by Otto Penzler
His wife returned and put a plate of food down in front of him. Pastina with butter and salt. A child’s supper. “Vino?” she said. He nodded. She returned with a grape jelly glass filled with wine she had poured from a gallon jug with no label. She sat down with her husband and watched him eat slowly.
He chewed a few mouthfuls of soft pastina and then had to rest his jaws. “I don’t know how much longer I can make that drive,” he said.
“I know,” his wife said, and looked down at the table. She had watery, red-rimmed eyes and a big nose. She looked up at him, and said, “But what would we do without the extra money?”
“There’s always pool. I’ve been thinking. An old man like me. I could hustle up a nine-ball game downtown.”
“Do you still have the stroke?”
“You never lose the stroke. It’s the eyes that go.”
“There’s still my nephew,” she said. “We have that money coming in every week.”
“A C-note a week isn’t enough,” he said.
“You could ask him for a raise. You’ve been driving him to work and home for five years now.”
The old man nodded. “I could,” he said. “It’s about time.” He put a mouthful of pastina in his mouth and chewed slowly.
• • •
His wife’s younger sister had married a prosperous lawyer. They had only one child, a son, who was born retarded. When the doctor told her her son was born retarded, the sister went into a state of shock. She lost all her hair. After that, she wore an assortment of henna-colored wigs that always made her look much younger than her older sister with her graying, and then white, hair. The younger sister refused to institutionalize her son since he was not severely retarded. She was determined to teach him to function. She trained him like a dog. She was oblivious to his cries and whimpers and even to the pleas of her older sister. She beat him with a belt over the slightest sign of weakness—spilled milk, soiled underpants— until he got his first job at twenty. He became a messenger in the Municipal Courthouse, a job he has held for thirty-five years. His father died when he was forty-five, and his mother got cancer when he was fifty. It took her a year to die. Her older sister visited her every day in the hospital. And every day, the younger sister pleaded with her older sister to watch over her son when she was gone. Then she died. She left her son enough money to remain in their big, old colonial house and to pay for a full-time nurse-housekeeper. The only thing her son needed was someone to drive him to work every morning and drive him home every night.
The old man didn’t mind doing that. He looked forward to it even. The only family he had in the world was his wife, who could never have children, and now his retarded nephew. He didn’t seem retarded, only odd, childish, talkative in that shrill way of women, which was understandable since he spent all his life close to his mother. He was short, blocky, prone to moods of extreme animation and sullen withdrawal. Sometimes in the morning, he would not stop chattering about a Yankee game he had watched the night before. He kept score of those games on an official scorekeeper’s pad. He told his uncle about every pitch, every out. Sometimes, though, nothing his uncle said to him could take him out of his sullen silences. He would spend their morning drive picking at the sleeve of his sweater like a petulant child. The old man tried to understand what put him in such a silent, brooding mood. He studied him for a sign, the oriental cast to his features, the age lines around his slanting eyes, his thick lips, his slack, hairless skin, and then he realized with a shock that his nephew was not a child, but a fifty-year-old man. On such days, the old man felt he more than earned his $100 a week.
• • •
The old man awoke the next morning in the twin bed beside his wife. It was still dark outside. He let his wife sleep. He got out of bed, put on his pot of espresso, and started to get dressed. He picked his clothes with great care. A Gant shirt with a frayed button-down collar. A stained rep tie. No. He put the tie back. He buttoned the shirt at his throat without the tie. He put on a gray cardigan sweater that was unraveling. Gray flannel slacks that had a sheen at the knees. Scuffed wingtip cordovans. All his other shoes were brilliantly polished. He looked at himself in the mirror, and smiled. A defeated old man.
