by Haven Kimmel
She had played against Bud awhile and cleaned his clock, as Jimmy would have said, then was shooting alone. The place was busy—it was a Saturday night, and this was what Cassie wrote for Belle: Saturday night, busy, I was alone in the room with the table. A song by Alabama was playing on the jukebox. (Cassie had done her best to get Uncle Bud to add two or three or even one album she could tolerate. She had nearly sold him on Etta James, but in the end he fell back on the old argument, which was that patrons in a pool hall are by and large nostalgic and want to recall sitting on a porch swing with Grandma.) She didn’t see him come in; her back was to the door. There were some bluff greetings, louder talk. What finally made her turn around was the change in atmosphere. She turned around and he was at the bar, surrounded by cronies he had long since abandoned, men who still thought him a hero for exploits a quarter of a century gone. His black leather cue case rested against his leg.
Cassie’s breath quickened, and she could hear her heartbeat. Jimmy still evoked elation and dread—she wanted to run to him before he got away, and she wanted to run past him and have it over with. Behind the bar Uncle Bud stood with his arms crossed. He glanced at Cassie, and she lowered her cue and rested it on top of her boot. She suspected, and Bud probably did, too, that Jimmy and Barbara had had a fight, and he was here to prove something. Uncle Bud shook his head, took a deep breath; he hated drama, his look said. Jimmy said something to him with a laugh, fellow feeling, and Bud didn’t move; finally, he turned and got Jimmy a beer from the cooler.
Cassie studied her father. He was wearing a pale pink shirt so finely woven that the fabric looked shiny, with gray slacks and the black wing tips he’d had for years. She wrote these details for Belle because they both knew the shoes, for a while had been forced to shine them on Sunday mornings, as if Jimmy were on his way to a church that prized such care. Cassie loved doing it, Belle was made so angry by the task that she sometimes broke out in hives. That night Cassie was still wearing the clothes from her weekend job, painter’s pants on which she’d wiped the residue from twenty different colors, a John Deere T-shirt, one of Poppy’s old flannel button-downs. Jimmy drank his beer, talked to his friends, made his way slowly back to the glassed-in room that held his dearest conquest. He looked like a model for a certain kind of father; Cassie looked like a vagrant. When his eyes met hers, he let his gaze flicker over her face, and she knew why he was there.
“Cass?” he said, coming through the door.
“Hey.”
“How’s my girl?” He kissed the side of her head. “You’re dusty.”
“Drywall,” Cassie said, running her hand over the grit on the back of her neck.
“Well, don’t get it on my table.” Jimmy put his beer on the shelf and began unzipping his cue case.
“Okay.”
“You’ve worked yourself up a good game, I hear.”
Cassie shrugged, looked back at Bud, who remained behind the bar, watching her. He would stop this if she asked.
“Your mom’s okay? Bella?”
Cassie shrugged again; he was wrong to ask. She noticed then that his hand shook as he tried to screw in the butt of his cue, a gesture she’d seen him make a thousand times. It was possible he was drunk; with Jimmy it was hard to tell. He gave nothing away in his gait, the whites of his eyes, his speech. He simply grew more malignant around the edges, and then he was gone.
Cassie leaned back in Belle’s desk chair, stretched out her fingers. It had been two years since she’d seen Jimmy, and two years since Belle left home, and in that time she’d written more than in all her years of school. Neither she nor Laura liked to talk on the telephone; Belle didn’t, either, really, so they wrote and wrote. It didn’t come naturally to Cassie and she didn’t enjoy it and it made her fingers ache. But Laura said it would come in handy if Cassie were ever arrested and forced to write a jailhouse confession. Cassie said they could break her fingers, she’d never confess to anything, and Laura nodded.
* * *
Jimmy racked the balls without bothering to ask Cassie if she was done with her game, and then he pulled a roll of money from his pocket. “You want to show your old dad what you’re made of?” Smiling.
Maybe she imagined it, or maybe it happened internally, but the whole establishment grew unusually quiet. Then Bud leaned his head in the doorway. “Cassie? Talk to you a minute?”
She walked with Bud behind the bar as Jimmy used her cue to break and to take his practice shots.
