The Kid

Some young buck came in and threw down a hundred. The old boys smiled their gap-toothed smiles, someone whistled.

Johnny said he’d play the young’n. Johnny’d play anyone with cash in their pocket. The kid smiled.

It was early yet, and there was only a small crowd around—guys off work needing a beer and a couple old timers hunched on stools. The jukebox had conked out a week back. All you could hear was the sound of cues hitting balls, balls hitting balls.

The kid played well—real well. He cleaned the table on his second try after Johnny missed a long ball. If there was one thing Johnny really hated, it was leaning against the wall and watching someone sweep his table.

Some of the guys chuckled weakly. It’s hard to laugh too loud without a jukebox. The kid didn’t laugh.

“You gonna buy me a drink?” asked Johnny.

“Can’t.”

“Why not?”

The kid put both hundred-dollar bills in his pocket.

“Thanks for the game,” said the kid, who wasn’t quite old enough to buy conciliatory rounds.

He walked towards the door. Nobody tried to stop him, not even Johnny, who went fuming to the bar and bought his own drink.

It was a week before the kid came back.

“That’s the kid who took Johnny for a hundo.”

A couple regulars kept their eye on him as he walked to the back. Everything you think about shady pool halls is true. They’re shadier in the back, and the tables in the back are the gambling tables. There’s a black metal door in the corner, always slightly ajar, and you don’t go through it unless you’re invited.

The kid went to the back table, put down a small stack of bills and waited. He was just a young kid, real green looking—it wasn’t long before he got a taker.

“You the kid who whooped Johnny last week?”

“I don’t know any Johnny.”

A few people edged closer to get a better view. The kid racked it, and then he took it down. The poor slob whom he beat, a construction worker with a gut and a shaggy beard, was just as sorry as Johnny the week before.

“Again,” said the construction worker.

“Sorry, can’t.”

“What do you mean you can’t?”

“Thanks for the game.”

The kid left. The construction worker cursed a little storm, then calmed himself over a rum and Coke.

“Fix the fucking jukebox,” he informed the bartender.

The kid was back around again in a couple days. The regulars wouldn’t take any of his action. The shows he’d put on the last couple weeks were enough to warn them off. He had to wait for fresh blood to wander in, to walk through that easy-swinging front door. Eventually he’d get one.

“That kid’s doing pretty nicely for himself,” noticed Johnny.

“Yeah,” agreed the regulars.

The kid yoked some poor jerk out of a couple hundred bones. Some guy in a cheap suit with a loose tie, probably a salesman.

“Lemme get a shot at my money back.”

“Can’t, gotta go—”

“C’mon, kid.”

The kid hesitated; you could see the pause. If you didn’t have a lot to do, if you came to the pool hall everyday and watched the new kid like the regulars, then maybe you’d notice that look on his face, that momentary lapse where he actually thought about a rematch.

“Sorry. Thanks for the game though.”

After that the kid was in there pretty much every day. He knocked off strays—high school kids just turned eighteen, traveling salesmen, white collar zombies moonlighting as hustlers for a week before they learned the score, guys trying to impress their girlfriends.

“Hey kid, how much you pull in since you been coming here?” asked Johnny.

“I dunno,” grinned the kid, flashing a new gold-capped tooth which made him look older than he was.

Autumn was coming to a close. The weather had turned colder. The regulars dragged themselves in wearing overcoats with the collars turned up.

The kid was in there as usual. He was showing Johnny some bank shots. Johnny went to the bar and got drinks. Everyone was feeling good. The high school football team was going to states again.

The door swung open and wind gusted in, tossing dry leaves around the bar. A young upstart with a million-dollar smile came waltzing in.

“Anyone wanna play?”

“Yeah, I’ll play,” replied the kid.

The kid and the upstart, a man with tufts of combed-back blonde hair, settled at a table near the back. At first nobody paid them any mind. Everyone figured that the cheeky newcomer in his boots and pea coat was just another sucker, younger than most.

But then the upstart announced, “Great game, thanks,” and pocketed his winnings. So the kid had lost. People lose. The regulars scratched their heads. It was bound to happen sooner or later, they said.

“Again?” asked the upstart.

“Sure,” replied the kid, saying what nobody thought they’d ever hear him say.

They played again. The kid lost again.

“What happened, kid?” asked Johnny.

“I lost.”

They played several more times. It was ugly. The kid just couldn’t stop himself.

That night the kid sat down with the old timers at the bar. It was funny, he looked right at home there. He had a gin and tonic. Johnny bought it for him.

“You got ID, kid?” asked the bartender.

“Don’t be an asshole,” said Johnny.

The kid had his drinks. As the night wore on, the old timers rose, one by one, a silent steady stream ebbing away to nothing before the sun’s first rays touched the broken neon sign out front.

The last regular, an old gentleman with a beaten fedora, stood and put two dollars down. He put on his hat and went out. The air that blew in was icy. Winter had begun.

Two months later, all the regulars, the degenerates and hustlers, the loners and rejects were filling up the pool hall. It was the night before New Year’s Eve.

Johnny was drinking, laughing and playing Nine Ball. The regulars were enjoying themselves. With the jukebox working, there were even a couple girls there, shaking their bodies in the dim light to the beat of the Stones.

The upstart, that fresh-faced young’n who’d taken the kid for two grand in one night, hadn’t shown his mug again. People talked about him like he was a ghost, an ethereal legend who’d swooped in, robbed the local champ, and vanished like an Indian summer.

Nobody had seen the kid around for some time either, for that matter. He was staying away it seemed.

“Scared,” hypothesized one.

“Nursing his pride,” proposed another.

“Nah,” replied Johnny, “I seen him around, from time to time.”

It was about an hour later, the witching hour, when most of the tables were hosting games and the hall might be called lively for once. The door crept open and the kid appeared.

“Hey, kid,” called Johnny. “Long time no see. Care for a friendly match?”

“Nah, Johnny, I don’t play too much anymore,” said the kid, taking a seat at the bar.

A high school senior, tipsy on a fake ID, turned to the drunken regular holding a pool cue, messing with the jukebox, and—his curiosity piqued by the sight of a kid just a little older than himself—asked who that young man was with the gold tooth who’d come in and sat down with the old timers.

Johnny turned to him, saying, with just a touch of the dramatic, accentuated by the liquored edge of his voice, “he used to be the best—it’s a shame he gave it up.”

A few of the regulars nodded, looking down into the murk of their glasses against the darkness of the oaken bar, or towards that swinging door where the old and young alike came in and out, and nobody knew, each time, who it might be.