The Hustler

  He would think about Bert. Bert was an interesting man. Bert had said something about the way a gambler wants to lose. That did not make sense. Anyway, he did not want to think about it. It was dark now, but the air was still hot. He realized that he was sweating, forced himself to slow down the walking. Some children were playing a game with a ball, in the street, hitting it against the side of a building. He wanted to see Sarah.

  When he came in, she was reading a book, a tumbler of dark whiskey beside her on the end table. She did not seem to see him and he sat down before he spoke, looking at her and, at first, hardly seeing her. The room was hot; she had opened the windows, but the air was still. The street noises from outside seemed almost to be in the room with them, as if the shifting of gears were being done in the closet, the children playing in the bathroom. The only light in the room was from the lamp over the couch where she was reading.

  He looked at her face. She was very drunk. Her eyes were swollen, pink at the corners. “What’s the book?” he said, trying to make his voice conversational. But it sounded loud in the room, and hard.

  She blinked up at him, smiled sleepily, and said nothing.

  “What’s the book?” His voice had an edge now.

  “Oh,” she said. “It’s Kierkegaard. Soren Kierkegaard.” She pushed her legs out straight on the couch, stretching her feet. Her skirt fell back a few inches from her knees. He looked away.

  “What’s that?” he said.

  “Well, I don’t exactly know, myself.” Her voice was soft and thick.

  He turned his face away from her again, not knowing what he was angry with. “What does that mean, you don’t know, yourself?”

  She blinked at him. “It means, Eddie, that I don’t exactly know what the book is about. Somebody told me to read it, once, and that’s what I’m doing. Reading it.”

  He looked at her, tried to grin at her—the old, meaningless, automatic grin, the grin that made everybody like him—but he could not. “That’s great,” he said, and it came out with more irritation than he had intended.

  She closed the book, tucked it beside her on the couch. She folded her arms around her, hugging herself, smiling at him. “I guess this isn’t your night, Eddie. Why don’t we have a drink?”

  “No.” He did not like that, did not want her being nice to him, forgiving. Nor did he want a drink.

  Her smile, her drunk, amused smile, did not change. “Then let’s talk about something else,” she said. “What about that case you have? What’s in it?” Her voice was not prying, only friendly, “Pencils?”

  “That’s it,” he said. “Pencils.”

  She raised her eyebrows slightly. Her voice seemed thick. “What’s in it, Eddie?”

  “Figure it out yourself.” He tossed the case on the couch. She picked it up, fumbling with and then opening the buckle at the top. When she pulled out the silk-wound butt end she said, “Interesting,” and then pulled out the other, thinner piece. “How do you work it?”

  “It screws together.”

  She looked at it with frowning concentration for a moment, then deftly—in spite of her drunkenness—put the pieces in place and twisted them together. She ran her hand lightly over the silken end, holding the cue in her lap. Suddenly she said, raising her eyes, puzzled, “It’s a pool stick!”

  “That’s right.”

  “It’s like a fancy cane. All these inlays…” Then it seemed to hit her and she said, “Are you a pool shark, Eddie?”

  He had never liked that term, and he did not like her tone of voice. “I play pool for money,” he said.

  She took a gulp of her drink, shuddered under it, and then laughed self-consciously. “I thought you were a salesman. Or maybe a confidence man…” She smiled at him. “I don’t know. It seems strange….”

  He looked at her a minute, carefully, before he spoke. Then he said, “Why?”

  She looked back to the cue in her lap. “I never knew a pool shark before. I thought they all wore double-breasted suits and striped shirts….”

  He started to answer this, but did not. She bit on her fingernail for a moment, and then said, “Why play pool?”

  He had heard this before, several times. And always from women. “Why not?”

  She was trying to sound serious, but her voice was still drunken. “You know what I mean. Do you make a living at it?”

  “Sometimes. I’ll do better.”

  This seemed to exasperate her. “But why pool? Couldn’t you do something else?”

  “Like what?” He noticed for the first time that she had light freckles at her elbows, and this discovery irritated him vaguely.

  “Don’t be cute about it,” she said. “You know what I’m driving at. You could… sell insurance, something like that.”

  He looked at her for a moment, wondering whether he should take her to bed, work up a little action. “No,” he said. “What I do I like fine.”

  He decided that it wouldn’t be worth the effort. He stood up from the couch, stretched, and then went into the bedroom to the dresser mirror and began combing his hair. The mirror, like the clown in the living room, had a white frame. He combed his hair carefully, patting it on the left side and then patting down the slight wave. He needed a haircut. Which was always a nuisance.

  Sarah spoke to him from the chair in the living room. “I’ve heard that pool can be a dirty game,” she said.

  He put the comb back in his pocket. “People say that,” he said. “I’ve heard people say that myself.”

  “You’re being comical,” she said, trying to make her voice sound dry. And then, “Is it dirty?”

  He walked back into the living room and, not looking at Sarah, looked instead at the clown. The clown looked back, sad and mean, holding the wooden staff. His fingers were painted in only sketchily, but they were graceful and sure of themselves. The clown was, apparently, unhappy, but was not to be pushed around; a good, solid clown and a figure to be respected. Eddie stretched again, his back to Sarah, still looking at the picture. “Yes. It’s dirty.” He felt of his face, which needed a shave. “Anyway you look at it, it’s dirty.”

