Allegiance and Betrayal: Stories

Against Losing

29 Against Losing “Know why you lost?” I said, “Yeah, you’re a better shooter.” Uncle Jarek, leaning his brass-jointed cue stick against the bar, laughed and hit me with one of his patented expressions: “Don’t lose you!” He tightened the turquoise bola at his throat, then reached for the VO and milk he claimed was easier on his ulcer. I said, “Try me again.” He looked at the inside of his wrist, the black watch face with gold roman numerals. “I’ve got to close up.” He winked. “Can’t keep a lady waiting.” We were in the basement of the Falcon Club, a white clapboard barn of a building with an upstairs hall for the occasional Grange dance or wedding reception. Uncle Jarek held the liquor license for this cellar tavern with its beery odors, low ceiling, and shadowy booths. Years ago, after his heart attack, he moved in with us, and my mother took care of him, saw that the doctor’s instructions were followed to the letter. I was still in grammar school. Uncle Jarek continued to live with us after his recovery but finally left when drinking and gambling came back into the picture. Dad didn’t get angry and didn’t give him the boot; he simply said more than once that he couldn’t understand why an otherwise intelligent adult would want to drink and throw away hard-earned money on pool and poker, especially after Nature had delivered a final warning. 30 | Allegiance and Betrayal Twice my father had gotten him jobs with benefits and security, and twice Uncle Jarek had blown it. Something about the Falcon Club attracted me, maybe its radical difference, or just a fascination with my black-sheep uncle. I had always enjoyed the twenty-five-mile drive into farm country where my father and uncle were born and raised. Every visit to the club was something new. When I was eight or nine, in some other tavern, Uncle stood me on a soda crate so that I could reach the table rails and taught me how to hold and stroke a cue stick. In high school, I shot a pretty good game and felt important in front of club members, many of them farmers in jeans, coveralls, baseball caps. Uncle also taught me fundamentals of the hustle that put a few bucks in my pocket at the college dorm, and a few carefully selected pool halls. “Fred’s boy,” Uncle Jarek would say to Vlasik, Bizewski, Woodchuck, or anyone who knew my father from the old days. “Smart kid—he’s going to college, studies philosophy.” This praise was genuine, but the word philosophy in the Falcon Club was a kiss of death and probably made me redden. It also made me feel guilty about emerging tastes in clothes and food my mother had noticed and teased me about. But club members didn’t notice, or let on that they did. They would buy me beers—even though I wasn’t legal—and ask how my father was doing. “You lost,” said Uncle Jarek, “because you don’t plan. You make shots hard as Chinese arithmetic, but the idea is not to have to make bank shots or combinations. Simple is best. You gotta see the whole picture and think ahead. You don’t—that’s the problem. It’s all about seein’, not just lookin’.” He walked to the table, took two balls from the return tray—the red 5 and the blue 2—placed them kissing at midtable, and aimed toward the left-hand pocket, though clearly off center. “Think you can make the deuce?” “Sure,” I said, cutting it at a wicked angle to compensate. To my surprise, the 2 went farther from the pocket than I could have imagined. Uncle Jarek laughed. “Whatta they teach you in college?” “Good question.” Against Losing | 31 “Physics,” he said, resetting the same off-center combination that had cost me the game. “The trick is to hit the first ball like you wanted the shot to go in the opposite direction. You put reverse english on the ball. Watch.” I watched. Uncle talked. I listened and took in everything: the constant white Stetson, wire glasses (“cheaters,” he called them), a purple vein in the wing of his nose, the pencil mustache, pearl buttons, black boots, and a blue cue-chalk smudge on his...