Oddly, the surprise of them was only slight. They were twisted grotesquely, and the thumbs were askew. Above the knuckle of his right thumb there was a broken piece of bone showing, white, tinged with dark brown along one edge. There were a few blots of brown blood on his shirt sleeve and there was blood, like dried and cracking glue, on his wrist.
But they seemed to be someone else’s hands, not his own. Or like so much ruined meat. And there was no pain in them….
He thought at first that Sarah was going to cry out when she saw him. She was reading when he came in, wearing her glasses and frowning, probably very drunk; but when she saw him her eyes flew wide.
“My God,” she said.
He sat down. And suddenly he felt a tenseness in his stomach; it was beginning to start in his hands. The pain. “Get me a drink,” he said.
“Sure.” She got up quickly, no sign of drunkenness in her movement, poured a tumbler half full of bourbon and brought it to him. He did not have to tell her to hold it for him. He drank half of it and told her that was enough.
“How… do you feel?” she said.
“I don’t know.”
Her eyes had the puzzled look, and she was studying his face strangely. “What happened to you?”
“A lot of things.” He was beginning to feel lightheaded now, and bodiless. And, somehow, he was calm, calmer than he ever remembered having been. Nothing was very real. “I got beat up.” Even his own voice sounded as if it were imaginary. “They broke my thumbs.”
There was an incredulous look on her small face, a twisted and hurt look, and abruptly he realized that she must know a great deal about this kind of thing. Her polio, and whatever wrenching of her leg it had produced, whatever strange ways it had twisted her.
“Come on,” she said, “I’ll get you to a hospital.”
There was an emergency room where the lights were too bright. The doctor was very old and had hands like a woman’s, soft and moist. An intern gave Eddie a shot in his arm before the doctor began to work. There was something indecently soft about the doctor and Eddie distrusted him, hated him when he began insistently feeling then pulling on the thumbs. But then the room started becoming smaller and dimmer and he passed out.
After that he was sitting in a chair by the wall, his body stiff and sticky, his arms numb, weightless. The back of his neck was itching. He looked down and saw two white plaster casts enclosing the sides of his hands.
Sarah and the doctor were talking and the doctor was saying, “…at least four weeks. Probably more,” and Sarah was asking about exercising the hands and the doctor said something about X-raying first, to find out about the sutures. He did not understand it, nor did he want to; but he watched Sarah, looking up at the doctor with her steady, wry look, getting all the facts straight. Sarah in this environment of white tile walls and oak chairs and steel needles and glass and the smells of alcohol and ether—another one of those strange and midnight worlds.
Finally he stood up, shakily, and said, “Let’s get out.”
She took him by the arm, gently, leading him outside….
He had to wear the casts for two weeks. They were infuriating things, hampering all the simple motions, making the feeding of himself a stupid and fumbling act, forcing him to play the woman in bed. And even more than that they were an emasculation, destroying his old sense of power and reserve, the sense that derived more than anything else from a ridiculous ability to manipulate a stick of polished wood on a table with colored balls. Perhaps that was what Turtle had wanted: to humble him, to make him atone for that one brilliant and savage performance in the nine-ball game, to make him pay what is always extracted from talent and skill when they become, as they sometimes must, infuriated and belligerent. It was not the man he had beaten who had taken revenge; it was the man who had presided over the game….
For the first several days he did not leave the apartment. He kept quiet most of the time, and did a good deal of thinking. Sometimes Sarah would talk to him—although she talked more than he wanted her to talk—telling him about her family or about some of the things she read. He put up with it, because there was nothing else to do.
She wrote a great deal. She would sit in the kitchen at the table, with her glasses on, for hours, over a portable typewriter, while he sat in the living room drinking or reading. Once, she attempted to read some of what she had written to him, but it made no sense. She explained that it was part of her thesis, something about a man named Keynes.
He was restless and he chafed at the inactivity, but he did not become morbid or really uncomfortable. Once, she rented a car and took him for a long ride and, finally, to a picnic, which she called a “surprise.” He was, properly, surprised. She had brought sandwiches and a Thermos of gin and grapefruit juice. They both got drunk on the gin, in the quick, weird, and unsatisfactory way that you get drunk in sunlight, and the afternoon was merely awkward. They wound it up by quarreling over the slow way that she drove the car back home.
After a week he began going out. He went to a few poolrooms, vaguely looking for Bert, but he did not see him. Then he started going to movies in the afternoons, and that, although it passed time, was unpleasant, giving him headaches. He picked up a whore one afternoon and bought her some drinks, but was not interested when she proposed getting a room. She probably would have been enjoyable enough—she was young and had blatantly obscene breasts—but she wanted more money than he could afford. Also, he possibly owed Sarah something, he was not certain what.
And then Sarah took him to the doctor and the doctor took the casts off. His hands came out of their cocoons pale, white, and stiff. Moving them was very painful, and he dared not try to flex his thumbs. The doctor had told him not to try putting any pressure on them for a week or more.
That night they got drunker than usual, to celebrate, and he tried, carefully and persistently, to form a pool bridge—the circle of curved forefinger and thumb that guides the thin end of the cue shaft—but it was impossible. This enraged him for a time. Sarah said nothing, but watched curiously as he attempted the manipulation. Then, when he grimaced once at a sudden stab of pain, she said, “You’d better leave it alone for a while. It hurts too much.”
“How do you know how much it hurts?” he said, and then immediately realized that she had an answer for that one.
But she did not use the answer. What she said was, “It shows on you.”
After a few days he found that he was able, after a fashion, to hold and swing the cue, at least on Sarah’s kitchen table. He had to use the open-hand bridge—with the palm flat on the table, the thumb slightly raised, and the cue’s end sliding in the groove between thumb and forefinger—and he held the big end of the stick just behind the balance with only the cupped fingers of his right hand, his thumb not supporting any weight. It was awkward, but he felt that he would be able to accomplish something that way.
One morning he was doing this, practicing on the table, trying to build up some kind of wrist action, to get flexibility into his stroke, which was still very painful. He had been doing this for more than an hour when Sarah came in, carrying a book, her thumb marking the place where she had stopped reading.
She sat and watched him silently for several minutes, and he paid no attention to her. Finally she said, “You look as if you know what you’re doing with that… stick.”