The Hustler Read online

  For a long while no one spoke. They seemed to be holding a position in a tableau. Then, not knowing what to do, Eddie broke it, pulling a cigarette from his pocket and putting it in his mouth—a weak gesture, but the only one he knew to make. Somewhere he was saying, wordlessly, You goddamn fool, saying it to himself. But that, too, was weak and meaningless. Something was about to happen, and only that had any meaning. He could hear the fan turning, shuddering its blades at each revolution, trembling the light bulbs on their black strings.

  Then one of the men, an old man with pale eyes, said, his voice gurgling and obscene, “You’re a pool shark, ain’t you, boy? A real pool shark?”

  Eddie said nothing. He let his eyes move to where the thick man, Turtle; was standing, his heavy lips in a pouting expression, his piglike eyes now malicious, staring at him contemptuously, and past him at the table. Then Turtle said, softly, “There’s your money,” nodding his head toward the table.

  For a moment Eddie hesitated, wondering if this, the open, malicious contempt, was the only thing those piggish eyes were considering. He hesitated, and Turtle said again, “There’s your money, boy,” and then Eddie turned and reached out for the bills and before he had them in his hand—so quickly that he could not see it happen—the hot, stubby fingers were clamped around his wrist and the broad, ugly face was in his and the sentence that the man had only started was being finished with, “…you pool shark son of a bitch”—a private utterance, said deep in the throat and coming out into his face with the smell of hot, avid breath and the thick emphasis of hate.

  He did not have time to be frightened before someone had taken the other arm and was pulling him, and Turtle was saying, now in a public voice, “Wait a minute. Let’s give the son of a bitch his money.” And then Turtle was, incongruously, tucking the bills into his, Eddie’s, shirt pocket and saying, “We pay what we lose around here, boy,” and peering at him from what seemed to have become a panorama of faces which he, Turtle, dominated in ugliness and in power. “But we don’t like pool sharks,” saying this now privately, confidentially, his face close, tucking the bills into the shirt pocket, tamping them down with his fingers, as if afraid they would be lost, as if Eddie might somehow ejaculate them from his pocket back on the table. “We got no use at all for pool sharks.” Softly, wanting to make it perfectly clear.

  Then they dragged him to the wooden toilet at the back of the room and two other men held him while Turtle carefully broke his thumbs. First the left one and then the right, taking them firmly on either side of the knuckle and bending them backward until the small bones in them broke.

  Along the middle of the wall behind Eddie there was a two-by-four, to which the wall boards were nailed. On this was a row of empty bottles, and several of these fell to the floor from the jarring, jerking movements of Eddie’s body, pinned against the wall. When the bottles hit they tinkled and jangled noisily; but Eddie did not hear them because of the overriding—yet distant, detached, far-off—sound of his own screaming.

  13

  He was sitting on a step, his arms hanging at his sides. The step was cold, damp, and he was staring at it, at the dark triangle of concrete between his legs. Actually, he could not see it very well, for the light from the lamp at the street corner was weak. But this did not make any difference. Somebody had hit him in the side of the face, very hard, and now he was sick. The side of his face was sore, but his hands did not seem to feel anything, no pain at all, nothing.

  Abruptly, he heard himself speak aloud. What he said was, Anyway, it wasn’t my wrists. He was astonished, for he seemed to have been crying. He remembered now; but he did not lift his hands to look at them. He continued sitting on the step, in front of the door of Arthur’s poolroom. He had beat on the door with his elbows and knees, his shoulders; he remembered all that. And some men had come out, suddenly, and hit him….

  After a while he heard someone coming down the street, but he did not look up. And then, in a moment, there was a voice, deep and resonant. “You go home now, boy. They closed.”

