Fats was sitting down too, resting. He stood up. His chin jerked, down into the soft flesh of his neck. “Fast Eddie,” he said tonelessly, “let’s play pool.”
“Break the balls,” Eddie said.
In the middle of the game the food came and Eddie ate his sandwich in bites between shots, setting it on the rail of the table while he was shooting, and washing it down with the coffee, which tasted very bitter. Fats had sent someone out and he was eating from a platter of a great many small sandwiches and link sausages. Instead of coffee he had three bottles of Dutch beer on another platter and these he drank from a pilsner glass, which he held in a fat hand, delicately. He wiped his lips gently with a napkin between bites of the sandwiches and, apparently, paid no attention whatever to the balls that Eddie was methodically pocketing in the thousand-dollar game that he, sitting in the chair and eating his gourmet’s breakfast, was playing in.
Eddie won the game; but Fats won the next one, by a narrow margin. And at nine o’clock the poolroom doors were opened again and an ancient colored man limped in and began sweeping the floor and opened the windows, pulling back the draperies. Outside the sky was, absurdly, blue. The sun shone in.
Fats turned his head toward the janitor and said, his voice loud and flat, across the room, “Cut off that goddamn sunshine.”
The black man shuffled back to the windows and drew the curtains. Then he went back to his broom.
They played, and Eddie kept winning. In his shoulders, now, and in his back and at the backs of his legs there was a kind of dull pain; but the pain seemed as if it were someone else’s and he hardly felt it, hardly knew it was there. He merely kept shooting and the balls kept falling and the grotesque, fat man whom he was playing—the man who was the Best Straight Pool Player in the Country—kept giving large amounts of money to Charlie. Once, he noticed that, while he was shooting and the other man was sitting, Fats was talking with the man with the pink cheeks and with Gordon, the manager. The pink-cheeked man had his billfold in his hand. After that game, Fats paid Charlie with a thousand-dollar bill. The sight of the bill that he had just earned made him feel nothing. He only wished that the rack man would hurry and rack the balls.
The aching and the dullness increased gradually; but these did not affect the way his body played pool. There was a strange, exhilarating feeling that he was really somewhere else in the room, above the table—floating, possibly, with the heavy, bodiless mass of cigarette smoke that hung below the light—watching his own body, down below, driving small colored balls into holes by poking them with a long, polished stick of wood. And somewhere else in the room, perhaps everywhere in the room, was an incredibly fat man, silent, always in motion, unruffled, a man whose sharp little eyes saw not only the colored balls on the green rectangle, but saw also into all of the million corners in the room, whether or not they were illuminated by the cone of light that circumscribed the bright oblong of the pool table.
At nine o’clock in the evening Charlie told him that he had won eighteen thousand dollars.
Something happened, suddenly, in his stomach when Charlie told him this. A thin steel blade touched against a nerve in his stomach. He tried to look at Fats, but, for a moment, could not.
At ten-thirty, after winning one and then losing one, Minnesota Fats went back to the bathroom and Eddie found himself sitting down and then, in a moment, his head was in his hands and he was staring at the floor, at a little group of flat cigarette butts at his feet. And then Charlie was with him, or he heard his voice; but it seemed to be coming from a distance and when he tried to raise his head he could not. But Charlie was telling him to quit, he knew that without being able to pick out the word. And then the cigarette butts began to shift positions and to sway, in a gentle but confusing motion, and there was a humming in his ears like the humming of a cheap radio and, suddenly, he realized that he was passing out, and he shook his head, weakly at first and then violently, and when he stopped doing this he could see and hear better. But something in his mind was screaming. Something in him was quivering, frightened, cutting at his stomach from the inside, like a small knife.
Charlie was still talking but he broke him off, saying, “Give me a drink, Charlie.” He did not look at Charlie, but kept his eyes on the cigarette butts, watching them closely.
“You don’t need a drink.”
Then he looked up at him, at the round, comic face dirty with beard and said, surprised at the softness of his own voice, “Shut up, Charlie. Give me a drink.”
Charlie handed him the bottle.
He turned it up and let the whiskey spill down his throat. It gagged him but he did not feel it burn, hardly felt it in his stomach except as a mild warmness, softening the edges of the knife. Then he looked around him and found that his vision was all right, that he could see clearly the things directly in front of him, although there was a mistiness around the edges.
Fats was standing by the table, cleaning his fingernails. His hands were clean again; he had washed them; and his hair although still greasy, dirty looking, was combed. He seemed no more tired—except for the soiled shirt and a slight squinting of the eyes—than he had when Eddie had first seen him. Eddie looked away, looking back at the pool table. The balls were racked into their neat triangle. The cue ball sat at the head of the table, near the side rail, in position for the break.
Fats was at the side of his vision, in the misty part, and he appeared to be smiling placidly. “Let’s play pool, Fast Eddie,” he said.
Suddenly, Eddie turned to him and stared. Fats’ chin jerked, toward his shoulder, his mouth twisting with the movement. Eddie watched this and it seemed, now, to have some kind of meaning; but he did not know what the meaning was.
And then he leaned back in his chair and said, the words coming almost without volition, “I’ll beat you, Fats.”
Fats just looked at him.
Eddie was not sure whether or not he was grinning at the fat man, at the huge, ridiculous, effeminate, jeweled ballet dancer of a pool hustler, but he felt as if something were going to make him laugh aloud at any minute. “I’ll beat you, Fats,” he said. “I beat you all day and I’ll beat you all night.”
“Let’s play pool, Fast Eddie.”
And then it came, the laughing. Only it was like someone else laughing, not himself, so that he heard himself as if it were from across the room. And then there were tears in his eyes, misting over his vision, fuzzing together the poolroom, the crowd of people around him, and the fat man, into a meaningless blur of colors, shaded with a dark, dominating green that seemed, now, to be actually being diffused from the surface of the table. And then the laughing stopped and he blinked at Fats.
He said it very slowly, tasting the words thickly as they came on. “I’m the best you ever seen, Fats.” That was it. It was very simple. “I’m the best there is.” He had known it, of course, all along, for years. But now it was so clear, so simple, that no one—not even Charlie—could mistake it. “I’m the best. Even if you beat me, I’m the best.” The mistiness was clearing from his eyes again and he could see Fats standing sideways at the table, laying his hand down toward the green, not even aiming. Even if you beat me…
Somewhere in Eddie, deep in him, a weight was being lifted away. And, deeper still, there was a tiny, distant voice, a thin, anguished cry that said to him, sighing, You don’t have to win. For hours there had been the weight, pressing on him, trying to break him, and now these words, this fine and deep and true revelation, had come and were taking the weight from him. The weight of responsibility. And the small steel knife of fear.