There was a one-legged pool hustler named The Pharaoh who used to eat his dinner every day at four o’clock in a diner under the el tracks on Blackhawk Avenue called The Pantry. The neighborhood kids didn’t know his real name, he just went by The Pharaoh because he said he came from Cairo, the tail of Little Egypt between the Mississippi and Ohio rivers.
“It’s the asshole of Illinois,” The Pharaoh told Roy and his friends, none of whom had ever been there.
“My mother had a cousin named Phil Webster was murdered in a bar in Paducah,” said Ralph McGirr. “That’s near there, ain’t it?”
“Paducah’s in Kentucky,” The Viper said, “across the Ohio. It’s pretty close.”
The Pharaoh said nothing, just finished his meatloaf and mashed potatoes and dug into a slice of blueberry pie. The boys sat on stools in The Pantry or stood around, waiting for The Pharaoh to be done with his meal so that they could follow him down the street to Lucky’s El Paso and watch him shoot pool. The El Paso was an old poolhall that had been closed down for years until Lucky Schmidt took it over. He renamed it Lucky’s but everybody around there still called it the El Paso, so he changed it to Lucky’s El Paso to pacify the old-timers. The Pharaoh didn’t care what the place was called as long as it had a five by ten foot table to play one-pocket on. The Pharaoh always dressed the same: he wore a red and black checkered flannel shirt buttoned up to the neck and dark gray trousers held up by black suspenders. Once Roy had seen what looked like part of a thick blue scar below The Pharaoh’s Adam’s apple; Roy guessed that was why he kept his shirt buttoned to the top.
After The Pharaoh had polished off the pie, he propped himself up on his crutches and swung out of The Pantry. Jimmy Boyle held open the door and The Pharaoh turned right, followed by six boys aged twelve to fifteen. He didn’t wear a coat. Nobody knew exactly how old The Pharaoh was or how he lost his left leg. Roy figured The Pharaoh was around forty or fifty years old because his curly brown hair was thinning and his forehead and cheeks were pretty wrinkled. The Viper said he’d heard Lucky ask The Pharaoh about how his leg went missing. This was while The Pharaoh was sitting down waiting for Ike the Kike to miss and without looking at Lucky The Pharaoh told him maybe someday he’d tell him but first Lucky should go fuck himself and his sister. After that, said The Pharaoh, they could talk about it.
The Pharaoh did not use his crutches when he shot; he supported himself by balancing his weight between his right leg and the table. The boys closely studied every move The Pharaoh made. His practice routine never varied: he lined up four balls at one end of the felt, hit them one after the other only just hard enough off the rail so that they came back to exactly the same spot at which he’d placed them. The Pharaoh did this three times with each ball unfailingly, then he was ready to play. Roy and his friends tried to emulate The Pharaoh’s warm-up but none of them could do it right more than once or twice. The only advice The Pharaoh would offer anyone was to tell them to tap the ball as if they were kissing their dead mother in her coffin.
The Pharaoh preferred one-pocket but occasionally indulged someone at nine ball. He never played straight pool, which he said was for stiffs. “If I’d bought into boredom,” he told Roy, “I’d have stayed in school.”
The only time Roy ever saw The Pharaoh lose was the last time he saw him, on a February night when he and The Viper went together to Lucky’s El Paso. The boys came in out of the beginning of a blizzard around nine o’clock and saw a very tall, skinny guy bent low over the match table, the one Lucky kept covered even when the place was full of customers. The other tables he sometimes let bums sleep on after closing but not this one. There were about fifteen men sitting or standing in close proximity to the match table, watching this tower of bones beating the bejesus out of The Pharaoh at his own game. The Pharaoh sat perfectly still in the ratty red armchair he always used, his lone leg stretched out in front of him, an inch and a half of white cotton sock exposed between his trouser cuff and a beat up brown brogan. He was smoking an unfiltered Old Gold, staring at his imperturbable opponent.
The tall, skinny guy was about the same age as The Pharaoh but he was better dressed. He wore a dark blue blazer over an open-necked pale yellow shirt and chino pants. His few strands of black hair were greased back on his skull. Everything about him was long: his fingers, nose, even his eyelashes. Nobody spoke. Roy and The Viper stood and watched what were the final moments of the match, and when it was over the other witnesses to the slaying of The Pharaoh dropped their cash on the table and marched out of the poolhall into the storm.
The victor picked up his winnings, folded the bills into a thick roll, wrapped a blue rubber band around it and stuffed it into a pants pocket. Then he went over to The Pharaoh and said softly, but not so softly that Roy and The Viper could not hear the words, “You’re washed up in Chi, Freddie, and don’t never go back to Cairo, neither.”
The Pharaoh sat and let his Old Gold smolder while the thin man unscrewed his cue, packed it into his case, pulled on a shabby beige trenchcoat, shook loose a Chesterfield from its pack to his lips, lit it, and without looking back at The Pharaoh left the El Paso. Lucky was sweeping up butts and putting the folding chairs away. He did not speak to The Pharaoh, nor did the boys, though they stood and waited for him. Roy thought maybe he’d need help walking in the snow.
After a half hour, The Viper elbowed Roy and they headed for the door. Before facing the blizzard Roy stopped and glanced over at The Pharaoh.
“Come on,” said The Viper, “I’m hungry. Let’s get some Chinks.”
“Think he can make it to his crib?” Roy asked. “Where do you think he’ll go?”
“I don’t know,” said The Viper, “but it probably won’t be Little Egypt.”