To foreshadow a bit, Thanksgiving at Mrs. W’s house was very, very nice, but her house wasn’t my home at that point. I wasn’t averse to it being my home, but when you move around as much as I did when I was a kid the concept of “home” has a more diffuse connotation than it would if you lived in one place, say, Wadley, Alabama, or even Chattanooga, for your entire life. I was more rootless than anyone in Mrs. W’s family, not as closely tied to the culture or the institutions or the people of Chattanooga as anyone else there. I was there not because I thought her house was home, but because Mrs. W was nice enough to invite me, and because I liked her, and because there wasn’t anyplace else where somebody was expecting me.
Ginny’s dad was waiting for us when we’d arrived at Mrs. W’s house. He collected Ginny and her luggage and left pretty fast. Walt lit a cigarette as soon as her car door closed, then he and Cisco pulled off into the night, the shiny Pontiac disappearing into an unusually warm November night. Standing outside, I couldn’t see much of Mrs. W’s house, but it seemed large and vine-covered, with a frame and shingle exterior painted some dark olive or brown. She greeted me warmly, of course, then when the others had left led me to a bedroom. The interior of her house was mostly warm varnished mahogany, with intricately cut mortise and tenon joints and carefully carved accents. It smelled like she’d just cooked cornbread. She had dark Oriental carpets on most of her floors, which seemed to be beautiful quarter-sawn oak. I’d never seen anything quite like it. She showed me to a spacious upstairs bedroom with two twin beds. Mission furniture. It was nice. Spare. Neat. Clean.
“Henry,” Mrs. W said, lighting a Benson & Hedges off of her Gates Zippo, “There’s nobody else with a claim to this room. I know you have family, but this room is open for you whenever you need it.”
An amazing offer.
“Now I’d love to catch up, but I’m tired. I had a glass of wine while I was waiting up for you guys and it’s put me right to sleep, so I’m going to go on to bed, although this is a little early for me.” It was about 10:00. “We’ll talk in the morning. I’m right across the hall. Your bathroom is behind me,” she said, from the bedroom door. “Good night, Henry. Good to have you here.” A few seconds later I could hear her door close across the hall.
I hadn’t brought anything to read except textbooks to encourage myself to study when the occasion arose. I found I wasn’t in the mood to study but it was too early to go to sleep. I opened the drawer to the night stand, and found two books: A leather-bound red-letter edition of the King James Bible and a smaller volume titled “Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece.” The Greek New Testament. I opened to John. “Kατα Ιωάννινν.” I tried to read the first verse: “Έν άρχη ήν ό λογος, και ό λογος ήν προς τον θεον, και θεος ήν όλογος.” Even with just a few months of college Greek I could read that much, but the next sentence was harder. I put it aside and picked it up in English. Strange book. Pastor Leslie was right. It doesn’t tell the same story as he rest of the New Testament at all. As I have done before, I fell asleep reading it without getting up to brush my teeth.
When I woke up the next morning it was early. The house was cool and quiet. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do. On the road, I would have made coffee, if there was a pot in the room, or gone looking for it. At college, I would walk up to the dining hall and eat bacon and drink coffee and look over my subjects until time for class to start. In Mrs. W’s house I had no idea who else was up at 6:30. I found the bathroom and brushed my teeth. As is the case with some old houses, none of the upstairs bedrooms had its own bathroom but all of them exited into a hall from which they all shared access to a common bathroom. Not modern, but not odd. I put enough clothing to present myself to the household and went downstairs.
The house was quiet and still, and I didn’t know my way around. I found my way through the living room and dining room to the kitchen, partly aided by the aroma of coffee. Mrs. Wertheimer was seated at the kitchen table, smoking a cigarette, looking at several three by five cards on the table in front of her. The floor creaked slightly as I came to the kitchen door and she looked up.
“Hey, Henry,” she said, happy to see me. She glanced up at the source of the coffee aroma, a 12 cup Hamilton Beach percolator. I followed her gaze, and you could see the coffee surging into the glass knob on top. Still not ready. “Looks like the coffee’s still got a few minutes to go,” she said. “How’d you sleep?”
“Great,” I said. “What are you up to?”
“Not a lot. Looking at recipes and waiting for the coffee. I like to cook, but I don’t do it too much, so I look over the recipes before I start.” She looked down at her cards and took a drag. “Are you a dressing person or a stuffing person?” she asked.
“I don’t know. What’s the difference?” I asked.
“They’re the same thing cooked differently. We’re going to have cornbread and bread stuffing. Or dressing. Stuffing is the mix of breadcrumbs and vegetables and all stuffed into the turkey and roasted with it, dressing is the same mix cooked in a casserole dish. Both are good.”
“I guess we always had dressing, then,” I said.
“We’re going to have both, but if you’ve never tried stuffing you should have some,” she said. “Nothing like it.” She looked at her cards and smoked her cigarette. “Yams?” she asked, looking up.
“Of course.”
“Candied or whipped?” she asked.
“I think I’m a candied guy,” I said. “I mean, I like whipped sweet potatoes, but candied yams are a real treat.”
“Good man,” she said. She shuffled the cards again and took a drag.
“Do you prefer mashed potatoes or rice as a starch?” she asked.
“The dressing, or stuffing, is plenty,” I said. “Are you thinking of rolls?” I asked.
“Yeah, that’s why I’m up early,” she said. “I think Thanksgiving needs to have good rolls, so I got up and started a batch of Parker House Rolls.” There was a large glass bowl filled with dough, covered with Saran-Wrap, near the oven.
“Don’t know Parker House Rolls,” I said.
“Lots of butter. A little sweet.”
“Like the rolls for lunch at City High?” I asked.
“Almost,” she said. “The City’s yeast rolls were made with margarine, but they were good.”
“They were good.”
“Sure they were,” she said. “I’ve got broccoli. Can you make Hollandaise?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Can you follow instructions?”
“I think so,” I said. Her eyes shot up to look at me over her glasses, then they softened speculatively. She took a drag from her cigarette.
“You don’t have much experience at that, I guess?” she asked.
“Maybe not.”
“It’s not so bad, you know, listening to what other people think.”
I thought about that for a minute. “I listen to you,” I said.
“Sure,” she said. “I appreciate it that you trust me. But maybe you could be more trusting of people around you. Have you been making friends in college?”
I thought for a minute. “Well, there’s Stoney. I tried to be nice to Milton, but I think he took it the wrong way.”
“How did you try to be nice to him?”
“I bought a nine ball game. Kept him from being fleeced by a pro I know named Donnie.” She looked at her recipe cards for a few seconds. The coffee was done and I got up hefted the pot. There were several mugs in front of the percolator. “Coffee?” I asked. She looked up.
“Sure,” she said. “Black.” I poured her a mug, put it down near her, poured one for myself, and sat down again on my stool. “Thanks,” she said, absent-mindedly. She took a sip. “Okay, here’s the plan,” she said. “Turkey, stuffing, dressing, candied yams, mashed potatoes, gravy, broccoli with hollandaise, corn soufflé. Parker House rolls, pumpkin pie, mincemeat pie. Good?”
“More food than I’m used to even on Thanksgiving,” I said.
“So I’m about to start cooking, and if Ginny shows up what’s going to happen?”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Henry, don’t be obtuse,” she said. “Last time I saw you together she was hanging on your every word. Last night she was staying as far away from you as possible and mooning over that snob from Atlanta.”
“Yeah. Okay. It’s odd. She saw me play pool for some money. Maybe a lot of money. I know it seemed like a lot to her. She didn’t like it that I risked so much.” Mrs. W. nodded and thought for a few minutes.
“Her mom’s that way, too. Her dad’s been offered a job as general counsel of this railroad. The Union Pacific. Big company. Great job. Could make him, or them, millions of dollars. Winnie’s worried because he’s got a good job now and she doesn’t see why he’d consider giving it up.”
“What’s his job now?”
“He’s a partner at Miller & Martin.”
“A lawyer deal?” I asked.
“Yes. And he does well. But being general counsel of the Union Pacific would be a much bigger lawyer deal. But the job is in Omaha.”
“Nebraska?”
“Yes,” she nodded.
“A long train ride from Chattanooga, especially as Chattanooga doesn’t have passenger rail.”
“Good point.” She smiled.
“Anything I can do to help with the Thanksgiving meal?” I asked, sipping my coffee.
“Maybe. Do you cook?”
“Not at all.”
“Never?” she was surprised.
“Sometimes I fried eggs for myself on Saturdays or Sundays,” I said.
“Because your mom was away?” she asked.
“No, because I liked them fried really, really hard, with a tough skin, and Mom thought that was wrong. I’d fry my eggs and she’d make toast.”
“Well, Ginny usually comes over a little bfore noon and helps.” She stood and handed me a black iron skillet with red and white hound’s tooth dish towel over it, then located a large Pyrex bowl. I lifted the dish towel and found a large, cool wheel of cornbread with one narrow slice missing. I looked up at Mrs. W. “Your job is to change that cornbread into tiny little crumbles in that bowl.” I shrugged and got to work. While I was crumbling, she took celery, onions, parsley and some other kind of green leaves out of the refrigerator and began to chop them, cigarette dangling from her lower lip. Chopping onions didn’t seem to bother her eyes.
“So what were you going to do with Ginny if you got her?” she asked. I thought for a few seconds about how to respond.
“I … I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but I like her, I think she’s great, but I wasn’t looking to be her boyfriend,” I said. Mrs. W. thought about this for a few seconds.
“She’s pretty. Smart. Vivacious, athletic. Nice figure.”
“She’s absolutely delightful in every way,” I said.
“Henry,” she asked, with a surprised tone in her voice, “are you homosexual?”
“No, ma’am,” I answered, crumbling my cornbread with a sigh.
“It’s completely okay with me if you are,” she said, earnestly, looking at me and stubbing out her cigarette.
“No, ma’am. I don’t seem to think about women as much as most guys my age, but I don’t think about men. Not in that way, I mean.” She frowned a bit. “I’ve never had a girlfriend and don’t miss having one. I can’t say why. I’m just not motivated like that.” She went back to turning her onions into tiny little cubes.
“It’s true I’ve never seen you with a girlfriend or even chasing one. I guess I just assumed it was going on somewhere else.”
“No, ma’am. It’s not that I dislike girls, I’m just not motivated to pursue them.”
“What religion were you raised?” she asked.
“Disciples of Christ.”
“No religious guilt overlay?”
“No, ma’am. We didn’t talk about sex in church and I never got the idea that there was any part of it was wrong from what I heard on Sunday. One of the few times I made out with a girl was with the preacher’s daughter here in Chattanooga.”
“What brought that on?” she asked.
“Can’t tell you,” I said. “We were the only people in the balcony for the Christmas Eve candle-light service. She suggested we move to the back row and then all of a sudden we were kissing. Don’t know what was going on. She was a couple years older than me and was already off at college.”
“And you didn’t like that?” she asked.
“No, I did. It was great. I’m just not motivated to seek it out.”
“What an odd man you are, Henry.” The cornbread was reduced to a bowl full of tiny crumbles. Mrs. W. noticed this and handed me a half loaf of French bread and another glass bowl. “Turn this into little chunks. It doesn’t have to be as fine as you got that cornbread. It just needs to be small enough for the blender to grab it.” This meant nothing to me. I tore off a few small chunks.
“Like this?” I asked. She looked.
“That’s fine. Even a little larger would be okay,” she said. “Ever had sex with a man?” I was a little surprised.
“No ma’am,” I said, in what I must admit was an amused way.
“You’re sure?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Because it’s really okay if you have. I really couldn’t care less.”
“Thanks. I’m just not gay. No gay sex. No vices of any kind.”
“Henry, you’re a professional gambler.”
“Other than gambling.”
“I know this shows me to be limited and parochial but I don’t understand a red-blooded young man who’s not chasing girls. Or even boys. So you’ve never wanted to chase girls?”
“Hmm,” I said. I thought.
“Who was she?”
“There have been two I thought were really attractive. Both were attached to other guys. One you may know because she was a student of yours so I probably ought not to talk about her and the other is this red-head I run into in pool halls from time to time. Both seem like good company.”
“Okay, fair enough.” She pulled a heavy glass Oster blender from under the counter and took my French bread chunks from me. She put a small portion of them in the blender and pulsed it a few times. The chunks became smaller and smaller crumbs each time she pulsed.
“Molly?” she asked. She was guessing which one of her prior students I’d been interested in.
“No, ma’am.” I answered. She pulsed the blender again then poured the crumbs into the cornbread crumbs.
“Gwen?” she asked, as she added more coarse bread chunks to the blender.
“No, ma’am.”
“Sandy?”
“No, ma’am,” I answered. Unless I was mistaken, she was naming pretty, smart girls she could remember from my graduating class.
“Cherry?”
“No, ma’am.”
“No, of course not. How about another cheerleader, though, Cindy?”
“No, ma’am. She was smart, though. You know, my idea was to protect the identity of somebody you taught.”
“Linda?” she asked.
“Mrs. Wertheimer, I am uncomfortable with this line of inquiry.”
“All right.” She returned her attention to sautéing her chopped onions and celery. “Chop this,” she said, handing me a bunch of parsley, dropping a very large pat of butter into the skillet that had earlier held the cornbread. “You want to clip off the leaves but not get any stem, then chop it pretty fine.” I did my best to follow instructions. She had an enormous stockpot she filled with water and brought to boil while I was separating parsley leaves from parsley stems with a kitchen knife that was larger than I’d used before. She looked down at my cutting board and grabbed a handful of parsley stems, “excuse me,” she said, and dropped them into the stockpot along with two celery sticks, some carrots, and some bay leaves. She handed me a large brown onion, saying “Quarter this,” which I did, dark brown skin and all. She then dropped what looked like a bunch of chicken necks into the water and took a large, maybe 35 pound, turkey from the refrigerator. She sat it on the counter and reached up inside it and pulled out a turkey neck and a small plastic sack of organs. “You like giblets in your gravy?” she asked me.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Chopped heart?”
“And gizzard and maybe even liver,” she said.
“No, thanks, but if you like it…”
“No. Never liked gizzards or heart either one. This liver, though,” she said, looking at a dark purplish mass that more or less filled her hand, “It always seemed I should be able to make a good pate our of that.” I could hear the front door open and Ginny call out.
“Aunt Maggie,” she called out, cheerfully, as though calling across a canyon.
“We’re in the kitchen,” Mrs. W. called back, looking up expectantly. Ginny showed up in a few seconds and embraced Mrs. W. on her chair with a big hug. Ginny had a dress of some sort in a dry cleaning bag in her right hand. They smiled warmly at each other for a second and hugged again. I sipped my coffee, now lukewarm.
“Hello, Henry,” said Ginny, still hugging, without opening her eyes. “Aunt Margaret is the best aunt in the world.”
“I bet,” I said. “She’s sure good at everything else.”
“Why don’t you put that in my closet,” said Mrs. W., gesturing at her dress. “I’ve put Henry in the guest room, so you can use mine.” Ginny nodded, then thought.
“But you’ll need it,” Ginny said.
“I’ll use it when you’re done,” Mrs. W. replied. “You can be hostess if anybody shows up while I’m making myself beautiful.” Ginny smiled and gave her another one of those quick girl-hugs, then ran off.
“So this is all going to be okay?” Mrs. W. asked me.
“Yes ma’am.”
“How much did you gamble in that pool game?” she asked.
“I put up $5,000,” I said. She looked and laughed.
“So you won $5,000 on one game?” She was happy for me.
“No ma’am, we were playing Cutthroat, a three person game, so each of us put up $5,000.” She smiled even broader.
“So you put up $5,000 and won $10,000?”
“Yes, ma’am. If I don’t find a pool game this weekend I’m leaving $10,000 with you.”
“Well, Hell. Good job. You’re a very improbable college student, Henry Baida. You know, that pays for pretty much a year at college.”
“Ginny made this point pretty forcefully, but she misunderstood the wager.”
“How so?”
“People who don’t gamble or who don’t really like math mistake the amount you win with the amount you bet. Ginny’s convinced I bet $15,000.” Mrs. W. nodded and lit another Benson & Hedges.
“There’s a lot of that in my family,” she said. “We were shopkeepers from Potsdam who opened a delicatessen in Chattanooga. So my grandfather took that big risk by moving to the U.S., but then he went into the family business and sent back to Germany for a teenaged wife. Some risk, but some running back to the old ways too. But you’ll like Gunner.
“Gunner?” I asked.
“Ginny’s dad. Great trial lawyer once. Clarence Darrow back at the Public Defender’s office. Then went to the big, old firm and seems to mainly concentrate on railroads.
“What’s he gamble on?” I asked.
“He’s a trial lawyer.”
“So?” She thought.
“I think Gunner feels capable of judging the odds in pretty much any situation,” she said. I could hear Ginny bounding down the stairs, and almost galloping towards the kitchen.
“What’s to do? she asked, sitting on the stool next to me.
“Want some coffee?” Mrs. W. asked.
“Sure!” she said, and hopped up to pour herself a cup. “Henry?” she asked, looking at me. She looked me in the eye as she asked. The look was pleasant, but not ‘interested,’ so she’d made up her mind about me.
“Yeah, thanks,” I said. I think once a girl decides she’s never going to have sex with you she finds it easier to be around you, but I’m a guy and so have little insight on what women think, and I might have even less insight than most guys. Ginny unplugged the percolator, filled my coffee cup, then warmed up Mrs. W.’s, then put the percolator back on the counter and plugged it back in, to keep it hot.
“So where are we?” Ginny asked.
“Well, we have cornbread crumbles. I’ve sautéed onions and celery. Henry’s turned French bread into pieces the Osterizer can handle. I’ve got a turkey stock, or turkey and chicken stock, working. What do you think?”
“Yams?” asked Ginny.
“Sure. Although I’ve used the biggest pot for the stock.” Ginny got off her stool and started looking around in Mrs. W’s shelves and cupboards and found a large pot, although not as large as the stock pot. Ginny piled all of the yams on the countertop next to that pot and frowned at them. She searched briefly and found a paring knife and trimmed the small ends and protuberances from the yams, placing them in the pot as she did so. Trimmed, they all fit so she removed them, filled the pot half-full with water, put it on the burner and turned it to high. “Salt?” she asked Mrs. W., without looking at her.
“A little,” Mrs. W. answered. Ginny retrieved a carton of Morton’s from a cabinet, poured a small mound on her palm, then brushed it into the water with her other hand.
Then Ginny was looking for something to do. She noticed my bowl of bread chunks, took them from the table in front of me, and put a handful into blender, and pulsed them several times to turn the bread into crumbs. “All of them?” she asked Mrs. W.
“Well, most of them,” Mrs. W. answered. Ginny nodded. She poured out the crumbs in the blender into the cornbread crumbs, then put two more handfuls into the blender and pulsed it several times, until the bread chunks were bread crumbs. She looked at the water in the sweet potato pot. Not yet boiling. She pored the French bread crumbs into the cornbread crumbs then put another few handfuls of bread chunks into the Osterizer and pulsed them into breadcrumbs. The water had started boiling so Ginny dropped in the trimmed yams, one at a time but without any delay between. Mrs. W was looking off to the middle distance and smoking her cigarette. Just before the silence became awkward, she asked me a question.”
“School’s going okay, Henry?”
“Yes ma’am. Pretty much. I have this odd sense that the Math Department and the Physics department don’t get along.” She looked at her coffee cup for a few seconds, then looked at me as though wondering what to do with me.
“Yeah, well. There was a time when the Math people and the Physics people all got along. Then, all of a sudden, everything changed.”
“Why so?” She took a last drag off of her cigarette and stubbed it out.
“You’re new to Physics?”
“Well, I’m taking it for the first time.”
“But you don’t know particle physics or special relativity?”
“No, ma’am,” I answered.
“The divide had more to do with Physics than it did with Math,” she said. “We were all together until this odd thing that happened in 1935. Albert published this paper with Dr. Podolsky and Nathan Rosen about the entanglement problem—you’ll get to it and if you don’t I’ll explain it—but to really understand you need to know quantum mechanics and special relativity so ask me in a couple of years and I’ll tell you. It’s weird.”
“Okay.” It wasn’t like her not to explain things. Ginny and she were working together to make food. They seemed to flow together as though they had rehearsed cooking Thanksgiving cooking. Neither seemed to need to talk, it all just seemed to flow. Every now and then one would stop to ask the other a question—“How long for a 35 pound turkey?” or “Is that Aunt Leah’s skillet?” but mostly they communicated without saying much at all, the way sisters sometimes do. At about 3:00 Ginny excused herself and disappeared upstairs.
“Go clean yourself up, Henry,” said Mrs. W. “Company’s coming.”
“I only have jeans,” I said.
“That’s fine. Shave and put on a clean shirt.” I went and did as told.
Thursday, November 4, 2010
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Chapter 23A: A Day of Thanks
Thanksgiving at Mrs. W’s house was very, very nice, but her house wasn’t my home at that point. I wasn’t averse to it being my home, but when you move around as much as I did when I was a kid the concept of “home” has a more diffuse connotation than it would if you lived in one place, say, Wadley, Alabama, or even Chattanooga, for your entire life. I was more rootless than anyone in Mrs. W’s family, not as closely tied to the culture or the institutions or the people of Chattanooga as anyone else there. I was there not because I thought Chattanooga was home, but because Mrs. W was nice enough to invite me, and because I liked her, and because there wasn’t anyplace else where somebody was expecting me.
Ginny’s dad was waiting for us when we’d arrived at Mrs. W’s house. He collected Ginny and her luggage and left pretty fast. Walt lit a cigarette as soon as her car door closed, then he and Cisco pulled off into the night, the shiny Pontiac disappearing into an unusually warm November night. Standing outside, I couldn’t see much of Mrs. W’s house, but it seemed large and vine-covered, with a frame and shingle exterior painted some dark olive or brown. She greeted me warmly, of course, then when the others had left led me to a bedroom. The interior of her house was mostly warm varnished mahogany, with intricately cut mortise and tenon joints and carefully carved accents. It smelled like she’d just cooked cornbread. She had dark Oriental carpets on most of her floors, which seemed to be beautiful quarter-sawn oak. I’d never seen anything quite like it. She showed me to a spacious upstairs bedroom with two twin beds. Mission furniture. It was nice. Spare. Neat. Clean.
“Henry,” Mrs. W said, lighting a Benson & Hedges off of her Gates Zippo, “There’s nobody else with a claim to this room. I know you have family, but this room is open for you whenever you need it.”
An amazing offer.
When I woke up the next morning it was early. The house was cool and quiet. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do. On the road, I would have made coffee, if there was a pot in the room, or gone looking for it. At college, I would walk up to the dining hall and eat bacon and drink coffee and look over my subjects until time for class to start. In Mrs. W’s house I had no idea who else was up at 6:30, needed to brush my teeth, and didn’t know where the bathroom was. As is the case with some old houses, none of the upstairs bedrooms had its own bathroom but all of them exited into a hall from which they all shared access to a common bathroom. Not modern, but not odd. I brushed my teeth and put on enough clothing to present myself to the household and went downstairs.
The house was quiet and still, and I didn’t know my way around. I found my way through the living room and dining room to the kitchen, partly aided by the aroma of coffee. Mrs. Wertheimer was seated at the kitchen table, smoking a cigarette, looking at several three by five cards on the table in front of her. The floor creaked slightly as I came to the kitchen door and she looked up.
“Hey, Henry,” she said, happy to see me. She glanced up at the source of the coffee aroma, a 12 cup Hamilton Beach percolator. I followed her gaze, and you could see the coffee surging into the glass knob on top. Still not ready. “Looks like the coffee’s still got a few minutes to go,” she said. “How’d you sleep?”
“Great,” I said. “What are you up to?”
“Not a lot. Looking at recipes and waiting for the coffee. I like to cook, but I don’t do it too much, so I look over the recipes before I start.” She looked down at her cards and took a drag. “Are you a dressing person or a stuffing person?” she asked.
“I don’t know. What’s the difference?” I asked.
“They’re the same thing cooked differently. We’re going to have cornbread and bread stuffing. Or dressing. Stuffing is the mix of breadcrumbs and vegetables and all stuffed into the turkey and roasted with it, dressing is the same mix cooked in a casserole dish. Both are good.”
“I guess we always had dressing, then,” I said.
“We’re going to have both, but if you’ve never tried stuffing you should have some,” she said. “Nothing like it.” She looked at her cards and smoked her cigarette. “Yams?” she asked, looking up.
“Of course.”
“Candied or whipped?” she asked.
“I think I’m a candied guy,” I said. “I mean, I like whipped sweet potatoes, but candied yams are a real treat.”
“Good man,” she said. She took a look at her cards and took a drag from her cigarette.
“Do you prefer mashed potatoes or rice as a starch?” she asked.
“The dressing, or stuffing, is plenty,” I said. “Are you thinking of rolls?” I asked.
“Yeah, that’s why I’m up early,” she said. “I think Thanksgiving needs to have good rolls, so I got up and started a batch of Parker House Rolls.” There was a large glass bowl filled with dough, covered with Saran-Wrap, near the oven.
“Don’t know Parker House Rolls,” I said.
“Lots of butter. A little sweet.”
“Like the rolls for lunch at City High?” I asked.
“Almost,” she said. “The rolls they served at City were made with margarine.”
“They were really good.”
“Sure were,” she said. “I’ve got broccoli. Can you make Hollandaise?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Can you follow instructions?”
“I think so,” I said. Her eyes shot up over her glasses, then they softened speculatively. She took a drag off of her cigarette.
“You don’t have much experience at that, I guess?” she asked.
“No, ma’am.”
“It’s not so bad, you know, listening to what other people think.”
I thought about that for a minute. “I listen to you,” I said.
“Sure,” she said. “I appreciate it that you trust me. But maybe you could be more trusting of people around you. Have you been making friends in college?”
I thought for a minute. “Well, there’s Stoney. I tried to be nice to Milton, but I think he took it the wrong way.”
“How did you try to be nice to him?”
“I bought a nine ball game. Kept him from being fleeced by a pro I know named Donnie.” She looked at her recipe cards for a few minutes. The coffee was done and I got up hefted the pot. There were several mugs in front of the percolator. “Coffee?” I asked. She looked up.
“Sure,” she said. “Black.” I poured her a mug, put it down near her, poured one for myself, and went back to my stool. “Thanks,” she said, when I put the mug in front of her. She took a sip. “Okay, here’s the plan,” she said. “Turkey, stuffing, dressing, candied yams, mashed potatoes, gravy, broccoli with hollandaise, corn soufflé. Parker House rolls, pumpkin pie, mincemeat pie. Good?”
“More food than I’m used to even on Thanksgiving,” I said.
“So I’m about to start cooking, and if Ginny shows up what’s going to happen?”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Henry, don’t be dense,” she said. “Last time I saw you together she was hanging on your every word. Last night she was staying as far away from you as possible and mooning at that snob from Atlanta.”
“Yeah. Okay. It’s odd. She saw me play pool for some money. Maybe a lot of money. I know it seemed like a lot to her. She didn’t like it that I risked so much.” Mrs. W. nodded and thought for a few minutes.
“Her mom’s that way, too. Her dad’s been offered a job as general counsel of this railroad. The Union Pacific. Big company. Great job. Could make him, or them, millions of dollars. Winnie’s worried because he’s got a good job now and she doesn’t see why he’d consider giving it up.”
“What’s his job now?”
“He’s a partner at Miller & Martin.”
“A lawyer deal?” I asked.
“Yes. And he does well. But being general counsel of the Union Pacific would be a much bigger lawyer deal. But the job is in Omaha.”
“Nebraska?”
“Yes.”
“A long train ride from Chattanooga, especially as Chattanooga doesn’t have passenger rail.”
“Good point.” She smiled.
“Anything I can do to help with the Thanksgiving meal?” I asked, sipping my coffee.
“Maybe. Do you cook?”
“Not at all.”
“Never?” she was surprised.
“Sometimes I fried eggs for myself on Saturdays or Sundays,” I said.
“Because your mom was away?” she asked.
“No, because I liked them fried really, really hard, with a tough skin, and Mom thought that was wrong. I’d fry my eggs and she’d make toast.”
“Well, Ginny usually comes over a little after noon and helps.” She stood and handed me a black iron skillet with red and white hound’s tooth dish towel over it, then located a large Pyrex bowl. I lifted the dish towel and found a large wheel of cornbread that must have been cooked last night with one narrow slice missing. I looked up at Mrs. W. “Your job is to change that cornbread into tiny little crumbles in that bowl.” I shrugged and got to work. While I was crumbling, he took celery, onions, parsley and some other kind of green leaves out of the refrigerator and began to chop them, cigarette dangling from her lower lip. Chopping onions didn’t seem to bother her eyes.
“So what were you going to do with Ginny if you got her?” she asked. I thought for a few seconds about how to respond.
“I, I, I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but I wanted to be her friend, not her boyfriend,” I said.
“That’s odd,” said Mrs. W. “She’s pretty. Smart. Vivacious, athletic.”
“She’s absolutely delightful in every way,” I said.
“Henry,” she asked, with a surprised tone in her voice, “are you homosexual?”
“No, ma’am,” I answered, crumbling my cornbread with a sigh.
“It’s completely okay with me if you are,” she said, earnestly, looking at me and stubbing out her cigarette.
“No, ma’am. I don’t seem to think about women as much as most guys my age, but I don’t think about men. Not in that way, I mean.” She frowned a bit. “I’ve never had a girlfriend and don’t miss having one. I can’t say why. I’m just motivated like that.” She went back to turning her onions into tiny little cubes.
“It’s true I’ve never seen you with a girlfriend or eve chasing one. I guess I just assumed it was going on somewhere else.”
“No, ma’am. It’s not that I dislike girls, I’m just not motivated to pursue them.”
“What religion were you raised?”
“Disciples of Christ.”
“No religious guilt overlay?”
“No, ma’am. We didn’t talk about sex in church, and I never got the idea that there was any part of it was wrong from what I heard on Sunday. One of the few times I made out with a girl was with the preacher’s daughter here in Chattanooga.”
“What brought that on?” she asked.
“Can’t tell you,” I said. “We were the only people in the balcony for the Christmas Eve candle-light service. She suggested we move to the back row and then all of a sudden we were kissing. Don’t know what was going on. She was a couple years older than me and was already off at college.”
“And you didn’t like that?” she asked.
“No, I did. It was great. I’m just not motivated to seek it out.”
“What an odd man you are, Henry.” The cornbread was reduced to a bowl full of tiny crumbles. Mrs. W. noticed this and handed me a half loaf of French bread and another glass bowl. “Turn this into little chunks. It doesn’t have to be as fine as you got that cornbread. It just needs to be small enough for the blender to grab it.” This meant nothing to me. I tore off a few small chunks.
“Like this?” I asked. She looked.
“That’s fine. Even a little larger would be okay,” she said. “Ever had sex with a man?” I was a little surprised.
“No ma’am,” I said, in what I must admit was an amused way.
“You’re sure?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Because it’s really okay if you are. I really couldn’t care less.”
