The Hustler

by Walter Tevis

  “And you like bus stations?”

  “No. I hate bus stations.” She made a small gesture with her hand. “Sometimes I wake up and I can’t get back to sleep—not without a drink. And this bar doesn’t open until six o’clock.”

  He liked the way she talked. Her voice was soft, yet the words were precise and well enunciated. There was something in the sound of her voice that, like the plain silver cigarette case, felt of natural class—a quality that Eddie liked very much.

  “You always drink in the mornings?” he said.

  “No. Only when I’m broke and have to wait for the bars to open so I can charge a drink. Otherwise I usually have a bottle at home. In which case I sleep very well.”

  This seemed ridiculous. She liked talking that way about herself. If she were really a lush she probably wouldn’t talk about it.

  He looked back at her and it struck him, suddenly, that she was pretty. Why not make a quick try, the fast hustle? “Look,” he said, “I can buy us a bottle….”

  Her expression hardly changed; but her voice was like a wall. “No,” she said.

  “Say, a fifth of Scotch.”

  She leaned forward, “Look,” she said, “we were doing fine here. Come off it.” She took a draw from her cigarette. “Anyway, I’m not your type.”

  What she had said was instantly right and he grinned at her. “All right,” he said. “You win. Sorry I brought it up.”

  “That’s okay,” she said, leaning back again. “A proposition is supposed to be flattering, even from a man who picks you up in a bus station. And I like Scotch—you made the right offer.”

  “Glad to hear it,” he said. He finished off his drink and then said, “One more?”

  “No,” she said, “I’m sleepy now.” She got up from her seat. He stood up too and saw how short she was, smaller than she had looked to be, sitting down. “I’ll walk you home,” he said.

  “If you want to. But you won’t earn anything by it.”

  This irritated him slightly. “Maybe I wasn’t trying to earn anything,” he said.

  She walked ahead of him when he stopped to pay the check and he noticed that she had a slight limp, her left foot hesitated gently against her stride. She kept her hands in her pockets. They walked in virtual silence, and when they came to her place—a faceless building in a long row of faceless buildings—she said “Thanks” and went inside before he had a chance even to attempt a foot in the door.

  It took him a half hour of walking to find a liquor store. Before he found it he passed a poolroom, closed. He bought a fifth of Scotch, took it back to his hotel room with him and, before he went to bed, set it, unopened, on the green metal dresser.

  8

  He awoke, sweating from the heat in his room, at seven-thirty that evening. After dressing, he went downstairs, out to the bus station, getting his suitcase from the locker but putting in another dime and leaving the pool cue. He would not be needing that for quite a while. It might be several weeks before he would want to advertise himself.

  Before he left he looked, on a long-odds gamble, into the lunchroom. The girl was not there. Then he went back to his room, shaved, and changed his clothes. Coming out he left a bundle of dirty shirts with the woman in the lobby, telling her to send them out for him. He made a mental note to buy himself some new socks and underwear. He hadn’t brought enough.

  Then he went looking for a poolroom.

  ***

  He found one on a street named Parmenter, a hole in the wall called Wilson’s Recreation Hall, the kind of place with green paint on the windows. There were three beat-up pool tables, green-shaded incandescent lamps, and an old man to rack the balls. There were a bar and a back room—for booking race bets or for a card game. The door was open and he could see a round table and some chairs, but nobody was in the back room. Up front a small, indecently wrinkled man was sitting behind an ancient cash register that squatted, its sides decorated in phony rococo, on the bar. He looked up as Eddie came in.

  It was a crummy place, a filthy, crooked-looking place, but Eddie felt at home in it. There were probably ten thousand poolrooms in the country, identical, down to the back room and the old man with the corrugated face, to Wilson’s Recreation Hall on Parmenter Street in Chicago, and Eddie felt as if he had played in at least half of them.

