Bank the 8

The town of Curly had a single billboard, a faded, wind-wavering sign welcoming motorists to the Sandhills town of two hundred and forty-seven residents. There had been a complementary billboard on the opposite edge of town, but a twister had churned through decades ago, obliterating the sign.

Twenty-two-year-old Grant Thomas slowed his rental car and squinted at the lone remaining billboard. The outsized words “Welcome to Curly!” were faded, but the underlying cursive was dark against the late afternoon sun.

Bank the 8!

Pondering that curious tagline, Grant fingered a letter on the suitcase next to him and steered the car past a kitschy but charming tourist trap of wooden cowboys and stagecoaches. He found a brick house on a corner lot and double-checked the address written on the back of a gas receipt.

Grant pulled into the driveway, and a screen door popped open before Grant switched off the engine. A silhouette filled the doorway like a man who had stories to tell and the scars to prove them.

Grant got out and stepped onto the driveway where every crack was carefully caulked. “Mr. Arthur McPherson?”

The silhouette stepped into the sun and became an old man, wrinkled but not weak, a raisin proud to have once been a grape.

“Nobody your age uses the term ‘mister’ anymore.” The old man ignored the railing and labored down the steps sideways. “And neither do I. Call me Arthur.”

“I’m Grant Thomas…Juliana’s boy.”

The younger man allowed himself to be contemplated by the elder.

“Is she dead?”

“Is she…no, she’s not dead.” The question confounded Grant. “Why would you think that?”

Arthur shuffled around Grant’s vehicle, pointing to the plates. “Rental car. Driven by the son of the only grandchild never to have returned home. Seemed like a reasonable guess.”

“She’s alive.”

“So why are you here, then? The letter?”

Grant nodded.

“Come on in.”

* * * *

The house looked like an interrupted burglary. The TV was missing from the living room, along with an armchair and end table. Blank walls with picture-sized squares of lighter paint greeted Grant as he surveyed his great-grandfather’s house for the first time. He looked over at Arthur.

“Are you dying?”

“Why, because I'm old?”

“No, because it looks like you're giving away all your stuff. And you sent a letter to everyone in the family, asking them to come and take whatever they want from your house. Seems like dying behavior to me.”

“I'm not dying. Just old. Ninety if I can make it until next January.”

“Why’re you giving everything away, then?”

“Why didn’t your mother ever come back?” There was a sincere curiosity in the old man’s eyes, absent anger or judgment. “I understand leaving at the first chance, but not returning?”

Grant was bothered and intrigued that they shared the same gray eyes. “Getting pregnant at sixteen by the sheriff’s son isn’t exactly a chance–I don’t think her leaving was an escape so much as an exile.”

“Does she know I talked to her dad? His dad? About them staying with me?”

“I don’t think I’d be here if you hadn’t.”

Arthur looked around the room. ”What could you want from a home you’ve never seen?”

“Not me, my mom. She sent me for the pool cue.”

“The SouthWest?”

“Mom said to tell you, ‘Is there any other?’”

“I didn’t know she still played.”

“She doesn’t. But she said you taught her.”

“I taught ‘em all, but she was the only one who ever listened.” Arthur placed a hand on the dining room table to steady himself as he walked towards a bedroom. “Four kids and six grandchildren. All gone now.”

Suddenly alone, Grant was overwhelmed by the silence of a house with nearly a hundred years of a single family’s memories. The house was worn, though not from misuse, only use: the carpet stains of ten thousand suppers, indented drywall from indoor baseball prohibited but played anyway, screens worn threadbare from Indian summer wind, rows of coat hooks once never enough and now sadly excessive, scratched hardwood floors from roller skates and dog nails and high heels on date nights, walls pocked with abandoned nails and hooks that once hoisted proud test scores and report cards and drawings and photos, every square inch a proud declaration of achievement and family.

“I forgot, it’s not here.” Arthur returned and sat down at the table.

“It’s not? Then where is it?”

“Here in town, I think. Can you drive us somewhere?”

* * * *

Curly's main drag rippled with the horizon, and Arthur caught Grant's eyes fixated on the undulating landscape as he drove into the sunset.

“First time in the Sandhills?”

“First time outside of Oregon.”

“What do you think?”

Grant could not believe how the vista kept sprawling, running, opening, turning. “It reminds me of a line from a poem that my mom said she wrote in school: ‘Everywhere I look, I must stare.’ ”

“Strange words from someone never comes home.”

“Mom said she appreciated the landscape, but the openness bothered her, made her feel vulnerable. So she moved up into the mountains, the forests.”

“What about you? Forest or prairie?”

“Not sure yet.” Grant had not prepared to be ensnared by the vastness. “But this feels…comfortable.”

“Tell your mom that when you get back. What's she doing these days?”

“She's an artist. Sculptures mainly, but some paintings, too.”

Arthur grimaced.

“That can't pay much.”

“That’s why she only does it after work. She's a welder by day, sculptor by night.”

“What about you? What do you do?”

“Welder, too. And an electrician. Two years at the community college. She paid for all of it. That’s probably why she never came home–no money.”

As they drove, Grant thought of the billboard.

“Hey, what does ‘Bank the 8’ mean?”

