The Lost Salt Gift of Blood by Alistair Macleod

Author:Alistair Macleod [Macleod, Alistair]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Literary, Fiction, Short Stories (Single Author), Cape Breton Island (N. S.), Cape Breton Island (N.S.), Short Stories
ISBN: 9780771099694
Publisher: New Canadian Library
Published: 1976-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

FIVE

The Golden Gift of Grey

AT MIDNIGHT he looked up at the neon Coca-Cola clock and realized with a taut emptiness that he had already stayed too late and perhaps was even now forever lost. He lowered his eyes and then quickly raised them again with the rather desperate hope that he might on a second try somehow catch the clock by surprise and find the hands somewhere else, at nine or ten perhaps, but it was no use. There they were, perfectly vertical, like a rigid arrow of accusation seeming to condemn by their very rigidity and righteousness everything in the world that was not so straight and stern as they themselves.

He felt sick at first and almost numb along his arms and down through his wrists and into his fingers, the way he had felt the time he had been knocked out in the high school football game. He moved his shoulders beneath his shirt in an attempt to shake off the chill and ran his tongue nervously over his lips and travelled his eyes then around the pool table to the men with the cue-sticks in their hands and to the stained black-brown wood that framed the table’s squareness. There were three quarters on the wood indicating that three challengers still remained. And he looked then at the soft, velvet green of the table itself, that held him, he thought, like a lotus land, and finally to the blackness of the eight-ball and the whiteness of the cue, good and evil he thought, paradoxically flowering here on the greenness of this plain. He was in his first real game, and it had somehow become a series of games, a marathon that had begun at eight when he had paused, books in hand at the doorway, and it had gone on and on, the night’s hours fleeing with the swiftness and unreality of a dream. The type of dream that holds you in a delicate tensile web, even while a certain part of you knows that you will not remember in the morning, and you do not quite know if the feeling is one of ecstasy or pain, or if the awakening is victory or defeat, or if you are forever saved or yet forever doomed.

And now a voice said, “Boy, you goen to wait all night? I ain’t got time.” And he moved with a jolt, out of the dream but in it, and said, “Side pocket,” indicating the direction with his head, and taking the cue he leaned over and across the table, raising his right leg and feeling his belt buckle press into his stomach, and the brown-black wood strong against his testicles and then the sensation of the smoothly polished wood running slickly through his fingers as he shot and then watched the gently nudged eight-ball roll softly and silently across the field of green until it vanished quietly before his eyes, and he could hear it then, changing and rolling noisily now somewhere beneath and within the table on its clattering way to join its predecessors in an underworld of dark.

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