“Thanks. I’m just not gay. No gay sex. No vices of any kind.”
“Henry, you’re a professional gambler.”
“Other than gambling.”
“I know this shows me to be limited and parochial but I don’t understand a red-blooded young man who’s not chasing girls. Or even boys. So you’ve never wanted to chase girls?”
“Hmm,” I said. I thought.
“Who was she?”
“There have been two I really liked. One you may know because she was a student of yours so I probably ought not to talk about her and the other is this red-head I run into in pool halls from time to time. Both seem like good company.”
“Okay, fair enough.” She pulled a heavy glass Oster blender from under the counter and took my French bread chunks from me. She put a small portion of them in the blender and pulsed it a few times. The chunks became smaller and smaller crumbs each time she pulsed.
“Molly?” she asked. She was guessing which one of her prior students I’d been interested in.
“No, ma’am.” I answered. She pulsed the blender again then poured the crumbs into the cornbread crumbs.
“Gwen?” she asked, as she added more coarse bread chunks to the blender.
“No, ma’am.”
“Sandy?”
“No, ma’am,” I answered. Unless I was mistaken, she was naming all the pretty, smart girls she could remember in my graduating class..
“Cherry?”
“No, ma’am.”
“No, of course not. How about another cheerleader, though, Cindy?”
“No, ma’am. She was smart, though. You know, my idea was to protect the identity of somebody you taught.”
“Linda?” she asked.
“Mrs. Wertheimer, I am uncomfortable with this line of inquiry.”
“All right.” She returned her attention to sautéing her chopped onions and celery. “Chop this,” she said, handing me a bunch of parsley, dropping a very large pat of butter into the skillet that had earlier held the cornbread. “You want to clip off the leaves but not get any stem, then chop it pretty fine.” I did my best to follow instructions. She had an enormous stockpot she filled with water and brought to boil while I was separating parsley leaves from parsley stems with a kitchen knife that was larger than I’d used before. She looked down at my cutting board and grabbed a handful of parsley stems, “excuse me,” she said, and dropped them into the stockpot along with two celery sticks, some carrots, and some bay leaves. She handed me a large brown onion, saying “Quarter this,” which I did, dark brown skin and all. She then dropped what looked like a bunch of chicken necks into the water and took a large, maybe 35 pound, turkey from the refrigerator. She sat it on the counter and reached up inside it and pulled out a turkey neck and a small plastic sack of organs. “You like giblets in your gravy?” she asked me.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Chopped heart?”
“And gizzard and maybe even liver,” she said.
“No, thanks, but if you want it..,”
“No. Never liked gizzards or heart either one. This liver, though,” she said, looking at a dark purple mass that more or less filled her hand, “It always seemed I should be able to make a good pate our of that.” I could hear the front door open and Ginny call out.
“Aunt Maggie,” she called out, cheerfully, as though calling across a canyon.
“We’re in the kitchen,” Mrs. W. called back, looking up expectantly. Ginny showed up in a few seconds and embraced Mrs. W. on her chair with a big hug. They smiled warmly at each other for a second and hugged again. I sipped my coffee, now lukewarm.
“Hello, Henry,” said Ginny, still hugging, without opening her eyes. “Aunt Margaret is the best aunt in the world.”
“I bet,” I said. “She’s sure good at everything else.”
“Okay,” Ginny said, when they were through hugging. “What’s to do?”
“Want some coffee?” Mrs. W. asked.
“Sure!” she said, and hopped up to pour herself a cup. “Henry?” she asked, looking at me. She looked me in the eye as she asked. The look was pleasant, but not ‘interested,’ so she’d made up her mind about me.
“Yeah, thanks,” I said. I think once a girl decides she’s never going to have sex with you she finds it easier to be around you, but I’m a guy and so have little insight on what women think, and I might have even less insight than most guys. Ginny unplugged the percolator, filled my coffee cup, then filled Mrs. W.’s, then put the percolator back on the counter and plugged it back in, to keep it hot. It can’t have had much left in it.
“So where are we?”
“Well, we have cornbread crumbles. I’ve sautéed onions and celery. Henry’s turned French bread into pieces the Osterizer can handle. I’ve got a turkey stock, or turkey and chicken stock. working. What do you think?”
“Yams?” asked Ginny.
“Sure. Although I’ve used the biggest pot for the stock.” Ginny got busy looking around in Mrs. W’s shelves and cupboards and found a large pot, although not as large as the stock pot. Ginny piled all of the yams on the countertop next to that pot and frowned at them. She searched briefly and found a paring knife and trimmed the small ends and protuberances from the yams, placing them in the pot as she did so. Trimmed, they all fit so she removed them, filled the pot half-full with water, and put it on the burner and turned it to high. “Salt?” she asked Mrs. W., without looking at her.
“A little,” Mrs. W. answered. Ginny retrieved a carton of Morton’s from a cabinet, poured a small mound on her palm, and brushed it into the water with her other hand. She looked around in the cabinets to locate a chrome Osterizer blender with a heavy glass jar and placed it on the counter, then took my bowl of bread chunks, smiling briefly, and placed it next to the blender. She put two handfuls into the blender and pulsed it several times, until the bread chunks were bread crumbs. She looked at the water in the sweet potato pot. Not yet boiling. She reached under a counter as though she knew where to find things and pulled out a large Pyrex bowl, and without missing a beat poured the breadcrumbs into the bowl. She put another few handfuls of bread chunks into the Osterizer and pulsed them into breadcrumbs. The water had started boiling so Ginny dropped in the trimmed yams, one at a time but without any delay between. Mrs. W was looking off to the middle distance and smoking her cigarette. Just before the silence became awkward, she asked me a question.”
“School’s going okay, Henry?”
“Yes ma’am. Pretty much. I have this odd sense that the Math Department and the Physics department don’t get along.” She looked at her coffee cup for a few seconds, then looked at me as though wondering what to do with me.
“Yeah, well. There was a time when the Math people and the Physics people all got along. Then, all of a sudden, everything changed.”
“Why so?” She took a last drag off of her cigarette and stubbed it out.
“You’re new to Physics?”
“Well, I’m taking it for the first time.”
“But you don’t know particle physics or special relativity?”
“No, ma’am,” I answered.
“The divide had more to do with Physics than it did with Math,” she said. “We were all together until this odd thing that happened in 1935. Albert published this paper with Dr. Podolsky and Nathan Rosen about the entanglement problem—you’ll get to it and if you don’t I’ll explain it—but to really understand you need to know quantum mechanics and special relativity to get at it, so ask me in a couple of years and I’ll tell you.”
“Okay.” It wasn’t like her not to explain things. Ginny and she were working together to make food. They seemed to flow together as though they had rehearsed cooking Thanksgiving cooking. Neither seemed to need to talk, it all just seemed to flow. Every now and then one would stop to ask the other a question—“How long for a 35 pound turkey?” or “Is that Aunt Leah’s skillet?” but mostly they communicated without saying much at all, the way sisters sometimes do. At about 3:00 Ginny excused herself and disappeared upstairs.
“Go clean yourself up, Henry,” said Mrs. W. “Company’s coming.”
“I only have jeans,” I said.
“That’s fine. Shave and put on a clean shirt.” I went and did as told.
Ginny’s dad was waiting for us when we’d arrived at Mrs. W’s house. He collected Ginny and her luggage and left pretty fast. Walt lit a cigarette as soon as her car door closed, then he and Cisco pulled off into the night, the shiny Pontiac disappearing into an unusually warm November night. Standing outside, I couldn’t see much of Mrs. W’s house, but it seemed large and vine-covered, with a frame and shingle exterior painted some dark olive or brown. She greeted me warmly, of course, then when the others had left led me to a bedroom. The interior of her house was mostly warm varnished mahogany, with intricately cut mortise and tenon joints and carefully carved accents. It smelled like she’d just cooked cornbread. She had dark Oriental carpets on most of her floors, which seemed to be beautiful quarter-sawn oak. I’d never seen anything quite like it. She showed me to a spacious upstairs bedroom with two twin beds. Mission furniture. It was nice. Spare. Neat. Clean.
“Henry,” Mrs. W said, lighting a Benson & Hedges off of her Gates Zippo, “There’s nobody else with a claim to this room. I know you have family, but this room is open for you whenever you need it.”
An amazing offer.
When I woke up the next morning it was early. The house was cool and quiet. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do. On the road, I would have made coffee, if there was a pot in the room, or gone looking for it. At college, I would walk up to the dining hall and eat bacon and drink coffee and look over my subjects until time for class to start. In Mrs. W’s house I had no idea who else was up at 6:30, needed to brush my teeth, and didn’t know where the bathroom was. As is the case with some old houses, none of the upstairs bedrooms had its own bathroom but all of them exited into a hall from which they all shared access to a common bathroom. Not modern, but not odd. I brushed my teeth and put on enough clothing to present myself to the household and went downstairs.
The house was quiet and still, and I didn’t know my way around. I found my way through the living room and dining room to the kitchen, partly aided by the aroma of coffee. Mrs. Wertheimer was seated at the kitchen table, smoking a cigarette, looking at several three by five cards on the table in front of her. The floor creaked slightly as I came to the kitchen door and she looked up.
“Hey, Henry,” she said, happy to see me. She glanced up at the source of the coffee aroma, a 12 cup Hamilton Beach percolator. I followed her gaze, and you could see the coffee surging into the glass knob on top. Still not ready. “Looks like the coffee’s still got a few minutes to go,” she said. “How’d you sleep?”
“Great,” I said. “What are you up to?”
“Not a lot. Looking at recipes and waiting for the coffee. I like to cook, but I don’t do it too much, so I look over the recipes before I start.” She looked down at her cards and took a drag. “Are you a dressing person or a stuffing person?” she asked.
“I don’t know. What’s the difference?” I asked.
“They’re the same thing cooked differently. We’re going to have cornbread and bread stuffing. Or dressing. Stuffing is the mix of breadcrumbs and vegetables and all stuffed into the turkey and roasted with it, dressing is the same mix cooked in a casserole dish. Both are good.”
“I guess we always had dressing, then,” I said.
“We’re going to have both, but if you’ve never tried stuffing you should have some,” she said. “Nothing like it.” She looked at her cards and smoked her cigarette. “Yams?” she asked, looking up.
“Of course.”
“Candied or whipped?” she asked.
“I think I’m a candied guy,” I said. “I mean, I like whipped sweet potatoes, but candied yams are a real treat.”
“Good man,” she said. She took a look at her cards and took a drag from her cigarette.
“Do you prefer mashed potatoes or rice as a starch?” she asked.
“The dressing, or stuffing, is plenty,” I said. “Are you thinking of rolls?” I asked.
“Yeah, that’s why I’m up early,” she said. “I think Thanksgiving needs to have good rolls, so I got up and started a batch of Parker House Rolls.” There was a large glass bowl filled with dough, covered with Saran-Wrap, near the oven.
“Don’t know Parker House Rolls,” I said.
“Lots of butter. A little sweet.”
“Like the rolls for lunch at City High?” I asked.
“Almost,” she said. “The rolls they served at City were made with margarine.”
“They were really good.”
“Sure were,” she said. “I’ve got broccoli. Can you make Hollandaise?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Can you follow instructions?”
“I think so,” I said. Her eyes shot up over her glasses, then they softened speculatively. She took a drag off of her cigarette.
“You don’t have much experience at that, I guess?” she asked.
“No, ma’am.”
“It’s not so bad, you know, listening to what other people think.”
I thought about that for a minute. “I listen to you,” I said.
“Sure,” she said. “I appreciate it that you trust me. But maybe you could be more trusting of people around you. Have you been making friends in college?”
I thought for a minute. “Well, there’s Stoney. I tried to be nice to Milton, but I think he took it the wrong way.”
“How did you try to be nice to him?”
“I bought a nine ball game. Kept him from being fleeced by a pro I know named Donnie.” She looked at her recipe cards for a few minutes. The coffee was done and I got up hefted the pot. There were several mugs in front of the percolator. “Coffee?” I asked. She looked up.
“Sure,” she said. “Black.” I poured her a mug, put it down near her, poured one for myself, and went back to my stool. “Thanks,” she said, when I put the mug in front of her. She took a sip. “Okay, here’s the plan,” she said. “Turkey, stuffing, dressing, candied yams, mashed potatoes, gravy, broccoli with hollandaise, corn soufflé. Parker House rolls, pumpkin pie, mincemeat pie. Good?”
“More food than I’m used to even on Thanksgiving,” I said.
“So I’m about to start cooking, and if Ginny shows up what’s going to happen?”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Henry, don’t be dense,” she said. “Last time I saw you together she was hanging on your every word. Last night she was staying as far away from you as possible and mooning at that snob from Atlanta.”
“Yeah. Okay. It’s odd. She saw me play pool for some money. Maybe a lot of money. I know it seemed like a lot to her. She didn’t like it that I risked so much.” Mrs. W. nodded and thought for a few minutes.
“Her mom’s that way, too. Her dad’s been offered a job as general counsel of this railroad. The Union Pacific. Big company. Great job. Could make him, or them, millions of dollars. Winnie’s worried because he’s got a good job now and she doesn’t see why he’d consider giving it up.”
“What’s his job now?”
“He’s a partner at Miller & Martin.”
“A lawyer deal?” I asked.
“Yes. And he does well. But being general counsel of the Union Pacific would be a much bigger lawyer deal. But the job is in Omaha.”
“Nebraska?”
“Yes.”
“A long train ride from Chattanooga, especially as Chattanooga doesn’t have passenger rail.”
“Good point.” She smiled.
“Anything I can do to help with the Thanksgiving meal?” I asked, sipping my coffee.
“Maybe. Do you cook?”
“Not at all.”
“Never?” she was surprised.
“Sometimes I fried eggs for myself on Saturdays or Sundays,” I said.
“Because your mom was away?” she asked.
“No, because I liked them fried really, really hard, with a tough skin, and Mom thought that was wrong. I’d fry my eggs and she’d make toast.”
“Well, Ginny usually comes over a little after noon and helps.” She stood and handed me a black iron skillet with red and white hound’s tooth dish towel over it, then located a large Pyrex bowl. I lifted the dish towel and found a large wheel of cornbread that must have been cooked last night with one narrow slice missing. I looked up at Mrs. W. “Your job is to change that cornbread into tiny little crumbles in that bowl.” I shrugged and got to work. While I was crumbling, he took celery, onions, parsley and some other kind of green leaves out of the refrigerator and began to chop them, cigarette dangling from her lower lip. Chopping onions didn’t seem to bother her eyes.
“So what were you going to do with Ginny if you got her?” she asked. I thought for a few seconds about how to respond.
“I, I, I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but I wanted to be her friend, not her boyfriend,” I said.
“That’s odd,” said Mrs. W. “She’s pretty. Smart. Vivacious, athletic.”
“She’s absolutely delightful in every way,” I said.
“Henry,” she asked, with a surprised tone in her voice, “are you homosexual?”
“No, ma’am,” I answered, crumbling my cornbread with a sigh.
“It’s completely okay with me if you are,” she said, earnestly, looking at me and stubbing out her cigarette.
“No, ma’am. I don’t seem to think about women as much as most guys my age, but I don’t think about men. Not in that way, I mean.” She frowned a bit. “I’ve never had a girlfriend and don’t miss having one. I can’t say why. I’m just motivated like that.” She went back to turning her onions into tiny little cubes.
“It’s true I’ve never seen you with a girlfriend or eve chasing one. I guess I just assumed it was going on somewhere else.”
“No, ma’am. It’s not that I dislike girls, I’m just not motivated to pursue them.”
“What religion were you raised?”
“Disciples of Christ.”
“No religious guilt overlay?”
“No, ma’am. We didn’t talk about sex in church, and I never got the idea that there was any part of it was wrong from what I heard on Sunday. One of the few times I made out with a girl was with the preacher’s daughter here in Chattanooga.”
“What brought that on?” she asked.
“Can’t tell you,” I said. “We were the only people in the balcony for the Christmas Eve candle-light service. She suggested we move to the back row and then all of a sudden we were kissing. Don’t know what was going on. She was a couple years older than me and was already off at college.”
“And you didn’t like that?” she asked.
“No, I did. It was great. I’m just not motivated to seek it out.”
“What an odd man you are, Henry.” The cornbread was reduced to a bowl full of tiny crumbles. Mrs. W. noticed this and handed me a half loaf of French bread and another glass bowl. “Turn this into little chunks. It doesn’t have to be as fine as you got that cornbread. It just needs to be small enough for the blender to grab it.” This meant nothing to me. I tore off a few small chunks.
“Like this?” I asked. She looked.
“That’s fine. Even a little larger would be okay,” she said. “Ever had sex with a man?” I was a little surprised.
“No ma’am,” I said, in what I must admit was an amused way.
“You’re sure?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Because it’s really okay if you are. I really couldn’t care less.”
“Thanks. I’m just not gay. No gay sex. No vices of any kind.”
“Henry, you’re a professional gambler.”
“Other than gambling.”
“I know this shows me to be limited and parochial but I don’t understand a red-blooded young man who’s not chasing girls. Or even boys. So you’ve never wanted to chase girls?”
“Hmm,” I said. I thought.
“Who was she?”
“There have been two I really liked. One you may know because she was a student of yours so I probably ought not to talk about her and the other is this red-head I run into in pool halls from time to time. Both seem like good company.”
“Okay, fair enough.” She pulled a heavy glass Oster blender from under the counter and took my French bread chunks from me. She put a small portion of them in the blender and pulsed it a few times. The chunks became smaller and smaller crumbs each time she pulsed.
“Molly?” she asked. She was guessing which one of her prior students I’d been interested in.
“No, ma’am.” I answered. She pulsed the blender again then poured the crumbs into the cornbread crumbs.
“Gwen?” she asked, as she added more coarse bread chunks to the blender.
“No, ma’am.”
“Sandy?”
“No, ma’am,” I answered. Unless I was mistaken, she was naming all the pretty, smart girls she could remember in my graduating class..
“Cherry?”
“No, ma’am.”
“No, of course not. How about another cheerleader, though, Cindy?”
“No, ma’am. She was smart, though. You know, my idea was to protect the identity of somebody you taught.”
“Linda?” she asked.
“Mrs. Wertheimer, I am uncomfortable with this line of inquiry.”
“All right.” She returned her attention to sautéing her chopped onions and celery. “Chop this,” she said, handing me a bunch of parsley, dropping a very large pat of butter into the skillet that had earlier held the cornbread. “You want to clip off the leaves but not get any stem, then chop it pretty fine.” I did my best to follow instructions. She had an enormous stockpot she filled with water and brought to boil while I was separating parsley leaves from parsley stems with a kitchen knife that was larger than I’d used before. She looked down at my cutting board and grabbed a handful of parsley stems, “excuse me,” she said, and dropped them into the stockpot along with two celery sticks, some carrots, and some bay leaves. She handed me a large brown onion, saying “Quarter this,” which I did, dark brown skin and all. She then dropped what looked like a bunch of chicken necks into the water and took a large, maybe 35 pound, turkey from the refrigerator. She sat it on the counter and reached up inside it and pulled out a turkey neck and a small plastic sack of organs. “You like giblets in your gravy?” she asked me.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Chopped heart?”
“And gizzard and maybe even liver,” she said.
“No, thanks, but if you want it..,”
“No. Never liked gizzards or heart either one. This liver, though,” she said, looking at a dark purple mass that more or less filled her hand, “It always seemed I should be able to make a good pate our of that.” I could hear the front door open and Ginny call out.
“Aunt Maggie,” she called out, cheerfully, as though calling across a canyon.
“We’re in the kitchen,” Mrs. W. called back, looking up expectantly. Ginny showed up in a few seconds and embraced Mrs. W. on her chair with a big hug. They smiled warmly at each other for a second and hugged again. I sipped my coffee, now lukewarm.
“Hello, Henry,” said Ginny, still hugging, without opening her eyes. “Aunt Margaret is the best aunt in the world.”
“I bet,” I said. “She’s sure good at everything else.”
“Okay,” Ginny said, when they were through hugging. “What’s to do?”
“Want some coffee?” Mrs. W. asked.
“Sure!” she said, and hopped up to pour herself a cup. “Henry?” she asked, looking at me. She looked me in the eye as she asked. The look was pleasant, but not ‘interested,’ so she’d made up her mind about me.
“Yeah, thanks,” I said. I think once a girl decides she’s never going to have sex with you she finds it easier to be around you, but I’m a guy and so have little insight on what women think, and I might have even less insight than most guys. Ginny unplugged the percolator, filled my coffee cup, then filled Mrs. W.’s, then put the percolator back on the counter and plugged it back in, to keep it hot. It can’t have had much left in it.
“So where are we?”
“Well, we have cornbread crumbles. I’ve sautéed onions and celery. Henry’s turned French bread into pieces the Osterizer can handle. I’ve got a turkey stock, or turkey and chicken stock. working. What do you think?”
“Yams?” asked Ginny.
“Sure. Although I’ve used the biggest pot for the stock.” Ginny got busy looking around in Mrs. W’s shelves and cupboards and found a large pot, although not as large as the stock pot. Ginny piled all of the yams on the countertop next to that pot and frowned at them. She searched briefly and found a paring knife and trimmed the small ends and protuberances from the yams, placing them in the pot as she did so. Trimmed, they all fit so she removed them, filled the pot half-full with water, and put it on the burner and turned it to high. “Salt?” she asked Mrs. W., without looking at her.
“A little,” Mrs. W. answered. Ginny retrieved a carton of Morton’s from a cabinet, poured a small mound on her palm, and brushed it into the water with her other hand. She looked around in the cabinets to locate a chrome Osterizer blender with a heavy glass jar and placed it on the counter, then took my bowl of bread chunks, smiling briefly, and placed it next to the blender. She put two handfuls into the blender and pulsed it several times, until the bread chunks were bread crumbs. She looked at the water in the sweet potato pot. Not yet boiling. She reached under a counter as though she knew where to find things and pulled out a large Pyrex bowl, and without missing a beat poured the breadcrumbs into the bowl. She put another few handfuls of bread chunks into the Osterizer and pulsed them into breadcrumbs. The water had started boiling so Ginny dropped in the trimmed yams, one at a time but without any delay between. Mrs. W was looking off to the middle distance and smoking her cigarette. Just before the silence became awkward, she asked me a question.”
“School’s going okay, Henry?”
“Yes ma’am. Pretty much. I have this odd sense that the Math Department and the Physics department don’t get along.” She looked at her coffee cup for a few seconds, then looked at me as though wondering what to do with me.
“Yeah, well. There was a time when the Math people and the Physics people all got along. Then, all of a sudden, everything changed.”
“Why so?” She took a last drag off of her cigarette and stubbed it out.
“You’re new to Physics?”
“Well, I’m taking it for the first time.”
“But you don’t know particle physics or special relativity?”
“No, ma’am,” I answered.
“The divide had more to do with Physics than it did with Math,” she said. “We were all together until this odd thing that happened in 1935. Albert published this paper with Dr. Podolsky and Nathan Rosen about the entanglement problem—you’ll get to it and if you don’t I’ll explain it—but to really understand you need to know quantum mechanics and special relativity to get at it, so ask me in a couple of years and I’ll tell you.”
“Okay.” It wasn’t like her not to explain things. Ginny and she were working together to make food. They seemed to flow together as though they had rehearsed cooking Thanksgiving cooking. Neither seemed to need to talk, it all just seemed to flow. Every now and then one would stop to ask the other a question—“How long for a 35 pound turkey?” or “Is that Aunt Leah’s skillet?” but mostly they communicated without saying much at all, the way sisters sometimes do. At about 3:00 Ginny excused herself and disappeared upstairs.
“Go clean yourself up, Henry,” said Mrs. W. “Company’s coming.”
“I only have jeans,” I said.
“That’s fine. Shave and put on a clean shirt.” I went and did as told.
Monday, September 13, 2010
Capter 22A: Traveling south for Thnksgiving
Cisco was from Atlanta, he was driving home for Thanksgiving, and the road from Nashville to Atlanta runs through Chattanooga, and he, being a nice guy, offered to drive me back to Chattanooga. I told him I was traveling with Ginny, and he said that was cool, and that he was also going to bring his friend Walt Gwinnett from some other dorm, a friend from high school. Everybody agreed we’d leave at about five on Wednesday. I was packed and ready to go, so when Cisco knocked on my door I picked up my suitcase and we left. When we got down to the parking lot, Walt was leaning against the car, in blue Blazer, blue Brooks Brothers button-down, khakis complete with alligator belt with monogrammed belt buckle, and Topsiders.
“Oh, hi,” said Walt, as though mildly surprised to see us.
“Walt, Henry. Henry, Walt,” said Cisco, unlocking the trunk.
“Walton Gwinnett,” said Walt, extending his hand.
“Henry Baida,” I answered, shaking his hand.
I’d never seen Cisco’s car before. It was a big black Pontiac Firebird Trans-Am without the optional gold detailing. It was clear he liked it. After I looked at it, he looked at me and cocked an eyebrow.
“The gold bird on the hood would have been too much for a guy like you,” I said.
“Damn straight,” he said, smiling, and tossed our bags into the not-so-big trunk. Walt held the door for me to get into the pretty small back seat. No coin toss, no discussion, I was in the back. Cisco started the car and backed out of the parking space. It had a big V-8, Glasspack kind of a rumble. It was already dark. Cisco pulled out of the dorm parking lot onto 21st Ave., then turned right onto Broadway. Walt looked at Cisco with concern.
“Why did you turn the wrong way?” asked Walt.
“We’re picking up a friend of Henry’s,” Cisco answered. Walt nodded idly and lit a cigarette with a metal butane lighter. “Roll down the window, if you’re going to smoke,” said Cisco. Walt’s expression indicated that he thought Cisco’s request to be an affront, but after a pause he complied and cranked down the window. Cisco turned onto Scarritt and found the front of Ginny’s dorm after a few minutes. Ginny was sitting out front, tweed jacket, knitted scarf, white blouse, blue jeans, dark blue Ferragamos, hair pushed back by a black velvet headband. Pretty girl. She didn’t know Cisco or his car, so when she looked at us, it was speculatively.
“Is that her?” Cisco asked.
“Yeah,” I answered.
“Jesus H. Christ, she is lights-out gorgeous,” said Cisco.
“She’s cute,” I agreed. Walt looked up for the first time to see who we were talking about. Cisco cut the engine and hopped out, approaching Ginny directly, and with a smile. He extended his hand.
“Ginny?” he asked, extending his hand. I was sitting behind Walt, and I’d expected him to get out of the car to greet Ginny, but he made no move to do so, so I slid over to exit from the drivers’ side.
“Yes?” Ginny replied, shaking his hand, tentatively.
“I’m Francis. Francis Atwater. A friend of Henry’s.” He was saying this as I was clambering out of his car. Her shaking of his hand became more cooperative and friendly once she saw me. She smiled at him.
“Hey, Ginny,” I said. She looked at me speculatively and waved. It was the first time I’d seen her face to face since my last pool game. She wasn’t sure what she thought of me. Cisco picked up her bag, opened the trunk, made room for her bag, closed the trunk lid, then returned his attention to Ginny. He smiled and placed his hand on her back, cooperatively moving her towards her seat. He opened the passenger door, where Walt was still seated.
“Walt, this is Ginny,” he said. “Ginny’s going to be sitting in the front seat, so you need to move to the back.” Walt tried his best not to frown, and stood up next to Ginny and Cisco. He smiled a hollow smile.
“Hello, Ginny, I’m Walton Gwinnett,” he said, offering his hand. She shook it. He sat in the passenger-side back seat, somewhat heavily, without removing his jacket.
“Hi, Henry,” she said.
“Hey. Good to see you again.” She waved again and sat in the passenger seat. Cisco unhinged the front seat to allow me access to the back seat.
“I wish you were shorter,” I said.
“She’s so cute,” he answered, too softly for her to hear.
“Smart, too,” I said, and got in. There just wasn’t much room in that back seat. Walt frowned at me. Ginny got into the passenger seat before Cisco could get around to hold her door, so she was in before him. He got in, sat, put the key in the ignition, then turned to her and flashed that bandit smile. She almost gasped.
“Ready?” he asked.
“Uh-huhm,” she answered, nodding, captivated. That fast. Cisco eased the Firebird into West End traffic, then navigated his way over to I-24. Once on the freeway he gave Ginny another smile, not so bright as the first.
“So tell me about yourself,” he said. She seemed surprised he asked.
“Oh, okay,” she said. “I’m a sophomore at Peabody. I’m thinking I’ll major in Psychology or Math and get a teacher’s certificate and maybe be a teacher. How about you?”
“You like teaching?” Cisco asked.
“I don’t know, but I think so,” she answered. “Since I was a little kid I’ve been involved in sports, and I’ve always imagined how I would be coaching the teams I’ve been on.”
“What sports?” Cisco asked.
“I like them all, but I mainly play soccer and tennis,” she said.
“So you want to teach Psychology to high school students?”
“That’s the thing. Most high schools don’t have many Psychology classes, maybe one per semester. Peabody has a really good psychology program, but I’m not gonna find a full-time job as a high school psychology teacher so since I’ve always gotten good grades in Math, I was thinking that I could also teach that. Anyway, that’s what I’m thinking now.”
“Henry back there may be good at Math,” he said. I sat up. I hadn’t expected to be mentioned. Walt, who had not seemed to be paying any attention, looked at me laconically and cocked an eyebrow. “Last week I asked him what pi was and he gave it to me to five decimal places,” Cisco said. Walt shook out a Benson & Hedges menthol and was about to place it between his lips. Cisco, displaying a hitherto-unknown eyes-in-the-back-of-the-head talent, said “No smoking, Walt.” Walt made an irritated face and put his cigarette away. Ginny seemed to think for a few seconds.
“Henry took Math from my Aunt Margaret, so I expect he knows it,” she said. I looked up, and saw that Cisco was looking at me inquisitively in the rear view mirror. I nodded. “Sometimes Math isn’t the real question. But the fact that Henry can remember that pi to eleven decimal places just means he has a good memory. It doesn’t mean he’s smart. Don’t get me wrong, Henry,” she said, without looking back at me, “I know you’re smart in math. What if, though, being good in math,” and here she wasn’t talking to me any more, but to Cisco, “causes other problems?”
“What kind of problems does Math lead to?” Cisco asked.
“Accountancy,” said Walt.
“Ignore Walt,” said Cisco. “He’s acting like old money.” Ginny looked at him blankly.
“Careers are a bother.” She nodded as though that explained something.
“Maybe you get to understand something better than the people around you, but still they worry about you. Or you do things that worry them,” she said.
“Like?” Cisco asked.
“Sometimes people do things that people close to them, or around them, or friends of theirs, don’t understand. It can make you think about them … differently.” Walt looked at me.
“I’m not sure I follow,” said Cisco, looking at Ginny earnestly for the second or two traffic safety allowed the driver of a Firebird.
“Sometimes you get an idea about a person, and then they do something, so you get a different idea of them. Enough about me. What about you?”
“Those are great shoes,” Cisco said to Ginny. I couldn’t see them. She smiled and looked at her shoes, then straight ahead into the darkness of I-24, still smiling.