Arthur grunted. “You came all the way from Oregon for a pool cue, and you don't know what ‘Bank the 8’ means?”

“No idea.”

“House rules for winning the game. It means either the cue ball or the 8-ball has to touch one side of the table before the 8-ball drops in a pocket.”

“Why not just play it straight?”

Arthur pointed to a brown and yellow building next to the tourist trap Grant passed on his way into town. “Pull in there.”

* * * *

Friendship and fury met every Friday night at the Lodge, the local tank for the meanest pool sharks in the tri-county area. Good-natured hollering greeted Grant as he held the door for Arthur, who acknowledged a few folks with a half-wave and headed straight to the bar.

“Where’s Blaine?” Arthur looked past the bartender.

“Out calving.” The bartender tapped a photo of a burly man hefting a Hereford calf. “I’m filling in for the next few weeks. What can I get you boys?”

Arthur pointed to a display case above the pool table. “Just my cue.”

The bartender’s broad smile matched his massive shoulders. “Well, now, you must be Arthur McPherson.” He reached his hand across the bar. “Keith Kimball. And I’d be happy to get that down for you, but you gotta agree to a wager first.”

“A wager? For my own pool cue?”

Keith pushed a couple of quarters across the bar. “One game. You win, I get the cue down and you can leave. But if I win, you have to stay and play the lot of us.”

Arthur smiled at the low and rising ooooh resonating from the nearby barflies.

“And what if I run the table?”

“Big talk from someone who hasn’t won the county tournament in two decades,” Keith kidded him, nodding to the wall. Grant saw a plaque with gold plates listing past champions. He counted fifteen for Arthur, but the most recent two belonged to Keith.

“Rack ‘em, young man.” Arthur drew a pool stick from the wall and gently twisted it, sighting it for any curving.

“Don't bother, they're all warped.” Keith racked the balls and stepped back.

Arthur shuffled around the table, leaned over, paused, and the decades fell away like phoenix ash. Arthur’s wrist snapped forward like a rattler, smashing open the rack and expelling two balls into opposite pockets. His second shot sent the 2-ball to the corner pocket, his third shot spun the 5-ball off the worn green felt and into the left side pocket. Shot number four was majestic, tapping home the 1-ball before spinning madly and nudging the 3-ball in the opposite corner. The edge of the 6-ball was barely showing, but it was enough to bump and roll it the length of the table, clacking on top of the already pocketed 7-ball.

Which just left the 8-ball. However, as Grant watched his great-grandfather crouch, he suddenly realized the old man wasn’t going to bank the eight. He was going to play it straight. Stunned, he watched Arthur fire the cue ball forward…only for Keith to snatch it off the table and plunk it down in its original position.

Keith gripped his stick and leaned back against the wall. “I’ll let you do a lot of things on this table, Mr. McPherson. You can beat me, even cheat me. But I’ll be damned if you end the game without banking the 8.”

Arthur exhaled, a sigh equal parts relief and gratitude. He leaned forward again, but his bank shot missed.

Keith assumed the table, running the striped balls into pockets until he, too, was left with the eight. But his bank missed as well.

Back and forth went the two men with their strange task, complicating an already complex game of geometry and physics. And then, Arthur’s three-bank wondershot toured the table and found relief in the final corner pocket. A cheer went up and the cue came down.

Amidst the clamoring, Grant turned to Keith. “Why do you guys bank the 8-ball? It just prolongs the game.”

Keith glanced over as if he’d blasphemed. “Exactly. Where’re you from, boy?”

Arthur tapped Grant on the shoulder, pressing the cue into his hand. “Your inheritance. And Juliana’s.” He squeezed his arm. “I don’t mind that she left. Or anyone else. I just want them to carry some part of this town with them. That’s why I wrote the letter.”

He turned to the bar. “Drinks are on Keith,” he announced, and the Lodge erupted.

Grant caught the laughing bartender before he went behind the counter. “Hey, can I use your phone quick?”

* * * *

Grant dialed and a woman picked up immediately.

“Hello, long-lost area code,” she answered. “That you, Grant?”

“Yep.”

“Figured. It’s not Grandpa’s number, so you must be somewhere else. The Lodge?”

“You got it, Mom.”

“You get the cue? And did you ask him what ‘Bank the 8’ means?”

Grant wanted to sound stern, even angry, but he laughed. “You didn’t send me out here for the cue, did you, Mom?”

Sunshine poured through the phone. “No, Grant, I did not.”

“Why not just tell me then, you know, suggest it?”

“Because you’re my son and I know that neither of us takes suggestions. We have to discover it on our own, pretend we figured it out without anybody’s help.”

Grant observed Arthur reclining in a chair, watching the next game.

“How’d you know?”

“Because you look at the forest the same way I used to look at the Sandhills. It’s beautiful, but you know something’s not right, that no matter the view or the weather, you just feel slightly out of place.”

“Do I really seem that out of place out there?”

“Well, tell me this: how’s the change of scenery treating you? How do you feel?”

Grant looked past the pool table, past the bar, through the front window, past the billboard, and fell into the abundance of the horizon, feeling an opening, a stirring, a reckoning.

“At rest.”

His mother laughed lightly.

“Well, then,” she said. “Welcome home, Grant.”