  There was one game going on. On the front table two men were playing one-pocket, a desultory, early-evening game of one-pocket. Eddie sat and watched them for almost an hour before one man quit and Eddie, grinning his very best, most personable grin, invited the remaining man to play for a while with him. Maybe for a half dollar on the side, just to pass the time…

  ***

  And thus, easily, with hardly a second thought, Eddie Felson came full circle, starting where he had begun, scuffling, charming himself into a fifty-cent game of pool. He won seven dollars. He worked for that; spending three hours at it, in hope of getting the man to raise the bet, trying to prod him into playing for a dollar a game, or, with luck, two dollars. But the man quit and left him with seven dollars and in an empty poolroom. Eddie shrugged his shoulders. You have to start somewhere….

  He found a restaurant and ate a steak. Then he wandered in search of another poolroom. This one he found by recognizing the familiar dull crash of a rack of balls being broken open as he walked by it on the street. The place was on the third floor of a building, above a hardware store; and he would have missed the small BILLIARDS sign if it hadn’t been for the sound of the balls.

  He did not have to wait long before he got into a game of snooker with three petty tout types, at five cents a point. Snooker is a game played with small balls and on a table with very tight and bouncy pockets; it is impossible to play it in a fast, loose style—Eddie’s style—the balls will not stay in the pockets unless they are shot with care and precision. It was not Eddie’s kind of game, but the other players were so poor that he had to hold himself back in spite of this.

  The other men were feeling good and Eddie mixed with them, buying a few rounds of drinks and telling an occasional joke. They seemed to think he was a great fellow. His feeling for them was not exactly contempt—although he knew they would have robbed him if they had a chance—but he found no remorse in taking them for forty dollars. It would have been more if the poolroom hadn’t closed at two in the morning.

  He figured his profit, after the drinks, at about thirty-two dollars. It would pay the rent; but he wasn’t worried about the rent.

  He was worried about at least a thousand dollars, which he needed very badly. He needed a thousand dollars so that he could get his little leather satchel out of the locker at the bus station and walk—no, take a taxicab—over to Bennington’s Billiard Room and play straight pool with Minnesota Fats. Not with Jackie French or George the Fairy, but with Minnesota Fats, the fat man with the jerky chin, the little eyes, the rings, the ballet steps, the curly hair, and six thousand dollars of Eddie Felson’s money. And all of Eddie Felson’s pride.

  Eddie put his cue stick in the rack. As he left, the proprietor said, “Come back, mister,” but he did not reply to this. He figured that he would be back, however.

  He was not accustomed to staying up all night; but he had got his hours badly twisted. He would have to get the landlady at the hotel to wake him earlier next time; maybe in three or four days he could get on some kind of reasonable schedule. He could start hustling around the rooms at noon, try and get to bed by three in the morning.

  Also he would have to make some contacts, try finding ways of getting some bigger money; he would get nowhere by scuffling indefinitely. And once he got himself a reputation as a winner, in the circuit of local small poolrooms, winning even thirty or forty dollars would become hard to do. He could not go back to Bennington’s, not without capital. Probably no one there would play him anyway, no one except Fats. They had already seen him play his best stick, knew what he could make happen on a pool table. He was not certain yet what he had already done, in the fir
st, staggering game at Bennington’s—but, whatever it was, he would have to make money. And, not only that, he would have to find some action, some important, high-money action. That was something he needed, in many ways.

  For this night, now that the poolrooms were closed and there was nothing for him to do, he had already dimly formulated the framework of a plan involving something else that interested him: the girl. Thinking about her he had become aware of possibilities. He needed a girl, and he was beginning to feel that he needed this one.

  Putting the plan into effect required first that he go to his room, clean himself up and change his clothes. He did this, and also straightened the room a little, smoothing out the half-made bed and filing some miscellaneous things away in a drawer of the bureau. He liked a room to be neat, in order. Then, leaving the fifth, he went out, bought a pint of Scotch, and slipped this into the breast pocket of his sport coat. There was a mirror in the liquor store and he examined himself in it. He looked good—neat and quietly dressed. Unlike a good many gamblers, Eddie liked dark colors, and he was wearing a dark gray coat, gray slacks, and plain black shoes. The only thing about him that could have said “Hustler” was the gray silk sport shirt, buttoned at the neck. He did not like the idea of carrying a bottle in his pocket—incredibly, he had never carried a bottle into a poolroom in his life—and he adjusted its weight so that it could not be noticed.