“How much do you have on you?” he asked.
“One-fifty. My paycheck.”
“All right, look.” Bud kept his eye on the room where Jimmy was playing alone. “There’s five, six hundred in the till, two or three thousand in the safe. Use it all.”
“Okay.”
“Lose it, let him bury himself. He’s not carrying that much. You drop below, say, four thousand, we’ll talk options. Lose the lag.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t play this hotheaded. You go in and beat him every game, he’ll make an excuse and walk. Or worse, he’ll beat you. You—”
“He’s not going to beat me.”
“You bring Laura into this, Belle, Poppy, he’ll beat you.”
“He’s not going to beat me.”
Bud leaned in close, tapped her chest with his finger. “You bring your history into this, he’ll beat you. Because you feel it and he doesn’t.”
“You best back that finger up.”
Bud gripped his temples. “See? This is what I mean about you, you are your own worst—”
“Cassie?” Jimmy stepped away from the table. “Bud trying to talk you out of a friendly wager?” He shook his head. “Far as I can tell, he doesn’t own you yet.”
Cassie looked Bud hard in the eye. “No,” she said. “He doesn’t.” But just before she walked away from Bud, she offered him Jimmy’s half-wink, and he opened the till. Then she turned to the table where her father waited, a slight man with a swing in his step. She was going to give him what he wanted: she was going to play like a girl. And then she was going to kick his ass.
To her sister she wrote: Bud backed me.
Cassie put the pencil down, turned her attention back to the desk. There were articles on chaos theory, fractal geometry, astrology. A small book-length collection of French surrealist parlor games. An introduction to Sufism. An article from a group called Solarplexus, which promised to lead the reader to an alchemical paradise at the edge of the sun. Nearly at the bottom, the sort of thing Cassie thought she might find: a blurry photocopy of an article on billiards and the law of reflection. At the top Belle had written, A ball in motion on a pool table behaves like a light ray reflecting off a mirror.
Cassie sighed. This was just like Belle. In truth, Cassie wrote in the margin, the velocity at which the ball strikes the rubber rail determines the angle of reflection. The law applies only if the ball is moving slowly. A ball in motion on a pool table behaves like a ball in motion on a pool table. But the accuracy of the physical hypothesis wasn’t what interested Belle, and Cassie knew it. What interested Belle was the mirror.
* * *
Jimmy called fifty bucks a game, and Cassie chose 9-ball. There were some things she’d let float in the interest of the outcome, and a couple things she wanted made clear from the outset. Through the first game Jimmy kept up a steady stream of talk, all vaguely hostile, as Cassie said nothing. She’d seen him do it at home, knew it threw some men off. It was a miracle Jimmy still had all his organs, the way he sharked. She lost the first game, the second. Jimmy drank, became giddy with victory. She lost barely, and only at the last possible second, on thin slices and long shots, letting Jimmy think she was playing at the edge of her skill. After the third game she took a bathroom break and picked up the money Bud had left for her there, along with a note: Lose one more, then come back for two. Then double the bid. In the bathroom Cassie flushed the note, tucked the money in her pocket. There was money in this, she’d realized. Jimmy’s roll wa
s all hundred dollar bills. He’d either mortgaged something of Barbara’s or had a handsome accident. Either way there was plenty in it for her, for Laura and Poppy and Bud. But she already knew, though she wasn’t ready to say it yet, that she didn’t care much about the money. She wanted something else of his, and it was simply a matter of pushing him to lose it.
Jimmy claimed the cue was an original Balabushka, which was no doubt Jimmy talking. George Balabushka had been dead for twelve years, and if Jimmy weren’t lying, the cue was worth twenty-five thousand dollars. It still had the original ferrule and finish, the original Irish linen wrap, Balabushka’s signature burned into the butt. She didn’t believe, and Bud didn’t, either, that even Jimmy would use it if it were authentic. But they’d both held it, Cassie only once, and they agreed that there was something unusual in the balance. It seemed to have its own heat, more like a fast horse or a gun. The cue was the last artifact in Jimmy’s possession of that fateful night in New Orleans, and Cassie thought maybe some things should be restored as a set. The table, the lamp, the cue. Whatever else he’d stolen and hadn’t advertised.
