The Hustler (16 page)

She took a gulp of her drink. “What are you trying to do to me? I love you, for Christ’s sake.”

He looked at her steadily and she seemed even more like an insect trying to escape from a jar, a jar with slippery, transparent, glass walls. “That’s a goddamn lie,” he said.

For more than a minute she was silent, looking at him.

“All right, Eddie,” she said. “You’ve won. Rack up your cue. You always win.”

He stared at her. “That’s more crap,” he said. But he did not say it well; she had gotten through.

“The way you’re looking at me,” she said, her eyes wide, hurt and angry, but her voice level. “Is that the way you look at a man you’ve just beaten in a game of pool? As if you had just taken his money and now what you want is his pride?”

“All I want is the money.”

“Sure,” she said. “Sure. Just the money. And the aristocratic pleasure of seeing him fall apart.” She looked at him more calmly now. “You’re a Roman, Eddie,” she said. “You have to win them all.”

He turned his face away, towards the orange clown. He did not like what she was saying. “Nobody wins them all.”

“No,” she said. “No, I suppose not.”

And suddenly he turned to her, seeing for the first time what seemed to be the whole truth of Sarah, in a moment’s flash of wonder and contempt. “You’re a born loser, Sarah,” he said.

Her voice was soft. “That’s right,” she said. She remained seated on the couch, upright, holding her drink in both hands protectively, as if holding a child or a child’s doll. Her elbows were on her knees, her lips tightly together, and she was no longer looking at him. It took him a moment to realize what she was doing. She was crying.

He said nothing, for there came to him a strange and ambivalent thing, twisting him, distorting his vision and yet making it so sharp that he felt that he could see anything—around corners, through walls, into the eye of the sun—there came into his mind, with a kind of pleasant contempt, the words that Bert had used with him:
self-pity. One of the best indoor sports.

Then, suddenly, she looked back up to him and said, “And you’re a winner, Eddie. A real winner…”

16

Bert was exactly on time, in the morning. It was a warm, fine, beautiful morning, a glistening, late-summer morning; but Eddie was hardly aware of this. He was awake; he had come sharply awake at four-thirty, to the sounds of shrill and infrequent birds and to a kind of cold turbulence within his own mind; but he hardly saw the thing that the morning had to show him—the city of Chicago, Illinois, in a state of grace. He leaned back in the large, well-upholstered seat of Bert’s car, held his small leather case in his lap, and kept his mind from thinking, or feeling.

Bert drove as he played poker, sitting erect, his lips tight, his eyes fixed ahead, missing nothing. He too was silent. They hardly spoke until noon, although there was no tension between them. What went on in Bert’s mind was unfathomable; Eddie would not have been certain what was going on in his own.

They stopped along the road for hamburgers and coffee, and Eddie had a quick drink, although Bert declined one. Afterward, in the car he looked at Bert and said, wanting now to talk, “What do they play in Kentucky, what’s the big game?”

Bert, as always, thought for a moment before he spoke. “They play bank pool,” he said, “and one-pocket.”

“Good,” Eddie said. “I like that about one-pocket. What does Findlay play?”

Bert paused again. “I don’t know. I never saw him play. I only know him from his poker days.”

Eddie grinned. “You must have a lot of confidence in me.”

“I don’t.”

“Then how do you know he won’t beat me? How do you know he won’t shoot better pool than I do?”

“I don’t know that. And I don’t have much confidence in you. But I got confidence in Findlay.”

“What does that mean?” Eddie withdrew a cigarette from his pocket and lit it.

“It means I got confidence that Findlay’s a loser, all the way a loser. And you happen to be only about one-half loser, the other half winner.”

“How do you figure that?”

Bert stretched himself behind the wheel and then allowed himself to relax slightly, although he continued to watch the road carefully as he spoke. “I told you,” he said. “I already watched you lose—watched you lose to a man you should of beat.”

Bert was beginning to take the old line again, and Eddie did not like it. “Look,” he said. “I already told you…”

“I know what you already told me,” Bert said. “And I don’t want to hear it again, not right now.” And then, when Eddie did not reply to this, Bert took a breath and said, “What I’m thinking about is you and Findlay personally—not the game of pool you’re going to play. Any way he shoots pool he probably shoots good enough to beat you if you want to let him and if he’s got the character for it. But he hasn’t, that’s the point.”