  Outside it was becoming chilly. He walked briskly, with his hands in his pockets, until he came to the bus station. It was three o’clock. The lunchroom was roped off as before; there were two empty booths this time. The girl was not there. He sat down, ordered scrambled eggs and coffee. Immediately he began to feel foolish. What were the odds against the girl’s coming in? It was too long a long shot. Maybe he should go by her place; he knew where it was. But what would he do when he got there? He didn’t even know what apartment she lived in; and he didn’t think she would take it very well even if he did know which door to knock on. But waiting in the bus station on the off-odds chance that she might come in was a stupid gamble.

  But he didn’t leave. He ate his eggs, and when he finished ordered another cup of coffee. He began smoking a cigarette.

  At four-thirty he looked up and saw her coming in the door. She was wearing a heavy knit blue cardigan, with a big collar that came up to her ears. Her hands were jammed into her pockets; she looked sleepy. But one thing he noticed well; she was wearing more lipstick, and her hair was carefully combed. Somehow he felt nervous; she looked good.

  For a moment he felt a tinge of panic. She would sit somewhere else and he would be left feeling like a fool. But she didn’t. She came, limping over toward him, sat down, and said, “Hi.”

  “Hello,” he said, and then grinned. The grin, this time, was not part of the hustle. He felt it. “Waiting for a bus?”

  “That’s right,” she said, settling down into the seat, her hands still in her pockets as if she were badly chilled. “Leaves at six o’clock.”

  “Couldn’t sleep?” he said.

  “God no.” She was becoming more expansive. “Did you ever wake up in an empty apartment at 4 A.M. and hear a Greyhound bus shifting gears outside your windows? Were you ever so wide awake that you thought you could never sleep again? Until you got out of bed, and felt like you were going to pass out?”

  He grinned at her. “No.”

  She shrugged her shoulders. Then she said, “My name—you may not believe this—is Sarah.”

  “Eddie. What do you do for a living, Sarah?”

  She laughed lightly. “By trade, I drink. Also a student, at the university. Economics. Six hours a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays.”

  That did not seem right. “College student” to him meant convertibles and girls with glasses. Nor did he think of college people sitting alone at night in places like this one. They were supposed to come in groups, singing, drinking beer—things like that.

  “Why economics?” he said.

  She smiled. “Who knows? To get a Master’s degree maybe.”

  He wasn’t sure what a Master’s degree was; but it sounded impressive enough. The girl was obviously an egghead type, which was fine. He liked brains, and he admired people who read books. He had read a few himself. “You don’t look like a college girl,” he said.

  “Thanks. College girls at the university never do. We’re all emancipated types. Real emancipated.”

  “I don’t mean that—whatever it means—I mean you don’t look young enough.”

  “I’m not. I’m twenty-six. I had polio once, and missed five years of grade school.”

  Immediately he had an image of her as a little waxy girl on a poster, the kind of cardboard gimmick that sits by a collection jar on the counter of a poolroom, next to the razor blades.

  “You mean braces and crutches and wheel chairs; all that?” His voice was not being particularly sympathetic; merely interested. Seeing her that way was like a look into a strange world he had heard of but never seen, had hardly felt existed save on the posters in drugstores and poolrooms. And once he had seen a movie trailer, where they had turned on the lights and tried to hustle him for his pocket change. He remembered wondering if the sick little kids in the movie knew they were being put on the make when the man had come around to take their pictures.

  “Yes,” she said, “all that. And books.”

  She was quiet for a moment, and then she said, “Look, let’s have another cup of coffee. It’s still an hour until six.”

  There it was, his opening. He suddenly felt nervous again, and cursed himself silently for feeling that way. “It doesn’t have to be,” he said.