“This ride is only ten minutes old,” said Walt, to me, not loud enough for the front seat to hear.
“I know,” I said.
“What did you do? Fuck her sister?”
“What was that?” asked Ginny.
“Nothing,” Walt and I chimed in together.
“So?” he asked.
“So what?” I answered.
“Did you have sex with her best friend, or what?”
“Gack, no,” I said. “Nothing like that.”
“What are you guys talking about?” she asked.
“Nothing,” we both called out.
“So what?” he asked.
“I won a pool game,” I said.
“So?”
“I bet a lot on it,” I said.
“So?”
“She was worried I was going to lose,” I said.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he said.
“What are you telling him, Henry?” she asked.
“Just guy talk,” I said.
“Don’t get distracted by the back seat, sweetheart,” said Cisco. “You were telling me the story of your life.”
“You’re being very … solicitous,” she said, still smiling.
“I’m just interested in people,” he said. Walt rolled his eyes and laid his head back on the headrest.
“Well,” she said, “I graduated from GPS. I was presented at the Cotton Ball, and most of the girls in my class are friends of mine, but I don’t like all that society stuff. I’m not a very girlie girl, but I think girls and women are important. I like sports but don’t like being called a jock.”
“Why not?” Cisco asked.
“Oh, I don’t know. Hard to say. I don’t like labels. Like, I’m all in favor of women’s rights. I hope the E.R.A. passes. I don’t think women should be second-class citizens. But I just don’t like Bella Abzug or Gloria Steinem and would just rather find my own way.”
“It seems like you care pretty deeply about this,” said Cisco, giving her a brief, earnest look.
“Not really,” she said. “My mom and my dad both work and I never grew up with this subservient deal. Nobody ever told me I couldn’t do things because I was a girl. So maybe I didn’t grow up like everybody. But the fact that I think girls should be able to do whatever they want doesn’t mean I want to be Shirley Chisholm.”
“So what do you like about soccer?” he asked. She closed her eyes.
“The beautiful game,” she said. “When I was little, they played me on defense, because I was fast and didn’t have those small skills, those little toe-tapping deals that the coach’s kids had. But once I got to middle school and got on the all-star teams they moved me to forward and anytime a halfback could feed me a ball, I could take a shot. It really is a wicked game. You see the ball sailing through the air, you feel the people around you, and in slow-motion you see whether to head it, chest it, or kick it, and you make your choice and WHAM it slams back into real time and you’re fighting for the ball. It’s just wonderful.”
“I played soccer in high school,” said Cisco.
“Really? What did you play?” she asked.
“I was the goalie.” Walt shook his head dismissively and looked out the window.
“That makes sense, you’re tall,” she said.
“I don’t think I was as talented as you were,” said Cisco, at which Walt’s expression conveyed feigned outrage. Walt didn’t seem to think much of Cisco as a soccer player. “But you also played tennis?” Walt sat up.
“Yeah. Love it.”
“Were you good?”
“Well, I was All-State in Tennessee for three years,” she said.
“Excuse me,” said Walt. “Are you Ginny McColl?”
“That’s me,” she said.
“Jesus,” Walt said. “I saw you play Chrissie Evert in 1972. You damned near beat her.”
“Yeah, well if you’re talking about the Atlanta game, it was an exhibition match, and Chrissie wasn’t playing at her best. She was originally scheduled to play Billie Jean King, but then Billie Jean got worried she might lose and bailed at the last minute, and I just happened to be there.”
“And didn’t you show up at Charlotte and play mixed doubles with Ilie Nastase?”
“I played against him and Rosemary Casals, yes. Margaret Court had the flu, and Marty Reissen asked me to stand in at the last minute.”
“That was a great match,” he said. “You’ve got a hell of a ground stroke.”
“Thanks,” she said. “What took you to Charlotte?”
“I was in men’s doubles. I flagged out of the junior singles in the quarter-finals.”
“Who with? Doubles, I mean.”
“Charlie Owens,” said Walt. She smiled.
“I saw Charlie beat Pete Fleming. Great game. He then hit on me.”
“Sounds like Charlie.”
“I was sixteen.”
“Still sounds like Charlie,” said Walt. “Why aren’t you playing now?”
“Peabody doesn’t have a tennis team,” she said.
“Yeah, but we do, and we’re right across the street. The tennis courts are closer to your dorm than to mine. And several of the women on our team are from Peabody. I don’t know how it works, but if you’re interested, there’s a way for you to play for us, and I’d love to have you as a mixed doubles partner.”
“You’re on the team? The actual S.E.C. team?” she asked.
“Too soon to say,” he answered. “I’m going to try out. I was Georgia All-State and All-Southeast in high school, but I don’t really know if there’s a place for me as a freshman. But I’ve seen you play. With you as a doubles partner, I’d be … we’d be in for sure.”
“That’s very sweet,” she said. “I’d love to.”
“We’ll work it out on the trip back,” he said. “Numbers and all. You’re fit?”
“Not really. Last time I played was over a year ago.”
“Let’s start running together,” he said. She smiled.
“I had no idea you were such a star,” said Cisco, and smiled at her. She noticed.
“I like tennis,” she said.
“What else do you like?” Cisco asked.
“Math, psychology, shoes, soccer, Neil Young, turnip greens, and my Aunt Margaret,” she said.
“And what do you dislike?” Cisco asked. Walt frowned and sat back, aware he’d lost her, at least for the moment.
“Cold ketchup. Gold chains on men. Anchovies. Boiled okra, multiple choice tests, oysters, electric stoves, Scotch whiskey, and backgammon,” she said. “And gambling,” she added, as an afterthought. Walt glanced at me.
“Why gambling?” Cisco asked. Walt looked at me out of the corner of his eye.
“Sometimes people just gamble insane amounts of money,” she said. “It’s like a compulsion. Maybe like a disease.”
“Are you talking about Henry?” asked Cisco.
“Maybe a little,” she said.
“I thought he won that pool game,” said Cisco.
“He did, but that’s not the point,” she said.
“You were there?” he asked.
“Yes, I was,” she said.
“What happened?” Cisco asked. “Henry won’t talk about it and Milton seems to … exaggerate.”
“Milton?” she asked.
“Jimmy Milton. A guy from our floor. He was there,” said Cisco. Ginny craned around to look at me.
“He was the curly-headed guy sitting next toy you during the game. He smokes,” I said. She frowned slightly, not remembering him. “When Donnie and I went off with his uncle to work out how the money would be held, I asked him to stay with you until I got back,” I said. She shook her head, puzzled.
“I think you must be misremembering,” she said. “I think it was just me and Melissa from my Art History class that waited for you boys to get done talking in secret.”
“All right,” I said. She looked through the window into the darkness as Cisco eased around a semi on I-24. We all looked ahead in the darkness as Cisco merged back into the right lane.
“So tell me the story,” said Cisco, to Ginny. He’d scaled the personality backa few degrees and his tone was more measured. He wanted to hear the story. Ginny paused for a few seconds, twirling her hair. She crossed her legs in a funny way that put her left shoe on the dashboard, then nipped at her index fingernail with her front teeth.
“Well it was just odd,” she said. All I could see was the back of her head. “I knew Henry was a pool player, and we’re both from Chattanooga, and my Aunt Margaret really likes him, so a few weeks ago when this ΣAE from Memphis I know took me to this pace called Annie’s I thought that it would be cool to take Henry there. And so we decided to go to dinner at Elliston’s and then go play pool. I just wanted to see him play, if he was so good. And then when we got to Annie’s he knew people there, but it wasn’t like you know people in college. These people were all … hard, somehow. Even Melissa, who seems sweet as pie in class, she seemed to know this other set of rules.”
“Henry?” Cisco asked me, through the rear-view mirror.
“I met Melissa in Hixson, Tennessee a few years ago. I went to jail for getting in a fight with her boyfriend, a big bruiser whose name I forget. She wasn’t called Melissa, then. Everybody called her Rosie.”
“Why?” Cisco and Ginny asked together.
“They said she was a riveter. Also she has long red curly hair.”
“Looker?” asked Cisco.
“Beautiful,” I answered. Cisco nodded.
“Sorry, Ginny,” said Cisco. Ginny cocked her head and I could see she was frowning a little, as though she wanted to argue whether Melissa was beautiful or not. “So tell me the rest of the story.”
“Well, the boys started playing pool, and Henry takes over for this strange little guy he seems to know…”
“That was Milton,” I said.
“Who?” she asked.
“Milton. The guy we were talking about earlier.”
“Okay,” she said, a little hesitantly. “Then they started making bets. And every time they did, Melissa, who I would say was dressed a little trampy, would hop off her stool and scoop up the money, and I think maybe she was slipping it into her bra. I didn’t really want to look.” Cisco looked at me in the rear vie mirror. I nodded. Walt, who had given no indication he was paying any attention at all, leaned back his head and grinned at the mental image.
“How much?” asked Cisco.
“I don’t really remember,” she said. “Not much, at first.”
“Henry?” asked Walt.
“Milt was thirty bucks up. I bought his game for forty bucks.”
“Interesting,” said Cisco.
“He was playing a hustler I know from outside Chattanooga. Good player.”
“Sooo … You were doing Milt a favor?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Funny,” he answered. “That’s not the way Milt tells it.”
“He’ll play that game by himself some day,” I said. I could see Cisco smile in the rear view mirror.
“So what happened next?” Cisco asked Ginny.
“Odd being outnumbered by boys,” she answered
“What?”
“I have two sisters. I went to a girl’s high school, and played sports on girls’ teams. It’s just odd to be in a conversation where everyone else is boys. You keep veering off into odd directions.”
“Sorry. I want to hear the story,” said Cisco.
“Okay. Well, at first it was really outa’ sight. Henry dropped two twenties on the table and Melissa came over and scooped them up and I felt like, wicked cool, because I just wanted to see him play and here we were already in a big money game, although I wasn’t sure why Melissa got to keep all the money. But they all seemed to know her, for some reason, and then Henry won that first game, the forty dollar one, and I’m all excited, thinking ‘Jeez, he’s really good, and he just won forty dollars, which is a fantastic amount of money for winning a pool game,’ and then the guy he was playing wanted to play for four times that.” Her head sagged. “That’s an astonishing amount of money to gamble, I’m thinking,” she said. “I mean, that’s more money than some people make in a week.”
“Henry?” asked Cisco.
“Yeah, Donnie wanted to bet $160, but my money was all on the table, anyway. But I’d beat him three out of three at the Hixson Lanes.”
“Sorry,” said Cisco, to Ginny.
“Are you sure you want to hear my story?” Ginny asked. “Because it sounds like what you want to hear is me telling Henry’s story.”
“Yeah, fair enough,” said Cisco. Walt waved his head from side to side as if to express that he understood her point.
“So after that Henry lost. He seemed so good, but this other guy was better, and at one point Henry forked over $120 on top of $40 so he was gambling $160 on one pool game! It was just insane. And he won that but then the guy in the orange tee shirt doubled down on him again and he lost. He lost $320. That’s just insane.
“Why?” Cisco asked.
“$320 is as much spending money as I’ll need for the entire semester. To bet it all on a pool game is just … dangerous.”
“Yeah, but what happened next?” Cisco asked.
“Henry doubled down again. It was way past time to stop. But he put six hundred dollars down on the table. Have you ever seen a hundred dollar bill?” Cisco smiled.
“Not often,” he said.
“Well Henry had six of them. And that was only the start. The guy from Texas then said they should play this other game for $15,000.” Walt sat up and looked at me. I shrugged.
“Milton said it was Cutthroat,” said Cisco.
“I guess that’s what they said,” Ginny answered. “But it turns out Henry had $5,000 in his wallet, and he laid it down to make that bet. I was just stunned when I saw he was carrying around $600, I mean, I’ve never seen anything like that before. But then he laid down fifty hundreds. Fifty. I’ve never seen that much money before. It was bad enough that he had it on him. That he was betting it nearly gave me a heart attack.”
“Why are you so worried?” Cisco asked. “It’s not your money.”
“I like Henry. I don’t like seeing him doing something stupid. I mean, he could have lost his entire education fund.” Walt glanced sideways at me. I shook my head.
“So how did the game go?” Cisco asked.
“It was awful,” she said. “Every time he took a shot, if he missed it, it might cost him $15,0000.” Walt looked at me. I shook my head no.
“So how many did he miss?” Cisco asked. There was a pause.
“I don’t remember,” she answered. Okay, this was fucked up. I hadn’t missed any shots in that last game, and that’s the game she was talking about.
“So who won?” Cisco asked. He knew the answer, but he was talking to Ginny.
“Henry won,” Ginny said. “But that’s not the point.”
“What’s the point?” asked Cisco.
“It could have gone horribly wrong. Some chances you just don’t take.”
“He won a lot, right?”
“Yes,” she said.
“From what I hear, it was like enough to pay for two years of college,” Cisco said.
“I suppose,” said Ginny.
“And he won,” said Cisco.
“Yes, but he shouldn’t have taken the risk,” she said, primly and confidently. There was a long silence in the car. After a few minutes Walt spoke up.
“I have a Jeep.”
“Yeah?” asked Cisco.
“I like to ride off-road. Nobody else at Westminster seemed to go for it, so I kept it to myself. But on weekends, I’d drive up just north or Atlanta and run around on dirt tracks through mud. Hell of a time,” said Walt. There was a pause of a few seconds.
“Don’t your parents belong to the Piedmont Driving Club?” asked Cisco.
“Yes, of course,” answered Walt. There was another awkward pause.
“Okay,” Walt continued. “So last year I got stuck in a traffic jam outside of Athens on 85. I wasn’t sure what caused the jam, but we were pointed south and traffic south wasn’t moving at all. I actually know that area outside Athens pretty well. My dad used to take me dove hunting not far from there. So I decided that waiting in the traffic on I-85 was getting us nowhere, so I decided to cut across the median, do a freeway u-turn, and pick up US 79 south, which I’d done many times when I was playing in lots of tennis tournaments. University of Georgia is p there and at the time I thought I wanted to go to Georgia and play on their tennis team. So whenever they sponsored a tournament, or even a clinic, I went. So I knew where I was and the median was no problem in a Jeep so I cruised across the median and headed north.”
Ginny was silent. “Okay,” I said, not sure where he was going with the story.
“I was dating a girl named Janie at the time,” Walt said. “Beautiful girl. Met her at a tennis tournament. She played for North Springs, third starter for singles and lead on women’s doubles. Gorgeous and smart.” Ginny looked at him as though she wasn’t sure she liked this story. “So I was driving my CJ, although you could have crossed that median in any passenger car. It was flat and grassy and dry, and so we headed back north on 85. Janie got wide-eyed and freaked out when I got on the median and said she couldn’t believe I’d done that. I didn’t get it and asked ‘Did what?’ and it turns out she was upset because I drove across the median! I resented this ‘cause I knew what I was doing, I mean I’d driven through mud flats and deep swamps and over big rocks so I was tres qualified to drive across a median strip, or to decide whether it was safe to drive across a median strip, in a Jeep, but I just pointed out to her hat I didn’t even have to shift to four wheel drive, that it was perfectly safe, and that I’d spent millions of hours driving through swamps and mud and dirt and wouldn’t have done it if I thought there’d been any risk at all. She asked me what woulda happened if we’d gotten stuck? She kept asking that over and over. She couldn’t accept that I actually knew what I was doing. She didn’t think the fact that I’d been right, that we gotten across the median with no trouble at all, meant anything. She was stuck on the fact that I’d taken a risk that she wouldn’t have taken. Because she woulda been uncomfortable driving like that herself, she didn’t think I should, either. The fact that I had more experience and was actually right cut no ice.” Ginny had her back to me but I could tell she was scraping her index finger across her incisors. There was a pause.
“But Henry could have lost fifteen thousand dollars.” I shook my head. Lordy.
“Henry?” Walt asked me.
“The most I could have lost was five kay,” I said. “It was like a fifteen thousand dollar bet only in one sense. And that’s not the way you think about it,” I said.
“Explain,” said Walt. I’m not sure how he got appointed moderator, but he did seem to be good at it.
“To me it was a five thousand dollar bet on two-to-one odds. I had to risk $5,0000 to maybe win $10,000. When I made that bet, I’d beat Donnie several times and Texas once. Two-to-one is pretty strong odds against people I’ve beat. For me not to make the bet, I figured either I needed to have a less than one in three chance of winning, which I didn’t, or it had to be more than I could afford, which it wasn’t.” Ginny opened her mouth as though to talk but Walt cut her off.
“So you only had five grand up?” Walt asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Only five grand?” Ginny asked. “Who has fifty hundreds in his wallet?” Walt looked at me.
“Yeah, well. Usually I don’t,” I said. “But you wanted to go to Annie’s, and I’ve played it before. Good-sized money changed hands last time I was there. It’s a lot cleaner now. Frat boys and sorority girls.”
“So you’re used to having five thousand dollars in you wallet?” she asked, as though I must be lying.”
“Yeah, sure. Not all the time, but, really, you know, I’m a gambler. Betting is what I do. And the most I ever won in a card game was at a party in New Orleans and I had to go back to my car for openers. I felt like I kid buying in to the grownup table. From then on, if I’m going somewhere I might play cards or pool, I take along some money.”
“Okay, so how much money do you have on you now?” she asked. I hesitated.
“Some,” I said, after a pause.
“Do you have five thousand dollars on you again?” she asked.
“No,” I said, carefully. I was aware that this answer, while accurate, was misleading, and might lead to trouble.
“Thank God,” she said. “Carrying around that kind of cash is just insane.” She shook her head in disbelief. “Wait,” she said, “How do you know you’re telling the truth?”
“I don’t have $5,000 in my wallet,” I said.
“Prove it,” she said.
“This is not going to go well, you know,” I said.
“You’re lying?”
“No, I’m telling the truth. You’re just asking about things that are none of your business.”
“Yean, I probably am,” she said, after a few second’s thought. She chewed her thumbnail more earnestly than was her habit and stared at the lane markers in the headlights. “I’ve never had much money,” she said, after another pause. “My parents are okay, money-wise, but they were determined not to spoil me. So I never had any. We lived on Lookout Mountain but I never had enough change to buy a Coke. So maybe I get worried about money faster than some people. If that’s the problem, I’m sorry.”
“That’s not the deal,” said Walt. I looked at him, surprised. “You’ve played tennis your whole life,” he said.
“And soccer,” Ginny nodded.
“But I’m guessing you’ve never bet on a game on either sport.”
“No, of course not. Nobody bets on tennis,” she said.
“Sure they do,” he said. “Bobby Rigs won a hundred grand betting on himself at Wimbledon. I saw him play a game against somebody in Savannah where he wore a dress, used a frying pan instead of a racket, and had a dachshund on a leash in his left hand the entire game. I heard the bet was for $1,500. He won. But that’s not the point. When you show up at a tennis tournament, you play whoever they tell you to play. When Henry shows up at a pool hall, he can decide whether he wants to play somebody or not, and if so, whether to bet, and if so, how much. It’s a different way of looking at a game.”
He had a point.
“I don’t gamble much at pool, but I seem to do okay,” said Cisco.
“Why do you think that is” I asked. He shrugged.
“It’s just luck,” he said.
“I’m going to guess you’re lucky at poker, too,” I said.
“As a matter of fact, it seems like I’m pretty lucky at cards, too,” Cisco said.
“Yeah, I’ve seen it,” said Walt.
I shook my head. “There’s no such thing as luck,” I said.
“You really believe that?” Walt asked.
“Yes, of course,” I said. “Lookit. Cisco’s lucky with … that is to say, he’s lucky in … other ways, so people think of him as lucky. But the reasons he’s lucky at cards are the same reasons he’s lucky .. in other ways. He’s extremely pleasant and affable, and smart, but he doesn’t give much away. He smiles a lot, but you never know what he’s thinking. He’s good at reading all sorts of nonverbal cues. He picks up on subtle things that everybody else misses. He distracts … people with his charm, but he’s always aware of his opportunities.”
In the rear-view mirror I could see Cisco flash that pirate smile at Ginny. “Just playing hunches,” he said. I imagine she smiled back.
“But what about pool? He usually wins at pool, too,” Walt asked.
“As you so astutely noticed, winning at pool is mainly deciding when to play,” I said. “Every game of chance is also a game of skill. You can play pure chance, but nobody does. Nobody bets on one cut of the cards, or one roll of the dice. We bet on things where some skill is involved. And once that happens, you’re not playing against the odds. If I were betting against the odds, I’d never bet, because long-term, the odds always win. But I’m not betting against the odds, I’m betting against the other guy, and the odds may be harder on him than they are on me. I’ve spent a lot of time playing pool, and it’s been a long time since I saw somebody I was sure was better than me. But if I see that kind of player tomorrow night, I won’t bet. And I think what Cisco’s doing is just putting down the cue when he sees somebody else who’s good.”
“Hey, there’s always something else to do,” said Cisco. “I don’t play any game unless I think I’m going to win.”
“Never?” asked Ginny. “Why?”
“You ‘play’ a game,” Cisco answered. “Play is supposed to be fun. It’s not fun to lose.”
We cruised on down the interstate towards Chattanooga. I thought about games and play and risk.
I had $12,000 in my wallet. I’d been thinking I might borrow Mrs. W’s car and drop by a pool hall while I was in Chattanooga.
“Oh, hi,” said Walt, as though mildly surprised to see us.
“Walt, Henry. Henry, Walt,” said Cisco, unlocking the trunk.
“Walton Gwinnett,” said Walt, extending his hand.
“Henry Baida,” I answered, shaking his hand.
I’d never seen Cisco’s car before. It was a big black Pontiac Firebird Trans-Am without the optional gold detailing. It was clear he liked it. After I looked at it, he looked at me and cocked an eyebrow.
“The gold bird on the hood would have been too much for a guy like you,” I said.
“Damn straight,” he said, smiling, and tossed our bags into the not-so-big trunk. Walt held the door for me to get into the pretty small back seat. No coin toss, no discussion, I was in the back. Cisco started the car and backed out of the parking space. It had a big V-8, Glasspack kind of a rumble. It was already dark. Cisco pulled out of the dorm parking lot onto 21st Ave., then turned right onto Broadway. Walt looked at Cisco with concern.
“Why did you turn the wrong way?” asked Walt.
“We’re picking up a friend of Henry’s,” Cisco answered. Walt nodded idly and lit a cigarette with a metal butane lighter. “Roll down the window, if you’re going to smoke,” said Cisco. Walt’s expression indicated that he thought Cisco’s request to be an affront, but after a pause he complied and cranked down the window. Cisco turned onto Scarritt and found the front of Ginny’s dorm after a few minutes. Ginny was sitting out front, tweed jacket, knitted scarf, white blouse, blue jeans, dark blue Ferragamos, hair pushed back by a black velvet headband. Pretty girl. She didn’t know Cisco or his car, so when she looked at us, it was speculatively.
“Is that her?” Cisco asked.
“Yeah,” I answered.
“Jesus H. Christ, she is lights-out gorgeous,” said Cisco.
“She’s cute,” I agreed. Walt looked up for the first time to see who we were talking about. Cisco cut the engine and hopped out, approaching Ginny directly, and with a smile. He extended his hand.
“Ginny?” he asked, extending his hand. I was sitting behind Walt, and I’d expected him to get out of the car to greet Ginny, but he made no move to do so, so I slid over to exit from the drivers’ side.
“Yes?” Ginny replied, shaking his hand, tentatively.
“I’m Francis. Francis Atwater. A friend of Henry’s.” He was saying this as I was clambering out of his car. Her shaking of his hand became more cooperative and friendly once she saw me. She smiled at him.
“Hey, Ginny,” I said. She looked at me speculatively and waved. It was the first time I’d seen her face to face since my last pool game. She wasn’t sure what she thought of me. Cisco picked up her bag, opened the trunk, made room for her bag, closed the trunk lid, then returned his attention to Ginny. He smiled and placed his hand on her back, cooperatively moving her towards her seat. He opened the passenger door, where Walt was still seated.
“Walt, this is Ginny,” he said. “Ginny’s going to be sitting in the front seat, so you need to move to the back.” Walt tried his best not to frown, and stood up next to Ginny and Cisco. He smiled a hollow smile.
“Hello, Ginny, I’m Walton Gwinnett,” he said, offering his hand. She shook it. He sat in the passenger-side back seat, somewhat heavily, without removing his jacket.
“Hi, Henry,” she said.
“Hey. Good to see you again.” She waved again and sat in the passenger seat. Cisco unhinged the front seat to allow me access to the back seat.
“I wish you were shorter,” I said.
“She’s so cute,” he answered, too softly for her to hear.
“Smart, too,” I said, and got in. There just wasn’t much room in that back seat. Walt frowned at me. Ginny got into the passenger seat before Cisco could get around to hold her door, so she was in before him. He got in, sat, put the key in the ignition, then turned to her and flashed that bandit smile. She almost gasped.
“Ready?” he asked.
“Uh-huhm,” she answered, nodding, captivated. That fast. Cisco eased the Firebird into West End traffic, then navigated his way over to I-24. Once on the freeway he gave Ginny another smile, not so bright as the first.
“So tell me about yourself,” he said. She seemed surprised he asked.
“Oh, okay,” she said. “I’m a sophomore at Peabody. I’m thinking I’ll major in Psychology or Math and get a teacher’s certificate and maybe be a teacher. How about you?”
“You like teaching?” Cisco asked.
“I don’t know, but I think so,” she answered. “Since I was a little kid I’ve been involved in sports, and I’ve always imagined how I would be coaching the teams I’ve been on.”
“What sports?” Cisco asked.
“I like them all, but I mainly play soccer and tennis,” she said.
“So you want to teach Psychology to high school students?”
“That’s the thing. Most high schools don’t have many Psychology classes, maybe one per semester. Peabody has a really good psychology program, but I’m not gonna find a full-time job as a high school psychology teacher so since I’ve always gotten good grades in Math, I was thinking that I could also teach that. Anyway, that’s what I’m thinking now.”
“Henry back there may be good at Math,” he said. I sat up. I hadn’t expected to be mentioned. Walt, who had not seemed to be paying any attention, looked at me laconically and cocked an eyebrow. “Last week I asked him what pi was and he gave it to me to five decimal places,” Cisco said. Walt shook out a Benson & Hedges menthol and was about to place it between his lips. Cisco, displaying a hitherto-unknown eyes-in-the-back-of-the-head talent, said “No smoking, Walt.” Walt made an irritated face and put his cigarette away. Ginny seemed to think for a few seconds.
“Henry took Math from my Aunt Margaret, so I expect he knows it,” she said. I looked up, and saw that Cisco was looking at me inquisitively in the rear view mirror. I nodded. “Sometimes Math isn’t the real question. But the fact that Henry can remember that pi to eleven decimal places just means he has a good memory. It doesn’t mean he’s smart. Don’t get me wrong, Henry,” she said, without looking back at me, “I know you’re smart in math. What if, though, being good in math,” and here she wasn’t talking to me any more, but to Cisco, “causes other problems?”
“What kind of problems does Math lead to?” Cisco asked.
“Accountancy,” said Walt.
“Ignore Walt,” said Cisco. “He’s acting like old money.” Ginny looked at him blankly.
“Careers are a bother.” She nodded as though that explained something.
“Maybe you get to understand something better than the people around you, but still they worry about you. Or you do things that worry them,” she said.
“Like?” Cisco asked.
“Sometimes people do things that people close to them, or around them, or friends of theirs, don’t understand. It can make you think about them … differently.” Walt looked at me.
“I’m not sure I follow,” said Cisco, looking at Ginny earnestly for the second or two traffic safety allowed the driver of a Firebird.
“Sometimes you get an idea about a person, and then they do something, so you get a different idea of them. Enough about me. What about you?”
“Those are great shoes,” Cisco said to Ginny. I couldn’t see them. She smiled and looked at her shoes, then straight ahead into the darkness of I-24, still smiling.
“This ride is only ten minutes old,” said Walt, to me, not loud enough for the front seat to hear.
“I know,” I said.
“What did you do? Fuck her sister?”
“What was that?” asked Ginny.
“Nothing,” Walt and I chimed in together.
“So?” he asked.
“So what?” I answered.
“Did you have sex with her best friend, or what?”
“Gack, no,” I said. “Nothing like that.”
“What are you guys talking about?” she asked.
“Nothing,” we both called out.
“So what?” he asked.
“I won a pool game,” I said.
“So?”
“I bet a lot on it,” I said.
“So?”
“She was worried I was going to lose,” I said.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he said.
“What are you telling him, Henry?” she asked.
“Just guy talk,” I said.
“Don’t get distracted by the back seat, sweetheart,” said Cisco. “You were telling me the story of your life.”
“You’re being very … solicitous,” she said, still smiling.
“I’m just interested in people,” he said. Walt rolled his eyes and laid his head back on the headrest.
“Well,” she said, “I graduated from GPS. I was presented at the Cotton Ball, and most of the girls in my class are friends of mine, but I don’t like all that society stuff. I’m not a very girlie girl, but I think girls and women are important. I like sports but don’t like being called a jock.”
“Why not?” Cisco asked.
“Oh, I don’t know. Hard to say. I don’t like labels. Like, I’m all in favor of women’s rights. I hope the E.R.A. passes. I don’t think women should be second-class citizens. But I just don’t like Bella Abzug or Gloria Steinem and would just rather find my own way.”
“It seems like you care pretty deeply about this,” said Cisco, giving her a brief, earnest look.
“Not really,” she said. “My mom and my dad both work and I never grew up with this subservient deal. Nobody ever told me I couldn’t do things because I was a girl. So maybe I didn’t grow up like everybody. But the fact that I think girls should be able to do whatever they want doesn’t mean I want to be Shirley Chisholm.”
“So what do you like about soccer?” he asked. She closed her eyes.
“The beautiful game,” she said. “When I was little, they played me on defense, because I was fast and didn’t have those small skills, those little toe-tapping deals that the coach’s kids had. But once I got to middle school and got on the all-star teams they moved me to forward and anytime a halfback could feed me a ball, I could take a shot. It really is a wicked game. You see the ball sailing through the air, you feel the people around you, and in slow-motion you see whether to head it, chest it, or kick it, and you make your choice and WHAM it slams back into real time and you’re fighting for the ball. It’s just wonderful.”
“I played soccer in high school,” said Cisco.
“Really? What did you play?” she asked.
“I was the goalie.” Walt shook his head dismissively and looked out the window.
“That makes sense, you’re tall,” she said.
“I don’t think I was as talented as you were,” said Cisco, at which Walt’s expression conveyed feigned outrage. Walt didn’t seem to think much of Cisco as a soccer player. “But you also played tennis?” Walt sat up.
“Yeah. Love it.”
“Were you good?”
“Well, I was All-State in Tennessee for three years,” she said.
“Excuse me,” said Walt. “Are you Ginny McColl?”
“That’s me,” she said.
“Jesus,” Walt said. “I saw you play Chrissie Evert in 1972. You damned near beat her.”
