Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [19]
“Well, I found a home, you know? And I’m gonna hang around here for a while; see if I can’t get up an honest game.”
“You’re chickenshit,” Levitt said shortly.
Billy went back to his practice, turning his back on the other two. It made the skin on the back of his neck crawl to do it, but he had no choice. He shot carefully, and had to concentrate to keep his fingers from shaking. He heard them talking behind him, and then finally they went away.
It was Saturday, and toward noon the poolhall began filling up. Many of the customers were in their teens, and these congregated around the two small snooker tables in the back, playing pink-wild snooker or sitting in the theater seats and making side bets, or just sitting watching. The keno game had four players, all men in middle age, and the rest of the tables and the bar were crowded. There were two horse-pinball machines behind the telephone booths at the inner end of the bar, and both had players and circles of watchers around them. The radio was on to a baseball game, adding to the babble of voices, clicking balls, the electric clunking of the pinballs, and the noise of the ventilating fan. The long dark room was blue with smoke and moist with humidity. Billy saw that men coming in from outside were wet, although it hadn’t been raining an hour before. Rain, that was one thing he hadn’t gotten away from; it rained in Portland almost as much as in Seattle. Of course to Billy rain was interesting for only one thing: it slowed down the cloth, and he had to shoot a little harder than usual to get the balls to perform properly.
After a while, John the houseman came up to Billy and said, “You got to get off the table now.”
A pang of fear ran through him, and a split-second afterward embarrassment and anger; he knew he wasn’t being kicked off the table because of race, but because there were players waiting, and it was policy to kick off practicers when there were two- or three-handed games waiting. But he could not help feeling that first reaction, and when he turned to John and shrugged, he saw in his eyes an expression of understanding, almost wariness. John said quickly, “Players waitin.”
“Yeah,” Billy said. He paid his time and put his cue away, and then, idle, went over and stood watching the keno game.
Keno is played on a standard billiard table; at one end is a wooden platform raised almost an inch above the level of the felt, and along its front edge is a brass ramp. There are four rows of holes in the ramp, spaced alternately, and each hole is numbered. In the exact center of the platform is a starred hole. Any player whose ball lands in the starred hole gets a keno and the point value of the ball. If the ball or balls land in any other hole, the player gets the value of the hole, and if the number on the ball matches the number of the hole, he also gets a keno. The game is played with a regular set of fifteen pool balls, racked at the other end of the table. In the game Billy was watching, each keno was worth fifty cents from each player, and the player with high score when all the balls were on the rack got a dollar from each of the other players, less any kenos. Each game ended with a flurry of calculating and arguing over the score, but Billy saw at once that there was plenty of money changing hands. It looked like a game worth getting into.
Keno looks like a luck game, which is its chief attraction to poor players, but as Billy stood and watched, now drinking a bottle of Coke, the players with the best stroke always seemed to come out ahead. There was more to the game than met the eye; it was not enough to ram your cue ball into another ball so that it banked around the table and ended up on the platform, although that is just exactly what most of the players did. Players came and went; at one point, as Billy watched, there were six of them, and a man with the placid face of an idiot stood by the blackboard keeping score and talking about the game like a sports announcer. But the good players, without seeming to,