  She looked at him quizzically. Then she said, “I think I know what that means. Only I’m not going.”

  He tried to grin. “I didn’t expect you to. I’m meeting you halfway. I’ve got a pint of Scotch in my pocket.”

  Her voice immediately became cold. “And you want me just to step out in the alley, is that it?”

  “No,” he said. “Hell, no. You know better than that. Right here.”

  She looked at him a moment, then shrugged her shoulders noncommittally. “Can this be done?” she said. “Legally?”

  “I thought you were an old hand.” He slipped the bottle out of his pocket, under his coat, down to the seat beside him. “This is done all the time.” He grinned, “By the pros.” He began cutting at the top with his thumbnail.

  With the bottle open beside him and hidden by his coat, he told the waitress to bring them Cokes. Sarah made a wry face and, when the waitress was gone, said, “Scotch and Coca-Cola?”

  “Just wait,” he said. “We can beat that rap too.”

  When the Cokes came, in glasses, he told her to drink hers. “I detest Coca-Cola,” she said.

  “Drink it,” he said. They drank them. Then he took her glass, empty except for the crushed ice, and asked her if she could drink it straight.

  “If I have to,” she said.

  He filled her glass almost full with Scotch, then poured a little water in it from her water glass. “Here,” he said, sliding it across the table to her. Then he began filling his own.

  He had done this kind of thing before, with a gang from the poolroom; but it had always seemed a cheap thing to do—like the guffawing types who turn up half pints in the back seats of cars and then go out and pinch girls on the ass. But here, with Sarah, it did not seem that way.

  At the first sip she grinned at him. “You’re a great man, Eddie,” she said. “You know how to beat the system.”

  They were working on their third one and the bottle was two-thirds empty when, abruptly, the waitress descended on them.

  Her voice was high and cracked; she looked and sounded as if they had delivered her a gross personal insult. “You can’t do that in here, mister.” As if she were the whole Greyhound Lines herself. “This isn’t that kind of place.”

  He looked up at her, trying to make his face serious and innocent. “How’s that?”

  “
I said you can’t sit in here and drink whiskey like you’re doing.” She peered at him nervously now. “I never saw the like.”

  “Okay,” he said, “I’m sorry.”

  The woman’s voice assumed a kind of wounded ferocity. “You’re gonna have to leave, mister. The both of you.” It struck him that she had a hillbilly twang. This was amusing. “Or I’m gonna have to call a policeman in.”

  He got up, finishing his drink. “Sure,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  They went outside and stood on the sidewalk in the weak light and the cold air. The bottle was back in his pocket and he felt mildly drunk and sleepy. “Well,” he said, “what next?”

  She was huddled up in her sweater, standing close to him. The wind that was blowing was not summery, but cold. “What time is it?” Her voice was soft.

  It was five-thirty, but he lied. “Five o’clock.” His mind worked fast. There were several ways he could play this; he was not certain which would be the best. Maybe a long shot…

  Gently, he slipped the bottle into her pocket. His hand brushed against hers, and he felt the brush of it all of the way to his stomach. “Look,” he said, “you better take this and go home to bed. You’ll catch cold out here.”

  She looked up at him. Her eyes were wide. Then she looked away. “Thanks,” she said, her voice very soft. She turned and began walking down the street, away from him. He watched her, watching the slight limp and the way her head was almost hidden by the big collar of her sweater. Her hands were still in her pockets, one now protectively over the bottle. Then, suddenly, she turned and began limping back, slowly. For a moment he felt as if he could not breathe.

  When she came up she stood in front of him, solid and small, and looked up at him steadily. Her feet were planted slightly apart. Her eyes were very earnest and they looked his face over carefully. Then she said, “You just won, Eddie. Come on.”

  9

  Her apartment was on the fourth floor; they had to walk up the stairs. They climbed them silently, and he said nothing when they went in, but seated himself on the sofa. She began taking off her sweater, and said, “I’ll get a couple of glasses.” She went into the kitchen. The blouse she was wearing was white, silky, and it clung loosely to her back.