“Yeah, well if you’re talking about the Atlanta game, it was an exhibition match, and Chrissie wasn’t playing at her best. She was originally scheduled to play Billie Jean King, but then Billie Jean got worried she might lose and bailed at the last minute, and I just happened to be there.”
“And didn’t you show up at Charlotte and play mixed doubles with Ilie Nastase?”
“I played against him and Rosemary Casals, yes. Margaret Court had the flu, and Marty Reissen asked me to stand in at the last minute.”
“That was a great match,” he said. “You’ve got a hell of a ground stroke.”
“Thanks,” she said. “What took you to Charlotte?”
“I was in men’s doubles. I flagged out of the junior singles in the quarter-finals.”
“Who with? Doubles, I mean.”
“Charlie Owens,” said Walt. She smiled.
“I saw Charlie beat Pete Fleming. Great game. He then hit on me.”
“Sounds like Charlie.”
“I was sixteen.”
“Still sounds like Charlie,” said Walt. “Why aren’t you playing now?”
“Peabody doesn’t have a tennis team,” she said.
“Yeah, but we do, and we’re right across the street. The tennis courts are closer to your dorm than to mine. And several of the women on our team are from Peabody. I don’t know how it works, but if you’re interested, there’s a way for you to play for us, and I’d love to have you as a mixed doubles partner.”
“You’re on the team? The actual S.E.C. team?” she asked.
“Too soon to say,” he answered. “I’m going to try out. I was Georgia All-State and All-Southeast in high school, but I don’t really know if there’s a place for me as a freshman. But I’ve seen you play. With you as a doubles partner, I’d be … we’d be in for sure.”
“That’s very sweet,” she said. “I’d love to.”
“We’ll work it out on the trip back,” he said. “Numbers and all. You’re fit?”
“Not really. Last time I played was over a year ago.”
“Let’s start running together,” he said. She smiled.
“I had no idea you were such a star,” said Cisco, and smiled at her. She noticed.
“I like tennis,” she said.
“What else do you like?” Cisco asked.
“Math, psychology, shoes, soccer, Neil Young, turnip greens, and my Aunt Margaret,” she said.
“And what do you dislike?” Cisco asked. Walt frowned and sat back, aware he’d lost her, at least for the moment.
“Cold ketchup. Gold chains on men. Anchovies. Boiled okra, multiple choice tests, oysters, electric stoves, Scotch whiskey, and backgammon,” she said. “And gambling,” she added, as an afterthought. Walt glanced at me.
“Why gambling?” Cisco asked. Walt looked at me out of the corner of his eye.
“Sometimes people just gamble insane amounts of money,” she said. “It’s like a compulsion. Maybe like a disease.”
“Are you talking about Henry?” asked Cisco.
“Maybe a little,” she said.
“I thought he won that pool game,” said Cisco.
“He did, but that’s not the point,” she said.
“You were there?” he asked.
“Yes, I was,” she said.
“What happened?” Cisco asked. “Henry won’t talk about it and Milton seems to … exaggerate.”
“Milton?” she asked.
“Jimmy Milton. A guy from our floor. He was there,” said Cisco. Ginny craned around to look at me.
“He was the curly-headed guy sitting next toy you during the game. He smokes,” I said. She frowned slightly, not remembering him. “When Donnie and I went off with his uncle to work out how the money would be held, I asked him to stay with you until I got back,” I said. She shook her head, puzzled.
“I think you must be misremembering,” she said. “I think it was just me and Melissa from my Art History class that waited for you boys to get done talking in secret.”
“All right,” I said. She looked through the window into the darkness as Cisco eased around a semi on I-24. We all looked ahead in the darkness as Cisco merged back into the right lane.
“So tell me the story,” said Cisco, to Ginny. He’d scaled the personality backa few degrees and his tone was more measured. He wanted to hear the story. Ginny paused for a few seconds, twirling her hair. She crossed her legs in a funny way that put her left shoe on the dashboard, then nipped at her index fingernail with her front teeth.
“Well it was just odd,” she said. All I could see was the back of her head. “I knew Henry was a pool player, and we’re both from Chattanooga, and my Aunt Margaret really likes him, so a few weeks ago when this ΣAE from Memphis I know took me to this pace called Annie’s I thought that it would be cool to take Henry there. And so we decided to go to dinner at Elliston’s and then go play pool. I just wanted to see him play, if he was so good. And then when we got to Annie’s he knew people there, but it wasn’t like you know people in college. These people were all … hard, somehow. Even Melissa, who seems sweet as pie in class, she seemed to know this other set of rules.”
“Henry?” Cisco asked me, through the rear-view mirror.
“I met Melissa in Hixson, Tennessee a few years ago. I went to jail for getting in a fight with her boyfriend, a big bruiser whose name I forget. She wasn’t called Melissa, then. Everybody called her Rosie.”
“Why?” Cisco and Ginny asked together.
“They said she was a riveter. Also she has long red curly hair.”
“Looker?” asked Cisco.
“Beautiful,” I answered. Cisco nodded.
“Sorry, Ginny,” said Cisco. Ginny cocked her head and I could see she was frowning a little, as though she wanted to argue whether Melissa was beautiful or not. “So tell me the rest of the story.”
“Well, the boys started playing pool, and Henry takes over for this strange little guy he seems to know…”
“That was Milton,” I said.
“Who?” she asked.
“Milton. The guy we were talking about earlier.”
“Okay,” she said, a little hesitantly. “Then they started making bets. And every time they did, Melissa, who I would say was dressed a little trampy, would hop off her stool and scoop up the money, and I think maybe she was slipping it into her bra. I didn’t really want to look.” Cisco looked at me in the rear vie mirror. I nodded. Walt, who had given no indication he was paying any attention at all, leaned back his head and grinned at the mental image.
“How much?” asked Cisco.
“I don’t really remember,” she said. “Not much, at first.”
“Henry?” asked Walt.
“Milt was thirty bucks up. I bought his game for forty bucks.”
“Interesting,” said Cisco.
“He was playing a hustler I know from outside Chattanooga. Good player.”
“Sooo … You were doing Milt a favor?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Funny,” he answered. “That’s not the way Milt tells it.”
“He’ll play that game by himself some day,” I said. I could see Cisco smile in the rear view mirror.
“So what happened next?” Cisco asked Ginny.
“Odd being outnumbered by boys,” she answered
“What?”
“I have two sisters. I went to a girl’s high school, and played sports on girls’ teams. It’s just odd to be in a conversation where everyone else is boys. You keep veering off into odd directions.”
“Sorry. I want to hear the story,” said Cisco.
“Okay. Well, at first it was really outa’ sight. Henry dropped two twenties on the table and Melissa came over and scooped them up and I felt like, wicked cool, because I just wanted to see him play and here we were already in a big money game, although I wasn’t sure why Melissa got to keep all the money. But they all seemed to know her, for some reason, and then Henry won that first game, the forty dollar one, and I’m all excited, thinking ‘Jeez, he’s really good, and he just won forty dollars, which is a fantastic amount of money for winning a pool game,’ and then the guy he was playing wanted to play for four times that.” Her head sagged. “That’s an astonishing amount of money to gamble, I’m thinking,” she said. “I mean, that’s more money than some people make in a week.”
“Henry?” asked Cisco.
“Yeah, Donnie wanted to bet $160, but my money was all on the table, anyway. But I’d beat him three out of three at the Hixson Lanes.”
“Sorry,” said Cisco, to Ginny.
“Are you sure you want to hear my story?” Ginny asked. “Because it sounds like what you want to hear is me telling Henry’s story.”
“Yeah, fair enough,” said Cisco. Walt waved his head from side to side as if to express that he understood her point.
“So after that Henry lost. He seemed so good, but this other guy was better, and at one point Henry forked over $120 on top of $40 so he was gambling $160 on one pool game! It was just insane. And he won that but then the guy in the orange tee shirt doubled down on him again and he lost. He lost $320. That’s just insane.
“Why?” Cisco asked.
“$320 is as much spending money as I’ll need for the entire semester. To bet it all on a pool game is just … dangerous.”
“Yeah, but what happened next?” Cisco asked.
“Henry doubled down again. It was way past time to stop. But he put six hundred dollars down on the table. Have you ever seen a hundred dollar bill?” Cisco smiled.
“Not often,” he said.
“Well Henry had six of them. And that was only the start. The guy from Texas then said they should play this other game for $15,000.” Walt sat up and looked at me. I shrugged.
“Milton said it was Cutthroat,” said Cisco.
“I guess that’s what they said,” Ginny answered. “But it turns out Henry had $5,000 in his wallet, and he laid it down to make that bet. I was just stunned when I saw he was carrying around $600, I mean, I’ve never seen anything like that before. But then he laid down fifty hundreds. Fifty. I’ve never seen that much money before. It was bad enough that he had it on him. That he was betting it nearly gave me a heart attack.”
“Why are you so worried?” Cisco asked. “It’s not your money.”
“I like Henry. I don’t like seeing him doing something stupid. I mean, he could have lost his entire education fund.” Walt glanced sideways at me. I shook my head.
“So how did the game go?” Cisco asked.
“It was awful,” she said. “Every time he took a shot, if he missed it, it might cost him $15,0000.” Walt looked at me. I shook my head no.
“So how many did he miss?” Cisco asked. There was a pause.
“I don’t remember,” she answered. Okay, this was fucked up. I hadn’t missed any shots in that last game, and that’s the game she was talking about.
“So who won?” Cisco asked. He knew the answer, but he was talking to Ginny.
“Henry won,” Ginny said. “But that’s not the point.”
“What’s the point?” asked Cisco.
“It could have gone horribly wrong. Some chances you just don’t take.”
“He won a lot, right?”
“Yes,” she said.
“From what I hear, it was like enough to pay for two years of college,” Cisco said.
“I suppose,” said Ginny.
“And he won,” said Cisco.
“Yes, but he shouldn’t have taken the risk,” she said, primly and confidently. There was a long silence in the car. After a few minutes Walt spoke up.
“I have a Jeep.”
“Yeah?” asked Cisco.
“I like to ride off-road. Nobody else at Westminster seemed to go for it, so I kept it to myself. But on weekends, I’d drive up just north or Atlanta and run around on dirt tracks through mud. Hell of a time,” said Walt. There was a pause of a few seconds.
“Don’t your parents belong to the Piedmont Driving Club?” asked Cisco.
“Yes, of course,” answered Walt. There was another awkward pause.
“Okay,” Walt continued. “So last year I got stuck in a traffic jam outside of Athens on 85. I wasn’t sure what caused the jam, but we were pointed south and traffic south wasn’t moving at all. I actually know that area outside Athens pretty well. My dad used to take me dove hunting not far from there. So I decided that waiting in the traffic on I-85 was getting us nowhere, so I decided to cut across the median, do a freeway u-turn, and pick up US 79 south, which I’d done many times when I was playing in lots of tennis tournaments. University of Georgia is p there and at the time I thought I wanted to go to Georgia and play on their tennis team. So whenever they sponsored a tournament, or even a clinic, I went. So I knew where I was and the median was no problem in a Jeep so I cruised across the median and headed north.”
Ginny was silent. “Okay,” I said, not sure where he was going with the story.
“I was dating a girl named Janie at the time,” Walt said. “Beautiful girl. Met her at a tennis tournament. She played for North Springs, third starter for singles and lead on women’s doubles. Gorgeous and smart.” Ginny looked at him as though she wasn’t sure she liked this story. “So I was driving my CJ, although you could have crossed that median in any passenger car. It was flat and grassy and dry, and so we headed back north on 85. Janie got wide-eyed and freaked out when I got on the median and said she couldn’t believe I’d done that. I didn’t get it and asked ‘Did what?’ and it turns out she was upset because I drove across the median! I resented this ‘cause I knew what I was doing, I mean I’d driven through mud flats and deep swamps and over big rocks so I was tres qualified to drive across a median strip, or to decide whether it was safe to drive across a median strip, in a Jeep, but I just pointed out to her hat I didn’t even have to shift to four wheel drive, that it was perfectly safe, and that I’d spent millions of hours driving through swamps and mud and dirt and wouldn’t have done it if I thought there’d been any risk at all. She asked me what woulda happened if we’d gotten stuck? She kept asking that over and over. She couldn’t accept that I actually knew what I was doing. She didn’t think the fact that I’d been right, that we gotten across the median with no trouble at all, meant anything. She was stuck on the fact that I’d taken a risk that she wouldn’t have taken. Because she woulda been uncomfortable driving like that herself, she didn’t think I should, either. The fact that I had more experience and was actually right cut no ice.” Ginny had her back to me but I could tell she was scraping her index finger across her incisors. There was a pause.
“But Henry could have lost fifteen thousand dollars.” I shook my head. Lordy.
“Henry?” Walt asked me.
“The most I could have lost was five kay,” I said. “It was like a fifteen thousand dollar bet only in one sense. And that’s not the way you think about it,” I said.
“Explain,” said Walt. I’m not sure how he got appointed moderator, but he did seem to be good at it.
“To me it was a five thousand dollar bet on two-to-one odds. I had to risk $5,0000 to maybe win $10,000. When I made that bet, I’d beat Donnie several times and Texas once. Two-to-one is pretty strong odds against people I’ve beat. For me not to make the bet, I figured either I needed to have a less than one in three chance of winning, which I didn’t, or it had to be more than I could afford, which it wasn’t.” Ginny opened her mouth as though to talk but Walt cut her off.
“So you only had five grand up?” Walt asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Only five grand?” Ginny asked. “Who has fifty hundreds in his wallet?” Walt looked at me.
“Yeah, well. Usually I don’t,” I said. “But you wanted to go to Annie’s, and I’ve played it before. Good-sized money changed hands last time I was there. It’s a lot cleaner now. Frat boys and sorority girls.”
“So you’re used to having five thousand dollars in you wallet?” she asked, as though I must be lying.”
“Yeah, sure. Not all the time, but, really, you know, I’m a gambler. Betting is what I do. And the most I ever won in a card game was at a party in New Orleans and I had to go back to my car for openers. I felt like I kid buying in to the grownup table. From then on, if I’m going somewhere I might play cards or pool, I take along some money.”
“Okay, so how much money do you have on you now?” she asked. I hesitated.
“Some,” I said, after a pause.
“Do you have five thousand dollars on you again?” she asked.
“No,” I said, carefully. I was aware that this answer, while accurate, was misleading, and might lead to trouble.
“Thank God,” she said. “Carrying around that kind of cash is just insane.” She shook her head in disbelief. “Wait,” she said, “How do you know you’re telling the truth?”
“I don’t have $5,000 in my wallet,” I said.
“Prove it,” she said.
“This is not going to go well, you know,” I said.
“You’re lying?”
“No, I’m telling the truth. You’re just asking about things that are none of your business.”
“Yean, I probably am,” she said, after a few second’s thought. She chewed her thumbnail more earnestly than was her habit and stared at the lane markers in the headlights. “I’ve never had much money,” she said, after another pause. “My parents are okay, money-wise, but they were determined not to spoil me. So I never had any. We lived on Lookout Mountain but I never had enough change to buy a Coke. So maybe I get worried about money faster than some people. If that’s the problem, I’m sorry.”
“That’s not the deal,” said Walt. I looked at him, surprised. “You’ve played tennis your whole life,” he said.
“And soccer,” Ginny nodded.
“But I’m guessing you’ve never bet on a game on either sport.”
“No, of course not. Nobody bets on tennis,” she said.
“Sure they do,” he said. “Bobby Rigs won a hundred grand betting on himself at Wimbledon. I saw him play a game against somebody in Savannah where he wore a dress, used a frying pan instead of a racket, and had a dachshund on a leash in his left hand the entire game. I heard the bet was for $1,500. He won. But that’s not the point. When you show up at a tennis tournament, you play whoever they tell you to play. When Henry shows up at a pool hall, he can decide whether he wants to play somebody or not, and if so, whether to bet, and if so, how much. It’s a different way of looking at a game.”
He had a point.
“I don’t gamble much at pool, but I seem to do okay,” said Cisco.
“Why do you think that is” I asked. He shrugged.
“It’s just luck,” he said.
“I’m going to guess you’re lucky at poker, too,” I said.
“As a matter of fact, it seems like I’m pretty lucky at cards, too,” Cisco said.
“Yeah, I’ve seen it,” said Walt.
I shook my head. “There’s no such thing as luck,” I said.
“You really believe that?” Walt asked.
“Yes, of course,” I said. “Lookit. Cisco’s lucky with … that is to say, he’s lucky in … other ways, so people think of him as lucky. But the reasons he’s lucky at cards are the same reasons he’s lucky .. in other ways. He’s extremely pleasant and affable, and smart, but he doesn’t give much away. He smiles a lot, but you never know what he’s thinking. He’s good at reading all sorts of nonverbal cues. He picks up on subtle things that everybody else misses. He distracts … people with his charm, but he’s always aware of his opportunities.”
In the rear-view mirror I could see Cisco flash that pirate smile at Ginny. “Just playing hunches,” he said. I imagine she smiled back.
“But what about pool? He usually wins at pool, too,” Walt asked.
“As you so astutely noticed, winning at pool is mainly deciding when to play,” I said. “Every game of chance is also a game of skill. You can play pure chance, but nobody does. Nobody bets on one cut of the cards, or one roll of the dice. We bet on things where some skill is involved. And once that happens, you’re not playing against the odds. If I were betting against the odds, I’d never bet, because long-term, the odds always win. But I’m not betting against the odds, I’m betting against the other guy, and the odds may be harder on him than they are on me. I’ve spent a lot of time playing pool, and it’s been a long time since I saw somebody I was sure was better than me. But if I see that kind of player tomorrow night, I won’t bet. And I think what Cisco’s doing is just putting down the cue when he sees somebody else who’s good.”
“Hey, there’s always something else to do,” said Cisco. “I don’t play any game unless I think I’m going to win.”
“Never?” asked Ginny. “Why?”
“You ‘play’ a game,” Cisco answered. “Play is supposed to be fun. It’s not fun to lose.”
We cruised on down the interstate towards Chattanooga. I thought about games and play and risk.
I had $12,000 in my wallet. I’d been thinking I might borrow Mrs. W’s car and drop by a pool hall while I was in Chattanooga.
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Chapter 21: I play pool, but the rest of the evening is confusing
Stoney’s mention of Ginny reminded me I needed to call her, and I did as soon as I got back to my room. She picked up after the second ring.
“Hello, this is Ginny. May I help you?”
“Hey, Ginny. This is Henry Baida. How are you?”
“Henry!” she crowed. “My favorite pool hustling car thief! How in the world are you?”
“Doing okay. How about you?”
“Doing well. Here’s our plan,” she said. “Tomorrow, you’re going to meet me at my dorm at 6:00, then we’re going to walk over to Elliston Place and have dinner at the Soda Shop, then we’re going to walk over to Annie’s down the street, and you’re gong to show me how to play pool.” I laughed.
“Okay. Sounds like a plan,” I said.
“I’m in Gillette Hall,” she said.
“I don’t really know my way around here,” I said, “And I really know even less about Peabody. How am I going to find Gillette Hall?”
“Cross 21st Avenue at that light where I saw you on the sidewalk. Walk on into campus and ask anyone you bump into where Gillette is,” she said. “See you at six.”
“How do I dress?” I asked.
“Like you always do,” she said. “Goodbye.” Okay, I know what she meant, but do I always do anything?
“The next night I showed up at Gillette Hall clad in a white Oxford cloth button-down shirt, khakis, and Weejuns, a few minutes before 6:00. I can’t remember what color socks I was wearing, but I was wearing some. Ginny was sitting on the steps in front of the dorm and saw me from maybe seventy yards away. She jumped up, waved, and kind of ran over towards me. Not quite a run, but faster than walking. She gave me a hug and said “Henry!” before falling in step next to me and turning me to walk back towards 21st. She was wearing a white cotton blouse, jeans, and dark blue flats with fabric bows built around a shiny brass buckle.
“You dressed up!” she said.
“I did?” I asked.
“Yes. Thank you! Okay,” she said, taking my arm. “Have you ever been to the Soda Shop on Elliston Place?”
“No,” I answered.
“Have you ever played pool at Annie’s” she asked. I thought.
“Is there a Skee-ball table up front?”
“Yes!” she answered.
“Yeah, I have,” I said.
“What do you think?” she asked, as we walked.
“Odd mix. Mostly college kids. There are some semi-tough hombres who play there, from time to time,” I said.
“Meaning?” she asked.
“Well, the kids are there to be kids, and the pros are there to hustle the kids,” I said.
“So?” she asked.
“Can be painful , or at least expensive, for the kids, but, I guess it’s safe enough. It’s usually just college kids blowing off steam, but…”
“Any problem for you?” she asked.
“No. I’m…” I tried to think how to put this.
“What?”
“Well, we might bump into some serious players who are there to fleece college kids and maybe later pick off each other,” I said.
“So?”
“They’re not all nice people.”
“You go there?” she asked.
“I’ve been there,” I said.
“Did you ever get hurt?”
“No. Not at all. I guess it’s safe as long as everybody’s sober. So maybe we should plan on clearing out before, say, 10:00,” I said.
“Far out,” she said. We were passing McTyeire. She led the way as we cut across my campus. She seemed to know her way around. “So,” she said, “finish the Boy Scout campout hotwire story.”
“Wow. Okay. Where’d it stop?”
“A woman was walking off in a black and white silk dress and a bunch of Boy Scouts were watching her leave,” she said.
“Okay. Well she was really pretty, and we were all watching her kind of…”
“Wistfully,” Ginny suggested.
“Maybe so. Teenaged boys have a way of looking at attractive, grown women that’s difficult to describe. They’re drawn to the beauty, but they’re not exactly sure why, exactly.”
“What’s her take on this, do you think?” Ginny asked.
“She’s older and more experienced than we were and understands us much, much better than we understand her,” I said.
“So then what happened?”
“She walked off,” I said. “We all watched her go. After a few minutes of silent staring it occurs to me that my dad once told me what a solenoid is and showed me how the engine would crank if you laid a screwdriver across its terminals. That was on a 1964 Plymouth Fury he had when we lived in Atlanta. So I pop the hood on the car in the ditch. It’s a standard 1968 Plymouth Valiant and it has the same solenoid relay as my dad’s Fury. If you connect the solenoid with the coil you don’t need a key.”
“Your father taught you how to steal cars?” she asked.
“In 1974 all teenaged boys in Georgia knew this,” I said. “Fathers played a different, more practical role than today. Keevin asked me what I was doing and I told him I could start the car…”
“Keevin?” she asked.
“Sorry, Kevin. Kevin Magid. Our senior patrol leader.”
“Then why Keevin?” she asked.
“Some of the guys in our scout troop were in his high school. He had this math teacher who got his name wrong, and called him Keevin Magoid. They all called him that. A nickname deal. It stuck. Boys are funny about nicknames.”
“’Kay,” she said. “Then what happened?”
“Snow White had some wire in his pocket and I used it to make contact between the coil and the starter solenoid, then jumped across the solenoid relay with my pocket knife, and it cranked. It didn’t catch, but only because it didn’t have enough gas, so Keevin jumped behind the wheel and gave me the thumbs up. I shorted the relay again, it cranked, Keevin pumped the gas pedal, and the engine started right up. I laid off the solenoid, and the engine purred. As much as a 1968 Plymouth Valiant can, anyway. Keevin shifted into reverse, backed out of the ditch, waved to us, and took off down the road after the woman in the black and white dress,” I said.
“Did you ask say anything to him?” she asked.
“I waved goodbye and said ‘Write if you find work.’” She looked confused. “My dad used to say that to me.”
“Wow,” Ginny said. “What happened?”
“Not much,” I said. “That was the Saturday of a weekend-long campout. Most of us were thirteen or fourteen, except for Kevin, who may have been fifteen. After he drove off we went back to police the campground and do our best to make breakfast, always a dodgy task with boys and campfires and no adults. It seems odd that no grownups were around, now that I think about it, but that’s the way I remember it. So we cleaned up the campsite and ruined some breakfast food, and then just before lunch, Keevin showed back up, on foot, still in his Scout uniform,”
“What did he say?” Ginny asked.
“Not much. He laid down on his cot in the big tent. He folded his hands behind his head and said “Miranda is a beautiful name,” and kind of stared at the ceiling without saying anything.”
“What did you do?” Ginny asked.
“I watched him stare at the ceiling for a few minutes, then went and made myself a baloney and cheese sandwich,” I said.
“So you weren’t curious what happened between Kevin and the woman in the black and white polka dot dress? she asked.
“Sort of. But I wasn’t going to ask,” I said
“You didn’t ask?” I take it she would have asked.
“No. Boys are naturally braggarts,” I said. “If there’d’ve been anything he wanted to tell us, he’d’ve said it.”
“And you never followed up?” Ginny asked.
“Nah. But that was one of the last times I saw him. We moved back to Eglin for a few months right after that,” I answered. “And after that to Okinawa. I lost track of Boy Scouts, but there was a bowling alley over in Pace, not far From Niceville—“ she had a puzzled expression. “Those are towns near Pensacola in the Florida panhandle,” I said. I was wandering off point. “Anyway, Keevin didn’t say anything and I didn’t ask.”
“Weird,” she said. “We’re here,” she said, in front of the Elliston Place Soda Shop.
“Cool,” I said.
We had to wait a few minutes for a table, but not long. It was a blue plate special kind of place with a big chrome Wurlitzer jukebox in the corner and mini-jukes in every booth where you could pick a tune without getting up. They didn’t serve beer and the waitresses all wore white. After somebody showed us to our table, ice water and silverware showed up almost immediately, and we were expected to look at the menu without prompting. We did, without much talk. Nothing on the menu cost much over three bucks.
“I’ll have fried chicken, mashed potatoes, turnip greens, biscuits, and tea,” said Ginny, when the time came. Our waitress was maybe 45, had deep black ringlets, a habit of scratching her scalp with her pencil point, and a name tag showing “Miranda.” She nodded at Ginny and looked at me.
“Chicken-fried steak, turnip greens, cole slaw, un-sweet tea, and a corn muffin,” I said. She nodded, slapped her green order pad into her apron pocket, and marched off.
“So you’ve never been here before?” Ginny asked.
“No. I usually eat on campus,” I said. “My kind of place, though. Thanks for introducing us.”
“It’s right down the street from Annie’s, and I like the food here.”
“I do have some misgivings about taking a respectable young woman to Annie’s”
“Why is it okay for you to go but not me?” she asked, almost, but not quite, teasing.
“Yeah, well. I’ve been to lots of places like that over the years. You might meet some impolite people there. I have. But if somebody’s rude to me, it’s not the first time, and it’s not the worst thing in the world, you know?”
“So how many pool halls have you been in?” she asked.
“Oh, God. I don’t know. A lot. But Annie’s isn’t a pool hall. It’s a bar with a few pool tables. The last time I was there a couple of the players were just a little … rough.”
“Then what were you doing there?” she asked.
“Making money.” Our food came. Good-sized portions and steaming hot. When Ginny took a bite out of her chicken I could hear the crisp in a muted crunch. Everything I had was good, but the best thing was the corn muffin. Just perfect. Ginny asked questions about pool and nine-ball and playing for money. Dinner for the two of us was right at eight bucks. I paid up and we walked down to Annie’s.
It hadn’t improved much since I was there last. One story, wall to your left, Skee ball to your right, a bar all the way back on the left. Pool tables on your right behind the Skee ball. Grimy floor, dirt accumulating in the corners. It smelled like stale beer, but not as bad as if it were carpeted. I stopped to look at the first table.
“Ah, shit.” I said.
“What?” Ginny asked.
“Sorry for swearing. I know some of these people,” I said, with a sigh. There, at the first table, Jimmy Milton from my dorm floor was awkwardly lining up a shot. I couldn’t tell what game he was playing, but he was playing against Donnie, or was it Hank? whom I’d played back at Hixson Lanes. Melissa, the red-head everyone at Hixson Lanes called Rosie, was sitting on a stool against the wall. Next to her a lone wolf in a Texas burnt orange tee shirt, wearing custom cowboy boots and holding a glittering custom cue stick, was watching Milton’s fumbling with a pro’s eye. Texas had one of those great big wallets secured to his belt by a silver chain, like bikers wear.
“Milton,” I called out, interrupting his shot. He looked over his shoulder with a glare, then recognized me and came over to shake my hand, smiling. Donnie looked up and saw me.
“Ah, shit,” said Donnie.
“Hi … Hank? Donnie?” I said.
“Donnie,” he said.
“What’s up?” said the guy in the Longhorns tee shirt.
“Old friend,” said Donnie.
“What are you playing?” I asked Milton.
“Nine ball,” he said, shaking my hand. “And I’m doing really good,” he said, under his breath. Melissa finally recognized me, smiled and waved. She had a very sweet smile.
“How far are you ahead?” I asked Milton.
“Maybe thirty bucks!” he said.
“Milt, I don’t want to burst your bubble, but what’s happening is that Donnie here is going to let you win two or three more and then he’s going to bet you double or nothing on the entire wad, and you’re going to take it if you’ve got that much cash because he’s been looking so frustrated at his inability to make a shot, then as soon as you double he’s going stop making mistakes and you’re gonna realize that Donnie is one of the best pool players in the Volunteer State. I don’t know Texas, but he’s a wolf in wolf’s clothing, and once Donnie takes all your money, Texas will step up to play Donnie with a swagger, but then he’ll lose once or twice to Donnie before Donnie clocks out. Once Donnie’s gone all the college boys will think they have a shot at Texas, and the routine will start all over again.” There was a pause. Milton looked confused, but decided offensive was better than defensive. I’d given him too much too fast.
“Why do you expect me to believe that interpretation of events?” asked Milton. “Maybe I was winning because tonight’s my night.”
“Donnie and I have met.”
“Why you gotta go fucking with it?” Donnie asked. “It’s just a calm little hustle. Now I’m out thirty bucks.”
“Ten bucks a game?” I asked.
“Sure,” said Milt and Donnie both. I handed Milt ten bucks.
“I want to buy your game, Milt.” I dropped two twenties on the table. “Melissa, hold that, please. It’s for what Donnie has in so far and the next game.” She hopped off of her stool, scooped up the money, and slid it into her bra.
A short, stout waitress interrupted to ask us if we wanted anything. Ginny ordered a Lite beer and I passed. Milton was still confused, but found his beer and took a swig..
“Just out of curiosity, what if I don’t want to sell the game?” Milton asked.
“I don’t mean to be rude, bud, but you were getting fleeced,” I said, in a quieter voice. “Donnie and Texas are both pros. I paid you what you put up for the first game, so you’re square, and I’ve paid Donnie what he’s given you so far. Assuming I win, I can pay you the additional thirty you were up. We both end up ahead.”
“If you win,” said Milt.”
“Yes.”
“If he’s such a shark, why do you think you’re going to win?”
“I’ve played him before.”
Milt pulled a dark brown Sherman out of a pack, frowned slightly, then lit it from a book of matches he retrieved from inside the cigarette pack.
“You act like you think you’re doing me a favor,” he said.
