THREE BEAR

THREE BEAR

Caricature #049

Drawn 2015-07-12

      Mister Brown closed his pool hall for good one Friday night. He was ready to retire anyway. The good times would be gone forever.

      Mr. Brown and most of his patrons considered Snooker a professional sport and “regular pool” to be beneath them. Only amateurs played Rotation Pool and there weren’t very many who did so. Even they preferred Snooker.

      The lone Pool table was in the corner at the far end of the basement room and the farthest away from Mister Brown’s watchful eyes. If you had a good reputation with him, you could do almost anything you wanted as long as you behaved yourself. If you showed bad behavior, he’d be quick to ask you to leave or he’d call the police and have you escorted out.

      He didn’t care what game you played but every now and then he would walk the circuit to make sure everything was going all right. If he thought you were a risk, he would refuse to sell you beer or run you out altogether.

      One Friday night, three Indians came in to play Pool. I shall call them One Bear, Two Bear and Three Bear.

      The Bear brothers came in quietly and made their way to the Pool table. They didn’t ask to buy any beer and he wouldn’t have sold it to them if they had, since he didn’t know them. From the time they descended the stairs, they had been acting strangely. That kind of behavior never sat well with Mr. Brown, so he watched them rather closely.

      He would not have let them in the door if he’d known they were drunk. Still, no one thought they were up to anything out of the ordinary.

      The Bear Brothers played Rotation Pool. This game had fifteen numbered balls. The game requires that players hit a white cue ball with a cue stick into consecutively numbered balls beginning with ball number one and sink each one in six pockets evenly spaced around the rectangle table in numerical order. A ball can be sunk out of sequence as long as the lowest numbered ball on the table is hit by the cue ball first.

      “Three Bear, why do you always have to put the cue ball behind another ball so I don’t have a clear shot?” asked One Bear.

      Three Bear just shrugged his shoulders. They continued playing.

      “Leave One Bear an opening, ch-bon,” said Three Bear after he took his turn. Three Bear shrugged. Silence ensued for a few minutes.

      Three Bear took his turn and left One Bear with an almost impossible shot. One Bear shot the cue ball in a vain attempt to hit the next sequential ball. He not only couldn’t hit the ball he was supposed to but he also left Two Bear with a hard-to-hit ball. He was “snookered”.

      Two Bear went into a string of cursing invective that would make a sailor blush. One Bear joined him. Three Bear shrugged.

      The Brothers played another game or two, then Three Bear was told to sit down and let One Bear and Two Bear play by themselves. The game seemed to go well. One Bear and Two Bear kept muttering in low voices to each other so Three Bear couldn’t hear.

      Suddenly, One Bear and Two Bear were standing on each side of Three Bear. Without warning, both of them slid their cue sticks in their hand so that they were holding the slender end. They glanced at each other and began using the cue sticks like a club on the skull of Three Bear.

      It was like a scene from a bad movie. Mr. Brown called the police the instant it began. One Bear and Two Bear sat down and began laughing as if waiting for the police to arrest them.

      As they were being handcuffed and led away up the stairs one of the policemen asked them why they did it. “Ch-bonnije didn’t deserve to live.”

      Mr. Brown had had enough. He closed up shop that night, never to re-open. It was the end of an era.

      I didn’t know any of the Brothers but I cried when I found out. Three Bear’s friends had turned on him. I knew the feeling, having been through it emotionally several times. I felt angry at the other two brothers and sorry for Mr. Brown. I would have closed up shop too.

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      The wordmaster says:

      ❝Even though I didn’t know any of the three brothers, I identified with Three Bear. I’ve often felt as if it were me on the receiving end of a cue stick.❞