He sat down with his cup of espresso. He rubbed a lemon peel around the lip of the cup and took a sip. He forced himself to remember. The secret was in never losing control. Knowing that one thing the mark didn’t know. It was always ego with the mark, not the money. It was all about saving face. The curse of Italians. Saving face. The old man was lucky to be raised in an orphanage by Irish nuns instead of the Italian home of the parents he never knew. It gave him the edge in his profession. He never lost control. He never lost sight of his only goal in the hustle. He always let the mark have his ego while he, the old man, walked out with the money. How you kept score. The cash in the pocket any way you could get it, and then, as you walked out the door the mark would shout after you, “You’re one lucky sunuvabitch! But I’ll get you tomorrow.” Which was the point. If you left him with his ego he’d stay on the string for a lot of tomorrows. Some marks were like his own private bank. He stopped in whenever he wanted to make a withdrawal.
The old man drained his espresso, washed the cup in the sink, and went to the coatrack by the door. His fedora and camel hair topcoat had dried. But not today. He put on a thin raincoat that would make him shiver all day, and a fleece-lined hunter’s cap with earmuffs.
It was bitterly cold outside. The snow had already begun to freeze. Ice had frozen to the windows of his Volkswagen. He had to hold a lighted match to the door lock to melt the ice. He got in, started the car, put on the defroster, and then got back out and dug out the snow around the wheels with his bare hands.
He drove slowly up and down hills that were packed down with icy snow. When he got to his nephew’s house, he saw him standing outside the front door. He wore a hunter’s cap, too, with earmuffs, and an expensive topcoat, and he carried a leather briefcase that contained his tuna fish sandwich and an apple. His nephew got in the car.
“Were you waiting long?” the old man asked.
“The Knicks won last night, uncle,” his nephew said. His lips peeled apart like an open wound when he spoke and his eyes were wide and unblinking. The old man drove off. His nephew kept talking in his shrill voice.
“Latrell Sprewell made twenty-four points,” his nephew said. He opened his briefcase and pulled out his official NBA scorebook. He traced his finger down the scorebook and began reading. “With two minutes and twenty-eight seconds gone in the first quarter, Latrell Sprewell scored a basket on a…” He looked close to the scorebook. “… jumpshot from twelve feet away from the basket. Then with four munites and fifty-two seconds gone in the first quarter, he was fouled by…” Again he looked close to the scorebook. “… Alonzo Mourning. He made his first foul shot and then he missed his second. With six minutes and…”
His nephew’s droning voice lulled the old man. The endless, meaningless torrent of words let the old man slip into a reverie of what he must do today. He tried to visualize it in his mind’s eye. The proper defeated slouch of an old man. Eyes always averted, looking down at the hunter’s cap in his hand. The weak shrug. The equivocation. “I don’t know.” And then, “Maybe just a few games.”
His nephew was still talking. He was in the fourth quarter now as they approached the courthouse on Main Street. The street had been plowed at night, but the plowing only packed down the remaining snow like a sheet of ice. The old man stabbed the brakes as they came to the courthouse and the Volkswagen began to slide in the snow. His nephew kept talking as the old man tried to steer the Volkswagen away from a parked car. The Volkswagen began to slow as it slid into the parked car with a jolt. His nephew had stopped talking now. He looked out his window at the crumpled fender of the Volkswagen against the crumpled fender of the parked car.
“Uncle, you hit a car,” his nephew said with wide eyes.
“It’s nothing,” the old man said.
“Are you all right?” His nephew nodded with great exaggeration. The old man said, “Hurry. You’ll be late for work. I’ll leave a note on the windshield so the owner can call me.”
He got out of the car and went over to the parked car as his nephew climbed the courthouse steps. The old man called out to him, “I’ll pick you up at six.” His nephew nodded and disappeared behind the big double doors of the courthouse. The old man looked around to see if anyone had seen him. He took out a piece of paper and a pen and scribbled on it. He stuck it under the parked car’s windshield wipers. The note read, “I hit your car. Sorry.”
