Dead and Gone

I’d expected the lack of depth perception to affect my game, but it didn’t seem to—the balls went where I wanted them to go.

We didn’t keep score.

One of the men on the next table strolled over, said to me, “You interested in playing for a little something?”

“No thanks.”

“Come on. Your girlfriend can watch you in action, what do you say?”

“No thanks.”

“My buddy and I, we’ve been watching you. Looks like you really know the game. I figured, maybe I could learn something, you know?”

“No thanks.”

“Hey, man. Is that all you know how to say?”

I let the prison yard come into my eyes, told him, “I can say, ‘Step the fuck off,’ pal. You like that better?”

But he’d been raised so far away from prison yards that he didn’t get it. His hand whitened around the pool cue he was holding. “You got a problem?” he challenged.

His buddy rolled up, stood behind the first guy’s right shoulder.

I guessed the fancy tables and the middle-class music didn’t mean so much after all.

“No problem,” I assured the guy with the pool cue. “In fact, we were just leaving.”

When I said “we,” I glanced over at where Gem was to make sure she understood. She was gone. I had a flame-tongue flicker of fear, but then I spotted her—standing off to the side of the two men, feet spread, knees slightly bent. And a clenched fist at her hip.

“You want to take this outside?” the guy with the cue asked, his voice more confident than his hands.

I stepped in close to him, the red three-ball I’d snatched from the table when they’d first closed in cupped in my fist. “No,” I said softly. “And neither do you.”

It took him a couple of heartbeats, but he finally matched the music to the lyrics. “Punk!” he sneered … as he was turning his back to walk away.

“What style?” I asked Gem in the car on the way back to the hotel.

“I do not understand.”

“Martial arts. What style do you study?”

“Me? I am no martial artist. Why would you think so?”

“Back there. When you made a fist. You put your thumb on top of your clenched fingers, not bent over the side, the way people usually do.”

“It is better that way?” she asked, innocently.

“The way you do it? Sure. You can feel the difference in the muscles of your forearm. And you won’t break your thumb when you strike that way, too.”

“So!”

“Are you trying to tell me you make a fist that way naturally?”

“No. It is true, someone showed me how to do that. But that is all they showed me. It was a long time ago. I was just a small child. I always did as my elders instructed me.”

“Didn’t … whoever showed you, didn’t they show you any more?”

“It was only that one night,” Gem said, nothing in her voice. “The next day, she was gone.”

I let it go. Some locks shouldn’t be picked.

“You can never slam the window closed,” she said later, in bed.

“When you try, it only opens wider.”

I lay there, wondering if it would ever be any different.

“It only opened a little this time, isn’t that true?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said, wondering how she knew.

“And then you tried to concentrate so hard on what you … what we were doing?”

“Yeah.”

“And that opened the window more, do you see?”

“Then how can I—?”

“This is something you cannot fight by fighting. By fighting, you invoke it.”

“Invoke it? It just popped—”

“No,” she whispered, as if telling me a deep secret. “You expect it. And your desire to battle it brings it forth.”

“What do I do, then? Surrender?”