“There she is,” Jimmy said as Cassie walked back out into the hall. “You’re a good sport. This is a tough lesson, I know. Don’t take it too hard.” He smiled his crooked smile at her. His shoulders, the line of his chest under his pink shirt, made Cassie want to cry.
“I’ll try not to.”
She won two games, dropped the third, let herself look desperate. She was exhausted from working all day and from straining against her inclinations all evening. A small and silent crowd gathered as the night wore on, and the phone rang repeatedly, but Bud ignored it. “A hundred a game,” she said as Jimmy racked the balls.
“You’re on,” he answered, without even glancing her way.
To her sister she wrote: I raised the stakes.
Barbara arrived around midnight, and threats were issued. A friend of Bud’s from the sheriff’s department sat outside in his car, keeping her at bay. At two in the morning Bud locked the doors. Jimmy was down thirty-seven hundred and out of cash.
“This is unacceptable, Cassie,” he said, lighting a cigarette with shaking hands. His pink shirt was unbuttoned, his T-shirt drenched with sweat. “You and that sumbitch Bud set something up and scoured me, and you’ll pay for it.”
Cassie rocked her head back and forth, trying to loosen the muscles in her neck. Her left shoulder felt like someone was frying bacon on it. “So quit,” she said.
Jimmy took two steps toward her, then shouted in her face, “I can’t quit!” Bud jumped up from the stool in the doorway, but Jimmy ignored him. “You know I can’t quit, that money is hers,” he said, gesturing toward the parking lot, “and if I leave here without it, she’ll not only kick me out of the house, she’ll have her goon squad of relatives kill me, they will kill me, Cassie, is that what you want?” He ran his fingers through his hair. He looked sick, feverish.
“How is this Cassie’s fault? Huh? You came in here blowing, you lost the money.”
“She hustled me, and you helped her. She just happened to be carrying around that kind of money?” The veins in Jimmy’s neck stood out, and a vein in his forehead throbbed.
Cassie remembered that moment in particular and wrote to Belle that she had felt clearheaded but distanced from her body. She heard what Jimmy was saying, that if she beat him, he would Literally Die, and Cassie would be responsible for it. She didn’t doubt what he said; Barbara Thompson came from a long line of puppy-drowning rednecks who target-practiced with a twelve gauge in the woods behind a trailer park filled with children.
“You know what I think?” Bud was in Jimmy’s face, and even though his voice was raised, Cassie could hear a hum coming from the hanging light. Below the argument was such a silence. “I think you’re a chickenshit failure who got himself—”
“What did you say to me? What did you say?”
“You heard me, you—”
“Hold on a minute,” Cassie said, raising her hands. “Bud, stop.” She turned to her father. “It sounds like you’re in a bind.”
“Cassie,” Bud said, “don’t do this. He pulled this on your mother for fifteen years—”
“No,” Cassie said, “it’s okay.” She looked at Jimmy, whose face was flooded with relief.
“I knew it, I knew I could count on you.”
“Here’s how I see it. You need to leave here with your original stake, and maybe even a couple hundred extra to sweeten it at home?”
Jimmy nodded.
“So how about this?” Cassie began racking the balls. “One game. If you win, you leave with four thousand even. If I win, you can still have the money, but you lose the cue.” She lifted the rack and hung it on a hook. Both men stared at her, astonished, and no one spoke. Cassie could nearly hear Jimmy’s mind at work, the full constraints, the bind he was in pressing against him. He’d never make it out past Bud, he could never move fast enough to hurt her. She realized that her clarity was temporary, that something was struggling underneath it; over and over she imagined Jimmy charging at her, and saw herself pulling the knife out of its sheath on her belt; she saw herself pulling it so fast she went through Poppy’s shirt and nicked her own side. Bud was staring at her and blinking slowly, like a predator in overhead sun.
“You’re saying—” Jimmy held his forehead—“that if I beat you, I leave with all my money, but if I lose, you’re taking the Balabushka? You’re out of your mind.”