  He looked up. The man was a young Negro, perspiring and dressed gorgeously in a blue suit, looking at him strangely. He did not say anything and the Negro said, “Boy, you hurt. You go to the doctor.” The man seemed to be swaying gently, and there was a worried look on his dark, shiny face. “Here, maybe you ought to have a drink.” There was something ridiculously like a businessman about the way he pulled a pint bottle from his breast pocket. He opened it and held the bottle while Eddie took a long pull. Eddie wiped his mouth with his sleeve, careful not to look at his hand as he did this.

  “Look, mister,” the other man was saying, softly. “You better let me get you to a doctor. You been in some rough company.”

  The drink made him feel better. He was uncertain how to stand up; he did not want to push himself up with his hands.

  “Help me up, please,” he said.

  The Negro helped him up, silently. “I’m all right,” Eddie said. “Thanks.”

  The man squinted at him but did not protest. “You go get a doctor. Hear?”

  “Sure,” Eddie said. He started walking.

  It seemed to be a very long time before he found a taxi. After he got in he had to think for a minute before he told the driver where to take him. Then he gave Sarah’s address. The driver was a young man, and not talkative.

  It was a long drive, and when they came into the more brightly lighted part of the city they stopped for a few moments at an intersection. In the weak light that came from the street corner, Eddie lifted his hands to his lap and looked at them.

  Oddly, the surprise of them was only slight. They were twisted grotesquely, and the thumbs were askew. Above the knuckle of his right thumb there was a broken piece of bone showing, white, tinged with dark brown along one edge. There were a few blots of brown blood on his shirt sleeve and there was blood, like dried and cracking glue, on his wrist.

  But they seemed to be someone else’s hands, not his own. Or like so much ruined meat. And there was no pain in them….

  ***

  He thought at first that Sarah was going to cry out when she saw him. She was reading when he came in, wearing her glasses and frowning, probably very drunk; but when she saw him her eyes flew wide.

  “My God,” she said.

  He sat down. And suddenly he felt a tenseness in his stomach; it was beginning to start in his hands. The pain. “Get me a drink,” he said.

  “Sure.” She got up quickly, no sign of drunkenness in her movement, poured a tumbler half full of bourbon and brought it to him. He did not have to tell her to hold it for him. He drank half of it and told her that was enough.

  “How… do you feel?” she said.

  “I don’t know.”

  Her eyes had the puzzled look, and she was studying his face strangely. “What happened to you?”

  “A lot of things.” He was beginning to feel lightheaded now, and bodiless. And, somehow, he was calm, calmer than he ever remembered having been. Nothing was very real. “I got beat up.” Even his own voice sounded as if it were imaginary. “They broke my thumbs.”

  There was an incredulous look on her small face, a twisted and hurt look, and abruptly he realized that she must know a great deal about this kind of thing. Her polio, and whatever wrenching of her leg it had produced, whatever strange ways it had twisted her.

  “Come on,” she said, “I’ll get you to a hospital.”

  ***

  There was an emergency room where the lights were too bright. The doctor was very old and had hands like a woman’s, soft and moist. An intern gave Eddie a shot in his arm before the doctor began to work. There was something indecently soft about the doctor and Eddie distrusted him, hated him when he began insistently feeling then pulling on the thumbs. But then the room started becoming smaller and dimmer and he passed out.

  After that he was sitting in a chair by the wall, his body stiff and sticky, his arms numb, weightless. The back of his neck was itching. He lo
oked down and saw two white plaster casts enclosing the sides of his hands.

  Sarah and the doctor were talking and the doctor was saying, “…at least four weeks. Probably more,” and Sarah was asking about exercising the hands and the doctor said something about X-raying first, to find out about the sutures. He did not understand it, nor did he want to; but he watched Sarah, looking up at the doctor with her steady, wry look, getting all the facts straight. Sarah in this environment of white tile walls and oak chairs and steel needles and glass and the smells of alcohol and ether—another one of those strange and midnight worlds.

  Finally he stood up, shakily, and said, “Let’s get out.”

  She took him by the arm, gently, leading him outside….

