Richard pushed through the bent screen door and let it slap
behind him. Instantly, smoke assaulted his eyes. The new fume hood, or exhaust
fan—whatever—only seemed to make it worse than usual, sucking smoke from thirty
or forty grad students’ Camels the length of the bar into a confluence over the
to-go refrigerator, where a stuffed polecat turned yellower in the eddy.
He ordered a sixty-five cent draft and looked the crowd
over. It was the regulars, mostly—an unhealthy combination of students in the
writing program, aspirers thereto, malingerers therefrom, middle-aged
functionaries, neighborhood punks, and the stray cellist, massage therapist, or
antique dealer. John the blind guy was on a stool under the polecat facing the
rear of the bar. Consuelo was back there, dismantling a newcomer at pocket
billiards.
As Richard sipped the top third off his watery beer, “Right
Down the Line” came on the juke box, and Consuelo sank seven in a row. She
hardly seemed to consider what she was doing as she shot, or what her next step
would be, but still, after each ball fell, there was another one
waiting—obvious, perfect, ripe for the plucking. As soon as she shot, she was
already moving around the table for the next one, as if drawn by a magnet.
She’d settle her gaze on an invisible point, take a practice stroke or two,
then barely flick her cue, and balls would collide and part and head for
pockets in a process as regular and elegant as a crystal growing under a
microscope. All in time to Garry Rafferty.
Consuelo’s opponent still had six balls on the table, and
when he saw they were blocking her shot on the eight he began to prepare
himself mentally for his comeback. But Consuelo gestured toward the pocket on
her own side of the table, then made an impossible bank through traffic.
Exactly as the eight fell, the song ended, and in the momentary silence Richard
heard the ball roll along the chute to its resting place. It reminded him, for
some reason, of a priest rushing through the catacombs, and he made a mental
note of it for his next poem. Consuelo looked up, smiled all around, shook
hands with her victim, and called the next name on the board.
Richard slid onto the stool next to John. “Hi, John,” he
said. “It’s Richard.”
John moved his chin in Richard’s direction. “Richard,” he
said. “I heard you order a minute ago.”
“She’s kicking their asses again.”
“So I gathered,” said John. He lifted his beer toward the
back of the bar and called, “Atta girl, Connie!” Richard clinked glasses with
him, and Consuelo turned around and smiled.
They sipped their sixty-five cent beers. Then Richard said,
“John, not to be rude, but what did you mean ‘so I gathered’ a minute
ago. Can you tell who’s playing by the sound of it?”
John smiled into the vague distance, as he always smiled. He
said, “I can hear their voices, Richard. With Connie, though, I’d probably be
able to tell just by the sound of the balls on the table. Click, click,
click—soft—like a string of pearls drawn from a box.”
Weird thing to say, Richard thought, and made a mental note.
He said, “How does she do it?”
“You know, I was wondering that myself. I asked her that.”
“And?”
“She has an unusual attitude about it. You probably won’t
believe me.”
“Tell me anyway.” Richard braced himself for another of
John’s you probably won’t believe this stories. They passed the time.
“I asked her how she got so good, and she said it isn’t a
matter of her being good, it’s a matter following the inherent pattern. She
said that when she first started to play pool, she saw it in terms of hitting
one ball into another so it would go into a pocket. After a while, the balls
disappeared, and she began to see just angles reflected endlessly in a mirror.”
“Well that makes enough sense.”
“But there’s more. She says that now, she doesn’t even look
for the angles because her senses get in the way. So she just kind of feels it.
She just taps in to the inherent pattern. The balls stop having any size or
shape at all. That’s the interesting thing. She says she doesn’t really look
with her eyes anymore, she just follows the natural pattern.”
Richard watched Consuelo sink a long combination. Her eyes
were definitely open. “No offense, John, but that sounds like a blind person’s
answer.”
“It does, doesn’t it?” John hid a smile with his beer.
“You don’t think I should consult a blind man about
billiards, do you?”
“Hmmm.” One of the punks came up on John’s other side and
asked him for a smoke. John didn’t have one.
Consuelo smiled again. She’d probably keep dismantling them
until she chose to stop. Meanwhile, Richard finished his sixty-five cent beer.
The last sip was as bad as the first. He counted his money and decided he would
only have four more.