem to stop. He did not even seem to be aware of the times when he was sitting down and Fats was shooting, seemed always to be at the table himself, stroking with his bruised, screaming arm, watching the bright little balls roll and spin and twist their ways about the table. But, although he was hardly aware that Fats was shooting, he knew that he was losing, that Fats was winning more games than he was. And when the janitor came in to open up the poolroom and sweep the floor and they had to stop playing for a few minutes while he swept the cigarette butts from around the table, Eddie sat down to count his money. He could not count it, could not keep track of what he had counted; but he could see that the roll was much smaller than it had been when Charlie gave it to him. He looked at Fats and said, “You fat bastard. You fat lucky bastard,” but Fats said nothing.

And then, after a game, Eddie counted off a thousand dollars to Fats, holding the money on the table, under the light, and when he had counted off the thousand he saw that there were only a few bills left. This did not seem right, and he had to look for a moment before he realized what it meant. Then he counted them. There was a hundred-dollar bill, two fifties, a half-dozen twenties and some tens and ones.

Something happened in his stomach. A fist had clamped on something in his stomach and was twisting it.

“All right,” he said. “All right, Fats. We’re not through yet. We’ll play for two hundred. Two hundred dollars a game.” He looked at Fats, blinking now, trying to bring his eyes to focus on the huge man across the table from him. “Two hundred dollars. That’s a hustler’s game of pool.”

Fats was unscrewing his cue, unfastening the brass joint in its center. He looked at Eddie. “The game’s over,” he said.

Eddie leaned over the table, letting his hand fall on the cue ball. “You can’t quit me,” he said.

Fats did not even look at him. “Watch,” he said.

Eddie looked around. The crowd was beginning to leave the table, men were shuffling away, breaking up into little groups, talking. Charlie was walking toward him, his hands in his pockets. The distance between them seemed very great, as though he were looking down a long hallway.

Abruptly, Eddie pushed himself away from the table, clutching the cue ball in his hand. He felt himself staggering. “Wait!” he said. Somehow, he could not see, and the sounds were all melting into one another. “Wait!” He could barely hear his own voice. Somehow, he swung his arm, his burning, swollen, throbbing right arm, and he heard the cue ball crash against the floor and then he was on the floor himself and could see nothing but a lurching motion around him, unclear patterns of light swinging around his head, and he was vomiting, on the floor and on the front of his shirt…

7

He awoke at four o’clock in the morning. He awoke with perspiration sticky on his face and with the taste of acid and vomit in his mouth, awoke from a long dream of a bright light and a thousand spinning colored balls, awoke but kept his mind, for minutes, at the edge of the remembrance of what had happened before he had come back to the hotel and had fallen into bed.

And then he tried to sit up—still not letting himself remember—and the surprise of the pain in his arms and his back, together with the unreality of awaking at four o’clock in the morning in a strange city, perspiring, wearing shoes in bed, the surprise of these things jarred the memory loose and it took hold of him, burning. He fell back and stared into the darkness, every scene of his stupidity and arrogance before him, in sharp detail, seen as clearly, as circumscribed by his own free will and choice to be a fool, as had the circle of light above the table at Bennington’s encompassed the ground where he had chosen—deliberately and with no one else to blame—to play the fool and play him well.

But this kind of vision does not last long. Maybe the light is too bright, too clear, and hurts the eyes. Eddie Felson pushed himself up painfully in bed and sat on the edge of it, his mind now a blank, waiting for the thick, phlegmatic ache at the base of his brain and the ache that burned the length of his right arm to go away. But they did not and he had to force himself erect. He did not feel that he could stand the light to be on and he shuffled and bumped his way across the room and into the bathroom. His feet felt as if they had been swathed with thick bandages and stuffed into his shoes. He managed to turn the water faucet on and stick his head under it. The water was hot, and he fumbled with the faucets, adjusting it. Then he withdrew his head, sopping, and groped for a towel. He turned the light on and, after a minute of squinting, looked in the mirror.