  ***

  He had to wear the casts for two weeks. They were infuriating things, hampering all the simple motions, making the feeding of himself a stupid and fumbling act, forcing him to play the woman in bed. And even more than that they were an emasculation, destroying his old sense of power and reserve, the sense that derived more than anything else from a ridiculous ability to manipulate a stick of polished wood on a table with colored balls. Perhaps that was what Turtle had wanted: to humble him, to make him atone for that one brilliant and savage performance in the nine-ball game, to make him pay what is always extracted from talent and skill when they become, as they sometimes must, infuriated and belligerent. It was not the man he had beaten who had taken revenge; it was the man who had presided over the game….

  For the first several days he did not leave the apartment. He kept quiet most of the time, and did a good deal of thinking. Sometimes Sarah would talk to him—although she talked more than he wanted her to talk—telling him about her family or about some of the things she read. He put up with it, because there was nothing else to do.

  She wrote a great deal. She would sit in the kitchen at the table, with her glasses on, for hours, over a portable typewriter, while he sat in the living room drinking or reading. Once, she attempted to read some of what she had written to him, but it made no sense. She explained that it was part of her thesis, something about a man named Keynes.

  He was restless and he chafed at the inactivity, but he did not become morbid or really uncomfortable. Once, she rented a car and took him for a long ride and, finally, to a picnic, which she called a “surprise.” He was, properly, surprised. She had brought sandwiches and a Thermos of gin and grapefruit juice. They both got drunk on the gin, in the quick, weird, and unsatisfactory way that you get drunk in sunlight, and the afternoon was merely awkward. They wound it up by quarreling over the slow way that she drove the car back home.

  After a week he began going out. He went to a few poolrooms, vaguely looking for Bert, but he did not see him. Then he started going to movies in the afternoons, and that, although it passed time, was unpleasant, giving him headaches. He picked up a whore one afternoon and bought her some drinks, but was not interested when she proposed getting a room. She probably would have been enjoyable enough—she was young and had blatantly obscene breasts—but she wanted more money than he could afford. Also, he possibly owed Sarah something, he was not certain what.

  And then Sarah took him to the doctor and the doctor took the casts off. His hands came out of their cocoons pale, white, and stiff. Moving them was very painful, and he dared not try to flex his thumbs. The doctor had told him not to try putting any pressure on them for a week or more.

  That night they got drunker than usual, to celebrate, and he tried, carefully and persistently, to form a pool bridge—the circle of curved forefinger and thumb that guides the thin end of the cue shaft—but it was impossible. This enraged him for a time. Sarah said nothing, but watched curiously as he attempted the manipulation. Then, when he grimaced once at a sudden stab of pain, she said, “You’d better leave it alone for a while. It hurts too much.”

  “How do you know how much it hurts?” he said, and then immediately realized that she had an answer for that one.

  But she did not use the answer. What she said was, “It shows on you.”

  ***

  After a few days he found that he was able, after a fashion, to hold and swing the cue, at least on Sarah’s kitchen table. He had to use the open-hand bridge—with the palm flat on the table, the thumb slightly raised, and the cue’s end sliding in the groove between thumb and forefinger—and he held the big end of the stick just behind the balance with only the cupped fingers of his right hand, his thumb not supporting any weight. It was awkward, but he felt that he would be able to accomplish something that way.

  One morning he was doing this, practicing on the table, trying to build up some kind of wrist action, to get flexibility into his stroke, which was still very painful. He had been doing this for more than an hour when Sarah came in, carrying a book, her thumb marking the place where she had stopped reading.

  She sat and watched him silently for several minutes, and he paid no attention to her. Finally she said, “You look as if you know what you’re doing with that… stick.”

  “I do,” he said.

  She watched him for another few minutes, and then she said, “How long have you been playing pool, Eddie?”

  Her tone of voice was light enough; but he did not like it.

  “Since I was about fourteen.”

  “Were you always good?”

