Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [96]
Old Larkin got up and came over to them. He did not look at Billy. “I’ll back you for two hundred,” he told the fat man. He got out his roll and peeled off ten twenties, leaving the roll thin as a pencil. Billy did not mind at all, but he grinned at the crowd and said, “I love a patriot, don’t you?”
“Six-twenty, then,” the fat man said. It was actually a question.
“You’re sure greedy, aint you,” Billy said. “You see my money, and you’re just so goddam sure you can beat me, you just got to play. Well, okay, we’ll play.” He got a twenty out of his pocket, from his regular roll, added it to six of the hundreds, and crammed the other hundreds into his pants pocket. “We’ll play, baby. One game of one-pocket, for six twenty.”
“You want to play for all of it?” the fat man asked.
“Sure,” Billy said. “Why fuck around? Lag for break, or flip a coin?” He grinned at old Larkin, whose face had gone gray.
It was really over before the game started. Billy knew it, he knew he had defeated the fat man’s spirit, and all that was left was to win the actual game. The fat man won the toss and broke safe, as one always does one-pocket, and then Billy sized up the lay of the balls very carefully, his whole body burning with a kind of calm ecstasy, shot what would have been a safety even if he had missed, a two-rail bank that dropped into his pocket without even touching the side rails. Then he made two more balls and left the cue ball frozen to the far rail. The fat man shot safe, and Billy made another bank, this time three rails and the cue ball safe anyway, made the shot, and ran out. The game was over. Billy took all the money, counted it, put his thousand dollars back in his shirt pocket and the rest in his pants pocket. Then he went back to the counter and began tipping another cue. He did not even see the fat man and his friends leave.
But it was not over yet, and Billy knew it. He went home at four in the morning and lay in his bed unable to sleep until well after sunup; he listened to the rain and wondered what part of himself he had opened up by defeating the Arizona fat man so thoroughly, so finally, and (what seemed worst of all) so dramatically. He remembered how incredibly sweet it had been, and how terribly he had missed that kind of victory; and he wondered why he now felt so down and empty. His wife knew something was the matter and did not bother him with questions. After she fed the children and ate breakfast, she took the little boy and girl to a neighbor’s and left Billy alone in the house. He could hear her bickering with the little boy about putting his rubber boots on. He wondered where they were going until he heard the little girl say something about it, and then he knew his wife was being considerate. This irritated him. Finally he fell asleep, and dreamed of vast clicking pool games.
When he awakened in the late afternoon, none of the tension was gone. He ate, and caught a bus back to the bowling alley. He had never managed to buy a car; no car seemed to fit him. He would not have a cheap car, and the usual Cadillac embarrassed him, yet to choose a different expensive car would have been to play their game, too, not to mention the down payment money that would have had to come out of his caseroll. He tried to make himself busy at work, but it seemed futile and dull, and so he went to see Luanne.
For once she was home alone, but in a sullen mood, and for an hour she and Billy sipped quietly at the whiskey he had brought. The place was so sordid. Instead of a kitchen there was a table against the wall with a hot plate on it and, even though Luanne ate out almost all the time, garbage bulged from wet sacks under the table and spilled onto the linoleum, and she had a tiny back porch also covered with old magazines, sacks of garbage, bottles, newspapers. The wallpaper in the room was puce, with heavy purple grapes and green vines decorating it, and the ceiling looked dirty. The bathroom was unspeakable