The Billiardist

The Billiardist

  By Rodney Cimburke

  Copyright 2012 Rodney Cimburke

  The Billiardist

  “It’s always louder when it rains in the spring.”

  “What?”

  “I said it’s…oh, what’s the point.”

  “Sorry, the rain on all these leaves is thunderous isn’t it?”

  There were three benches intentionally shaped like giant Lincoln Logs—one long one, and two shorter ones—along the back wall. Through the raw hole of a window, Brynne could see all the way through the place to where Jarvis sat on one of the shorter benches, leaning on the jukebox. It was playing something from south of the border full of abrupt, inflectioned trumpets; the two women out on the smoking porch couldn’t hear it over the rain.

  “Damn, it’s loud,” Sasha said, flicking her cigarette out into the rain where it hissed black before it hit the ground. She followed Brynne’s eyes through the old plywood-colored interior of The Jamestown. “Oh shit,” she said.

  “Yeah, I wonder if he’ll know us,” Brynne said very softly.

  “Why are you whispering?” Sasha asked.

  ****

  Ross stepped to the bar. The place wasn’t as rowdy as he had feared, and there weren’t that many people in here at all; there were a few others at the small bar with him, two guys playing pool at one of the tables and a hunched man with curly black hair practicing bankshots on the other. There were those two girls smoking cigarettes on the little covered porch outside, the still one and the nervous-acting one who both fell quiet when he and Marcel had walked by. Ross could see the still one—the cuter one—standing by the glassless window looking in; at first he thought she was looking at him, but she wasn’t. To his right, an older man was passed out against the jukebox.

  A door banged and Marcel stepped from the gloomy nook where the bathrooms were, his lips pulled down in a sort of amusing disgust.

  “What a shithole,” Marcel said, sliding up next to Ross. “The walls were stickier than the floor. Decent graffiti though. Funny.”

  “Why were you touching the walls?” Ross asked.

  The bartender had appeared, leaning with both palms on the bartop, eyebrows cocked like he was in a hurry.

  “I’ll have a Fat Tire,” Marcel said.

  Ross ordered a shot of Wild Turkey. As soon as the bartender had moved away, he said, “Remind me why we stopped here again?”

  “Yeah, sorry man,” Marcel answered. “This place used to be a lot more happenin’ back in the day.” He looked around. “The fucking Jamestown. I haven’t been here in a while, and I thought it’d be nice to stop out here and get a drink. I’m so sick of the bars in town, but if I’d known that it was like this now, I woulda kept on driving.”

  “It’s like being inside a giant toolshed.”

  Marcel looked around again, this time noting the random and mismatched clientele, “and full of tools apparently.”

  ****

  Yes this is the exact angle. I knew if I just lined it up a little further to the left of that one cigarette burn and Breathe and smooth and follow through. Visible blue powder at the cuestrike and a resistant dimpling of the rail cushion, beginning of that equilateral tangent and back to the near rail by my wrist, even less resistance. Soft now, slowed it approaches the sixball perched by the sidepocket eclipsed slightly by the nine just for the betterment of my game. Six inches away, slowing, still rolling over that goddamn crack in the slate and matching pock in the worn felt, coming out of it just beside the line it should still be on but maybe it helped. It lists imperceptibly really, I’m down at the level of the table under the inevitable stainedglass light so I see imperceptibility played on the kellygreen, some ashes lost under the points of the back corner the brush missed. Yes listing like I said, told by the blue dots on the cueball’s surface like the surface of some frozen moon they spin different than they were around their own pole, expanding and returning like the story of a quick Universe. An inch now half that. The ticking of contact is out-sounded by the jukebox and now it’s Mexican but I hear I hear again down at this level so the green backlights into my face, I hear it maybe due to listening for especially it alone. The shot falls and I split like a cell to immediately deride a great shot in practice countlessly muffed in games.

  ****

  Brynne and Sasha stepped through the door on their tiptoes almost, as if they were entering a room in which a baby slept that they’d been warned not to waken. Sasha closed the door behind them with hardly a snick of the latch.

  “Seriously. Why are we sneaking around again?” She asked.

  “Shhh!” Brynne hissed. “We might wake him up, and I’d just as soon not blow this chance because we spook him, k?”

  “Brynne. He’s passed out on a jukebox; I don’t think he heard us come in.”

  They slid into an open booth where they could keep their eyes on him.

  Sasha looked up when the bathroom door clapped and saw one of the travelers rise up to the bar beside the other one, frowning. They ordered drinks and she watched them. Brynne never looked away from where Jarvis was slumped.

  “Well, well. They’re both pretty cute, huh? Those travelling boys that came in a while ago.”

  “It’s The Jamestown Hun, of course they’re cute. Compared to these sorry regulars, how could even the ugliest person not seem so?”

  “Ooh, the shorter one just knocked back a shot of whiskey. He must be the dangerous one of the two. Yeah, no chaser for you, you bad boy. I want to go over there.”

  “No way, they’re right next to Jarvis, too close, too close.”

  “Oh Jesus. How many times will those two walk in here? I’ll bet they’ll never be back. Hell, I know I wouldn’t if–”

  “Goddamn stop thinking with your pussy for once. This is serious.”

  “Tch. Serious, shit. I’ll give it a few more minutes, but then I’m going over, fuck this surveillance crap.”

  ****

  “I think she means to come over here,” Marcel said.

