He got there a little before eight and locked the door behind him for privacy. Mayhew’s supplies closet was at the end of the room facing the pinball machines; he got from it a brace with a fork bit, a hex wrench and a screwdriver.
In ten minutes he had the rails off number eight and was removing the old cloth, using the screwdriver to pry loose the staples that held it. When he was finished he folded the faded and worn fabric and put it in the trash. The three-piece slate underneath was a mess; he cleaned out the loose plaster and then picked the rails up from the floor and set them on it. By the time he had the feather strips pulled and the old cloth off the cushions, it was nine. He stopped working, turned on the rest of the lights and opened up. Three students were at the door, all of them in down coats, waiting to play the arcade machines. He got quarters for them from the cash register and went back to work, ignoring the dim electronic threats from the machines and the voices of the students.
You had to level the table itself first; if you did it after patching the slate, the patches would crack. He used the center slate for a benchmark, setting the level across it and then tapping a shingle under one of the table legs to bring the bubble to center. He switched the level to right angles, checked it and slipped in another shingle. It took several minutes to get it right, placing the level the long way, the short way, and diagonally, choosing between thick and thin shingles. Three black students came in to play nine-ball; he gave them the balls and the diamond-shaped nine-ball rack, ticketed their table for the time. The clock punched out 11:42 on the card. The lunchtime crowd would be in at about twelve-thirty; he would be too busy to finish the table. He hurried back to it, wanting to get the three pieces of slate leveled and patched before that happened.
It went pretty fast. It was years since he had done any of this, but he had forgotten none of it. There was something deeply satisfying about doing it and doing it right. Not many people knew how. Clearly, Mayhew—or whoever did it for him—did not. Eddie got the rest of the old plaster off the slates and leveled them, sliding playing cards between the big slabs of slate and the wooden joists that held them, raising one end and then the other by the thickness of two aces or a jack, until they were all three perfectly aligned. He sighted down each end of the table and then used the level. With a whiskbroom he swept the plaster dust away; he went back to the closet, took an empty coffee can and began mixing the dental plaster.
The joints of the slates were patched in twenty minutes, along with the countersink holes for the heavy screws that held the slates in place. By the time he was finished, the lunchtime crowd began to come in and he let the plaster dry while he marked time cards and handed out balls.
He had to stay behind the counter for the next hour and a half, keeping an eye on things, making change and taking in money. During a short break he clamped the tenon machine to the countertop; then he took a few cues that were in need of repair and began replacing their ferrules. The Elk Master tips would go on later. One cue was too warped to be worth the effort; he put it in the trash with the worn-out cloth from Table Eight.
At two the crowd slacked off abruptly, leaving for classes. It would be slow until three-thirty or so, when Mayhew came in. They would work together to handle the crowd until Eddie left at five. By two-thirty, a dozen cues had new white ferrules and leather tips. He went back to Table Eight and sanded down the plaster, using progressively finer paper, until the joints were silky and rock-hard. He checked the bed one final time with the level and then unrolled the Simonis cloth. At first he planned to save this one superb billiard cloth for last; now he had decided to start out with it. He had been saving it for several years, for a rainy day. His rainy days had come, and maybe gone. He got shears out and began to cut the strips for the six rails. It took him two hours to get the cloth cut, trimmed, pulled tightly over the rubber cushions and held in place with the feather strips. But the material was a pleasure to work with. It was virgin wool from Belgium—fine, smooth, tightly woven and a dazzlingly bright green. By four o’clock he had the rest of it cut, stretched across the slate table bed and fitted around the six pockets. He was kneeling beside the table putting in the last of the number-three tacks with the tack hammer when Mayhew came in.
Eddie had said to him several days before that he planned to work on the equipment; Mayhew had nodded curtly and muttered, “Go ahead.” Now he ignored Eddie and went behind the counter and turned the radio on, to his gospel show. Eddie gritted his teeth and spit the last of the tacks out onto the peen of the hammer. The show would go on two hours, with sanctimonious music, a sermon and letters. It was infuriating, but there was nothing to do about it except wait for spring, when Mayhew would leave for good, retiring from his twenty-year job of running this half-assed poolroom. After a few minutes, during a commercial for Preparation H, Mayhew walked back to the men’s room, passing Eddie but not looking at him. Eddie had the first rail in place and was fastening it to the slate bed with a hex wrench. When Mayhew came back a few minutes later, he stopped and looked over the freshly covered table. Eddie finished one of the rails and set the wrench down. “These Gold Crowns are solid,” he said. “Good slates and rails.”
Mayhew looked at him a moment. “There was a lot of wear left in that old cloth.”
They had all the pictures hung, but there were still Arabella’s books in boxes. They spent that evening putting them into the built-in bookcases in the dining room. “You haven’t said much about your job,” Arabella said.
“There’s not much to say about it.”
“How’s Mayhew?”
“I can stand him till spring.”
“Do you shoot any pool?”
“I don’t have the time. How do you like editing?”
She didn’t answer for a moment but worked on the books, getting them alphabetized onto the shelves. “I ought to read these Chekhov stories,” she said after a while. “I’ve had the books a dozen years. Editing an academic journal’s a bore.”
“Maybe you’ll find something better.”
“It isn’t likely.”
“What we need,” Eddie said, “is a drink.”
Arabella put the last of the Chekhov volumes neatly on their shelf, stood back and looked at them. “A drink,” she said, “and then a movie.”
During the next week, he covered Tables Six and Seven, using Peerless rubber-backed cloths this time. They were less elegant than the Simonis on Number Eight, but were durable and certainly better than what they replaced. The cloths had been sitting in a stack on the top shelf of Mayhew’s supply closet; Eddie saw them there on his first day. They were covered with a layer of dust.
After doing the tables he went to work in earnest on the rest of the cues, throwing out a half-dozen warped or split ones, re-tenoning some, putting new white plastic points and fresh tips on all of them, sanding and buffing the leather edges so they fit perfectly and would not bulge out in use. It was tough work, but it satisfied something in him that needed satisfaction. He had not worked this hard since the first month of owning his own poolroom.