The old man backed his car into the street and drove off. His dented front fender rattled a bit but didn’t scrape the tire. He turned down a side street into the warehouse district. Old red-brick buildings long since abandoned. Their windows broken. Rusted machinery in their parking lots. He pulled into one of the warehouses that had a hand-painted sign above the door: SHORTY’S POOL HALL. He parked the car alongside of an Oldsmobile Cutlass painted lime green with gold wheels. “Melatizana,” the old man said out loud. He sat in his car for a moment until he had calmed himself. Then he got out and went inside. He walked down a narrow, dirty hallway to a pair of frosted glass doors with the words POOL HALL painted on them. He pushed open the doors and stepped inside. It was dark and it smelled of piss and cigarette smoke and spilled beer and b.o. A tall, gaunt man whose face looked like something out of a wax museum—his chalky cheeks had a fake, rosy tint—was sitting hunched over a desk, reading a newspaper. The old man looked around the dimly lit pool hall. All the tables but one were deserted. A melanzana in his late thirties was banging the balls around the table by himself. He looked up at the old man and then back to his table. He wore a tight, black silk T-shirt that showed off all the gold chains around his neck, and tight black pants. The old man shuffled over to the bench along the wall behind the melanzana, and sat down. He watched him shoot for a few minutes. Banging the balls aimlessly with a touch like a blacksmith.
The melanzana was hunched over the table, sighting a shot, when he glanced over his shoulder at the old man watching him. He smiled, flashing his gold teeth. He had processed hair, shimmering with pomade, curling down his cheeks in ringlets.
“You taking a picture, old man, or what?”
The old man looked down at the hunter’s hat in his hands, and said softly, “I’m sorry. I was just watching.”
“You got nuthin’ better to do with your time?” The old man said nothing. The black man said, “No, I guess you don’t. An old man with too much time and nuthin’ to do, huh?” The black man turned back to his shot, rammed the cue ball hard into a rack of balls, scattering them across the table. He straightened up and turned toward the old man.
“It’ll cost you to watch, old man,” he said. “I ain’t puttin’ on a show for free for some old white dude got nuthin’ to do but wait to die.”
The old man felt his face get hot. “I’m sorry,” he said again, and stood up. “I won’t bother you anymore.”
He began to walk away. The melanzana called after him. “Hey, old man. Come on back here. Grab you a stick and we’ll play a coupla games.”
The old man turned and said, “I don’t know. I haven’t played in years.”
“So what? You’re here, ain’t you? We’ll shoot a coupla games a nine ball for fun. Maybe a dollar or two just to keep score.”
The old man looked down at his soft, pink hands fingering his cap. “I don’t know,” he said again.
“Come on, old man. What else you got to do? I ain’t about to hustle no poor old man in some sorry-ass clothes.”
“Well…” The old man began to take off his raincoat. “Just a few games.”
They shot nine ball for hours. The old man won a few games when they shot for a dollar, but then his stroke became erratic, jerky, when they began to shoot for ten dollars a game. He hit short straight-in shots too hard, and long shots too easily. He blinked repeatedly as he sighted a long shot. The object ball far down the table looked fuzzy, like a tennis ball. He jabbed his stick at the cue ball and rattled the object ball around the table. After each game, he dug into his pants pocket and paid the black man. When he had lost all the money he had won shooting craps he went over to the rack against the wall and hung up his cue stick.
“I have to go now,” the old man said.
“What? You got an important date? An old man with nuthin’ but time on his hands.”
“I have to pick up my nephew from work.”
“The good uncle, huh?” The old man put on his raincoat and cap. He felt tired, but good. A good tiredness. Physical, not mental. The black man said, “I’ll tell you what, old man. I’ll give you a chance to win your money back tomorrow.”
The old man shook his head, no. “You’re too good for me.”
The black man grimaced. “Aw, I was lucky today. You shoot a pretty good stick for an old man. Maybe tomorrow will be your day.” The old man shook his head, no. The black man said, “I’ll give you a spot tomorrow. How’s that? The eight and nine. You pocket the seven you win. I gotta go all the way to the nine.”
The old man looked up at his smiling black face and his gold teeth. “Well,” he said. “If you say so. Tomorrow at the same time.”
His nephew was waiting for him on the steps of the courthouse. He got in the Volkswagen and they drove off.