Bert drove silently for a few minutes, pushing the big car along at a steady sixty-five. Then he said, “Unless you’re in a game with a sap or a drunk, when you’re playing for the large money you play the man himself more than you ever play the game. Like in poker, in a really worth-while poker game, everybody knows how to play the odds, everybody knows how it stands with filling straights and flushes, with figuring the pot and counting out the cards—I knew all that when I was fifteen. But the man who wins the games is the man who watches for the big money and pulls his guts together and gives himself character enough to stare down five other men and make the bet that nobody else would think of making and follow through with it. It’s not luck—there’s probably no such thing as luck, and if there is you can’t depend on it. All you can do is play the percentages, play your best game, and when that critical bet comes—in every money game there is always a critical bet—you hold your stomach tight and you push hard. That’s the clutch. And that’s where your born loser loses.”

Eddie thought about this a minute. Then he said, “Maybe you’re right.”

“But you got to know when the clutch in the game is,” Bert said, his voice becoming more insistent now. “You got to know and you got to bear down, no matter what kind of voice is telling you to relax. Like when you were playing pool with Minnesota Fats, when you had him beat and you were so tired your eyeballs were hanging out, and when something was gonna have to give somewhere—either you or Fats.” Bert stopped a minute, and when he spoke again his voice was hard, direct and certain. “You know when that was? When it was that Fats knew he was gonna beat you?”

“No.”

“Okay, I’ll tell you. It was when Fats went to the toilet and you flattened out in a chair. Fats knew the game was in the clutch, he knew he had to do something to stop it, and he played smart. He went back to the john, washed his face, cleaned his fingernails, made his mind a blank, combed his hair, and then came back ready. You saw him; you saw how he looked—clean again, ready to start all over, ready to hold tight and push hard. And you know what you were doing?”

“I was waiting to play pool.”

“That’s right,” Bert said. “Sure. You were waiting to get your ass beat. You were flattened out on your butt, swimming around in glory and in whiskey. And, probably, you were deciding how you could lose.”

For a moment Eddie did not answer, feeling an unreasoning anger, a kind of wild irritation…. Then he said, “What makes you know so goddamn much? What makes you know what I think about when I shoot pool?”

“I just know,” Bert said. And then, “I been there myself, Eddie. We’ve all been there….”

***

Eddie did not say anything, but sat, the irritation still tight in his stomach and the slight, irritating, itching pain in his hands. He wanted to fight something, to hit out at something, but he did not know what. He watched the road ahead of them, and after a while he began to feel calmer.

And then, after more than an hour, Bert said, “That’s what the whole goddamn thing is: you got to commit yourself to the life you picked. And you picked it—most people don’t even do that. You’re smart and you’re young and you got, like I said before, talent. You want to live fast and loose and be a hero.”

“Be a hero? Who the hell said what I want?”

“I did. You and any decent goddamn gambler wants to be a hero. But to be a hero you got to sign a contract with yourself. If you want the glory and the money you got to be hard. I don’t mean you got to get rid of mercy, you’re not a con man or a thief—those are the ones that can’t live if they got mercy. I got it myself. I got soft places. But I’m hard with myself and I know when not to go weak. Like when you give the business to a woman; you got to give it; don’t hold back. Do your second-guessing afterward. Or before. But with a woman you make a contract—I don’t know what all the words are in the contract but it’s there and if you don’t know about it you’re not human, I don’t care what all the slobs and the bastards and the free love people say. And when you give it to the woman or when you make the contract that says, ‘I’m gonna beat your ass in this game of pool,’ you don’t hold back. Don’t let the little squirrel on your back that says, Keep free of it; don’t give yourself away, talk you into anything. Make the squirrel shut up. Don’t try to kill him; you need him there. But when he starts telling you there wasn’t any contract, make him shut up. And when you come to that certain time in the game he says,
Don’t stick your neck out. Be smart. Hold back
, not because he wants to save your money for you, but because he doesn’t want to lose you, doesn’t want to see you put your goddamn heart into the game. He wants you to lose, wants to see you being sorry for yourself, wants you to come to him for sympathy.”