  “Why don’t you just go over there.” Ross returned, disinterested.

  The attitudes of the two women when they walked inside from smoking seemed to be reversed. The still one—the cuter one—was acting really cagy now; she had moved very carefully across the warped floor, never taking her eyes off of the old drunk passed out on the juke. Ross had looked at him and back at her a couple of times. The other one, a little taller and dressed more slutty, seemed to be the calm one now. She had leaned and said something to the used-to-be calm one and they moved to an empty booth by the door.

  “Well,” Marcel said, “looks like the blonde only has eyes for the drunk there. But the other one, oh boy, she’s interested.

  Their drinks came.

  Ross knocked back the bourbon and grimaced like most everyone always does. He looked for the bartender, but didn’t see him.

  “Man, I can’t believe this place now,” Marcel said looking around. There were cobwebs looped in the high ceiling built up to the gauge of yarn from the constant dust.

  “How did it used to be? To be honest, I can’t see a place like this ever being much different than this here.”

  “Shit man, you’re just used to those college bars in town. This place…this place, and places like it were fucking establishments. But not now. Now it’s all overpriced drinks in some cramped piece of shit place. Drunk chicks and frat boys playing Jenga. Fucking sickening really, what’s become of bars these days.”

  “Wow. Arguing the merits of a bar,” Ross looked around himself, “this bar at that.”

  “Dude, you just don’t know.” Marcel shook his head with actual grief.

  They sat quiet for a few minutes.
The bartender finally reappeared looking as impatient as ever and Ross ordered a pint of Drifter; Marcel had another Fat Tire.

  They both swiveled out toward the vast, wasted room and the taller, now-calmer girl was halfway across the floor to them.

  ****

  I really want to go to go home and rest away from the night lying long between here and there. Fulltable bank before I can even surmise the inside of my car. Then home, where I will evidently continue to not be able to finish this story. In the window flashes smooth the neon Heineken sign; some places in the flyspecked tubing are dark and sizzling where the green gas has failed—not the same green at all as the table, the bank I have to make a going-away gift for me and the table, the green felt not like the sign in the window. Slide slide and Breathe and smooth and follow through. The largest triangle possible, and all that real estate: here there here and drop, bow to no one in particular, but just the same it’s part of it. Velvet case, insides scalloped with unintentional fingerswoops that mark one way and erase only in the exact opposite like bankshots more often than not, two piece cuestick perfect fitting under and over, the stick goes dark and latch latch. One two three steps to the main level, and hair swirled at the back of a cream neck above shadowed shoulderpoints above screaming stretched fabric above bared midriff—a word from a clothing catalog—above a narrow gauze of shorts above the double terminus of legs tapering to rubytoed icepicks. Sasha. Oh, and look, there’s Brynne and at the bar, Marcel and Ross, and just to be sure, yes, Jarvis is here too. I don’t suppose I should expect them to leave me alone, I’ve only been trying to finish their story for two and a half weeks now, but there is something about them, their situation(s), which is altogether maddeningly unfinishable. They seem to think differently, the way they follow me, tormenting but indirect, like the fragments of real imaginary beings that they are. Yes, “Finish us, Finish us!” They always say, but they won’t tell me how or even why and that is the most frustrating part. I expect they’ll finish themselves, but how could they? Sasha just clears my trajectory, the path worn like a dog would see a color where there is none: door to table back to door, same road two-way, a different bathroom circuit a whole other dog color. At the door, sudden quiet when it doesn’t seem like it should be, or maybe it only just wasn’t. I know that they are looking at me, calling me coward, calling me stupid for not being able to type that final mark of punctuation that will allow them to all rest. Even the minor characters in the bar think this at my back. The night sucked and telescoping from the door dislodged, parkinglot dripping and squiggled over from the not-pool-table-green of the Heineken sign. My car waits.

  And like always it stops right there: the music, the rain, the people—characters that mean nothing and everything, their hopes and whatnots, dreaming that they fall asleep and dream each other, and I’m stuck dreaming them all without conclusion. I practice banks and doublebanks and to be honest downright unparalleled feats of 2-D trigonometry thinking that I will think.

  At the track earlier Brynne and Sasha stretched like cats with double sportsbra cleavage aimed at Ross and Marcel where they ran the bleachers for warm-ups, and Jarvis the groundskeeper fast asleep in a folding chair against the equipment shed, his head unbelievably resting on a blaring radio. After that, at the convenience store, the girls by the chips and the guys getting fountain drinks, Sasha and Marcel eye gaming over neglected shelves of lighter fluid and cheap playing cards, and Brynne staring at Jarvis the clerk who is completely blottoed with inappropriate employed sleep, his head between earbuds that even she can hear, and her intent on figuring out how I think she knows him or what circumstance would eventually connect them should I be able to finish all the reasons.

  So no, not even a little surprised that all five of them pause in my dark house like grouped stars that have never been closer to constellatory, but unfinished statues they still remain, and they remain still, unable to move past the last circumstance I wrote them into.

  Laptop open and tired hum of unfinished stories in the lower classes of hard drive, wondering why finished pieces—and this especially so with edited versions—have it so good, and Ross and Marcel, and screenglow, and Brynne and Sasha, and the fragmented scroll of pages they all so depend upon me figuring out for them, and the mysterious Jarvis sleeping in the other room using the bleating alarm clock as a pillow, and Breathe and smooth and follow through.

  ###