“I guess I think I am, but mainly I like playing Donnie. If you want to go on and see how this plays out, be my guest, but I promise you that if you keep playing the only way you’re going home with any money is if Donnie can’t figure out how much you’ve got.’
“What makes you so sure I’m not as good as him?” Milton asked.
“You were holding the ass end of your stick with a closed fist. The tip was waving around like a snake-charmer’s flute. Donnie’s slick like Vaseline. Before you play a Donnie let’s go to a pool hall. Practice some. Watch some Donnies play some Texans. Practice some more. Then play Donnie.” Of course, he would have to practice a lot to be ready to play Donnie, but I didn’t say so. Milt smoked and gazed off into middle distance for a few seconds, then shrugged and handed me his cue. He looked around for a seat, and noticed the vacant stools on either side of Melissa. His expression changed and he made a beeline for the seat next to her. I could tell from his expression that a seat next to Melissa was a reward in itself.
I looked at the cue Milton had handed me. 28 ounce. I rolled it between my palms. Almost straight.
Ginny, Miller Lite in hand, moved closer to the table from her position near the to the door and gave me an inquiring look. She was close enough for me to talk to her without talking to anyone else.
“I know everybody at this table except for the guy in cowboy boots, and I think he’s trouble,” I said. She nodded knowingly then looked around again, noticing Melissa for the first time.
“Aren’t you Melissa from my Art History class?” Ginny said.
“Ginny?” Melissa answered. Ginny ran over. They smiled excitedly and hugged briefly, then Ginny took a seat next to Melissa against the wall. Melissa had Milton on one side and Ginny on the other.
“Are you picking up or do you want to re-rack?” Donnie asked.
“I want to re-rack, because I haven’t touched a cue in three or four months, but I guess I bought the game in progress. We’re playing nine ball?”
“Yep,” said Donnie. He was playing with a sleek-looking two-piece cue lacquered clear over some dark, heavy wood. It had an inlay high on the barrel, a little figure of some kind, and a fine inlaid perfect checkerboard girdling the barrel low towards the heel, right at the point where his thumb and index finger would hold the big end in an appropriately loose hinge. It looked expensive.
“My shot, then,” I said. Since Milton had been about to make a shot when I interrupted, it was my turn. Milton took a drag off his Sherman, pointedly blowing the smoke away from Melissa. I chalked the cue and looked at the table. We were up to the five ball. The five, six and seven were going to be easy shots, but I couldn’t see the eight or nine.
I rifled off the five with enough stop English to leave the cue ball dead in its tracks. Or so I thought, but I was out of practice. I sank it, but the cue ball rolled a few inches past the point of impact.
“Fuck,” I said, under my breath. I lined up the six and shot it in. Again, the cue ball ended up a few inches away from where I wanted it. Not far, and the seven was still doable, but I didn’t have the precision I wanted. The seven had become a finesse shot rather than a sure thing, but I sank it, gently.
“Damn,” said Milton. “You’re good.”
“You shoulda seen him in Hixson,” said Donnie, without looking up.
I studied the table. I could get the eight on a two-rail bank shot that would tap it in and leave me lined up to put in the nine any one of a number of places, but my touch wasn’t there. The other shot was to touch it slightly and lay it up somewhere Donnie couldn’t possibly put it in and hope for a better table next shot. Safer.
But fuck that.
Even though I was only three shots into the game, I was having a crisis of confidence. Eight months earlier, the two-rail bank shot on the eight would have been a sure thing. I was finding myself tempted to dumb down my game because I was a little rusty. So fuck it, I went for the two rail shot.
I sank the eight, but only barely. There were “Oooo”s around the table, but it wasn’t as pretty as it could have been. Donnie could see I wasn’t myself, even if nobody else could. I didn’t look at Texas.
The nine was no trouble. I rolled it in and won the game.
“Fuck me runnin’,” said Milton, dropping his cigarette butt to the floor. “You can play this game.” Ginny looked happy and made as if to applaud, then glanced at Melissa, who was watching Donnie carefully and with concern. Ginny quickly stifled her celebratory impulse. She looked at her fingernails.
“Again?” asked Donnie.
“Sure. Stakes?” I answered.
“You bought your friend’s stake, so where are we at?” he asked.
“There’s forty on the table, thirty of which I owe Milton, if I win,” I said.
“You sure?” Milton asked. I turned to him.
“Milt, you were thirty bucks up when I cut in so I owe you thirty either way. You get your stake out of whoever buys the game.” He looked back blankly. “You were thirty bucks up. Don’t let me take that away from you by buying the game for ten bucks.” Blank stare. I thought about how to rephrase this for a few seconds. “Don’t gamble in pool halls any more,” I said.
“Okay,” he said, still confused, and torn between Melissa’s proximity and wanting to know what was going on.
“So quadruple that?” said Donnie.
“What’s that mean?” Milton asked.
“Donnie wants to play double-double or nothing on this game,” I answered.
“So how much?” he asked.
“$160.00,” I answered.
“On one fucking game?” Milton asked, incredulous.
“Sure.”
“I’ll be dipped in shit,” he said.
I pulled $120.00 out of my wallet and dropped it on the table. I looked up at Donnie and he laid out $160.000. I looked up at Melissa, who hopped off of her stool, stepped forward, and smoothly scooped the cash off of the table, placing it next to the earlier stake. She returned to her stool and looked at Donnie and me, still intently.
“Who’s Texas?” I asked Donnie, loudly enough that Texas could hear.
“Just a friend. He’s almost as good as you used to be,” Donnie answered. I looked again at Donnie’s cue. There was a little goblin of some sort, finely detailed and cleanly inlaid into the barrel, sleekly lacquered over.
“Do I need to worry?”
“Not as long as you’re playing me. I don’t know what happens if you take his money. I’m not sure I’ve ever done it,” Donnie said. “I’ve beat him, but you know how it is. He may have been losing to me to set me up for some other day. Hard to say. He plays it pretty close to the vest.” I nodded, then cocked an eye at Texas. He waved silently without much expression and watched the table. Donnie racked for nine ball.
A lot of life is confidence, and just as much is lack of confidence. You can’t always win if you have it, but you can almost never win if you don’t. Not in pool, anyway. Ginny was looking at me with concern, or maybe horror. $320 was a lot of money in 1974. I chalked my cue and sighted for the break. I tried to concentrate. I couldn’t feel it. I popped the break, but it didn’t go as well as I’d liked. The balls scattered well, but nothing went in. Damn. Donnie was looking at the table. He lined up a shot. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Ginny bite on her index fingernail, just briefly.
“Be good to me Max,” he said.
“What?” I asked. He didn’t answer, and snapped off the two. He sighted the three.
“All right Max, let’s do it again,” he said.
“Who the fuck are you talking to?” I asked.
“My cue stick. Can you shut the fuck up?” he answered. He got the five off the three but that left him with no shot on the three, so he was screwed.
“You have my sympathies,” I said.
“As I recall you know the foul rules,” he said. Under the rules, if he did not make contact with the three, I could take any ball in hand, meaning I could drop one into a pocket, which, one way or another, was going to clear me for a shot on the three.
“Nice stick,” I said, referring to his cue.
“Yeah,” he said. “I won it off a grad student who thought he could beat me and didn’t have $500. He said I got a hell of a deal. Plays great.”
“And what’s that inlaid there, a goblin?” I asked.
“A demon,” he said. He held it up for me to see. There was a little demon, with a slightly bestial face and horns and a tail, made of mother of pearl, very neatly detailed. “Prior owner said the demon’s name was Maxwell,” said Donnie, “ so I call him Max. Luck deal.”
“Cool. Looks good. Your shot.” He took a game try at an impossible shot and hit the seven first. That was a foul, so I got to take one in hand. If I moved the six I had a perfect shot on the three, so I dropped the six into the near pocket as Donnie’s penalty, then knocked in the four. Again, though, the cue ball didn’t end up exactly where I would have liked. Damn. Another tough shot. I lined up, feeling a little shaky, but thinking with a little luck I could sink the four. I was ready to take the shot even though it didn’t feel right because shooting was what I did.
But I stopped. I stood up straight, cue at my side, heel down. I closed my eyes and thought about that night when Donnie and I had played in Hixson. I’d beat him three times in a row. Three out of three. I thought about that. After a few seconds I decided I was still that pool player. It changed me. School was gone. I knew no Greek. My only physics was what I knew from pool tables. It was a good feeling.
When I opened my eyes, I looked around and noticed Donnie and I had drawn a few onlookers.
“Don’t be an asshole,” said Donnie, spinning Max between his palms like a top. “Play pool.”
“Sorry,” I said.
I got the four and the eight, smack, smack, and then the other four were arranged around the table in a shooter’s buffet.
“Fuck,” said Donnie. The bar started getting quieter. He was close enough for me to talk without anyone else hearing.
“I thought Melissa was with the big guy,” I said, just between me and Donnie.
“She left him after your fight,” Donnie answered. He shrugged. “I always liked her. I had her address. I wrote her a few letters. She came up and visited my freshman year, then applied to Peabody. She’s a freshman there now. Seems to be a good student, and loves Art. Good kid..”
“I think my friend Milton has his eye on her,” I said. Donnie looked their way.
“She doesn’t look captivated, and she lives with me,” he said.
“Too bad, Milt,” I said. You’re in school, too?” I asked.
“Sure. I’ve seen you in the C-Room a couple times, but we’re not really pals, so I never said hi. I’m in Engineering, and Melissa and I live off campus. You and I aren’t going to be bumping into each other much.” I nodded, then looked back at the table. It really was lined up beautifully.
“Okay,” I said, after I thought through a game plan. The four and the seven went in together. The six was tricky, but rolled in. I could have smacked the nine in hard, but just barely tapped it in. There was a collective exhalation when I got it. I looked up and Ginny’s eyes were pretty wide.
“Again?” I asked Donnie. He shook his head.
“For a beer, sure. For $160, no,” he said. “You bounced back from your sabbatical pretty fast.”
“I will,” said Texas.
“You’ll do what?” I asked.
“I’ll take that wager,” he said.
“Double, or double-double?” I asked.
“Double,” Texas said.
“Donnie, he wants to buy your bet,” I said.
“Done.”
“$160 new money, Texas, plus $160 to cover,” I said. Texas put three hundreds and a twenty on the table. Melissa promptly hopped up, gave Donnie $160, and moved the $160 to her repository.
“Who is this guy?” Texas asked Donnie.
“Meet Henry Baida, high priest of the Church of Straight Lines,” Donnie answered.
“How good is he?” asked Texas.
“Crazy good,” said Donnie.
“Meaning?”
“When I played him in Hixson he was the best I’d ever seen. But crazy. Tonight, for the first three shots, a little unsteady on his pins. Rusty. I thought I had him. Then he did that samurai composure deal and he was the best again.”
“Crazy how?” asked Texas.
“It’s a universal conspiracy or something,” said Donnie. “He has this idea that things don’t always happen like they should. Maybe the laws of physics don’t always apply. Engineering has holes in it. Or something. And he thinks it affects his pool game. Things happen that shouldn’t happen. Shit like that. Nutty.”
“Okay,” said Texas. “Your break,” he said to me. Ginny got up from her stool and got close enough to me to do a loud whisper.
“$320 is a lot of money,” she said.
“$640 is more,” I said.
“Is there any chance you’re doing this to impress … somebody?” she asked.
“No, no,” I answered. “What time is it?” I’d never replaced the watch I lost at Hixson Lanes.
“Just before eight,” she said.
“We’re doing fine,” I said. “Texas thinks he’s good. I’m not sure what’s gonna happen, but we’ll be outta here by ten.” She went back to her stool next to Melissa. They did this happy excited giggle thing when she sat. Milton looked on with rapt attention, and neither of them seemed to know he was there.
Texas had racked for nine ball. I broke. It wasn’t a great break but the eight rolled in. I sank the two and the three, but the only shot on the four was a paper-thin slice into the side pocket, and it just grazed the rail and settled right in front of the right side pocket. Texas shot it in like a staple gun, then got the five and the six with no trouble. That left the seven and the nine. He eased in the seven, and rifled in the nine. He looked up at me with the expression of a man who’s thinking “I just won $640.”
“Again?” I asked. He had to think.
“Sure.” I took out my wallet and put six hundreds and two twenties on the table. He looked at the money and licked his lips. Melissa swooped down and collected it. The bar was quiet enough now that you could hear glasses clink, and our crowd of spectators was growing. I looked up to see what Ginny thought. She had a look of horrified concern in her eyes, back ramrod straight, staring at the table, scraping her right little finger against her bottom teeth.
It was Texas’ break. He didn’t do well. The balls didn’t scatter very much, nothing went in. But oh, what a lovely table for me. It wasn’t even work. The balls sank themselves. I ran the table. It was fun.
I looked up at Texas. “Again?” I asked.
“Let’s do something different,” he said.
“Like what?” I asked.
“A real bet,” he said. “Real money.”
“I haven’t been paid on the last one,” I said.
“All right.” He looked up at Melissa. “Pay up,” he said. She jumped up and handed me $1,280, but some of that was mine.” I handed thirty back to her.
“She looked at the $30, unsure what I wanted her to do with it.
“It’s Milton’s,” I said.
“Who?” she asked.
“Milton, The guy sitting next to you,” I said. She looked around. “No, back over there, where you and Ginny are sitting. Milton’s sitting on the stool on the other side of you from Ginny.” She turned around to look.
“The guy with the fuzzy hair?” she asked.
“Yes. I owe him that because of the way I bought the first game.”
She smiled sweetly and held the bills in front of her the way a flower girl holds a flower, then turned and bounced back to her stool, handing Milton his money in the process. He was still confused.
I looked around and noticed that Donnie still hadn’t sat down.
“How much you got?” Texas asked me.
“Enough,” I said.
“Look. Let’s you and me play him in cutthroat,” Texas said to Donnie.
“I hate cutthroat,” said Donnie.
“Everybody hates cutthroat,” Texas answered, talking directly to Donnie. “And I can see he’s good. But he ain’t better than both of us. And we gang up on him, we split his money.”
“N-O spells ‘no.’ I am not giving Henry any more money.”
“I’ll stake you. I been watching you. You never make mistakes. And crazy people always make mistakes.”
“Not this one,” said Donnie. “How much do you want to play for anyway?”
“Five grand,” he said.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” said Donnie. “Like I have that on me.”
“Like I said, I’ll stake you. I’ll give you a grand of it if we beat him. If you beat me, two grand.”
Cutthroat’s an odd game. It’s the only pool hall game you can play with three players. There are three groups of colored balls: one to five, six to ten, and eleven to fifteen. As with eight ball, you choose which group is yours when you sink a ball. Unlike eight ball, in which you try to k sink your own balls, stripes or solids, in cutthroat the object is to knock in the other players’ balls. In cutthroat, the player with balls left on the table at the end of the game wins, and you keep playing until only one player has any balls left on the table.
“You’re telling me you have $10,000 in cash on you?” I asked Texas. He thought for a second. You could see the wheels turning. The bar was getting quieter and quieter.
“No, but I have a check,” he said.
“No checks,” I said.
“It’s okay. I promise. I have an account at the bank and everything,” he said. “And I won’t stop payment or nothin’.”
“No checks,” I said. He thought a few seconds and then looked up at me.
“How would you cover a $5,000 bet?” he asked. I took out my wallet and counted out fifty hundreds and snapped them onto the table. Ginny looked utterly horrified. Even Melissa’s eyes were wide. The students all looked on in reverential, or was it excited? silence.
“Holy mother-fucking shower of shit,” said Milton, not loudly, but easily audible. There was no sound whatsoever in the bar. You could hear noises from the kitchen of the restaurant next door, and traffic on Elliston Place.
Texas looked at the stack of bills and licked his lips. I had him. He had enough cash to cover my bet, and was letting greed make the decision for him. He wasn’t thinking any more. He pulled that great big wallet off his hip and hefted it in his hand before unzipping it, looking at my stack of hundreds. He knew how much was in his wallet, but still he thought for a long time before unzipping it. He counted out a hundred bills and riffed them with his fingers. There were some audible reactions from spectators as he counted again, and then laid them on the table.
He’d convinced himself of something for which there was no logical basis—that he and Donnie together were better than me, as though their talent were somehow cumulative. How good they were, together or separate, had nothing to do with how good I was. As long as I was better than either of them, I stood a good chance of winning, regardless of their cumulative chances. If three people are trying to outrun two hungry tigers, the cumulative speed of the slower runners doesn’t do them much good.
Of course, I’d never played Texas, but he wasn’t thinking straight, so I figured I was probably okay.
Milton lit another cigarette. Melissa and Ginny looked like they were witnessing a tragedy.
“Lag for break, right?” I asked.
“Yeah, sure,” said Texas. Donnie nodded.
“So if Melissa would do the honors…” said Texas. Melissa got up as if to pick up the stack of bills. It was clearly not going to fit in her brassiere.
“No,” I said. “Sorry, Melissa. Donnie, do you know the owner here?” It’s not that I didn’t trust her, I did, I just thought $15,000 might attract the wrong kind of attention to her.
“Sure,” Donnie said. “My Uncle Roy.”
“Does he have a safe?”
“Yeah. Good idea. Angie, can you get Mr. King for me? Get Biggie, too.” He was talking to the waitress. She nodded.
“Biggie?” I asked.
“He’s the cooler here. A little out of shape, but he was a green beret and used to be one of Elvis’ bodyguards.” A few silent minutes later a sharp, thin, tall man in a blue oxford cloth shirt and khakis came in, followed by an enormous sumo wrestler-sized man dressed all in stylish black. They saw the stack of bills on the table simultaneously.
“Now Donald, you know I promised your mother I would discourage you from gambling,” he said, in a mountain accent.
“I’m not really gambling, here,” he said. “These two idiots are playing and I may get a part of it.”
“All right, then,” said Uncle Roy, resignedly.
“My girlfriend here’s been holding the stakes,” said Donnie,” but I think Biggie might be a better candidate on this game.”
“How much?” asked Uncle Roy.
“Fifteen,” Donnie said.
“Far out,” said Biggie. He scooped up the cash and stuffed it into the front pocket of his black jeans.
“So I take the first lag?” I asked. The other two nodded. This was a good sign. Either of them was good enough to run the table straight through given the chance, so it was important to win the lag. I have a good lag stroke, and the fact that Donnie and Texas were willing to let me go first meant they weren’t playing or thinking aggressively. The fact that so much money was at stake had them scared.
I went all in. I tapped it solidly, it bounced cleanly off the head rail and sped towards the near rail. A good lag shot always looks like it’s going to hit the near rail, and several people gasped, but it stopped a half inch short. Hard to beat. I put the heel of my cue on the side rail to mark the spot. I looked up at Ginny. She still had her hand over her mouth, where it had popped when she’d gasped.
“Shit,” said Texas.
“Jesus H. Christ,” said Milton, through his smoke.
“I told you,” said Donnie. He lined up for a lag shot. “Come on, Max” he said. He tapped well, bounced off the head rail cleanly and coasted to a stop about an inch and a half from the near rail. A good lag, but mine was better so Donnie didn’t bother to mark it. Donnie lit a Winston 100 from a Bic and laid it on the rail. Uncle Roy frowned at this; whether he disapproved of smoking or was worried about his table getting a cigarette burn was unclear. After a few seconds, Donnie picked it up and blew a smoke ring at the table. It bounced off of the felt but dissipated immediately. It was still quiet. Two soldiers walked by outside, and you could tell both that they were drunk and that they were talking about the girls in Saigon.
Texas bent over to take his lag shot and I got a good look at his cue stick. It was the most beautiful cue I’d ever seen. It had an elaborate vine and flower inlay pattern on both halves, and a phrase in French inlaid up the axis of the heel end in a flowing script. The detail was amazing. He paused and stood up, over-thinking his shot. Either you make your lag or you don’t.
“What does it say?” I asked, looking at his stick.
He answered in what sounded to me like perfect French.
“To doubt is uncomfortable, but to be certain is absurd,” I translated.
“Right,” he answered. “My mother used to say that. She was French. Said it was Voltaire.” I nodded.
“Your shot,” I said. He lined up again, got a determined look on his face, and took his lag shot. He went all in. It was the right choice, but it didn’t work out for him. Maybe if he’d gone first he wouldn’t have had to press and could have put the pressure on me to beat his best. But now he had to do better than his best. You could hear the ball bounce off the head rail—it hopped a little, a sign he’d hit it a little too hard—then you could hear it roll back to the near rail, hear it rolling slower and slower and slower, then the barely audible bump against the near rail, Everyone exhaled at the same time.
My break.
People were taking sides. It was mainly college kids, and I think the girls were mainly rooting for Texas. He was better looking and in better shape than Donnie or me.
Donnie racked. I couldn’t remember if there was a way you were supposed to rack for cutthroat, but Donnie racked them like I would do for eight ball, with the one at the nose and the eight in the middle. Donnie stood back, retrieved his cigarette from the rail and watched. All of the smokers seemed to take a drag in unison.
“You’re up,” said Texas.
“Yeah,” I said. I put the cue ball slightly above and to the left of the head spot. It just works out well for me. What I’ve played most is nine ball, and you don’t use all the balls in nine ball. You use all fifteen balls in cutthroat, and if you hammer it on all fifteen balls, the break is inherently chaotic. I’ve played against guys who can chip balls off one at a time in straight pool without scattering the racked set, but I’ve never lost to one of them. They might take a game or two off of me, but I’ve always come out ahead. Opening up the break lets the game start, and until you do you’re not winning, you’re just avoiding losing.
I hit that break really hard, and was richly rewarded. The six, nine and eleven all rolled in.
“Fuck me in the ass with a red hot poker,” said Milton. Texas looked worried.
“Do I need to call my shots?” I asked.
“You can if you wanna show off,” said Donnie, “but I don’t need it.” Texas waved me off and shook his head. I looked at the table. It wasn’t bad. “I guess you’re taking low,” said Donnie.
“I don’t have to call yet, so I won’t,” I said. Donnie was alluding to the fact that the one, two, three, four and five were all still on the table, but two were missing from the middle six-to-ten group and one was missing from the high ten-to-fifteen group. The object was to have balls from your group left on the table at the end of the game.
It was tricky, but I did it. The seven and ten were close to the waist pockets, so getting them is was a cinch. The twelve and fifteen were in opposite corners, so firm contact was required, but no risk as long as you made the shot, and I took them both. The eight was guarded by the two at the right top corner, and the thirteen and fourteen were in the middle of the table.
“What do you think?” I asked Donnie.
“I think I’m fucked,” he answered. It would have been rude to have asked for shot advice, but it would have been interesting to know how he would have played it. Texas was looking at the table in placid irritation.
The one ball was in the way of sinking the thirteen in the top left pocket, and the three might be in the way of putting it in the left side pocket, but if I sank the thirteen in the left side, I was perfect on the fourteen in the right side pocket, so I went with that. The thirteen just barely rolled, easy, gentle, like petting a kitten. That was the last of the high balls, so one of either Donnie or Texas was out of the game. Since Texas lost the lag, it made sense for it to be him, but it was their decision.
“Holy nickel-plated donkey shit,” said Milton. It was quiet. The loudest sound was a college boy in a pink shirt lighting a Kool. You could hear the crinkle of the cellophane as he handled the pack, the spark wheel of his Bic, and then a faint jingle of change when he dropped the lighter back in his pocket.
“I have to call now, right?” I asked. Texas nodded. Since all of the high balls were gone, I had to say whether I was claiming high or middle as mine. Since the one through the five were still on the table, and only the eight was left of the middle, the choice was pretty obvious, but still I looked. “Yeah, I’m taking low,” I said, after a minute. Donnie and Texas nodded balefully.
“So this is what he does? Takes the cue out of your hand?” asked Texas.
“Not like this,” said Donnie. “He’s good, but not this good. There’s a lot of luck here, too. Or are you seeing your … anomalies here, Henry?”
“I don’t like to talk much when I’m shooting,” I said.
“Humor me. You’re about to take a thousand dollars away from me. Do you feel lucky tonight?” he lit another cigarette.
“No. But I don’t believe in luck.”
“What do you believe in?” Donnie asked.
“I think there’s a lot of randomness in pool, and with enough practice you sort through the randomness, recognize what to do, and make the next shot less random,” I said. I really didn’t like talking while playing. If I believed in luck, I’d have been worried that this would jinx me.
“None of your rule violations, here? No crumbling at the edges?”
“So you with one ball on the table are mocking me, who has five?” I asked.
“Mocking, no. But tell Carl what you told me back in Hixson.”
“Carl?” I asked.
“Texas,” Donnie said, nodding towards Texas.
“I didn’t tell you anything. I asked if you’d noticed, playing pool, that sometimes, for no reason, outcomes diverge from expectations. Now can you leave me the fuck alone long enough to let me sink the eight?”
“Sorry,” Donnie said. I would bet he was worried that Texas had taken his claim that I was crazy too seriously and might be mad at him accordingly, but that wasn’t what had pulled Texas in. What set the hook on Texas was greed, and the strange notion that two good players are better than one good player. Chance isn’t like that. Two on one doesn’t change the odds. The number of players doesn’t change their skill. If two tigers are chasing three runners, even though none of the runners could ever outrun the tigers, the fastest runner will still survive, unless the tigers are stupid.
The cue ball was far enough up that I could sneak past the two and tap it in, but I also had a shot knocking in the eight off of the two, but doing that there was a risk the two might fall in, too. I would still win, but it was perfect the other way, so I plopped the two in.
I won.
Oddly, there wasn’t as much of a reaction from the crowd as you might expect. The kids were mostly nine ball and eight ball players, and a lot of them didn’t understand cutthroat, and so didn’t understand that I’d won. Melissa did, as did Uncle Roy and Biggie, and maybe a few of the frat guys. Donnie and Texas looked at each other and shrugged, and started taking apart their cues. I handed my cue back to Milton.
“Your table, Milt,” I said.
“Biggie, put the proceeds in the office safe, and lock it,” said Uncle Roy.
“What about—“ Biggie said, then stopped. “Yes sir,” he said, instead, and disappeared.
“So that’s it,?” Milton asked. “You fucking won?”
“I did,” I said. I wanted to say “good game” or something to Texas and Donnie, but thought it would come through as strained or condescending. “Au revoir,” I said to Texas. He nodded as he slid the halves of his beautiful cue into a leather cue bag. Donnie had put the halves of his cue into a hard aluminum case that he slung over his shoulder, then gave Melissa a hug. Milton was wanting to be excited and bounded over. I put up a palm to slow his reaction down. I didn’t mean to be rude but “This guy just went ten large and didn’t get to make a shot,” I said. “We need to show some respect.” Milton nodded and looked at Texas, headed for the front door. “But this is fucking fantastic!” he whispered, hoarsely. “You’ll get laid tonight for sure!”
As Texas left, the crowd began to break up.
“Mr. ..” said Uncle Roy, looking at me.”
“Baida,” said Donnie. “Uncle Roy, Henry Baida. Henry, Uncle Roy.”
“Mr. Baida, would you care to step into my office?” asked Roy.
“Sure,” I said. “Donnie, would you come, too? Milton would you buy Ginny and Melissa a drink, please? And one for yourself, too. We won’t be long,” I said. I was reaching for my wallet to give Milton some cash for the drinks, but Roy put his hand on my arm.
“The drinks are on the house,” he said, not to me but to the waitress.
“Thank you, sir.” I said. “I need to buy one for Donnie, though.”
“Donald?” Uncle Roy asked.
“Scotch. Neat,” he said. I gave the waitress a twenty.
“Glenfiddich?” she asked. Donnie nodded.
“This way, boys,” said Uncle Roy. I looked around. No one looked threatening.
“Milt, stay here until I get back. It’ll just be a few minutes. Don’t go anywhere. Just sit here with them. Are you okay with this, Ginny?” She nodded. I looked at Melissa. She smiled.
“Henry, how long has it been since you were here?” Melissa asked.
“A few years,” I answered.
“It’s different now,” she said. I looked at Uncle Roy.
“I bought this place in 1976,” he said. “My third neighborhood tavern. In 1977 there was a stabbing here and I decided Annie’s needed more of my attention. I hired Biggie and started coming here daily. Shall we?” he asked, gesturing a path to his office. It was a small office, but it held Uncle Roy, Biggie, Donnie and me as long as we were all standing. Before we started talking, the waitress showed up with a brimming glass of scotch on a small tray and extended it to Donnie. There was five dollars of change on the tray and he waved her to take it. He took a small sip of his drink.
“Biggie has your winnings and I will be glad to hold them in my safe until tomorrow morning,” said Uncle Roy, to me. We open at eleven. Would you like to pick it up soon afterwards.?’
“Not really. Sorry, I don’t mean to impose on your hospitality, but Donnie, do you by any chance pass by here on your way to school?” I asked.
“Not exactly, but it’s not far out of my way.”
“How much did I cost you tonight?” I asked. He thought.
“Well, by busting up my game with your bearded buddy, maybe three hundred, if he actually had it. But you covered that and then won it back.”
“I’ll give you half of what you would have won if I’d lost the cutthroat game if you’ll mule the money for me.”
“A grand?” he asked.
“No, five hundred.” He thought and sipped his scotch.
“Tomorrow?” he asked.
“No, Friday,” I said.
“Why?” he asked. Biggie and Uncle Roy looked at me with interest.
“If Texas is going to try to steal his money back, he’s going to be looking for me to come and get it. He won’t be looking for you. And even if he’s looking to jump me, he won’t wait around three days.” Donnie shrugged.
“Okay by me,” he said. “Roy?” Roy looked square at me.
“So you trust us?” he asked.
“Yes, sir, I do,” I answered.
“Then I want to trust you as well,” he said. “I will hold your money for the next three days, but I never want to have a pool game of that nature in my restaurant ever again,” he said. “It was quite exciting for the boys and girls, but word will get out that big money can be had here and a different group of people will show up. I make money by selling dollar beers to boys and girls. I make no money off of pool, and I do not wish to lose my investment in this bar. Understood?”
“Yes, sir. You have my word. Last time I played here Stumpy still ran it, and it was a different crowd. I meant no disrespect.”
“None taken. Biggie, put the stakes in the safe and lock it.”
“Hang on,” I said. “Mr. King, may I offer you something as a token of my thanks?” I asked.
“No, but thank you,” he said.
“Biggie, take a Franklin for yourself.” He thought about it, then laughed.
“I’ll take a Grant.” he said. “I don’t want Mr. King to think you’re spoiling me, and besides, it weren’t any kind of work.”
“That’s cool,” I said. He peeled off a fifty and put the rest in a small metal drawer in the top right corner of the safe, shut the door with a solid and satisfying metallic “clunk,” then shot the bolt and spun the dial.
Two years tuition. Lordy.
When Donnie and I got back to the room with the pool tables, Milton was still there. Ginny and Melissa were talking to each other, and Milton appeared to be trying to get a word in edgewise from time to time, without success.
“Howdy, girls,” said Donnie.
“So which one of you ladies am I going to walk home?” said Milton.
“Donnie!” said Melissa, and stood to give him a promising hug.
“Hello, Henry,” said Ginny. She still looked worried.