“Okay,” Cassie said, yawning. “I’m going home then, I’m beat.” Bud yawned, too.
“Wait! Wait, what’s plan B?”
Cassie shook her head. “I’m sorry, that’s my only plan. Otherwise, I’m taking this money home to Laura.” She headed toward the door.
“Jesus!” Jimmy laughed, letting his head fall back. “You’re going to take everything away from me, if not you and Laura, then Bud. You’re a bunch of cannibals.” He wiped his eyes, laughed again, then stood very still.
Cassie looked at Bud, at Jimmy, at the floor. For a moment she couldn’t swallow. She cleared her throat and said, “Take it or leave it.”
He took it, Cassie wrote, and I broke and cleared the table without him ever taking a shot or saying a word. After I sank the 9, Bud went to the safe and got more money, and we counted it all out until he had four thousand. Jimmy took the cue apart slowly and carefully, and wiped it down, then put it in the case and handed it to me, but he never met my eye. Bud let him out the front door, then locked it behind him, and we watched him give the deputy a salute. Then he got in Barbara’s old Mustang and she peeled away. You know he must have been out of sorts to leave the Lincoln there. For a while I couldn’t take the stick out of the case. I couldn’t even look at it. But in time that feeling went away, although I never saw Jimmy again.
She straightened the pages, attached a paper clip, and slipped the letter underneath the essay on chaos theory. She stood and straightened her back, crossed her arms, and looked out the window. A clear November day, and colder than it looked. Girls came and went in the rooms around her, laughing loudly and slamming doors. From this angle, stared at long enough, the walkways leading up to and away from Belle’s dormitory looked like streambeds, tributaries meeting and diverging on the way to some greater body. Cassie stood that way twenty minutes or so, looked down at the clock. One-thirty-six. She watched for a thin girl braced against the cold, head bent and moving with great purpose. Cassie waited for her sister.
Part ThreeRATTLESNAKE KITE
CATTAILS, 1999
At two in the morning Cassie was still sitting alone at the scarred kitchen table. She remembered these hours after Poppy’s death, too, the way her mind struggled against the information and wouldn’t let her sleep; the strange doubling of consciousness that lasted for months. She might be driving or measuring a piece of hardwood for flooring, and she would be driving but also telling herself that Poppy was gone. Pulling the tape measure out, marking the board, measuring it again, Pop
py is gone, until he was in every gesture and every breath. There seemed to be no other way to allow him to die.
Laura would have said that at two in the morning the soul was less moored to the body than at any other time, and could fly free, and Cassie felt that, too, the vague awareness of a door not yet open. But a door that could be opened. And staying or going was the question at hand. On the table were Laura’s journals, a stack of letters bound with a bright blue ribbon, scraps of paper torn from envelopes and message pads. The yellow lined notebook in which Cassie and Belle and Laura had been leaving messages for one another. And two plane tickets. She gathered up the scraps of paper—on each was printed a few words, a phrase, in Belle’s block handwriting—and lined them up randomly in front of her. A man walks down the street / to be pregnant in a dream / In the chthonic realm everyone is wealthy / Like the ghost of pure spirit / Followed by a gray dog / and everything is cheap / the tyranny of the door frame / is to be pregnant with something. She read it, rearranged it, Belle’s method of sense-making made no sense at all to Cassie.
She tipped her head back and closed her eyes. Her fingertips were cold, and she pressed them against her eyelids like a compress, letting the chill through. The act felt medicinal but was not. She had been awake almost seventy-two hours and would not rest until she had decided what to do about the plane tickets; she could go, or she could leave them somewhere in the house; no one would blame her either way.
The letter Laura had left in her jewelry box already looked worn, as if years had pulled something from it and put something different back in. Cassie had seen it for the first time only four days ago; since then, the letter, typed on the heavyweight cotton bond Laura favored for correspondence, had been taken from the envelope, unfolded, pored over, refolded, and tucked away over a dozen times. It was dated March 21, a little more than a year before, the day Laura was told she had lung cancer, and decided, after what surely had been only a few agonizing hours spent alone and without counsel, to forgo treatment. The letter, addressed to Cassie and Belle, was intended as a justification.