  “I started winning money when I was fifteen. Two—three dollars a day. Sometimes more.” He grinned. “Sometimes I lost too.”

  “But not often.”

  “No.” He swung the stick smoothly at an imaginary cue ball. “Not often…”

  ***

  At Wilson’s he practiced for three hours before the pain in his hands made him stop. He was crude and awkward, and even his stroke, the pendulum-like motion of his right arm, had suffered; but he could make balls. He kept lining them up and shooting them in, one after another.

  He did not go back to Sarah’s, but to a restaurant and then to a movie. The movie had to do with a deep-sea diver, and he watched it distractedly, not able to keep himself in spite of the pain from flexing his fingers, cautiously, carefully working his thumbs around, back and forth.

  After the show he walked, through tired old residential avenues, along a honky-tonk street of bars, tattoo parlors and a penny arcade, and through streets where there seemed to be nothing but stores where women could buy clothes. He thought about buying something for Sarah, a silk nightgown or something, but then thought better of it. He had barely forty dollars—and nobody had said anything yet about the doctor bills.

  When he got back to Sarah’s she had already finished dinner: her dishes were piled, dirty, in the sink. She was in the living room, writing, the typewriter on her lap, when he came in.

  He went into the kitchen, washed out a frying pan, and fried himself a frozen steak. He put this on a coffee saucer—one of the few remaining clean dishes in the cabinet—poured himself a glass of milk, got two slices of bread, stale, from the box on top of the stove, came into the living room, and sat beside Sarah on the couch. He made a sandwich with the bread and meat and began eating.

  When he finished he looked at Sarah, grinned, and said, “Women, they tell me, are supposed to be real good at washing dishes.”

  She didn’t look at him. “Is that right?” she said.

  “That’s right. And cooking too.” He set the saucer down, reached over and patted her on the butt.

  “Well, not this woman,” she said. “And I wish you’d quit patting my rear. It doesn’t thrill me in the least.”

  “It’s supposed to,” he said. “Maybe you’re just different.” And then, “You’re funny, Sarah. Are all the women in Chicago like you?”

  “How should I know? I don’t know all the women in Chicago.” She finished pecking a line out on the typewriter, and then looked at him, peering up over her glasses, her arms crossed over the typewriter in her lap. “I’m probably different, I suppose,” she said, “‘a horrible example of free thought.’”
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  “That sounds bad.”

  “It is. Fix me a drink.”

  He got up and poured her a glass of Scotch and water. He did not make one for himself. Then, when he gave it to her, he said, “I’ll see you around,” and headed for the door.

  “Hey!” she said, and he turned. She was still looking up at him over her glasses. Her skin, in the light, seemed very white, transparent. Her blouse was thin, and beneath it he could see the outline of her small bosom, moving gently as she breathed.

  “What is it?” he said.

  She took a sip of her drink. “You’ve been out all afternoon.”

  Immediately he felt a thin edge of irritation in his voice. “That’s right.”

  “So why go out now?”

  He hesitated a moment, and then said, “So why not?”

  She looked at him thoughtfully, a little coldly—there was a hardness that could come into her eyes—and then she said, softly, “No reason at all. Good night.” She went back to the paper she was typing.

  “Don’t wait up for me,” he said, going out the door….

  ***

  It was getting late when he walked into Wilson’s, and there were only a few men there. On the back table was a very tall, elderly man, a straight-backed, white-haired man with a double-breasted gray suit. He was practicing and Eddie, standing at the counter in the front of the room, watched him for several minutes. The man shot stiffly—he looked to be at least sixty years old—but he was good. He was practicing at straights, and he knew the game; Eddie could tell from the way he controlled the cue ball, making it lie down when he wanted it to without any wild English or long, haphazard rolls. He did not seem to have the stroke of a real first-rate player, for he lacked the smoothness and the gentle, precise wrist action; normally he would have been considerably below Eddie’s league.