“Thanks, Milt,” I said.
“No, really,” said Milton. “I’ll be damned happy to walk either of these two ladies home.”
“Maybe next time?” said Melissa.
“I need to talk to Henry,” said Ginny.
“Oh, well,” said Milton, and shrugged.
“Milt, thanks,” I said. “You were a big help. I appreciate it.”
Milton thought about it, frowned, lit a cigarette, saluted me with the wrong hand, smiled, and left. Kids were still looking at us as tough we were important. But Annie’s had turned back into a regular college bar. It was a few minutes before ten.
“Shall we?” I asked Ginny.
“Sure,” she said. She still didn’t seem happy.
“See you, Donnie,” I said. “Good game. Good seeing you again. Melissa.” She smiled her pretty smile.
Ginny and I left. She didn’t speak at first. She didn’t hold my arm the way she had on the way to dinner.
“Have you done that a lot?” she asked, when we were on the sidewalk.
“I’ve played pool a lot,” I said. “I’ve never bet $5,000 on cutthroat before, and I’ve never played Donnie at cutthroat before, and I’ve never played Texas before.” She wasn’t happy with the way I answered. She seemed to assume I either knew or should know what she was getting at and was intentionally being evasive. Unfortunately, I had no idea what she was getting at.
“You gambled an insane amount of money,” she said.
“But I won,” I said.
“But you could have lost,” she said.
“True,” I answered. “But I looked at the odds and decided it was worth the risk.”
“How can you possibly have decided it was worth risking fifteen thousand dollars?” she asked.
“I didn’t have fifteen up.” I said. “I had five up, and Texas had ten. The two to one odds are was one of the things that sold me on the deal.”
“You need to explain this,” she said, maybe a little crossly.
“Okay. So I was playing nine ball with Donnie, and won. Texas doubled…”
“That’s not what I’m talking about,” she said. “He proposed a $15,000 bet and you went along with it.
“Sure.”
’How in the world can you go along with a crazy bet like that?”
“So,” I asked. “You don’t bet much?”
“Not at all,” she said.
“Betting is neither a science nor an art,” I said. “You have to think about odds in the same way that birds think about wind speed.” I looked at her and could see I got no purchase on that idea. ‘In the game you’re worried about,” I said, “I’d beat Donnie three out of three last time we’d played, and Texas looked like a good player. But chances are, I had him, since I had Donnie.”
“But you couldn’t possibly know that,” she said.
“True. But look. In games of chance, the odds are a reality. In a race between me and the odds, the odds win, In a race between any player and the odds, the odds always win. But you’re not really playing against the odds. You’re playing against the other player, and he’s playing against the odds. All you have to do is do better than he’s doing, and you take his money. There’s nothing magical about this.”
She thought. I can’t say she looked happy.
“That’s too much to gamble,” she said.
“Not really,” I said. “I had it in my wallet, and if I’d lost, nothing awful would have happened to me. Nobody would have beat me up or anything. I had the money, so I just would have forked over. Or Biggie would have forked over for me,” I said, remembering.
“But nobody can afford to lose $15,000,” she said, troubled.
“I didn’t have fifteen in,” I said. “I had five in. He had ten. That was part of what I liked about the bet. It was two to one, and I knew I could beat Donnie. How often do you get a bet like that?”
“But think about if you’d lost,” she said.
“If I’d lost I’d still have had enough money to graduate college, and then some. I got all my money gambling, anyway, so history would suggest my decision-making protocol is sound.”
“Henry, that was just insane,” she said. “You shouldn’t have done that.”
“But I won,” I said.
“But you might have lost,” she said.
”Okay. Say I think I have a particular skill. Say I think I know how to change tires. And then you have a flat tire. And I offer to change your tire, and you say no, you’d rather the Auto Club come and change your tire. And I say no, we don’t have the time to wait on the Auto Club, and I go ahead and change `your tire. And then you drive off and nothing bad ever happens to you. The changed tire is fine. Is it okay or not okay that I changed the tire?”
“I’m always glad to have a tire changed for me,” she said, “but why do you want to create worry?”
“What? I’m not creating worry, I’m just thinking I know what I’m doing.”
“But what if you don’t?’ she asked.
“But I did.”
“But what if you hadn’t?” she asked.
“I’d’ve lost five K,” I said. “Not the end of the world. I had it in my wallet.”
“That’s just too much to gamble,” she said.
“Really, it’s not, even if you lose, if you have it,” I said.
“We’re here,” she said, acknowledging that we were back in front of her dorm. “Henry Baida, once again you’ve given me much to think about.”
She turned and vanished into her dorm.
I walked back towards my own dorm, confused. I could understand why she’d think I’d been taking an unwise risk if I’d lost. The fact that I hadn’t lost would seem to me to have insulated me from a talk about the perils of gambling.
I reached the intersection of 21st and Garland, and under the blue light of the mercury vapor light, and there was a young woman there. She seemed to want to avoid contact at first, so I ignored her. But then she started looking at me.
“Are you in my Greek class?” she asked, right before the light changed.
“Well, I’m taking Greek,” I said. “α, β, γ, δ, ε, ζ, η,” and all that. She was peering at me in the darkness.
“Look, I hate to ask this,” she said, “I’m not far from my dorm but I have to walk past the entrance to the emergency room of the hospital and sometimes there are some assholes hanging outside and I’d just appreciate having company on the way past.”
“No problem, I said. “We waited for the light to turn back to green for our direction. The silence was awkward.
“So how are you liking Greek?” I asked. She seemed a little surprised that I spoke to her.
“Excuse me?” she asked, putting her hand above her breast as though worried.
“How are you enjoying Greek?” I asked again. The light turned green for our direction. I gestured towards the street and we began to walk. She wasn’t carrying anything except a small purse about the size of a Gideon Bible hanging at her right hip secured by a strong-looking brass chain across her chest to her right shoulder. It was a warm night, but she had her arms crossed in front of her as thought she were chilly. If a stride can be both purposeful and worried, hers was.
“It’s all right I guess,” she said. “Why?”
“I’m really enjoying it,” I said. I’m terrible at small talk. She didn’t roll her eyes, but she seemed irritated. We passed by the entrance to the Emergency Room, and there was a group of men loitering near the entrance. One, dressed like a biker, looked at us from ten or fifteen feet away, pitched his butt, registered our presence, then moved our way.
“Keep moving,” she said.
“What?”
“This is how it starts,” she said. The biker came right up to us. I stopped, and touched Rachel’s arm to stop her, too. She stopped, but she was obviously unhappy about it. I kind of splayed my hands at her as a way of suggesting “Calm down. We’re okay.” It wasn’t unreasonable for her to be concerned. He looked pretty tough. He was looking at me, though, not her, and he seemed to want to talk. I felt like I ought to know him.
“Leave us alone,” demanded Rachel, loudly. “We didn’t do anything to you.” He was a little taken aback, but looked at me rather than answering her.
“Ain’t you Henry?” the biker asked.
“That’s me,” I said, warily.
“Man, like, I just watched you take fifteen large off’n that asshole from Houston who’s been cleanin’ everybody’s plough over to Annie’s,” he said. “I’m about to start my shift here at the hospital, but I’d just like to shake the hand of the man who just won fifteen grand on one game.” We shook. “Thanks, man,” he said.
“And you are?” I asked.
“I’m Purliss Pettis, but ever’body calls me Skidmark.”
“You work here, Skidmark?”
“Yes, sir. I am a psychiatric nurse at this here hospital.”
“Pleased to meet you Skidmark. This is Rachel.” Skidmark stretched an earnest, tattooed hand towards Rachel. She shook his hand with a worried look.
“Pleased to meet you, ma’am,” he said. And he was.
“Skidmark, Rachel walks by here from time to time after dark and she’s worried about her safety. Isn’t she pretty safe around here?” Skidmark looked kind of uncomfortable, reached for a cigarette, shook it out, and lit it.
“She’s safe from physical harm, yes, sir,” he said. “But since you ask, they’s been things said around here that pro’l’ly shouldn’t’a been said.” His response was, admittedly, not what I’d expected. I’d hoped to help Rachel feel safe walking home to her dorm, but I was reinforcing her fears.
“What do you mean?” Rachel asked.
“Ma’am, when a pretty girl like you walks by, they’s a lot of guys thinks it’s okay to call out and ask you on a date. I mean, all of us knows you’re out of our league, but still we sorta ... call out.”
“And you think I like that?”
“Oh, Lord no,” said Skidmark. “We got no shot with the likes of you, so we got nothin’ to lose. I mean, If you acted like you was interested any one of those guys would be in seventh heaven, but that never happens.”
“So maybe this sexist objectification ought to stop,” said Rachel. Skidmark, confused, looked at me.
“Now that you’ve met Rachel, are you going to call out at her if she walks by in the future?” I asked him.
“Oh, fuck no. She’s a Lady,” he answered. I wasn’t sure this helped much.
“Can you maybe discourage people from making women like Rachel uncomfortable as they walk past? ”
“I promise to pound the shit out of anybody who yells out at college girls in the future,” he said.
“No pounding,” Rachel said. “I have a music lab at Peabody that gets out late. I just want to walk past here without being worried.”
“Yo!” yelled Skidmark, with a huge, bellowing voice. “Get up here.” He waved his arm in a big circle. The group of men by the Emergency Room entrance looked vaguely irritated but pitched their butts and shuffled up to us.
“This girl is a Lady, and we been worrying her,” he said, to the assembled crowd. The men all shuffled their feet uncomfortably and looked down. Called to task, they were embarrassed about the way they’d been behaving. “All of us is gonna be nice to her from now on, right?” The guys all shuffled around and made apologetic but noncommittal answers. Skidmark, not a large man, stepped forward and grabbed a large black man in scrubs by the ear. “You hear me, you sumbitch?”
“Yeah, yeah,” said the sumbitch. “I got it. We go’n’ be nice.”
“Okay,” said Skidmark. “See you boys tomorrow night,” said Skidmark. The boys all slid away.
“And they’re all gonna listen to you?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“Why? And why do you expect them to follow orders?” asked Rachel. Skidmark thought for a few seconds. Skidmark frowned for a second or two.
“My ol’ lady made me this needlepoint pillow,” he said. “It says ‘Yea though I walk through the valley of the death, I shall fear no evil, for I am the meanest motherfucker in the whole goddamned valley.’ And every one o’ them guys knows it. They’ll leave you alone and the others’ll catch on.”
“Okay,” said Rachel, hesitantly.
“Look, I’m late for work, so I really gotta go, but you was always safe, physically. None of these guys is criminals. And I admit we oughta work on our manners. I apologize, but you jus’ wave and we’ll take care of you. Right now, I gotta run. Evenin’,” he said to Rachel, tipping his cap, and turned to return to the hospital. Rachel watched him walk away with her hand at her throat, like someone who was having a hard time believing what she is seeing.
“What was that?” she asked.
“Hard to explain. It’s a Southern deal,”
“You have to explain,” she said. We were walking again.
“He knows you now, so he’ll treat you differently in the future. He’ll make sure all of his friends do, too.”
“Why?’
“I’m not sure I’m the best person to explain this, but Southerners have a tendency to lump people into groups. Black or white. American or un-American. Alabama or Auburn.”
“And?” she asked.
“Then they act like they can’t understand each other. The white can’t understand the black. The American resolutely cannot understand the un-American, or even what it perceives to be un-American. Those people protesting the Viet Nam war are completely different than Americans, so they must be Communists.”
“And Alabama/Auburn?” she asked. I thought for a second.
“Actually, that runs far deeper than black/white or American/Communist,” I answered. “I’m not sure it can be explained to somebody who didn’t grow up in it.”
She nodded silently. “So?” she asked.
“When Southerners see people as groups, they can be hard. The Jim Crow laws are a good example. Blacks were seen as a group, and the legislators seem to have had no trouble passing all these mean-spirited laws. But if you ask a privileged Southern man about the Black woman who raised him, he’ll describe her as a saint. There’s a tendency to see individual members of the group entirely different than the group as a whole. Hard to explain.”
We were at the front door of her dorm.
“You refer to southerners as ‘them,’” she said. “You don’t regard yourself as a southerner?”
“No. Not at all,” I said.
“You sound kind of southern,” she said.
“I’m a military brat,” I said. She nodded. “But a lot of the bases were in Mississippi and Florida, then I went to high school in Chattanooga.”
“I was thinking you were the Other to me, but you seem to think of yourself as the Other to them.”
“Not following you,” I said, still in front of her dorm. If we’d been on a date, this would have been where I kissed her good night, but we weren’t on a date. There was a pause of a few seconds while I looked at her and she thought about what was happening. I was clueless.
“How about we have a glass of wine?” she asked. This was an unexpected and, to me, hasty suggestion.
“I don’t drink,” I said.
“I forgot. You’re religious,” she said.
“No, not really,” I said. “”I just don’t drink.. Where would you get a drink around here, anyway?”
“The graduate students’ pub is just around the corner. In the basement of my dorm,” she said.
“Okay,” I said. I wasn’t sure where this was going, but to say “Hey, I’m tired and just won large then my geometry teacher’s favorite niece got mad at me about it so I’m going to pass” seemed an inappropriate response. I followed her around the dimly-lit sidewalk to the basement entrance on the right side of the dorm. Right side if you were facing North, anyway.
“Are you sure I’m allowed in?” I asked.
“Sure. Why?”
“I’m not a grad student.” She thought a little, then kind of shrugged.
“You know, the grad students always seem to be happy to see me, so I don’t expect a problem.”
She opened the door and led the way in. It was not well-lit, the ceiling seemed low, the furniture was indifferent, there weren’t many people present, all of them were male, and all of them recognized Rachel. Glasses were raised, salutations were exclaimed. There were maybe ten tables with three or four chairs each and a kind of bar where a few bearded men in their twenties sat on cushioned stools, leaning back. They all greeted Rachel as she approached.
“Hi, guys. This is Henry from my Greek class,” she said. “We’re not dating or anything.” They waved, I waved back.
“I’ll have a red wine,” she said, to the bartender. She may have made a slight air-kiss gesture with her mouth. The bartender was happy to see her. He put down his copy of Zur Genealogie der Moral and removed the screw cap to fill a water glass from a green glass gallon jug of red wine.
“Name your poison,” the bartender said, looking at me. “As long as it’s Gallo Paisano, Rachel’s sedative of choice, or Taylor Lake County White from our struggling refrigerator.
“How about soda water?” I asked. He raised his eyebrows.
“Usually, the answer would be ‘no,’” he said. “But you’re in luck. Or may be in luck. A few days ago a guy came around and gave me a bunch of cases of this water called Perrier,” which he pronounced Perry Ur, “and told me it was a cross between club soda and mineral water. I can give you one of those, if you like. I don’t know what to charge you for it, though. We got it for free.”
“Perrier,” said Rachel, pronouncing it correctly.
“What?” asked the bartender.
“She’s telling you how it’s pronounced in French,” I said. “I’ll try one, and you can give me the soda water for free and charge me a dollar for a glass of ice without offending ethics.”
“Oh wow, that’s so cool,” he said, slapping his palms on the bar. With this kind of enthusiasm he had to be high. “I was worried about how to deal with the conflict between giving you the Perry-err.”
“Perrier,” said Rachel.
“Sorry, Pear-yay,” said the bartender, “because the university is paying me. So even though I hate institutions, I was wondering would it be, like, moral for me to give you this soda water for free since the university wouldn’t make any money off of it. I mean, if everybody employed by the university acted like that, then the university wouldn’t have any money, but that’s more of an Aristotelian or even Millsean question than Nietzchean. But you solved the problem for me, man. Thanks.”
“Mine?” Rachel asked looking at the glass of wine.
“Yeah, sure,” the bartender answered. “Mine is … elsewhere. I drink therefore I am. Go take a seat, I’ll bring it right out.”
We found a table and sat. The table had a plastic tablecloth patterned like red and white plaid cloth and two of those café chairs with curved wood backs. The bartender showed up almost immediately with two water glasses—one with Rachel’s wine, the other filled with crushed ice —and a pale green teardrop-shaped bottle. I’d never seen foreign water before. He’d uncapped it with a bottle opener before he brought it out. I looked around at the other tables and everybody else had regular-sized wineglasses that held about a quarter of what Rachel’s did, but then everyone else in the bar was male and none of them were wearing miniskirts.
“I think I understand your description of the Southern male as displaying a disjointed personality capable of seeing individuals as displaying traits that are not present in groups of those same individuals. Why do you think that is?” she asked. Gack.
“I’m not sure that’s exactly what I meant, but I think people have a tendency to think of their own lives as unique and to think of the lives of others as ordinary and average. This might encourage them to think that the others in their lives are extraordinary, as well. A bigoted rich woman may think that her Black yard-man and housekeeper are gifted and wonderful and honest but that the majority of Blacks are not, when in fact her Black employees are typical and average—that most members of the group display the same qualities.” I sipped the Perrier. It was good. I wouldn’t prefer it to plain water on all occasions, but it was good. Especially in crushed ice. “I dunno.” I shrugged.
“I was thinking more of the nature of being,” she said. “The being of consciousness is a being of such that in its being, its being is in question. Perhaps the duality of perception is a failure to understand the nature of being. ” She appeared to take a sip of her wine, but about a third of the contents of the glass disappeared.
“Not following you,” I said.
“The being of consciousness does not coincide with itself in a full equivalence. That kind of equivalence, such as the in-itself, can be expressed as ‘being what it is.’ In the in-itself there is not a particle which is not wholly within itself without distance, without separation. When being is conceived like that there is no duality.” She paused to sip another third of her glass. ”This duality—group/not group—I think is a symbol a sign, that southern men have not evolved into the in-itself consciousness that we should all strive for.”
“Well, I agree that there’s a conflicting duality there, but assuming that the group as a whole shares the traits you observe in the individual members of that group you know leads to a different group of problems,” I said. I was really out of my depth. Nevertheless, I had managed to shock Rachel.
“What kind of problems could that possibly cause?” she asked. “It would lead to the unification, the in-itself-ness, of the southern male consciousness.”
“That’s not what happens,” I said. “It leads to stereotypes, and that’s part of what’s wrong.” I really wasn’t even sure my answer was responsive.
“Honestly, that wasn’t the thing about it that struck me the most. It was the Otherness of it.”
“Otherness,” I said.
“Partly it was the result of different spheres of perception, but part of it was that those guys were all so weird,” she said. The bartender showed up with a green glass gallon jug of wine and refilled Rachel’s glass. She leaned her head back and smiled warmly and a little lazily at him. He smiled back.
“Well, you probably seemed novel to them, too. Skidmark said—“
“And what kinda name is that?” she demanded.
:A nickname. I’m betting he didn’t pick it for himself. But what he said was that they all knew you were out of their league. So to them you are this Other you talk about. They don’t identify with you in any way, so the manners they know don’t seem to apply.”
She nodded silently and took an actual sip of her wine.
“I never met a group of men like that. Wearing scrubs, or dressed all in black with earrings, Confederate flag do-rags. Weird.”
“You find odd things at the margins,” I said.
“What?” she looked at me crossly.
“It’s not odd for people who live on the margins to have eccentricities. And I think that people standing outside the emergency room entrance at eleven on a week night aren’t far from the margin, one way or another.” She thought about this and pulled back a significant percentage of her wine.
“So were you always religious?” she asked,
“No,” I answered, hesitantly.
“You had a conversion experience?” she asked,
“No,” I answered, again hesitantly.
“William James said that there are two types of religious people, those who have a powerful conversion experience, and those who are quietly religious from birth.”
“That sounds right,” I said.
“So which are you?” she asked, taking a modest, and maybe slightly sloppy, slurp of her wine. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
“I’m neither,” I said. “I’m not a religious person.”
“Oh, come on,” she said. “You don’t drink. You’re taking Greek to read the Bible. You don’t think Nixon is a criminal.”
“Well, Amtrak is criminal,” I said. “I don’t know if Nixon is.”
“Talking about model trains instead of Cambodia and Watergate may be a crime in and of itself,” she said, although she said it somewhat genially. “So have you always been this, like, Christian Republican, Baptist kind of a guy? I grew up in Manhattan, so I don’t know how you get to be that way.” She finished her wine.
“I’m really not any of those things,” I said, trying to drink up my Perrier.
“Then what are you, Henry Baida?”
“I’m a student. Double major in Math and Physics,” I said. The bartender showed up at Rachel’s elbow and refilled her wine glass. He placed another bottle of Perrier and a glass of crushed ice in front of me, then coughed gently.
“Excuse me,” said the bartender, “but we need to close in thirty minutes.”
“Thanks,” I said. Rachel ignored him.
“And what were you before you were a student?” she asked.
“I was a gambler,” I said, opening the new bottle of Perrier.
“Oh yeah,” she said. “Your buddy Skidmark was talking about that. So you won fifteen dollars off of somebody from Houston. Again, you and Skidmark seem so much like the Other to me. That he’d go out of his way to shake your hand over a fifteen dollar bet. Why would a person do such a thing?”
“Strange things happen on the margins,” I said.
“I’m wondering what these fifteen dollars mean to you,” she said. “The conceptual pieces of knowledge we acquire in our history with the Other, and you seem to view your fellow southerners as the Other, produce a stratum constitutive of the psychic body. So far as we suffer our physical experiences reflectively we constitute them as a quasi-object by means of an accessory reflection. Observation comes from ourselves. What did you observe when you won your fifteen dollars?”
“That the guys I was playing had very nice pool cues.”
“How?”
“One of them had a little red demon inlaid into his cue. The other had an elaborate entertained floral pattern, with a line in French.” She took a sip of her drink and sat up.
“What did the French say?” she asked.
“Le doute est inconfortable, mais d'avoir confiance est absurde, ” I answered. “As best I recall. I’ve just got high school French.”
“That’s Voltaire,” she said. She gulped at her wine.
“That’s what Texas said,” I said.
“Texas?” she asked.
“One of the guys I was playing against.”
“People like you speak French in pool halls?”
“Look, it’s getting late, I’m tired, maybe we can knock this off and go on home,” I said.
“No, really. Guys who are really into pool speak French?”
“Well, Texas did.”
“Where is this pool hall?” she asked.
“It’s not a pool hall, it’s a bar named Annie’s down on Elliston Place.”
“Why was it so important to you to win fifteen dollars?” she asked, gulping down some more wine. “To apprehend oneself as an undifferentiated transcendence is not yet to apprehend oneself as the partial structure of a We-subject. Are you that pure exemplification of the human species that Sartre talked about?”
“I doubt it,” I said. There were three fingers of wine in her glass and she bolted them, then raised her arm, rotating her hand gently as though unscrewing a light bulb. She smiled at me.
“Time to go,” she said. The bartender arrived immediately. I was expecting a check, but he didn’t have one.
“Five dollars,” he said.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“Three glasses of wine and two glasses of ice,” he said, worried in a pained way.
“Yeah, but those were massive glasses of wine,” I said. “One dollar per? You’re sure?”
“The rules say what to charge per glass,” he said.
“All right,” I said, and gave him a ten. “Keep it.” He looked utterly delighted.
“Thank you, sir,” he said.
“Walk me home, Henry Baida,” she said.
We left, her gait seeming much more relaxed than when we came I. She smiled and waved at all the grad students in a way that suggested she enjoyed their attention. As we reached the door she took my arm. I opened the heavy oak door with my other arm and we emerged into the cool but humid night. She held my arm up the short staircase and around the short bricklaid path to the front door of her dorm. She stopped just short of the front door light, still holding my arm, and looked at me with a mysterious, inquisitive look in her eyes.
“Were all of those guys philosophy majors?” I asked.
“Almost all of them were grad students,” she answered, amiably. “Most of them are studying philosophy, but the pub also draws in its fair share of astronomers and mathematicians. Physics, some of the time, but not tonight. The odd d-school student.”
“D-school?” I asked.
“Divinity school. Guys working on being preachers. Or pastors. Or ministers. Or whatever. So would you like to come upstairs?” she asked.
“Thanks, but it’s probably not a good idea. But I really appreciate the invitation,” I said. She frowned at me for a few seconds.
“You’re a difficult man, Henry Baida,” she said. She then placed her palms on my cheeks and pulled me toward her and kissed me fully, thoroughly, soulfully, wetly, swirlingly. It was a wonderful and strange thing, that kiss. “What do you think of that, Henry Baida?” she asked.
“I think that strange things happen in the margins,” I answered.
“They do. Things can happen upstairs, too,” she said, then thought better of her forwardness and pulled back a bit. “Good night,” she said, and kissed me on the cheek. She smiled and turned and walked into the light of the lamp nest to the front door of her dorm, maybe twenty feet away. At the door she paused and waved, almost shyly, and disappeared.
Lordy.
“Hello, this is Ginny. May I help you?”
“Hey, Ginny. This is Henry Baida. How are you?”
“Henry!” she crowed. “My favorite pool hustling car thief! How in the world are you?”
“Doing okay. How about you?”
“Doing well. Here’s our plan,” she said. “Tomorrow, you’re going to meet me at my dorm at 6:00, then we’re going to walk over to Elliston Place and have dinner at the Soda Shop, then we’re going to walk over to Annie’s down the street, and you’re gong to show me how to play pool.” I laughed.
“Okay. Sounds like a plan,” I said.
“I’m in Gillette Hall,” she said.
“I don’t really know my way around here,” I said, “And I really know even less about Peabody. How am I going to find Gillette Hall?”
“Cross 21st Avenue at that light where I saw you on the sidewalk. Walk on into campus and ask anyone you bump into where Gillette is,” she said. “See you at six.”
“How do I dress?” I asked.
“Like you always do,” she said. “Goodbye.” Okay, I know what she meant, but do I always do anything?
“The next night I showed up at Gillette Hall clad in a white Oxford cloth button-down shirt, khakis, and Weejuns, a few minutes before 6:00. I can’t remember what color socks I was wearing, but I was wearing some. Ginny was sitting on the steps in front of the dorm and saw me from maybe seventy yards away. She jumped up, waved, and kind of ran over towards me. Not quite a run, but faster than walking. She gave me a hug and said “Henry!” before falling in step next to me and turning me to walk back towards 21st. She was wearing a white cotton blouse, jeans, and dark blue flats with fabric bows built around a shiny brass buckle.
“You dressed up!” she said.
“I did?” I asked.
“Yes. Thank you! Okay,” she said, taking my arm. “Have you ever been to the Soda Shop on Elliston Place?”
“No,” I answered.
“Have you ever played pool at Annie’s” she asked. I thought.
“Is there a Skee-ball table up front?”
“Yes!” she answered.
“Yeah, I have,” I said.
“What do you think?” she asked, as we walked.
“Odd mix. Mostly college kids. There are some semi-tough hombres who play there, from time to time,” I said.
“Meaning?” she asked.
“Well, the kids are there to be kids, and the pros are there to hustle the kids,” I said.
“So?” she asked.
“Can be painful , or at least expensive, for the kids, but, I guess it’s safe enough. It’s usually just college kids blowing off steam, but…”
“Any problem for you?” she asked.
“No. I’m…” I tried to think how to put this.
“What?”
“Well, we might bump into some serious players who are there to fleece college kids and maybe later pick off each other,” I said.
“So?”
“They’re not all nice people.”
“You go there?” she asked.
“I’ve been there,” I said.
“Did you ever get hurt?”
“No. Not at all. I guess it’s safe as long as everybody’s sober. So maybe we should plan on clearing out before, say, 10:00,” I said.
“Far out,” she said. We were passing McTyeire. She led the way as we cut across my campus. She seemed to know her way around. “So,” she said, “finish the Boy Scout campout hotwire story.”
“Wow. Okay. Where’d it stop?”
“A woman was walking off in a black and white silk dress and a bunch of Boy Scouts were watching her leave,” she said.
“Okay. Well she was really pretty, and we were all watching her kind of…”
“Wistfully,” Ginny suggested.
“Maybe so. Teenaged boys have a way of looking at attractive, grown women that’s difficult to describe. They’re drawn to the beauty, but they’re not exactly sure why, exactly.”
“What’s her take on this, do you think?” Ginny asked.
“She’s older and more experienced than we were and understands us much, much better than we understand her,” I said.
“So then what happened?”
“She walked off,” I said. “We all watched her go. After a few minutes of silent staring it occurs to me that my dad once told me what a solenoid is and showed me how the engine would crank if you laid a screwdriver across its terminals. That was on a 1964 Plymouth Fury he had when we lived in Atlanta. So I pop the hood on the car in the ditch. It’s a standard 1968 Plymouth Valiant and it has the same solenoid relay as my dad’s Fury. If you connect the solenoid with the coil you don’t need a key.”
“Your father taught you how to steal cars?” she asked.
“In 1974 all teenaged boys in Georgia knew this,” I said. “Fathers played a different, more practical role than today. Keevin asked me what I was doing and I told him I could start the car…”
“Keevin?” she asked.
“Sorry, Kevin. Kevin Magid. Our senior patrol leader.”
“Then why Keevin?” she asked.
“Some of the guys in our scout troop were in his high school. He had this math teacher who got his name wrong, and called him Keevin Magoid. They all called him that. A nickname deal. It stuck. Boys are funny about nicknames.”
“’Kay,” she said. “Then what happened?”
“Snow White had some wire in his pocket and I used it to make contact between the coil and the starter solenoid, then jumped across the solenoid relay with my pocket knife, and it cranked. It didn’t catch, but only because it didn’t have enough gas, so Keevin jumped behind the wheel and gave me the thumbs up. I shorted the relay again, it cranked, Keevin pumped the gas pedal, and the engine started right up. I laid off the solenoid, and the engine purred. As much as a 1968 Plymouth Valiant can, anyway. Keevin shifted into reverse, backed out of the ditch, waved to us, and took off down the road after the woman in the black and white dress,” I said.
“Did you ask say anything to him?” she asked.
“I waved goodbye and said ‘Write if you find work.’” She looked confused. “My dad used to say that to me.”
“Wow,” Ginny said. “What happened?”
“Not much,” I said. “That was the Saturday of a weekend-long campout. Most of us were thirteen or fourteen, except for Kevin, who may have been fifteen. After he drove off we went back to police the campground and do our best to make breakfast, always a dodgy task with boys and campfires and no adults. It seems odd that no grownups were around, now that I think about it, but that’s the way I remember it. So we cleaned up the campsite and ruined some breakfast food, and then just before lunch, Keevin showed back up, on foot, still in his Scout uniform,”
“What did he say?” Ginny asked.
“Not much. He laid down on his cot in the big tent. He folded his hands behind his head and said “Miranda is a beautiful name,” and kind of stared at the ceiling without saying anything.”
“What did you do?” Ginny asked.
“I watched him stare at the ceiling for a few minutes, then went and made myself a baloney and cheese sandwich,” I said.
“So you weren’t curious what happened between Kevin and the woman in the black and white polka dot dress? she asked.
“Sort of. But I wasn’t going to ask,” I said
“You didn’t ask?” I take it she would have asked.
“No. Boys are naturally braggarts,” I said. “If there’d’ve been anything he wanted to tell us, he’d’ve said it.”
