Freak Chance
He probably didn’t ride up on a horse, but then, nobody actually went outside to check. Usually when you got into Ralph’s you didn’t go out until you left, and you rarely remembered that.. Nobody had ever seen him before, and later, when his visit there had fossilized into legend, the accounts of his appearance—indeed the accounts of the event itself—would vary so wildly from one guy to the next, the whole business just went into the communal barrel of Ralph’s-stories, fodder for endless exegesis from then on.
But I got it from Dolan Krebs, who was there, and whose version would have been one of the more likely to approximate the truth.
So, all agreed the visitor had never been there before—that would have been instantaneously obvious to those guys—and never returned there after that night. He certainly wasn’t a Ralph’s kind of guy, but then he wasn’t like some clueless dork who didn’t know what he was walking into either. I mean, look at the outside of Ralph’s—potholed parking lot with not just weeds but little trees growing out of the cracks, a parabolic stain on the back wall leached by the farewell piss of countless drunks over countless years, a moldy, teetering satellite dish on the roof that hadn’t been functional in anyone’s memory—not exactly a fern bar. He was just an ordinary looking guy who had to at least suspect what he was walking into.
He got a beer, everybody still conscious enough to be staring at him, then went to the back and watched a couple of games of pool, then put his quarters on the side of the table. Brandt Gunner, who else?—racked them up and asked the guy if he wanted to play for five bucks. The guy agreed, lost—they played again, he won—the bet went to ten dollars and things started to get more serious. All this time these guys on the other table were arguing about some bullshit—Dolan didn’t remember what it was—but it was something, like always, that had come down to if something was true or not. Brandt had run out of patience listening to them and said, “Would yall please decide on something—things are either true or they’re not.”
“Not always,” said the visitor.
The billiard room, you could call it, got kind of quiet—not just because it was so unexpected, but because here was this guy nobody knew contradicting Brandt Gunner.
“Is that right?” said Brandt. “Like what, for example?”
“Well, any number of things,” the guy said.
It wasn’t just that he didn’t look like somebody who would be in Ralph’s—he didn’t sound like it. And things didn’t stop there.
“Certainty is very elusive,” he said.
“No shit?”
“No. Yes. When we reason inductively, we can only get high probability—never certainty.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Well, for example, if you come upon a fruit tree—say, plum—loaded with plums and you pick one and bite into it and it’s sour, and you go around to the other side and pick one from there and it’s sour too, and then you pick ten or twelve from all over the tree and they’re all sour, you would probably conclude, the plums on this tree are sour.”
“Who gives a shit?”
“But you wouldn’t know with certainty that the next plum you picked would be sour. In fact, you would have to pick and taste every single one before you could be certain.”
“I’m not seeing how this has anything to do with me.”
“Well—another example. If I strike that ten-ball with this cue ball, you would probably say the force would make the ten-ball move.”
“I probably would.”
“But how could you know with certainty that the opposite wouldn’t happen?”
“What opposite?”
“That the cue ball would come flying backwards and the ten-ball wouldn’t move.”
Brandt laughed. Dolan said you could tell he was starting to sort of enjoy this. “Yes. I would say that wouldn’t happen—with certainty.” He wiggled his hands, mocking the guy.
“I’m just saying, the only way you could know—with certainty—would be to stand here forever trying it. I mean, we say the ‘laws of physics,’ but maybe we just say it’s a law because we haven’t stood here and tried it a trillion times. It may be the case that one out of a trillion times there’s a deviation—which could be the key to understanding reality in an entirely new way.”
“You’re saying if I stood here and hit a trillion pool balls, one time the cue ball would be the one that moves?”
“No, I’m only saying there’s no way to know it wouldn’t happen unless you did. And of course that one time wouldn’t necessarily be the trillionth time, it could be any time—maybe the next time you try.”
“I’m saying that’s not possible.”
“Care to make a bet on it?”
Brandt looked around to see if anybody was listening, and laughed. “Friend, I’ll take that bet any day, any place. How much?”
“Well, the odds are with you,” the guy said, “so not much.”
“The odds are 100% with me, so I’ll take any bet.”
“Okay. A hundred dollars?”
Everybody was really paying attention now. They murmured and shifted around.
“You’re all listening to this shit, right? I got witnesses?” said Brandt.
You couldn’t have paid them to leave.
They cleared the table and put the ten ball in the center.
“You want to hit it, or you want me to?” said the guy.
“I’ll do it,” said Brandt. “I don’t trust you.”
And according to Dolan, here’s what happened. Brandt set the cue ball about a foot behind the ten-ball, leaned over and stroked. The cue ball hit the ten-ball and shot backwards, bouncing against the cushion. The ten-ball hadn’t moved.
Nobody breathed.
Brandt had a look on his face like Dolan had never seen before. He looked like he’d done something in his pants and wanted to take a swing at the guy with the cue stick at the same time. Then he leaned over and picked up the ten-ball and inspected it, and felt the table under it. “How’d you do that?” he said.
“Me?” said the guy. “I didn’t do anything—you did. It was just time, I guess. One in a trillion. I figured it was worth a try.”
“No way. It’s a trick. You rigged it somehow.”
“How? You saw it. It just happened,” said the guy. “And you took the bet fair and square. Everybody here heard it.”
Brandt looked around. Everybody just stared at him, waiting, and didn’t say anything. The guy stood there waiting too.
“I tell you what,” said Brandt, taking out his wallet. “I’m a man of my word, but if—make that when—I figure out how you stole my money, I’ll find you and kill you and kill your family.”
“I don’t have a family. And there’s no such thing as your or my money. There’s just money. It goes around from one person to another—it doesn’t belong to anybody—just like you can’t say you own the air you breathe. Same with money. You just try to help it get where it’s most needed. I happen to need it now because I’m broke and need food and shelter. Tomorrow I’ll be helping somebody myself.”
Brandt was more or less cornered, Dolan said. He couldn’t look little around his guys. He paid the guy, and said, “I think it would be a good idea if you got the hell out of here and never came back in here again.”
“I’m just passing through.”
“You’re some kind of bullshit con man.”
“I’m actually not. I’m just a mortal passing through this world like everybody else and I guess I’ll be on my way now.”
The rest is legend.
August 25, 2023