  Then he walked into the bathroom and began undressing, hanging his clothes over the edge of the bathtub. On the back of the toilet Sarah kept a turtle in a glass bowl. At present, it was probably asleep. Eddie did not investigate this; but he thought about the turtle. A self-contained, cautious, withdrawn creature. Solid and reliable, like Bert—withdrawn, now, into its two houses: one given it by God, the other by the five-and-ten. The turtle asked no questions, and was required to give no answers.

  Eddie put his pajamas on and went to bed. Before he turned the bedroom lights out, he saw that Sarah was still in the living room, staring at the wall. He rolled over and fell immediately asleep.

  12

  The ride was a long one. The cab took him through a district of warehouses, of loud, dirty kids in the streets, of oculists and liquor stores and lady fortune tellers. The wooden building with the faded sign that said ARTHUR’S was in the middle of a block, with a decaying heap of a warehouse on one side and a vacant lot on the other. It was early Saturday night and through the open window of the cab he could hear loud talk and hillbilly music coming from the bar. An ancient and greatly stooped man was shuffling down the street, near the sidewalk, muttering loudly to himself.

  Eddie almost told the driver to take him back; he did not know this kind of place and it made him uneasy to be in it. But he needed money and he needed action and he got out of the cab. There was no movement of air and the air itself was very warm, tinged faintly with the smell of garbage. The door of the poolroom was open, and the clicking sounds of the balls seemed louder, out in the street, than he was used to hearing them sound inside.

  Inside, the poolroom was very small, hot, smelling of creosote and, faintly, of stale urine. In the middle of the room was a large overhead fan with flat, black blades. From the center of this hung a curled streamer of flypaper, dotted with black. There was
a cuspidor by each wall, sitting on the plank floor, and by each of these was a cluster of empty bottles—whiskey, Coca-Cola, and 7-Up.

  Five men were playing nine ball on the front table. Besides the rack man, with the triangle hanging in the crook of his arm, there was only one spectator, a heavy, porcine man with a crushed felt hat, its brim turned up and fastened in front with a safety pin. Over the table two bare incandescent bulbs hung on frayed cords from the ceiling. They trembled with the vibration from the fan. Tied between the cords was a smudged cardboard sign that read OPEN GAME; and below this someone had written in pencil, PLAY AT YOUR OWN RISK.

  The men were wearing overalls or khaki pants and either white T-shirts or the kind of slick-surfaced sport shirt that is translucent, outlining the underwear beneath it. There was one thin-faced young man—a man of about Eddie’s age—whose face was pale and who, in spite of the khaki pants and sport shirt, had a dapper, sharp-eyed look—the B-movie version of the hustler: the pool shark.

  He leaned against the wall and watched several games. No one seemed to notice him—the men were very intent with playing—and he was glad he had made a point of not wearing a coat. The pale young man seemed to be doing most of the winning. His style looked good, and he had a nice way of making the money balls, which he did so well that the other players called him “lucky”—for a good hustler the finest of compliments. Once, when the kid made what seemed a too obvious combination bank on the nine, Eddie looked closely at the face of the big man with the safety-pin hat—the others had called him Turtle—but the broad face showed no surprise or awareness when one of the men said, “You lucky punk,” to the kid.

  They were playing two dollars on the nine and a dollar on the five. A respectable game; you could win twelve dollars in maybe two or three minutes. The table was small—a four by eight—and had drop pockets, the kind that have been filed down to make the balls fall in easier. It would have been a lock table for any first rate nine-ball player, a table a good man would have to try hard to miss on. Eddie’s fingers began itching for a cue.

  But he did not even have to invite himself in. After about twenty minutes a player quit and the kid looked at Eddie insolently and said, “You want in, friend?”

  Eddie looked at him. He had always hated this kind: the sharp kind, the snotty, second-rate punk hustler. “Well,” Eddie said, grinning at him, “maybe I’ll try a couple for kicks.”

  “Sure thing, friend.” One side of the kid’s mouth drooped into a practiced casualness, the kind of thing picked up from pictures of hillbilly singers, practically a sneer. “Just watch who you’re kicking.”

  The big man, who was now the game’s only watcher, guffawed.

  Eddie remained grinning. “I always watch who I’m kicking. Helps my aim.” The big man did not laugh at this.

  Eddie picked a cue out of the rack and began playing, using the awkward style that Charlie had rehearsed him in years before, playing it especially carefully this time. He had to fool the kid, because the kid was the one with the money. And to fool another hustler is not always easy. So he played poorly, but managed to make the right shot at the right time every now and then, often enough to stay even with the game. He kept his eye on the kid, who seemed to suspect nothing.