“And you never followed up?” Ginny asked.
“Nah. But that was one of the last times I saw him. We moved back to Eglin for a few months right after that,” I answered. “And after that to Okinawa. I lost track of Boy Scouts, but there was a bowling alley over in Pace, not far From Niceville—“ she had a puzzled expression. “Those are towns near Pensacola in the Florida panhandle,” I said. I was wandering off point. “Anyway, Keevin didn’t say anything and I didn’t ask.”
“Weird,” she said. “We’re here,” she said, in front of the Elliston Place Soda Shop.
“Cool,” I said.
We had to wait a few minutes for a table, but not long. It was a blue plate special kind of place with a big chrome Wurlitzer jukebox in the corner and mini-jukes in every booth where you could pick a tune without getting up. They didn’t serve beer and the waitresses all wore white. After somebody showed us to our table, ice water and silverware showed up almost immediately, and we were expected to look at the menu without prompting. We did, without much talk. Nothing on the menu cost much over three bucks.
“I’ll have fried chicken, mashed potatoes, turnip greens, biscuits, and tea,” said Ginny, when the time came. Our waitress was maybe 45, had deep black ringlets, a habit of scratching her scalp with her pencil point, and a name tag showing “Miranda.” She nodded at Ginny and looked at me.
“Chicken-fried steak, turnip greens, cole slaw, un-sweet tea, and a corn muffin,” I said. She nodded, slapped her green order pad into her apron pocket, and marched off.
“So you’ve never been here before?” Ginny asked.
“No. I usually eat on campus,” I said. “My kind of place, though. Thanks for introducing us.”
“It’s right down the street from Annie’s, and I like the food here.”
“I do have some misgivings about taking a respectable young woman to Annie’s”
“Why is it okay for you to go but not me?” she asked, almost, but not quite, teasing.
“Yeah, well. I’ve been to lots of places like that over the years. You might meet some impolite people there. I have. But if somebody’s rude to me, it’s not the first time, and it’s not the worst thing in the world, you know?”
“So how many pool halls have you been in?” she asked.
“Oh, God. I don’t know. A lot. But Annie’s isn’t a pool hall. It’s a bar with a few pool tables. The last time I was there a couple of the players were just a little … rough.”
“Then what were you doing there?” she asked.
“Making money.” Our food came. Good-sized portions and steaming hot. When Ginny took a bite out of her chicken I could hear the crisp in a muted crunch. Everything I had was good, but the best thing was the corn muffin. Just perfect. Ginny asked questions about pool and nine-ball and playing for money. Dinner for the two of us was right at eight bucks. I paid up and we walked down to Annie’s.
It hadn’t improved much since I was there last. One story, wall to your left, Skee ball to your right, a bar all the way back on the left. Pool tables on your right behind the Skee ball. Grimy floor, dirt accumulating in the corners. It smelled like stale beer, but not as bad as if it were carpeted. I stopped to look at the first table.
“Ah, shit.” I said.
“What?” Ginny asked.
“Sorry for swearing. I know some of these people,” I said, with a sigh. There, at the first table, Jimmy Milton from my dorm floor was awkwardly lining up a shot. I couldn’t tell what game he was playing, but he was playing against Donnie, or was it Hank? whom I’d played back at Hixson Lanes. Melissa, the red-head everyone at Hixson Lanes called Rosie, was sitting on a stool against the wall. Next to her a lone wolf in a Texas burnt orange tee shirt, wearing custom cowboy boots and holding a glittering custom cue stick, was watching Milton’s fumbling with a pro’s eye. Texas had one of those great big wallets secured to his belt by a silver chain, like bikers wear.
“Milton,” I called out, interrupting his shot. He looked over his shoulder with a glare, then recognized me and came over to shake my hand, smiling. Donnie looked up and saw me.
“Ah, shit,” said Donnie.
“Hi … Hank? Donnie?” I said.
“Donnie,” he said.
“What’s up?” said the guy in the Longhorns tee shirt.
“Old friend,” said Donnie.
“What are you playing?” I asked Milton.
“Nine ball,” he said, shaking my hand. “And I’m doing really good,” he said, under his breath. Melissa finally recognized me, smiled and waved. She had a very sweet smile.
“How far are you ahead?” I asked Milton.
“Maybe thirty bucks!” he said.
“Milt, I don’t want to burst your bubble, but what’s happening is that Donnie here is going to let you win two or three more and then he’s going to bet you double or nothing on the entire wad, and you’re going to take it if you’ve got that much cash because he’s been looking so frustrated at his inability to make a shot, then as soon as you double he’s going stop making mistakes and you’re gonna realize that Donnie is one of the best pool players in the Volunteer State. I don’t know Texas, but he’s a wolf in wolf’s clothing, and once Donnie takes all your money, Texas will step up to play Donnie with a swagger, but then he’ll lose once or twice to Donnie before Donnie clocks out. Once Donnie’s gone all the college boys will think they have a shot at Texas, and the routine will start all over again.” There was a pause. Milton looked confused, but decided offensive was better than defensive. I’d given him too much too fast.
“Why do you expect me to believe that interpretation of events?” asked Milton. “Maybe I was winning because tonight’s my night.”
“Donnie and I have met.”
“Why you gotta go fucking with it?” Donnie asked. “It’s just a calm little hustle. Now I’m out thirty bucks.”
“Ten bucks a game?” I asked.
“Sure,” said Milt and Donnie both. I handed Milt ten bucks.
“I want to buy your game, Milt.” I dropped two twenties on the table. “Melissa, hold that, please. It’s for what Donnie has in so far and the next game.” She hopped off of her stool, scooped up the money, and slid it into her bra.
A short, stout waitress interrupted to ask us if we wanted anything. Ginny ordered a Lite beer and I passed. Milton was still confused, but found his beer and took a swig..
“Just out of curiosity, what if I don’t want to sell the game?” Milton asked.
“I don’t mean to be rude, bud, but you were getting fleeced,” I said, in a quieter voice. “Donnie and Texas are both pros. I paid you what you put up for the first game, so you’re square, and I’ve paid Donnie what he’s given you so far. Assuming I win, I can pay you the additional thirty you were up. We both end up ahead.”
“If you win,” said Milt.”
“Yes.”
“If he’s such a shark, why do you think you’re going to win?”
“I’ve played him before.”
Milt pulled a dark brown Sherman out of a pack, frowned slightly, then lit it from a book of matches he retrieved from inside the cigarette pack.
“You act like you think you’re doing me a favor,” he said.
“I guess I think I am, but mainly I like playing Donnie. If you want to go on and see how this plays out, be my guest, but I promise you that if you keep playing the only way you’re going home with any money is if Donnie can’t figure out how much you’ve got.’
“What makes you so sure I’m not as good as him?” Milton asked.
“You were holding the ass end of your stick with a closed fist. The tip was waving around like a snake-charmer’s flute. Donnie’s slick like Vaseline. Before you play a Donnie let’s go to a pool hall. Practice some. Watch some Donnies play some Texans. Practice some more. Then play Donnie.” Of course, he would have to practice a lot to be ready to play Donnie, but I didn’t say so. Milt smoked and gazed off into middle distance for a few seconds, then shrugged and handed me his cue. He looked around for a seat, and noticed the vacant stools on either side of Melissa. His expression changed and he made a beeline for the seat next to her. I could tell from his expression that a seat next to Melissa was a reward in itself.
I looked at the cue Milton had handed me. 28 ounce. I rolled it between my palms. Almost straight.
Ginny, Miller Lite in hand, moved closer to the table from her position near the to the door and gave me an inquiring look. She was close enough for me to talk to her without talking to anyone else.
“I know everybody at this table except for the guy in cowboy boots, and I think he’s trouble,” I said. She nodded knowingly then looked around again, noticing Melissa for the first time.
“Aren’t you Melissa from my Art History class?” Ginny said.
“Ginny?” Melissa answered. Ginny ran over. They smiled excitedly and hugged briefly, then Ginny took a seat next to Melissa against the wall. Melissa had Milton on one side and Ginny on the other.
“Are you picking up or do you want to re-rack?” Donnie asked.
“I want to re-rack, because I haven’t touched a cue in three or four months, but I guess I bought the game in progress. We’re playing nine ball?”
“Yep,” said Donnie. He was playing with a sleek-looking two-piece cue lacquered clear over some dark, heavy wood. It had an inlay high on the barrel, a little figure of some kind, and a fine inlaid perfect checkerboard girdling the barrel low towards the heel, right at the point where his thumb and index finger would hold the big end in an appropriately loose hinge. It looked expensive.
“My shot, then,” I said. Since Milton had been about to make a shot when I interrupted, it was my turn. Milton took a drag off his Sherman, pointedly blowing the smoke away from Melissa. I chalked the cue and looked at the table. We were up to the five ball. The five, six and seven were going to be easy shots, but I couldn’t see the eight or nine.
I rifled off the five with enough stop English to leave the cue ball dead in its tracks. Or so I thought, but I was out of practice. I sank it, but the cue ball rolled a few inches past the point of impact.
“Fuck,” I said, under my breath. I lined up the six and shot it in. Again, the cue ball ended up a few inches away from where I wanted it. Not far, and the seven was still doable, but I didn’t have the precision I wanted. The seven had become a finesse shot rather than a sure thing, but I sank it, gently.
“Damn,” said Milton. “You’re good.”
“You shoulda seen him in Hixson,” said Donnie, without looking up.
I studied the table. I could get the eight on a two-rail bank shot that would tap it in and leave me lined up to put in the nine any one of a number of places, but my touch wasn’t there. The other shot was to touch it slightly and lay it up somewhere Donnie couldn’t possibly put it in and hope for a better table next shot. Safer.
But fuck that.
Even though I was only three shots into the game, I was having a crisis of confidence. Eight months earlier, the two-rail bank shot on the eight would have been a sure thing. I was finding myself tempted to dumb down my game because I was a little rusty. So fuck it, I went for the two rail shot.
I sank the eight, but only barely. There were “Oooo”s around the table, but it wasn’t as pretty as it could have been. Donnie could see I wasn’t myself, even if nobody else could. I didn’t look at Texas.
The nine was no trouble. I rolled it in and won the game.
“Fuck me runnin’,” said Milton, dropping his cigarette butt to the floor. “You can play this game.” Ginny looked happy and made as if to applaud, then glanced at Melissa, who was watching Donnie carefully and with concern. Ginny quickly stifled her celebratory impulse. She looked at her fingernails.
“Again?” asked Donnie.
“Sure. Stakes?” I answered.
“You bought your friend’s stake, so where are we at?” he asked.
“There’s forty on the table, thirty of which I owe Milton, if I win,” I said.
“You sure?” Milton asked. I turned to him.
“Milt, you were thirty bucks up when I cut in so I owe you thirty either way. You get your stake out of whoever buys the game.” He looked back blankly. “You were thirty bucks up. Don’t let me take that away from you by buying the game for ten bucks.” Blank stare. I thought about how to rephrase this for a few seconds. “Don’t gamble in pool halls any more,” I said.
“Okay,” he said, still confused, and torn between Melissa’s proximity and wanting to know what was going on.
“So quadruple that?” said Donnie.
“What’s that mean?” Milton asked.
“Donnie wants to play double-double or nothing on this game,” I answered.
“So how much?” he asked.
“$160.00,” I answered.
“On one fucking game?” Milton asked, incredulous.
“Sure.”
“I’ll be dipped in shit,” he said.
I pulled $120.00 out of my wallet and dropped it on the table. I looked up at Donnie and he laid out $160.000. I looked up at Melissa, who hopped off of her stool, stepped forward, and smoothly scooped the cash off of the table, placing it next to the earlier stake. She returned to her stool and looked at Donnie and me, still intently.
“Who’s Texas?” I asked Donnie, loudly enough that Texas could hear.
“Just a friend. He’s almost as good as you used to be,” Donnie answered. I looked again at Donnie’s cue. There was a little goblin of some sort, finely detailed and cleanly inlaid into the barrel, sleekly lacquered over.
“Do I need to worry?”
“Not as long as you’re playing me. I don’t know what happens if you take his money. I’m not sure I’ve ever done it,” Donnie said. “I’ve beat him, but you know how it is. He may have been losing to me to set me up for some other day. Hard to say. He plays it pretty close to the vest.” I nodded, then cocked an eye at Texas. He waved silently without much expression and watched the table. Donnie racked for nine ball.
A lot of life is confidence, and just as much is lack of confidence. You can’t always win if you have it, but you can almost never win if you don’t. Not in pool, anyway. Ginny was looking at me with concern, or maybe horror. $320 was a lot of money in 1974. I chalked my cue and sighted for the break. I tried to concentrate. I couldn’t feel it. I popped the break, but it didn’t go as well as I’d liked. The balls scattered well, but nothing went in. Damn. Donnie was looking at the table. He lined up a shot. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Ginny bite on her index fingernail, just briefly.
“Be good to me Max,” he said.
“What?” I asked. He didn’t answer, and snapped off the two. He sighted the three.
“All right Max, let’s do it again,” he said.
“Who the fuck are you talking to?” I asked.
“My cue stick. Can you shut the fuck up?” he answered. He got the five off the three but that left him with no shot on the three, so he was screwed.
“You have my sympathies,” I said.
“As I recall you know the foul rules,” he said. Under the rules, if he did not make contact with the three, I could take any ball in hand, meaning I could drop one into a pocket, which, one way or another, was going to clear me for a shot on the three.
“Nice stick,” I said, referring to his cue.
“Yeah,” he said. “I won it off a grad student who thought he could beat me and didn’t have $500. He said I got a hell of a deal. Plays great.”
“And what’s that inlaid there, a goblin?” I asked.
“A demon,” he said. He held it up for me to see. There was a little demon, with a slightly bestial face and horns and a tail, made of mother of pearl, very neatly detailed. “Prior owner said the demon’s name was Maxwell,” said Donnie, “ so I call him Max. Luck deal.”
“Cool. Looks good. Your shot.” He took a game try at an impossible shot and hit the seven first. That was a foul, so I got to take one in hand. If I moved the six I had a perfect shot on the three, so I dropped the six into the near pocket as Donnie’s penalty, then knocked in the four. Again, though, the cue ball didn’t end up exactly where I would have liked. Damn. Another tough shot. I lined up, feeling a little shaky, but thinking with a little luck I could sink the four. I was ready to take the shot even though it didn’t feel right because shooting was what I did.
But I stopped. I stood up straight, cue at my side, heel down. I closed my eyes and thought about that night when Donnie and I had played in Hixson. I’d beat him three times in a row. Three out of three. I thought about that. After a few seconds I decided I was still that pool player. It changed me. School was gone. I knew no Greek. My only physics was what I knew from pool tables. It was a good feeling.
When I opened my eyes, I looked around and noticed Donnie and I had drawn a few onlookers.
“Don’t be an asshole,” said Donnie, spinning Max between his palms like a top. “Play pool.”
“Sorry,” I said.
I got the four and the eight, smack, smack, and then the other four were arranged around the table in a shooter’s buffet.
“Fuck,” said Donnie. The bar started getting quieter. He was close enough for me to talk without anyone else hearing.
“I thought Melissa was with the big guy,” I said, just between me and Donnie.
“She left him after your fight,” Donnie answered. He shrugged. “I always liked her. I had her address. I wrote her a few letters. She came up and visited my freshman year, then applied to Peabody. She’s a freshman there now. Seems to be a good student, and loves Art. Good kid..”
“I think my friend Milton has his eye on her,” I said. Donnie looked their way.
“She doesn’t look captivated, and she lives with me,” he said.
“Too bad, Milt,” I said. You’re in school, too?” I asked.
“Sure. I’ve seen you in the C-Room a couple times, but we’re not really pals, so I never said hi. I’m in Engineering, and Melissa and I live off campus. You and I aren’t going to be bumping into each other much.” I nodded, then looked back at the table. It really was lined up beautifully.
“Okay,” I said, after I thought through a game plan. The four and the seven went in together. The six was tricky, but rolled in. I could have smacked the nine in hard, but just barely tapped it in. There was a collective exhalation when I got it. I looked up and Ginny’s eyes were pretty wide.
“Again?” I asked Donnie. He shook his head.
“For a beer, sure. For $160, no,” he said. “You bounced back from your sabbatical pretty fast.”
“I will,” said Texas.
“You’ll do what?” I asked.
“I’ll take that wager,” he said.
“Double, or double-double?” I asked.
“Double,” Texas said.
“Donnie, he wants to buy your bet,” I said.
“Done.”
“$160 new money, Texas, plus $160 to cover,” I said. Texas put three hundreds and a twenty on the table. Melissa promptly hopped up, gave Donnie $160, and moved the $160 to her repository.
“Who is this guy?” Texas asked Donnie.
“Meet Henry Baida, high priest of the Church of Straight Lines,” Donnie answered.
“How good is he?” asked Texas.
“Crazy good,” said Donnie.
“Meaning?”
“When I played him in Hixson he was the best I’d ever seen. But crazy. Tonight, for the first three shots, a little unsteady on his pins. Rusty. I thought I had him. Then he did that samurai composure deal and he was the best again.”
“Crazy how?” asked Texas.
“It’s a universal conspiracy or something,” said Donnie. “He has this idea that things don’t always happen like they should. Maybe the laws of physics don’t always apply. Engineering has holes in it. Or something. And he thinks it affects his pool game. Things happen that shouldn’t happen. Shit like that. Nutty.”
“Okay,” said Texas. “Your break,” he said to me. Ginny got up from her stool and got close enough to me to do a loud whisper.
“$320 is a lot of money,” she said.
“$640 is more,” I said.
“Is there any chance you’re doing this to impress … somebody?” she asked.
“No, no,” I answered. “What time is it?” I’d never replaced the watch I lost at Hixson Lanes.
“Just before eight,” she said.
“We’re doing fine,” I said. “Texas thinks he’s good. I’m not sure what’s gonna happen, but we’ll be outta here by ten.” She went back to her stool next to Melissa. They did this happy excited giggle thing when she sat. Milton looked on with rapt attention, and neither of them seemed to know he was there.
Texas had racked for nine ball. I broke. It wasn’t a great break but the eight rolled in. I sank the two and the three, but the only shot on the four was a paper-thin slice into the side pocket, and it just grazed the rail and settled right in front of the right side pocket. Texas shot it in like a staple gun, then got the five and the six with no trouble. That left the seven and the nine. He eased in the seven, and rifled in the nine. He looked up at me with the expression of a man who’s thinking “I just won $640.”
“Again?” I asked. He had to think.
“Sure.” I took out my wallet and put six hundreds and two twenties on the table. He looked at the money and licked his lips. Melissa swooped down and collected it. The bar was quiet enough now that you could hear glasses clink, and our crowd of spectators was growing. I looked up to see what Ginny thought. She had a look of horrified concern in her eyes, back ramrod straight, staring at the table, scraping her right little finger against her bottom teeth.
It was Texas’ break. He didn’t do well. The balls didn’t scatter very much, nothing went in. But oh, what a lovely table for me. It wasn’t even work. The balls sank themselves. I ran the table. It was fun.
I looked up at Texas. “Again?” I asked.
“Let’s do something different,” he said.
“Like what?” I asked.
“A real bet,” he said. “Real money.”
“I haven’t been paid on the last one,” I said.
“All right.” He looked up at Melissa. “Pay up,” he said. She jumped up and handed me $1,280, but some of that was mine.” I handed thirty back to her.
“She looked at the $30, unsure what I wanted her to do with it.
“It’s Milton’s,” I said.
“Who?” she asked.
“Milton, The guy sitting next to you,” I said. She looked around. “No, back over there, where you and Ginny are sitting. Milton’s sitting on the stool on the other side of you from Ginny.” She turned around to look.
“The guy with the fuzzy hair?” she asked.
“Yes. I owe him that because of the way I bought the first game.”
She smiled sweetly and held the bills in front of her the way a flower girl holds a flower, then turned and bounced back to her stool, handing Milton his money in the process. He was still confused.
I looked around and noticed that Donnie still hadn’t sat down.
“How much you got?” Texas asked me.
“Enough,” I said.
“Look. Let’s you and me play him in cutthroat,” Texas said to Donnie.
“I hate cutthroat,” said Donnie.
“Everybody hates cutthroat,” Texas answered, talking directly to Donnie. “And I can see he’s good. But he ain’t better than both of us. And we gang up on him, we split his money.”
“N-O spells ‘no.’ I am not giving Henry any more money.”
“I’ll stake you. I been watching you. You never make mistakes. And crazy people always make mistakes.”
“Not this one,” said Donnie. “How much do you want to play for anyway?”
“Five grand,” he said.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” said Donnie. “Like I have that on me.”
“Like I said, I’ll stake you. I’ll give you a grand of it if we beat him. If you beat me, two grand.”
Cutthroat’s an odd game. It’s the only pool hall game you can play with three players. There are three groups of colored balls: one to five, six to ten, and eleven to fifteen. As with eight ball, you choose which group is yours when you sink a ball. Unlike eight ball, in which you try to k sink your own balls, stripes or solids, in cutthroat the object is to knock in the other players’ balls. In cutthroat, the player with balls left on the table at the end of the game wins, and you keep playing until only one player has any balls left on the table.
“You’re telling me you have $10,000 in cash on you?” I asked Texas. He thought for a second. You could see the wheels turning. The bar was getting quieter and quieter.
“No, but I have a check,” he said.
“No checks,” I said.
“It’s okay. I promise. I have an account at the bank and everything,” he said. “And I won’t stop payment or nothin’.”
“No checks,” I said. He thought a few seconds and then looked up at me.
“How would you cover a $5,000 bet?” he asked. I took out my wallet and counted out fifty hundreds and snapped them onto the table. Ginny looked utterly horrified. Even Melissa’s eyes were wide. The students all looked on in reverential, or was it excited? silence.
“Holy mother-fucking shower of shit,” said Milton, not loudly, but easily audible. There was no sound whatsoever in the bar. You could hear noises from the kitchen of the restaurant next door, and traffic on Elliston Place.
Texas looked at the stack of bills and licked his lips. I had him. He had enough cash to cover my bet, and was letting greed make the decision for him. He wasn’t thinking any more. He pulled that great big wallet off his hip and hefted it in his hand before unzipping it, looking at my stack of hundreds. He knew how much was in his wallet, but still he thought for a long time before unzipping it. He counted out a hundred bills and riffed them with his fingers. There were some audible reactions from spectators as he counted again, and then laid them on the table.
He’d convinced himself of something for which there was no logical basis—that he and Donnie together were better than me, as though their talent were somehow cumulative. How good they were, together or separate, had nothing to do with how good I was. As long as I was better than either of them, I stood a good chance of winning, regardless of their cumulative chances. If three people are trying to outrun two hungry tigers, the cumulative speed of the slower runners doesn’t do them much good.
Of course, I’d never played Texas, but he wasn’t thinking straight, so I figured I was probably okay.
Milton lit another cigarette. Melissa and Ginny looked like they were witnessing a tragedy.
“Lag for break, right?” I asked.
“Yeah, sure,” said Texas. Donnie nodded.
“So if Melissa would do the honors…” said Texas. Melissa got up as if to pick up the stack of bills. It was clearly not going to fit in her brassiere.
“No,” I said. “Sorry, Melissa. Donnie, do you know the owner here?” It’s not that I didn’t trust her, I did, I just thought $15,000 might attract the wrong kind of attention to her.
“Sure,” Donnie said. “My Uncle Roy.”
“Does he have a safe?”
“Yeah. Good idea. Angie, can you get Mr. King for me? Get Biggie, too.” He was talking to the waitress. She nodded.
“Biggie?” I asked.
“He’s the cooler here. A little out of shape, but he was a green beret and used to be one of Elvis’ bodyguards.” A few silent minutes later a sharp, thin, tall man in a blue oxford cloth shirt and khakis came in, followed by an enormous sumo wrestler-sized man dressed all in stylish black. They saw the stack of bills on the table simultaneously.
“Now Donald, you know I promised your mother I would discourage you from gambling,” he said, in a mountain accent.
“I’m not really gambling, here,” he said. “These two idiots are playing and I may get a part of it.”
“All right, then,” said Uncle Roy, resignedly.
“My girlfriend here’s been holding the stakes,” said Donnie,” but I think Biggie might be a better candidate on this game.”
“How much?” asked Uncle Roy.
“Fifteen,” Donnie said.
“Far out,” said Biggie. He scooped up the cash and stuffed it into the front pocket of his black jeans.
“So I take the first lag?” I asked. The other two nodded. This was a good sign. Either of them was good enough to run the table straight through given the chance, so it was important to win the lag. I have a good lag stroke, and the fact that Donnie and Texas were willing to let me go first meant they weren’t playing or thinking aggressively. The fact that so much money was at stake had them scared.
I went all in. I tapped it solidly, it bounced cleanly off the head rail and sped towards the near rail. A good lag shot always looks like it’s going to hit the near rail, and several people gasped, but it stopped a half inch short. Hard to beat. I put the heel of my cue on the side rail to mark the spot. I looked up at Ginny. She still had her hand over her mouth, where it had popped when she’d gasped.
“Shit,” said Texas.
“Jesus H. Christ,” said Milton, through his smoke.
“I told you,” said Donnie. He lined up for a lag shot. “Come on, Max” he said. He tapped well, bounced off the head rail cleanly and coasted to a stop about an inch and a half from the near rail. A good lag, but mine was better so Donnie didn’t bother to mark it. Donnie lit a Winston 100 from a Bic and laid it on the rail. Uncle Roy frowned at this; whether he disapproved of smoking or was worried about his table getting a cigarette burn was unclear. After a few seconds, Donnie picked it up and blew a smoke ring at the table. It bounced off of the felt but dissipated immediately. It was still quiet. Two soldiers walked by outside, and you could tell both that they were drunk and that they were talking about the girls in Saigon.
Texas bent over to take his lag shot and I got a good look at his cue stick. It was the most beautiful cue I’d ever seen. It had an elaborate vine and flower inlay pattern on both halves, and a phrase in French inlaid up the axis of the heel end in a flowing script. The detail was amazing. He paused and stood up, over-thinking his shot. Either you make your lag or you don’t.
“What does it say?” I asked, looking at his stick.
He answered in what sounded to me like perfect French.
“To doubt is uncomfortable, but to be certain is absurd,” I translated.
“Right,” he answered. “My mother used to say that. She was French. Said it was Voltaire.” I nodded.
“Your shot,” I said. He lined up again, got a determined look on his face, and took his lag shot. He went all in. It was the right choice, but it didn’t work out for him. Maybe if he’d gone first he wouldn’t have had to press and could have put the pressure on me to beat his best. But now he had to do better than his best. You could hear the ball bounce off the head rail—it hopped a little, a sign he’d hit it a little too hard—then you could hear it roll back to the near rail, hear it rolling slower and slower and slower, then the barely audible bump against the near rail, Everyone exhaled at the same time.
My break.
People were taking sides. It was mainly college kids, and I think the girls were mainly rooting for Texas. He was better looking and in better shape than Donnie or me.
Donnie racked. I couldn’t remember if there was a way you were supposed to rack for cutthroat, but Donnie racked them like I would do for eight ball, with the one at the nose and the eight in the middle. Donnie stood back, retrieved his cigarette from the rail and watched. All of the smokers seemed to take a drag in unison.
“You’re up,” said Texas.
“Yeah,” I said. I put the cue ball slightly above and to the left of the head spot. It just works out well for me. What I’ve played most is nine ball, and you don’t use all the balls in nine ball. You use all fifteen balls in cutthroat, and if you hammer it on all fifteen balls, the break is inherently chaotic. I’ve played against guys who can chip balls off one at a time in straight pool without scattering the racked set, but I’ve never lost to one of them. They might take a game or two off of me, but I’ve always come out ahead. Opening up the break lets the game start, and until you do you’re not winning, you’re just avoiding losing.
I hit that break really hard, and was richly rewarded. The six, nine and eleven all rolled in.
“Fuck me in the ass with a red hot poker,” said Milton. Texas looked worried.
“Do I need to call my shots?” I asked.
“You can if you wanna show off,” said Donnie, “but I don’t need it.” Texas waved me off and shook his head. I looked at the table. It wasn’t bad. “I guess you’re taking low,” said Donnie.
“I don’t have to call yet, so I won’t,” I said. Donnie was alluding to the fact that the one, two, three, four and five were all still on the table, but two were missing from the middle six-to-ten group and one was missing from the high ten-to-fifteen group. The object was to have balls from your group left on the table at the end of the game.
It was tricky, but I did it. The seven and ten were close to the waist pockets, so getting them is was a cinch. The twelve and fifteen were in opposite corners, so firm contact was required, but no risk as long as you made the shot, and I took them both. The eight was guarded by the two at the right top corner, and the thirteen and fourteen were in the middle of the table.
“What do you think?” I asked Donnie.
“I think I’m fucked,” he answered. It would have been rude to have asked for shot advice, but it would have been interesting to know how he would have played it. Texas was looking at the table in placid irritation.
The one ball was in the way of sinking the thirteen in the top left pocket, and the three might be in the way of putting it in the left side pocket, but if I sank the thirteen in the left side, I was perfect on the fourteen in the right side pocket, so I went with that. The thirteen just barely rolled, easy, gentle, like petting a kitten. That was the last of the high balls, so one of either Donnie or Texas was out of the game. Since Texas lost the lag, it made sense for it to be him, but it was their decision.
“Holy nickel-plated donkey shit,” said Milton. It was quiet. The loudest sound was a college boy in a pink shirt lighting a Kool. You could hear the crinkle of the cellophane as he handled the pack, the spark wheel of his Bic, and then a faint jingle of change when he dropped the lighter back in his pocket.
“I have to call now, right?” I asked. Texas nodded. Since all of the high balls were gone, I had to say whether I was claiming high or middle as mine. Since the one through the five were still on the table, and only the eight was left of the middle, the choice was pretty obvious, but still I looked. “Yeah, I’m taking low,” I said, after a minute. Donnie and Texas nodded balefully.
“So this is what he does? Takes the cue out of your hand?” asked Texas.
“Not like this,” said Donnie. “He’s good, but not this good. There’s a lot of luck here, too. Or are you seeing your … anomalies here, Henry?”
“I don’t like to talk much when I’m shooting,” I said.
“Humor me. You’re about to take a thousand dollars away from me. Do you feel lucky tonight?” he lit another cigarette.
“No. But I don’t believe in luck.”
“What do you believe in?” Donnie asked.
“I think there’s a lot of randomness in pool, and with enough practice you sort through the randomness, recognize what to do, and make the next shot less random,” I said. I really didn’t like talking while playing. If I believed in luck, I’d have been worried that this would jinx me.
“None of your rule violations, here? No crumbling at the edges?”
“So you with one ball on the table are mocking me, who has five?” I asked.
“Mocking, no. But tell Carl what you told me back in Hixson.”
“Carl?” I asked.
“Texas,” Donnie said, nodding towards Texas.
“I didn’t tell you anything. I asked if you’d noticed, playing pool, that sometimes, for no reason, outcomes diverge from expectations. Now can you leave me the fuck alone long enough to let me sink the eight?”
