“I … Oh, look! There’s one.”
I guessed Gem was one of those folks who think the food’s better in a roadhouse.
The joint had a long bar, bunch of square wooden tables scattered around, a couple of red vinyl booths, sawdust on the floor. But it was no honky-tonk—that was Garth Brooks coming out of the jukebox, not Delbert McClinton.
It did have a pool table; one of those bar-size little ones with a slot for the quarters, designed for playing eight-ball and not much else. But that was fine with Gem—she said it looked just like the one in the bar near her home. Once I explained how eight-ball was played, she happily slammed balls all over—and occasionally off—the table, attracting some admiring glances, but no audio.
She finally pocketed the eight ball while I still had three stripes on the table, and rewarded herself with a brief “Hah!” of triumph. I was still congratulating her when a fat blond guy with a bad haircut and worse acne stepped up with a quarter in his hand, saying, “I got the winner.”
Before I could say anything, Gem swung her hip into me to shut me up, said “Okay!” to the blond guy.
He slotted his quarter, waited for the balls to drop, took them out, and racked them. “Your break,” he said to Gem.
“Oh, you go ahead,” she replied, nestling against me.
I didn’t move. Gem reached across her body with her right hand, grabbed my wrist, and pulled my arm around her neck. She turned her head until she found my hand, nibbled at it until she got my thumb in her mouth. Then she sucked on it, hard, her innocent eyes watching the blond guy.
He miscued, missing the entire rack. Somebody laughed. His face mottled red. Without waiting for a response from Gem, he snatched the cue ball, set it up again, and, this time, slammed it deep into the rack, scattering the balls. Two solids and one stripe dropped. He pocketed two more balls before he missed. Gem slowly disengaged her mouth from my thumb, walked over to the table with three times her normal wiggle, and bent over the table a long time, studying her shot. Which she finally dropped in. But that was it—she was done, not another shot was open. Grinning, she whacked away at the cue ball, turning away to walk back over to me while the balls were still flying.
“You made one!” one of the watchers advised her, pointing to the thirteen ball, which had slopped in off two cushions and a kiss.
“Thank you,” Gem said politely. Then she sashayed back over to the table, where she tried the same trick. Only this time, no such luck.
The blond guy shot carefully. He was strictly a barroom eight-ball player—good enough to win a few rounds of beers, but any decent pool hall with full-size tables would have picked him clean in an hour. He finished by dropping the eight ball in the corner, to a round of sarcastic applause from the people watching.
“You want to try?” he asked me, face flushing, averting his eyes from Gem’s lipstick-smeared mouth, gone back to working on my thumb.
“No thanks.”
Gem wiggled against me, making “Go ahead!” noises even though her mouth was full.
“Shut up,” I told her, smacking her bottom to underline the words.
Which only got a giggle added to the wiggle.
I raised my unencumbered hand in surrender. Gem let go of my thumb, giving it a last lick for luck. I put in a quarter, racked the balls for the blond guy the same way he had for Gem, stepped back to let him break.
He did a good job, pocketing one of each and leaving himself a nice open table. He only had two striped balls left when he finally missed.
“You gonna run out now?” he asked me.
“Sure.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Okay.”
“You wanna—?”
“Yes!” Gem interrupted, before he could finish his offer to bet.
He turned toward her. “How much?”
Gem’s face was a mask of concentration. Finally, she said, “Five?”
“You sure you want to go that deep?” he sneered at her.
“You are correct,” she answered. “Let us make it for two, all right?”
A couple of the men watching laughed.
The blond’s flush turned angry. “Hey, you think it’s such a lock, maybe you—”
“Oh, lighten up, Wally,” one of the watchers said.
He slapped two singles on the table. Looked over at me. Gem reached in my jacket pocket like it was her own, pulled out my roll, extracted a pair of hundreds, put them next to the blond’s money. As she did, she looked down, said “Oh! You meant two
That threw the watchers into convulsions. I moved quick to head things off. “Stop playing around,” I told Gem, snatching the two centuries off the table, replacing them with a pair of singles of my own.
“Hey, pal,” the blond snarled at me. “If you want to—”
I ignored him. Stepped to the table. The balls looked as big as grapefruits, the pockets as wide as bowling alleys. I made all the solid balls disappear in a couple of minutes, then closed with a tap-in on the eight.