  And then, after about an hour, he began acting as if he were getting hot, sweating a little, acting high and strutting—another thing that Charlie had taught him—making enough wild shots to start winning in earnest, but missing enough to make it look convincing. And the kid did as Eddie hoped, making good shots, running balls without trying so much to appear lucky, drilling the money balls in with malice and skill. He always seemed to sneer at the nine ball before he made it, as if to convince himself of his power over it. In another hour they had driven the other men, grumbling, out of the game. Eddie was about sixty dollars ahead; the kid must have won more than that, for he had continued to collect quite often. Once, when he had lost and paid off to the kid, the other man leered at him and said, “That’s tough, friend,” and Eddie thought, You just wait, you son of a bitch, grinning at him.

  Now, when the last other player had quit and they were all standing by the big man, watching the two of them, the kid gave him the same look and said, “It’s you and me, friend.”

  “Say, that’s right.” He tried to make his voice friendly. “You think maybe we ought to raise the bet?”

  The kid did not hesitate. He said, “Five on the nine ball. Two on the five.”

  “Okay.” Eddie said.

  He let the kid score the nine twice in a row, just to salt the bet well, losing the last game by acting as if he were now, finally, playing his serious game of pool. He did this by cautiously running the balls from the one to the seven, then acting nervous and missing on the eight, making certain that he left a simple shot. This was a routine way of building confidence in the other man—to struggle through the difficult preliminaries and then choke up, letting him pick up an easy victory. It pleased Eddie to see the kid throw off his amateur game completely and try for style when he pocketed the eight and the nine.

  “Say, kid,” Eddie said, “you’re one of the best.”

  The other player said nothing for a moment, just stood there with the sneer, one hand in his hip pocket, the other lightly holding his cue stick, his little finger sticking out delicately. Then he said, “You quitting, friend?”

  Eddie stared at him. When he spoke he was astonished by the anger in his own voice. He did not grin. “No, kid,” he said, levelly, “I’m not quitting.” And then, “Suppose we play a game of hundred-dollar freeze-out. Ten games for ten a game, winner take all. Then we’ll see who quits.”

  The kid looked at him coolly. That’s right, Eddie thought, you’ve got me now, boy. You smug little bastard.

  “Okay, friend,” the kid said, “you’re on.”

  They tossed, and Eddie won the break. And then, while the houseman was racking the balls, Eddie thought, When I win this he’ll quit anyway, and he set his cue stick against the wall and began rolling up his sleeves, carefully, looking around him at the cheap, filthy place he was in, and then at the little easy table. He picked up his cue, chalked it. “Okay, punk,” he said softly, “here we go.”

  He stepped up to the table, slipped easily into the old, automatic, easy form, stroked smoothly and powerfully, and slugged the nine-ball in on the break, firing it into the corner pocket on a one-to-three shot. “That’s one,” he said, trying to grin, but his voice sounding strangely hard, grating, even to himself. And the sound of his voice shook him. You weren’t supposed to feel this way, not on the hustle. And it was not wise—it was never wise—to look too good, not in a place like this one. He glanced at the group that was watching. Their faces seemed to have no expressions. I’d better remember to lose a couple.

  It would be wiser not to try to make the nine on the break any more; the shot was too unreliable and showy. Instead, he would play this time for a wide spread and a second shot. He got it, slamming two balls in on the break; and then he ran the other seven off the table without pausing between shots or taking his eyes from the table. “That’s two,” he said. There was a little murmur in the group of men who were standing against the wall.

  While the balls were being racked, he glanced at the kid, who was leaning against the next table, now, a cigarette hanging from his mouth.

  He won the next game by making an easy combination of the nine on his second shot. He ran out the balls, one through nine, in the fourth game. And when he did that something told him that he should not have, that he should not have looked that good. He would miss a ball the next game.

  And then, when he was beginning to break, as the winner always does in nine ball, as he was drawing back his cue, he heard the insolent voice, almost drawling, “You better not miss, friend,” and he stopped his stroke, stared up at the kid and, then, laughed, coldly.

  “I don’t rattle,” he said. “And, just for trying, I think I’ll beat your ass flat.”

  It wa
s simple. It was astonishingly simple. And fast. With the drop pockets and the little table and the quiet fury that he felt even in his cue stick he ran the next six games without even coming close to missing, making every shot perfectly. He slugged them in and eased them in and knifed them in, with dead-ball position.

  When it was over the kid’s sneer was gone and there was a buzzing—a fine, exalted buzzing—in Eddie’s ears. When the kid threw the wadded-up bills out on the table, Eddie glanced at them, not picking them up, and said, “Are you quitting now, friend?”

  The kid turned away from him and racked his cue. “Hell, yes, I’m quitting,” trying, feebly, to shrug it off. Then he walked out of the poolroom, and Eddie suddenly remembered a time only a few weeks before when he had walked out of a poolroom himself, beaten and staggering and sick in his bowels; and he knew why he had despised, had hated, the snot-nosed, cheap, hustling kid who had seemed to be the same age as himself.

  And then he looked up from the table to the five men who had been watching and knew, instantly, that he had made a mistake.

  He was standing so that the table was behind him and the row of men in front. All of them had, it seemed, moved closer to him, and one of them, the one nearest the door, had shifted his position so that it would have been impossible to pass by him. They were all watching him closely. In the direct light from the two vibrating, bare bulbs their eyes seemed to flicker over him.