“You aren’t that good either,” Charlie said, and Eddie laughed again.
“This car’s all right,” he said, grinning. “It plays a pretty tough game. And you know what, Charlie? After we finish up, after I get, say, fifteen thousand and enough money to fly back home, I’m gonna give you this car.”
“Thanks,” Charlie said, with gravity, “and ten per cent.”
“And ten per cent.” He laughed and cut back out into the passing lane. The old Packard, with surprising determination, shot past the rest of the line of traffic. Back in the driving lane Eddie settled it down to a steady seventy miles an hour.
After a minute Charlie spoke again. “What’s the hurry?”
“I want to get there. To Bennington’s.” He paused. “This is gonna be the part that counts. I been wanting to see Bennington’s place for a long time.”
Charlie seemed to think about this for a minute. Then he said, “Look, Eddie. Remember I asked you to stay out of Chicago? Altogether.”
Eddie tried to keep the annoyance from showing. He let the words sit a moment, then he said, “Why?”
Charlie’s voice was flat as ever. “You might get beat.”
Eddie kept his eyes on the road. “So maybe I shouldn’t gamble in the first place, I might get beat. Maybe I should be a salesman. Drugs, maybe.”
Charlie flipped his cigarette butt out of the window. “Maybe you are.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you’re the kind of pool hustler sells a bill of goods. The kind of high-class con man every mark gets friendly with. First time you ever walked into my place back home you weren’t sixteen years old and you were selling a bill of goods.”
Eddie grinned. “So I know how to set up a good game for myself, so what? Is that bad?”
“Look, Eddie, you want to play one of the big boys at Bennington’s? You want to leave off this penny-ante hustling and try and clean up in one big lick?”
“Who else is gonna let me win ten thousand in one night?”
“Look, Eddie.” Charlie turned to him, his face still impassive. “You’re not gonna charm those Chicago boys into a thing. Like in Hot Springs, only worse. You’re gonna be playing people who know what’s happening on a pool table.”
“In Hot Springs I made a bad bet. I learned something. I won’t make any bad bets in Chicago.”
“I heard people say that when you walk in Bennington’s you’re making a bad bet.”
Eddie, abruptly, laughed. “Charlie,” he said, “if you wasn’t my best friend, I’d make you get out and walk.”
They drove silently for a while. It was getting late in the afternoon, the air was beginning to cool off now and there was more shade. They were passing clumps of buildings, getting into country that was more thickly settled. Traffic in the other direction was becoming thicker too, the beginnings of the weekend exodus from the city. Billboards hustling beer and gasoline became frequent.
Finally Charlie spoke. Eddie had been waiting for it, wondering exactly what it was that he had on his mind. “Eddie,” he said, “you don’t have to go to Bennington’s at all. Why risk what we got? You can scuffle around in the little rooms and pick up at least a thousand, no chance of losing. Then we drive back home by a different way and you fill out your fifteen grand the same way you picked up what we already got.”
Eddie let it all sink in. Then he said, almost pleadingly, “Charlie, you’re trying to undermine my confidence. You know I got to play at Bennington’s. You know I been a scuffler all my life, a small man out West. You know when I beat Johnny Varges—that’s Johnny Varges, Charlie, the man who invented one-pocket pool—he said I was the best he ever seen. And back home there were people who said I was the best in the country. The best in the country, Charlie.”
“That’s right,” Charlie said, “and you let a nowhere bank hustler named Woody Fleming hit you for eight hundred dollars in Hot Springs.”
“Charlie,” Eddie said, “I gave him two balls out of eight. For Christ’s sake, that’s the first money I dropped since we left Oakland, California.”
“Okay. I take it back. I wanted to remind you that, sometimes, people lose.”
Eddie’s voice was still pained. “Look, Charlie. Did you ever see a better pool player than me? Did you ever see, in twenty years running a poolroom, anybody ever who I couldn’t beat, heads up, any day of the week, any game of pool he could name?”
“Okay. Okay.” A trace of irritation insinuated itself into Charlie’s voice. “Nobody can beat you.”
They passed through a suburb, then another. Eddie kept smoking continually, and he was beginning to feel intensely a thing that he had felt many times before, but never before quite so strongly: a kind of electric self-awareness, a fine, alert tension. And a sense of anxiety, too, and of expectation. He felt good. Nervous; his stomach tight; but good.
5
Eddie sat on the edge of the bed, dressed only in his expensive shorts, in which he had slept. His bed was beside the window of the room and he was looking out, into the afternoon sunshine and into a tangle of the flat sides of buildings. Behind him, Charlie was still sleeping, his face, even in sleep, comic and impassive.
Eddie lit a cigarette, in a more leisurely way than he usually lit them. He felt good. He had just awakened from a long, mildly alcoholic sleep; but his mind had been instantly clear, the meaning of the time and the place understood.
He looked around the hotel room. It was very clean, modern-looking, with blond furniture and pastel walls; and this pleased him. He began whistling through his teeth.
Then he went to the bathroom and took a hot shower, washed his hair, scrubbed his fingernails with a pink nylon brush that he carried in his shaving kit, shaved, sat on the edge of the bathtub and began shining his shoes.
Charlie padded into the bathroom, wearing pajamas, and seated himself on the commode. He blinked at Eddie a minute, and at length spoke. “For Chrissake who—who else in God’s green world in the morning would sit on the bathtub, naked as sin and with his ribs showing, and polish his goddamn shoes?” Then he fell into a classic pose of contemplation, elbows on knees.
Eddie finished with the shoebrush. “Me. And it’s afternoon. Two o’clock in the afternoon.”
“Okay,” Charlie said. “Okay, so it’s afternoon and that makes it just fine to parade your anatomy and shine your shoes in the bathtub. Okay. Now get out. I want privacy.”
Eddie picked up his shoes and walked out of the bathroom, intentionally not closing the door. Charlie said nothing, but managed to reach a fat foot out far enough from his throne to slam it shut.
Eddie put on a pair of clean shorts and sat back down on the bed. Then he called out, as casually and as jokingly as he could, “How much money am I gonna win today, Charlie?”
He hadn’t expected an answer; but he waited for one. Then he said, louder, “Who’s gonna beat me?”
This, too, got no answer. Not from the sitting Buddha. But he felt high, and he felt like talking, like needling Charlie. He knew he had talked it up much too much already; but he wanted to talk it up more, wanted Charlie to try to puncture his ego for him more, wanted to laugh at Charlie and to know, too, that everything that Charlie said about him was right.
“What do you think Bennington’s boys are gonna do when they see me?” He leaned back on the bed, grinning; but his grin was a little tense, strained.
Charlie opened the door, waddled in, and began searching through his suitcase. “I already told you what I think about Bennington’s,” he said.