“How was work today?” the old man said. His nephew did not respond. The old man looked across at him. He was sitting with his briefcase on his lap, digging at the briefcase with a fingernail. “You’re gonna scratch the leather,” the old man said. His nephew ignored him and continued scratching at the leather with a brooding concentration. The old man sighed and concentrated on the road.
They drove in silence until they were only a mile from his nephew’s house. Finally, the old man said, “Nephew, I’ve been thinking. It would help me and your aunt if you could pay me one fifty a week instead of one hundred. I’ve been driving you for five years now.” He looked over at his nephew. He was still digging at his briefcase. He had scraped away a spot of dark, shiny leather to reveal the white hide underneath.
“What do you think, nephew?” the old man said.
His nephew just stared at his finger gouging at the leather, but said nothing. The old man shook his head. He turned the corner that led to his nephew’s house. When he reached the house, he parked in front and turned to his nephew to ask him again. He had stopped digging at his briefcase now, but he was still staring at it. Finally, his nephew said, “I don’t want you to drive me anymore, uncle.” He stared at his briefcase as he spoke.
The old man looked at him. “What? But why?”
“You’re too old. You got in an accident today. I’m afraid.”
“That? That was nothing. The car just skidded on the ice. It could happen to anyone.”
“I don’t want you to drive me anymore, uncle. You’re too old. You got in an accident today. I’m afraid.”
Before the old man could respond, his nephew opened the door and got out. He turned his back on his uncle and began walking with quick, prissy steps toward the front door.
The old man called out after him. “Are you sure?” His nephew did not turn around. He just opened the front door, went inside, and shut the door behind him.
• • •
The old man and his wife ate their dinner in silence. Finally, his wife said, “What will we do?”
The old man, looking down at his food, said, “I’ll do what I’ve always done. I’ll find a way.”
“What if he’s not there tomorrow?”
“He’ll be there. He’s a greedy melanzana”
“But you don’t have any money to play with.”
“I won’t need any. I’ll tell him we’ll pay up at the end of the day, not after each game.”
“Are you sure you can beat him?”
The old man looked up at her. His face was flushed. “That fucking melanzana Laughing at me. It was all I co
uld do not to let him know I was setting him up for a score. I could beat him with one hand.”
“Oh no,” she said. “That’s too dangerous. You can’t play him jack up. If you win, he’ll know.”
The old man smiled at his wife. “Don’t worry, honey. All these years, I’m not going to make a mistake. He’ll never know what happened. I’ll walk out with his money and he’ll think he won.”
She nodded, but she did not smile.
That night, asleep in bed, the old man dreamed. He tossed and turned and woke up in the middle of the night. His face was flushed with anger. He said, out loud, “Fired by a fucking retard!” His wife groaned in the bed beside him. He whispered to her, “Shhh. Go back to sleep.”
• • •
The melanzana was waiting for him. He smiled at the old man as he took off his raincoat. The gaunt man with the waxlike face was sitting at his desk, reading a newspaper. All the tables were deserted. The old man noticed another melanzana, only younger, leaning against the wall next to a table. He wore a purple satin jogging suit and those fancy melanzana sneakers. He had a shaved head and a big earring like a pirate’s. He stared at the old man through dark sunglasses.
“I was afraid you wasn’t gonna show, old man,” the older melanzana said.
“I’m here, ain’t I?” the old man said. He took a breath and forced himself to smile. “I had to go to the bank to get money.”
“Money, eh?” the melanzana said. “I don’t think you’ll be needin’ no money today, old man. Today’s your lucky day.” He smiled and looked over at the younger man. “Ain’t that right, brother Reeshaad?” The younger black man gave him a thin smile, but said nothing.
The older melanzana racked the balls at the table near the other one while the old man took a cue stick off the rack. He reminded himself not to roll the stick over the green felt tablecloth to make sure it was straight. The older melanzana opened a black leather case, took out two pieces of an elaborately carved cue stick, and screwed them together.