“Sorry,” Donnie said. I would bet he was worried that Texas had taken his claim that I was crazy too seriously and might be mad at him accordingly, but that wasn’t what had pulled Texas in. What set the hook on Texas was greed, and the strange notion that two good players are better than one good player. Chance isn’t like that. Two on one doesn’t change the odds. The number of players doesn’t change their skill. If two tigers are chasing three runners, even though none of the runners could ever outrun the tigers, the fastest runner will still survive, unless the tigers are stupid.
The cue ball was far enough up that I could sneak past the two and tap it in, but I also had a shot knocking in the eight off of the two, but doing that there was a risk the two might fall in, too. I would still win, but it was perfect the other way, so I plopped the two in.
I won.
Oddly, there wasn’t as much of a reaction from the crowd as you might expect. The kids were mostly nine ball and eight ball players, and a lot of them didn’t understand cutthroat, and so didn’t understand that I’d won. Melissa did, as did Uncle Roy and Biggie, and maybe a few of the frat guys. Donnie and Texas looked at each other and shrugged, and started taking apart their cues. I handed my cue back to Milton.
“Your table, Milt,” I said.
“Biggie, put the proceeds in the office safe, and lock it,” said Uncle Roy.
“What about—“ Biggie said, then stopped. “Yes sir,” he said, instead, and disappeared.
“So that’s it,?” Milton asked. “You fucking won?”
“I did,” I said. I wanted to say “good game” or something to Texas and Donnie, but thought it would come through as strained or condescending. “Au revoir,” I said to Texas. He nodded as he slid the halves of his beautiful cue into a leather cue bag. Donnie had put the halves of his cue into a hard aluminum case that he slung over his shoulder, then gave Melissa a hug. Milton was wanting to be excited and bounded over. I put up a palm to slow his reaction down. I didn’t mean to be rude but “This guy just went ten large and didn’t get to make a shot,” I said. “We need to show some respect.” Milton nodded and looked at Texas, headed for the front door. “But this is fucking fantastic!” he whispered, hoarsely. “You’ll get laid tonight for sure!”
As Texas left, the crowd began to break up.
“Mr. ..” said Uncle Roy, looking at me.”
“Baida,” said Donnie. “Uncle Roy, Henry Baida. Henry, Uncle Roy.”
“Mr. Baida, would you care to step into my office?” asked Roy.
“Sure,” I said. “Donnie, would you come, too? Milton would you buy Ginny and Melissa a drink, please? And one for yourself, too. We won’t be long,” I said. I was reaching for my wallet to give Milton some cash for the drinks, but Roy put his hand on my arm.
“The drinks are on the house,” he said, not to me but to the waitress.
“Thank you, sir.” I said. “I need to buy one for Donnie, though.”
“Donald?” Uncle Roy asked.
“Scotch. Neat,” he said. I gave the waitress a twenty.
“Glenfiddich?” she asked. Donnie nodded.
“This way, boys,” said Uncle Roy. I looked around. No one looked threatening.
“Milt, stay here until I get back. It’ll just be a few minutes. Don’t go anywhere. Just sit here with them. Are you okay with this, Ginny?” She nodded. I looked at Melissa. She smiled.
“Henry, how long has it been since you were here?” Melissa asked.
“A few years,” I answered.
“It’s different now,” she said. I looked at Uncle Roy.
“I bought this place in 1976,” he said. “My third neighborhood tavern. In 1977 there was a stabbing here and I decided Annie’s needed more of my attention. I hired Biggie and started coming here daily. Shall we?” he asked, gesturing a path to his office. It was a small office, but it held Uncle Roy, Biggie, Donnie and me as long as we were all standing. Before we started talking, the waitress showed up with a brimming glass of scotch on a small tray and extended it to Donnie. There was five dollars of change on the tray and he waved her to take it. He took a small sip of his drink.
“Biggie has your winnings and I will be glad to hold them in my safe until tomorrow morning,” said Uncle Roy, to me. We open at eleven. Would you like to pick it up soon afterwards.?’
“Not really. Sorry, I don’t mean to impose on your hospitality, but Donnie, do you by any chance pass by here on your way to school?” I asked.
“Not exactly, but it’s not far out of my way.”
“How much did I cost you tonight?” I asked. He thought.
“Well, by busting up my game with your bearded buddy, maybe three hundred, if he actually had it. But you covered that and then won it back.”
“I’ll give you half of what you would have won if I’d lost the cutthroat game if you’ll mule the money for me.”
“A grand?” he asked.
“No, five hundred.” He thought and sipped his scotch.
“Tomorrow?” he asked.
“No, Friday,” I said.
“Why?” he asked. Biggie and Uncle Roy looked at me with interest.
“If Texas is going to try to steal his money back, he’s going to be looking for me to come and get it. He won’t be looking for you. And even if he’s looking to jump me, he won’t wait around three days.” Donnie shrugged.
“Okay by me,” he said. “Roy?” Roy looked square at me.
“So you trust us?” he asked.
“Yes, sir, I do,” I answered.
“Then I want to trust you as well,” he said. “I will hold your money for the next three days, but I never want to have a pool game of that nature in my restaurant ever again,” he said. “It was quite exciting for the boys and girls, but word will get out that big money can be had here and a different group of people will show up. I make money by selling dollar beers to boys and girls. I make no money off of pool, and I do not wish to lose my investment in this bar. Understood?”
“Yes, sir. You have my word. Last time I played here Stumpy still ran it, and it was a different crowd. I meant no disrespect.”
“None taken. Biggie, put the stakes in the safe and lock it.”
“Hang on,” I said. “Mr. King, may I offer you something as a token of my thanks?” I asked.
“No, but thank you,” he said.
“Biggie, take a Franklin for yourself.” He thought about it, then laughed.
“I’ll take a Grant.” he said. “I don’t want Mr. King to think you’re spoiling me, and besides, it weren’t any kind of work.”
“That’s cool,” I said. He peeled off a fifty and put the rest in a small metal drawer in the top right corner of the safe, shut the door with a solid and satisfying metallic “clunk,” then shot the bolt and spun the dial.
Two years tuition. Lordy.
When Donnie and I got back to the room with the pool tables, Milton was still there. Ginny and Melissa were talking to each other, and Milton appeared to be trying to get a word in edgewise from time to time, without success.
“Howdy, girls,” said Donnie.
“So which one of you ladies am I going to walk home?” said Milton.
“Donnie!” said Melissa, and stood to give him a promising hug.
“Hello, Henry,” said Ginny. She still looked worried.
“Thanks, Milt,” I said.
“No, really,” said Milton. “I’ll be damned happy to walk either of these two ladies home.”
“Maybe next time?” said Melissa.
“I need to talk to Henry,” said Ginny.
“Oh, well,” said Milton, and shrugged.
“Milt, thanks,” I said. “You were a big help. I appreciate it.”
Milton thought about it, frowned, lit a cigarette, saluted me with the wrong hand, smiled, and left. Kids were still looking at us as tough we were important. But Annie’s had turned back into a regular college bar. It was a few minutes before ten.
“Shall we?” I asked Ginny.
“Sure,” she said. She still didn’t seem happy.
“See you, Donnie,” I said. “Good game. Good seeing you again. Melissa.” She smiled her pretty smile.
Ginny and I left. She didn’t speak at first. She didn’t hold my arm the way she had on the way to dinner.
“Have you done that a lot?” she asked, when we were on the sidewalk.
“I’ve played pool a lot,” I said. “I’ve never bet $5,000 on cutthroat before, and I’ve never played Donnie at cutthroat before, and I’ve never played Texas before.” She wasn’t happy with the way I answered. She seemed to assume I either knew or should know what she was getting at and was intentionally being evasive. Unfortunately, I had no idea what she was getting at.
“You gambled an insane amount of money,” she said.
“But I won,” I said.
“But you could have lost,” she said.
“True,” I answered. “But I looked at the odds and decided it was worth the risk.”
“How can you possibly have decided it was worth risking fifteen thousand dollars?” she asked.
“I didn’t have fifteen up.” I said. “I had five up, and Texas had ten. The two to one odds are was one of the things that sold me on the deal.”
“You need to explain this,” she said, maybe a little crossly.
“Okay. So I was playing nine ball with Donnie, and won. Texas doubled…”
“That’s not what I’m talking about,” she said. “He proposed a $15,000 bet and you went along with it.
“Sure.”
’How in the world can you go along with a crazy bet like that?”
“So,” I asked. “You don’t bet much?”
“Not at all,” she said.
“Betting is neither a science nor an art,” I said. “You have to think about odds in the same way that birds think about wind speed.” I looked at her and could see I got no purchase on that idea. ‘In the game you’re worried about,” I said, “I’d beat Donnie three out of three last time we’d played, and Texas looked like a good player. But chances are, I had him, since I had Donnie.”
“But you couldn’t possibly know that,” she said.
“True. But look. In games of chance, the odds are a reality. In a race between me and the odds, the odds win, In a race between any player and the odds, the odds always win. But you’re not really playing against the odds. You’re playing against the other player, and he’s playing against the odds. All you have to do is do better than he’s doing, and you take his money. There’s nothing magical about this.”
She thought. I can’t say she looked happy.
“That’s too much to gamble,” she said.
“Not really,” I said. “I had it in my wallet, and if I’d lost, nothing awful would have happened to me. Nobody would have beat me up or anything. I had the money, so I just would have forked over. Or Biggie would have forked over for me,” I said, remembering.
“But nobody can afford to lose $15,000,” she said, troubled.
“I didn’t have fifteen in,” I said. “I had five in. He had ten. That was part of what I liked about the bet. It was two to one, and I knew I could beat Donnie. How often do you get a bet like that?”
“But think about if you’d lost,” she said.
“If I’d lost I’d still have had enough money to graduate college, and then some. I got all my money gambling, anyway, so history would suggest my decision-making protocol is sound.”
“Henry, that was just insane,” she said. “You shouldn’t have done that.”
“But I won,” I said.
“But you might have lost,” she said.
”Okay. Say I think I have a particular skill. Say I think I know how to change tires. And then you have a flat tire. And I offer to change your tire, and you say no, you’d rather the Auto Club come and change your tire. And I say no, we don’t have the time to wait on the Auto Club, and I go ahead and change `your tire. And then you drive off and nothing bad ever happens to you. The changed tire is fine. Is it okay or not okay that I changed the tire?”
“I’m always glad to have a tire changed for me,” she said, “but why do you want to create worry?”
“What? I’m not creating worry, I’m just thinking I know what I’m doing.”
“But what if you don’t?’ she asked.
“But I did.”
“But what if you hadn’t?” she asked.
“I’d’ve lost five K,” I said. “Not the end of the world. I had it in my wallet.”
“That’s just too much to gamble,” she said.
“Really, it’s not, even if you lose, if you have it,” I said.
“We’re here,” she said, acknowledging that we were back in front of her dorm. “Henry Baida, once again you’ve given me much to think about.”
She turned and vanished into her dorm.
I walked back towards my own dorm, confused. I could understand why she’d think I’d been taking an unwise risk if I’d lost. The fact that I hadn’t lost would seem to me to have insulated me from a talk about the perils of gambling.
I reached the intersection of 21st and Garland, and under the blue light of the mercury vapor light, and there was a young woman there. She seemed to want to avoid contact at first, so I ignored her. But then she started looking at me.
“Are you in my Greek class?” she asked, right before the light changed.
“Well, I’m taking Greek,” I said. “α, β, γ, δ, ε, ζ, η,” and all that. She was peering at me in the darkness.
“Look, I hate to ask this,” she said, “I’m not far from my dorm but I have to walk past the entrance to the emergency room of the hospital and sometimes there are some assholes hanging outside and I’d just appreciate having company on the way past.”
“No problem, I said. “We waited for the light to turn back to green for our direction. The silence was awkward.
“So how are you liking Greek?” I asked. She seemed a little surprised that I spoke to her.
“Excuse me?” she asked, putting her hand above her breast as though worried.
“How are you enjoying Greek?” I asked again. The light turned green for our direction. I gestured towards the street and we began to walk. She wasn’t carrying anything except a small purse about the size of a Gideon Bible hanging at her right hip secured by a strong-looking brass chain across her chest to her right shoulder. It was a warm night, but she had her arms crossed in front of her as thought she were chilly. If a stride can be both purposeful and worried, hers was.
“It’s all right I guess,” she said. “Why?”
“I’m really enjoying it,” I said. I’m terrible at small talk. She didn’t roll her eyes, but she seemed irritated. We passed by the entrance to the Emergency Room, and there was a group of men loitering near the entrance. One, dressed like a biker, looked at us from ten or fifteen feet away, pitched his butt, registered our presence, then moved our way.
“Keep moving,” she said.
“What?”
“This is how it starts,” she said. The biker came right up to us. I stopped, and touched Rachel’s arm to stop her, too. She stopped, but she was obviously unhappy about it. I kind of splayed my hands at her as a way of suggesting “Calm down. We’re okay.” It wasn’t unreasonable for her to be concerned. He looked pretty tough. He was looking at me, though, not her, and he seemed to want to talk. I felt like I ought to know him.
“Leave us alone,” demanded Rachel, loudly. “We didn’t do anything to you.” He was a little taken aback, but looked at me rather than answering her.
“Ain’t you Henry?” the biker asked.
“That’s me,” I said, warily.
“Man, like, I just watched you take fifteen large off’n that asshole from Houston who’s been cleanin’ everybody’s plough over to Annie’s,” he said. “I’m about to start my shift here at the hospital, but I’d just like to shake the hand of the man who just won fifteen grand on one game.” We shook. “Thanks, man,” he said.
“And you are?” I asked.
“I’m Purliss Pettis, but ever’body calls me Skidmark.”
“You work here, Skidmark?”
“Yes, sir. I am a psychiatric nurse at this here hospital.”
“Pleased to meet you Skidmark. This is Rachel.” Skidmark stretched an earnest, tattooed hand towards Rachel. She shook his hand with a worried look.
“Pleased to meet you, ma’am,” he said. And he was.
“Skidmark, Rachel walks by here from time to time after dark and she’s worried about her safety. Isn’t she pretty safe around here?” Skidmark looked kind of uncomfortable, reached for a cigarette, shook it out, and lit it.
“She’s safe from physical harm, yes, sir,” he said. “But since you ask, they’s been things said around here that pro’l’ly shouldn’t’a been said.” His response was, admittedly, not what I’d expected. I’d hoped to help Rachel feel safe walking home to her dorm, but I was reinforcing her fears.
“What do you mean?” Rachel asked.
“Ma’am, when a pretty girl like you walks by, they’s a lot of guys thinks it’s okay to call out and ask you on a date. I mean, all of us knows you’re out of our league, but still we sorta ... call out.”
“And you think I like that?”
“Oh, Lord no,” said Skidmark. “We got no shot with the likes of you, so we got nothin’ to lose. I mean, If you acted like you was interested any one of those guys would be in seventh heaven, but that never happens.”
“So maybe this sexist objectification ought to stop,” said Rachel. Skidmark, confused, looked at me.
“Now that you’ve met Rachel, are you going to call out at her if she walks by in the future?” I asked him.
“Oh, fuck no. She’s a Lady,” he answered. I wasn’t sure this helped much.
“Can you maybe discourage people from making women like Rachel uncomfortable as they walk past? ”
“I promise to pound the shit out of anybody who yells out at college girls in the future,” he said.
“No pounding,” Rachel said. “I have a music lab at Peabody that gets out late. I just want to walk past here without being worried.”
“Yo!” yelled Skidmark, with a huge, bellowing voice. “Get up here.” He waved his arm in a big circle. The group of men by the Emergency Room entrance looked vaguely irritated but pitched their butts and shuffled up to us.
“This girl is a Lady, and we been worrying her,” he said, to the assembled crowd. The men all shuffled their feet uncomfortably and looked down. Called to task, they were embarrassed about the way they’d been behaving. “All of us is gonna be nice to her from now on, right?” The guys all shuffled around and made apologetic but noncommittal answers. Skidmark, not a large man, stepped forward and grabbed a large black man in scrubs by the ear. “You hear me, you sumbitch?”
“Yeah, yeah,” said the sumbitch. “I got it. We go’n’ be nice.”
“Okay,” said Skidmark. “See you boys tomorrow night,” said Skidmark. The boys all slid away.
“And they’re all gonna listen to you?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“Why? And why do you expect them to follow orders?” asked Rachel. Skidmark thought for a few seconds. Skidmark frowned for a second or two.
“My ol’ lady made me this needlepoint pillow,” he said. “It says ‘Yea though I walk through the valley of the death, I shall fear no evil, for I am the meanest motherfucker in the whole goddamned valley.’ And every one o’ them guys knows it. They’ll leave you alone and the others’ll catch on.”
“Okay,” said Rachel, hesitantly.
“Look, I’m late for work, so I really gotta go, but you was always safe, physically. None of these guys is criminals. And I admit we oughta work on our manners. I apologize, but you jus’ wave and we’ll take care of you. Right now, I gotta run. Evenin’,” he said to Rachel, tipping his cap, and turned to return to the hospital. Rachel watched him walk away with her hand at her throat, like someone who was having a hard time believing what she is seeing.
“What was that?” she asked.
“Hard to explain. It’s a Southern deal,”
“You have to explain,” she said. We were walking again.
“He knows you now, so he’ll treat you differently in the future. He’ll make sure all of his friends do, too.”
“Why?’
“I’m not sure I’m the best person to explain this, but Southerners have a tendency to lump people into groups. Black or white. American or un-American. Alabama or Auburn.”
“And?” she asked.
“Then they act like they can’t understand each other. The white can’t understand the black. The American resolutely cannot understand the un-American, or even what it perceives to be un-American. Those people protesting the Viet Nam war are completely different than Americans, so they must be Communists.”
“And Alabama/Auburn?” she asked. I thought for a second.
“Actually, that runs far deeper than black/white or American/Communist,” I answered. “I’m not sure it can be explained to somebody who didn’t grow up in it.”
She nodded silently. “So?” she asked.
“When Southerners see people as groups, they can be hard. The Jim Crow laws are a good example. Blacks were seen as a group, and the legislators seem to have had no trouble passing all these mean-spirited laws. But if you ask a privileged Southern man about the Black woman who raised him, he’ll describe her as a saint. There’s a tendency to see individual members of the group entirely different than the group as a whole. Hard to explain.”
We were at the front door of her dorm.
“You refer to southerners as ‘them,’” she said. “You don’t regard yourself as a southerner?”
“No. Not at all,” I said.
“You sound kind of southern,” she said.
“I’m a military brat,” I said. She nodded. “But a lot of the bases were in Mississippi and Florida, then I went to high school in Chattanooga.”
“I was thinking you were the Other to me, but you seem to think of yourself as the Other to them.”
“Not following you,” I said, still in front of her dorm. If we’d been on a date, this would have been where I kissed her good night, but we weren’t on a date. There was a pause of a few seconds while I looked at her and she thought about what was happening. I was clueless.
“How about we have a glass of wine?” she asked. This was an unexpected and, to me, hasty suggestion.
“I don’t drink,” I said.
“I forgot. You’re religious,” she said.
“No, not really,” I said. “”I just don’t drink.. Where would you get a drink around here, anyway?”
“The graduate students’ pub is just around the corner. In the basement of my dorm,” she said.
“Okay,” I said. I wasn’t sure where this was going, but to say “Hey, I’m tired and just won large then my geometry teacher’s favorite niece got mad at me about it so I’m going to pass” seemed an inappropriate response. I followed her around the dimly-lit sidewalk to the basement entrance on the right side of the dorm. Right side if you were facing North, anyway.
“Are you sure I’m allowed in?” I asked.
“Sure. Why?”
“I’m not a grad student.” She thought a little, then kind of shrugged.
“You know, the grad students always seem to be happy to see me, so I don’t expect a problem.”
She opened the door and led the way in. It was not well-lit, the ceiling seemed low, the furniture was indifferent, there weren’t many people present, all of them were male, and all of them recognized Rachel. Glasses were raised, salutations were exclaimed. There were maybe ten tables with three or four chairs each and a kind of bar where a few bearded men in their twenties sat on cushioned stools, leaning back. They all greeted Rachel as she approached.
“Hi, guys. This is Henry from my Greek class,” she said. “We’re not dating or anything.” They waved, I waved back.
“I’ll have a red wine,” she said, to the bartender. She may have made a slight air-kiss gesture with her mouth. The bartender was happy to see her. He put down his copy of Zur Genealogie der Moral and removed the screw cap to fill a water glass from a green glass gallon jug of red wine.
“Name your poison,” the bartender said, looking at me. “As long as it’s Gallo Paisano, Rachel’s sedative of choice, or Taylor Lake County White from our struggling refrigerator.
“How about soda water?” I asked. He raised his eyebrows.
“Usually, the answer would be ‘no,’” he said. “But you’re in luck. Or may be in luck. A few days ago a guy came around and gave me a bunch of cases of this water called Perrier,” which he pronounced Perry Ur, “and told me it was a cross between club soda and mineral water. I can give you one of those, if you like. I don’t know what to charge you for it, though. We got it for free.”
“Perrier,” said Rachel, pronouncing it correctly.
“What?” asked the bartender.
“She’s telling you how it’s pronounced in French,” I said. “I’ll try one, and you can give me the soda water for free and charge me a dollar for a glass of ice without offending ethics.”
“Oh wow, that’s so cool,” he said, slapping his palms on the bar. With this kind of enthusiasm he had to be high. “I was worried about how to deal with the conflict between giving you the Perry-err.”
“Perrier,” said Rachel.
“Sorry, Pear-yay,” said the bartender, “because the university is paying me. So even though I hate institutions, I was wondering would it be, like, moral for me to give you this soda water for free since the university wouldn’t make any money off of it. I mean, if everybody employed by the university acted like that, then the university wouldn’t have any money, but that’s more of an Aristotelian or even Millsean question than Nietzchean. But you solved the problem for me, man. Thanks.”
“Mine?” Rachel asked looking at the glass of wine.
“Yeah, sure,” the bartender answered. “Mine is … elsewhere. I drink therefore I am. Go take a seat, I’ll bring it right out.”
We found a table and sat. The table had a plastic tablecloth patterned like red and white plaid cloth and two of those café chairs with curved wood backs. The bartender showed up almost immediately with two water glasses—one with Rachel’s wine, the other filled with crushed ice —and a pale green teardrop-shaped bottle. I’d never seen foreign water before. He’d uncapped it with a bottle opener before he brought it out. I looked around at the other tables and everybody else had regular-sized wineglasses that held about a quarter of what Rachel’s did, but then everyone else in the bar was male and none of them were wearing miniskirts.
“I think I understand your description of the Southern male as displaying a disjointed personality capable of seeing individuals as displaying traits that are not present in groups of those same individuals. Why do you think that is?” she asked. Gack.
“I’m not sure that’s exactly what I meant, but I think people have a tendency to think of their own lives as unique and to think of the lives of others as ordinary and average. This might encourage them to think that the others in their lives are extraordinary, as well. A bigoted rich woman may think that her Black yard-man and housekeeper are gifted and wonderful and honest but that the majority of Blacks are not, when in fact her Black employees are typical and average—that most members of the group display the same qualities.” I sipped the Perrier. It was good. I wouldn’t prefer it to plain water on all occasions, but it was good. Especially in crushed ice. “I dunno.” I shrugged.
“I was thinking more of the nature of being,” she said. “The being of consciousness is a being of such that in its being, its being is in question. Perhaps the duality of perception is a failure to understand the nature of being. ” She appeared to take a sip of her wine, but about a third of the contents of the glass disappeared.
“Not following you,” I said.
“The being of consciousness does not coincide with itself in a full equivalence. That kind of equivalence, such as the in-itself, can be expressed as ‘being what it is.’ In the in-itself there is not a particle which is not wholly within itself without distance, without separation. When being is conceived like that there is no duality.” She paused to sip another third of her glass. ”This duality—group/not group—I think is a symbol a sign, that southern men have not evolved into the in-itself consciousness that we should all strive for.”
“Well, I agree that there’s a conflicting duality there, but assuming that the group as a whole shares the traits you observe in the individual members of that group you know leads to a different group of problems,” I said. I was really out of my depth. Nevertheless, I had managed to shock Rachel.
“What kind of problems could that possibly cause?” she asked. “It would lead to the unification, the in-itself-ness, of the southern male consciousness.”
“That’s not what happens,” I said. “It leads to stereotypes, and that’s part of what’s wrong.” I really wasn’t even sure my answer was responsive.
“Honestly, that wasn’t the thing about it that struck me the most. It was the Otherness of it.”
“Otherness,” I said.
“Partly it was the result of different spheres of perception, but part of it was that those guys were all so weird,” she said. The bartender showed up with a green glass gallon jug of wine and refilled Rachel’s glass. She leaned her head back and smiled warmly and a little lazily at him. He smiled back.
“Well, you probably seemed novel to them, too. Skidmark said—“
“And what kinda name is that?” she demanded.
:A nickname. I’m betting he didn’t pick it for himself. But what he said was that they all knew you were out of their league. So to them you are this Other you talk about. They don’t identify with you in any way, so the manners they know don’t seem to apply.”
She nodded silently and took an actual sip of her wine.
“I never met a group of men like that. Wearing scrubs, or dressed all in black with earrings, Confederate flag do-rags. Weird.”
“You find odd things at the margins,” I said.
“What?” she looked at me crossly.
“It’s not odd for people who live on the margins to have eccentricities. And I think that people standing outside the emergency room entrance at eleven on a week night aren’t far from the margin, one way or another.” She thought about this and pulled back a significant percentage of her wine.
“So were you always religious?” she asked,
“No,” I answered, hesitantly.
“You had a conversion experience?” she asked,
“No,” I answered, again hesitantly.
“William James said that there are two types of religious people, those who have a powerful conversion experience, and those who are quietly religious from birth.”
“That sounds right,” I said.
“So which are you?” she asked, taking a modest, and maybe slightly sloppy, slurp of her wine. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
“I’m neither,” I said. “I’m not a religious person.”
“Oh, come on,” she said. “You don’t drink. You’re taking Greek to read the Bible. You don’t think Nixon is a criminal.”
“Well, Amtrak is criminal,” I said. “I don’t know if Nixon is.”
“Talking about model trains instead of Cambodia and Watergate may be a crime in and of itself,” she said, although she said it somewhat genially. “So have you always been this, like, Christian Republican, Baptist kind of a guy? I grew up in Manhattan, so I don’t know how you get to be that way.” She finished her wine.
“I’m really not any of those things,” I said, trying to drink up my Perrier.
“Then what are you, Henry Baida?”
“I’m a student. Double major in Math and Physics,” I said. The bartender showed up at Rachel’s elbow and refilled her wine glass. He placed another bottle of Perrier and a glass of crushed ice in front of me, then coughed gently.
“Excuse me,” said the bartender, “but we need to close in thirty minutes.”
“Thanks,” I said. Rachel ignored him.
“And what were you before you were a student?” she asked.
“I was a gambler,” I said, opening the new bottle of Perrier.
“Oh yeah,” she said. “Your buddy Skidmark was talking about that. So you won fifteen dollars off of somebody from Houston. Again, you and Skidmark seem so much like the Other to me. That he’d go out of his way to shake your hand over a fifteen dollar bet. Why would a person do such a thing?”
“Strange things happen on the margins,” I said.
“I’m wondering what these fifteen dollars mean to you,” she said. “The conceptual pieces of knowledge we acquire in our history with the Other, and you seem to view your fellow southerners as the Other, produce a stratum constitutive of the psychic body. So far as we suffer our physical experiences reflectively we constitute them as a quasi-object by means of an accessory reflection. Observation comes from ourselves. What did you observe when you won your fifteen dollars?”
“That the guys I was playing had very nice pool cues.”
“How?”
“One of them had a little red demon inlaid into his cue. The other had an elaborate entertained floral pattern, with a line in French.” She took a sip of her drink and sat up.
“What did the French say?” she asked.
“Le doute est inconfortable, mais d'avoir confiance est absurde, ” I answered. “As best I recall. I’ve just got high school French.”
“That’s Voltaire,” she said. She gulped at her wine.
“That’s what Texas said,” I said.
“Texas?” she asked.
“One of the guys I was playing against.”
“People like you speak French in pool halls?”
“Look, it’s getting late, I’m tired, maybe we can knock this off and go on home,” I said.
“No, really. Guys who are really into pool speak French?”
“Well, Texas did.”
“Where is this pool hall?” she asked.
“It’s not a pool hall, it’s a bar named Annie’s down on Elliston Place.”
“Why was it so important to you to win fifteen dollars?” she asked, gulping down some more wine. “To apprehend oneself as an undifferentiated transcendence is not yet to apprehend oneself as the partial structure of a We-subject. Are you that pure exemplification of the human species that Sartre talked about?”
“I doubt it,” I said. There were three fingers of wine in her glass and she bolted them, then raised her arm, rotating her hand gently as though unscrewing a light bulb. She smiled at me.
“Time to go,” she said. The bartender arrived immediately. I was expecting a check, but he didn’t have one.
“Five dollars,” he said.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“Three glasses of wine and two glasses of ice,” he said, worried in a pained way.
“Yeah, but those were massive glasses of wine,” I said. “One dollar per? You’re sure?”
“The rules say what to charge per glass,” he said.
“All right,” I said, and gave him a ten. “Keep it.” He looked utterly delighted.
“Thank you, sir,” he said.
“Walk me home, Henry Baida,” she said.
We left, her gait seeming much more relaxed than when we came I. She smiled and waved at all the grad students in a way that suggested she enjoyed their attention. As we reached the door she took my arm. I opened the heavy oak door with my other arm and we emerged into the cool but humid night. She held my arm up the short staircase and around the short bricklaid path to the front door of her dorm. She stopped just short of the front door light, still holding my arm, and looked at me with a mysterious, inquisitive look in her eyes.
“Were all of those guys philosophy majors?” I asked.
“Almost all of them were grad students,” she answered, amiably. “Most of them are studying philosophy, but the pub also draws in its fair share of astronomers and mathematicians. Physics, some of the time, but not tonight. The odd d-school student.”
“D-school?” I asked.
“Divinity school. Guys working on being preachers. Or pastors. Or ministers. Or whatever. So would you like to come upstairs?” she asked.
“Thanks, but it’s probably not a good idea. But I really appreciate the invitation,” I said. She frowned at me for a few seconds.
“You’re a difficult man, Henry Baida,” she said. She then placed her palms on my cheeks and pulled me toward her and kissed me fully, thoroughly, soulfully, wetly, swirlingly. It was a wonderful and strange thing, that kiss. “What do you think of that, Henry Baida?” she asked.
“I think that strange things happen in the margins,” I answered.
“They do. Things can happen upstairs, too,” she said, then thought better of her forwardness and pulled back a bit. “Good night,” she said, and kissed me on the cheek. She smiled and turned and walked into the light of the lamp nest to the front door of her dorm, maybe twenty feet away. At the door she paused and waved, almost shyly, and disappeared.
Lordy.
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