Eddie looked at him. “And if you lose?”

“Then you lose. When you’re a winner, it hurts your soul to lose. But your soul can take being hurt.”

Eddie was not certain of what it all meant. But after a while he said, “Maybe you’re right.”

“I know I’m right,” Bert said.

***

They passed through Cincinnati late in the afternoon, a crowded, gray city, and crossed a bridge into Kentucky. After a while there were a great many fields of a tall, broad-leafed kind of plant and, passing one of these fields, Eddie said, “What is that stuff, cabbage?”

Bert laughed. “That’s tobacco.”

Eddie looked at the big plants for a moment, a huge field of them. “What do you know?” he said. The leaves of the plants were shiny—sticky-looking.

Later there started to be a great many white, new-looking fences and big white barns. The meadows around these barns, framed by the fences, were very green and smooth. On several of these places there were horses.

“Those are racehorses, aren’t they?”

“That’s right,” Bert said.

“They look like any other horses to me.”

Bert laughed. “What other kind of horses does a pool hustler see, anyway—except racehorses?…”

***

Downtown Lexington could have been downtown anywhere—all neon and glass and traffic. The hotel was called the Halcyon—there were others, but this was the one that Bert said had a poolroom in it—and they pulled up in front.

Eddie got out into the warm evening air, stretching his arms. “So this is Kentucky,” he said, looking around.

“That’s right,” Bert said, walking into the hotel lobby. The lobby was big and elegant, and over on the far wall was a doorway and a sign above this saying, tastefully,
BILLIARD ROOM
. From this doorway, Eddie could hear the sounds that he always recognized—the crashing of balls and the soft murmur of men’s voices.

“I’ll pick up the reservations and get you a key,” Bert said. “You can go ahead and check the battlefield, if you want.”

“Thanks,” Eddie said. He walked over to the door, carrying his little leather case.

17

He could feel the tension, the excitement of the place even before he opened the door, could hear the heavy undercurrent of voices, the clickings of many balls, the soft cursing and dry laughter, the banging of cue sticks on the floor. And when he went in he could almost smell the action and the money. He could even feel them, down to his shoes. It was like a whorehouse Saturday night and payday in the mines; the day the war was over and Christmas. He could feel his palms sweating for the weight of his cue.

Every table was going—two, four, even six-handed games. And on almost every table was a hustler. Near the front was the Whetstone Kid, short, red-headed, and wearing chartreuse slacks; Eddie had seen him play nine ball in Las Vegas. On the table behind him was another small man, an incredibly shabby person who specialized in shooting pool with drunks and in selling playing cards which, on their backs, illustrated the fifty-two classic positions in three colors. This fellow was known as Johnny Jumbo; Eddie had seen him in Oakland. In the middle of the room, surrounded by a small crowd of miscellaneous jockeys and tout types, Fred Marcum from New Orleans, a man with patent-leather hair and olive eyes, was talking with quiet agitation to a man whom Eddie knew only as Frank, and who was supposed to be the acknowledged master at jack-up pool, a seldom-played game. And there were others; he could tell by the styles of playing, by the feel of the games, even though he did not know the players, that there must have been dozens of them.

It was a panorama, a gallery. Bert had said that they followed the races; but Eddie had expected nothing like this, this convocation of the faithful, this meeting of the clans.

The room was packed with people. There were a few lost innocents: college boys with sweaters, and on one table a few men who could only be salesmen. These were playing a silly and awkward game of rotation pool, laughing uproariously whenever one of them miscued or knocked one of the balls off the table or shot at the wrong ball by mistake.

Eddie walked on into the room, was greeted by Fred Marcum and the Whetstone Kid, saw a few men glance at him furtively—and this made him feel very good and important—and found himself a place to stand over by the wall, where he could watch several games at once….

After a few hours, after the crowd had thinned down somewhat—although the air was still full of smoke and money—Bert came in. He was still neat, but his hair was slightly mussed, and his trousers horizontally creased. He came making his way through the room purposefully—a stern broker walking smugly across the floor of the exchange.