Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [20]
He fidgeted through three or four games, and then finally got in without half-trying. A tall red-faced man who had been losing steadily as Billy watched, cursing his bad shots and bad lays as bad luck, finally got out in disgust when he had to pay off eight kenos and game. “Shit, this sure as hell aint my day,” he announced. He walked up to the wall rack to put his cue in it, and instead, thrust it into Billy’s hands. “Here,” he said. “You try it.”
Billy moved up to the table, picked up a piece of chalk, and stood there chalking the cue, and no one seemed to object. One of the players said to him, “You follow me,” and he was in. Apparently, his money was as good as anybody else’s. The action-feeling started to come over him, and he felt good; he could feel it thickening in his throat, and deep in his belly was a sense of anticipation almost sexual. When it was his turn to shoot he bent over the table slowly, savoring the feeling. He banked the six-ball off the side rail with the speed and direction he assumed would make it go up onto the ramp, hit the twelve-ball, which was in the center keno hole, displace the twelve, displace the ten-ball behind it, and give him a score of at least twenty-eight plus keno, maybe double keno if the ten kept rolling and landed in its own hole in the back row. Instead, the six sped up the ramp, glanced off the twelve without moving it, skipped over the top of the ten and off the back of the table, coming up against the bar with a crack.
The idiot at the scoreboard chanted,“...and the new money jumps the rail and draws a blank! Next shooter, Mister Frank Bartholomew, if you please!”
There were five players in the game, and it was a long time before Billy shot again. But he was not conscious of the wait; he was too busy watching the shooters. When it was his turn, high man had a score of 32, and there were two kenos on the board. He sized up the lay of the balls carefully. Somebody yelled, “Shoot the fuckin shot,” but he paid no attention. This time he had a clear shot, no bank necessary. It was the five-ball, whose holes were in the back row; he could try for a keno and five points, but now he distrusted his stroke for this game, and suspected that if he shot a direct shot he would go off the back again. There was a cluster of balls in the middle of the platform, two of them not in holes but just leaning against other balls. The shot would be to play the five into the pack; but if he did so, his cue ball would also go up onto the ramp, and wipe out his score. Billy’s stroke was good enough for him to be able to hit the five with lower left draw so that the cue ball would end up going back and forth across the table, but to do so he would have to hit the five too hard. There were other balls to shoot at, but none of them in good position. There was only one other alternative; to massé the cue ball so that it curved up behind the five and drove it straight into the pack instead of at an angle; then the cue would spin backward. But this was a circus shot, extremely difficult, and making the shooter look like a show-off and a fool whether he missed or made it.
But it was the only shot by which he could catch up. So, estimating carefully, stretching his fingers into his high, massé bridge, Billy fired. The cue ball took off in one direction, then curved sharply up behind the five, struck it, and zipped back to the end rail, where it hit two other balls and came to rest. The five rode up the brass, powered by spin the reverse of the cue ball’s, hit the pack, imparted its spin to the other balls and knocked them free; they wobbled,