Ninety-One Back on a Hundred — Machine 41, Third Row

Oh — come up, come up, it's fine, the doors aren't till ten but the stairs are open because Endō props them for the delivery. Mind the crate, I'm on the crate. Machine forty-one. It's been paying ninety-one back on a hundred for eleven days and the house figure is eighty-seven, and eighty-seven is what it's supposed to sit at, so somewhere in those nails there are four balls a hundred going out the door that shouldn't be, and the shutters go up at ten.

Ninety-one on a hundred against eighty-seven. That's four. At the rate the two men who play forty-one actually fire — and they fire fast, the one with the flat cap fires very fast, he's here at ten past ten and he's here at four — four a hundred is about a hundred and forty balls an hour off us. Write that down: a hundred and forty an hour. I've written it on my sheet twice already because I keep wanting it to be a smaller number.

The notebook isn't mine. It's Tsuchiya's. He did the nails here nine years and left in June to go and work for his wife's brother in Toyohashi, doing something with lorry parts, and he left the notebook in the drawer under the change counter and nobody's asked for it. I can read his hand fine except the numbers with a stroke through them, those I can't read at all, and there's a stroke through about one figure in six.

Right — the thing about a payout percentage, and I want to say this before Sekiguchi comes up, because he doesn't believe me: it isn't a setting. There's no dial. Nobody types eighty-seven into anything. Eighty-seven is the angle of two hundred and forty brass nails and nothing else on this earth. You want it at eighty-seven, you bend nails until it's at eighty-seven. That's the whole job. So when he says "just put it back to spec," there's no spec to put it back to, there's a field of nails and a count.

And you can't tell by looking. That's the honest bit. A ball coming off the rail is deterministic in principle, sure, it's a lump of steel and there's no magic, but every nail it grazes turns a difference the width of a hair into a difference the width of your thumb by two rows down, and by the time it's at the bottom your thumb is a lane. So the only way to know what a board does is fire several thousand balls at it and count them. That's what the figure on my sheet is doing right now — it's counting. Watch the spread narrow. It narrows and then it stops narrowing much and that's when you can believe it.

Eleven days is nothing, by the way. Eleven days on one machine is barely a number. I said that to Sekiguchi on Saturday and he said "it's four percent, Nishizuka," and I said four percent of eleven days is still eleven days, and he said the shutters go up at ten. Which they do. So here I am.

Now — Sekiguchi wants me to close the throat. The throat's those two nails sat right over the middle pocket, one either side, and if you tap them in a hair the pocket gets narrower and fewer balls drop and the figure comes down. And he wants that because you can see a closed throat. He can stand at the end of the aisle and go, right, something's been done. And I have told him three times now: closing a throat is the first thing anybody checks. It is the first thing. It's the first thing I'd check.

Look four rows up instead. Rail nails — the two either side of where the ball comes off the rail and enters the field. Those two decide how many balls even reach the interesting part of the board. You can tighten a whole machine on those and never lay a hammer on a single pocket. Tsuchiya's got them marked twenty-seven and twenty-eight and his little tick beside them, and that part of his map is right.

The map — that's it taped in the frame down the left there, the red ballpoint one. It's about thirty nails marked and numbered and the bottom two-thirds of it is correct and genuinely useful. Top three rows are laid out completely wrong, and eight, nine and twenty-two aren't on this machine. Never have been. He must have copied it off the row we sold to the place in Kanayama, they were a different board. Doesn't matter, I use the bottom.

Right, I've had a fire at it. Estimate's coming up around ninety and a bit — call it ninety point four, ninety point four — and the spread's still wide so don't hold me to it. No, I had that wrong. It's the launch scatter, I had the scatter too tight in my head, real hands don't draw the same twice. Ninety-one even, call it ninety-one, and the spread's about six tenths either side. That's much closer to what the floor count says, which is nice for once.

Oh, that's good. That's genuinely good — there's a nail four rows up, off centre left, sitting right where the traffic from the left lane and the traffic off the rail have to pick a side. A junction. Bend that one a fifth of a degree and it moves a third of a percent on its own. One tap. One tap instead of six, and six taps in the wood is six taps I don't have to spend. I'm pleased about that, I'll be honest with you.

Because taps are the cost. That's the thing nobody outside this floor knows. Every tap loosens the nail in the plywood a bit, and past about six the hole is enlarged and the nail starts moving on its own under ball impact, and then your machine drifts off figure inside a week and there is nothing you can do about it, ever, because you cannot un-enlarge a hole. That's why you work in as few taps as you can. Not because it's elegant. Because the wood remembers.

Bend a nail up and the ball bounces higher off it and carries further. Bend it down and you kill the bounce and it drops nearly straight. They're not opposites though — a ball's going slower up top than it is down at the bottom, so the same bend does two different things at two different heights. Up top you're steering. Down low you're stopping.

Have a flick yourself. Draw the lever — the amount you draw is the speed, it's continuous, there's no notches — and you'll find the flat cap man's draw eventually, about three-quarters, which is not luck. He's measuring. He's been measuring for two years. A board fair at full draw can be generous at three-quarters and he found the three-quarters.

And the balls aren't the same as each other either. Worn ball's lighter and rounder and runs faster and further than a fresh one. The tray's mixed — that's normal, stock gets mixed — so your identical shot isn't identical, ever. You can see it, the worn ones sit brighter.

Vacuum's still going in the back, that's Kubo doing under the fourth row, he does it in passes and I never know when he's going to come round. Tea's stone cold. Poured it at half eight.

Third time and then I'll shut up about it: ninety point eight. Ninety point eight. I was reading a stroked-through number in his notebook as a nine and it's a four, it's got to be a four, the rest of the column doesn't work otherwise. So the gap on the house is under four, not over, and if I can get the two rail nails and that junction nail — three taps, three — we're on figure and the wood's barely touched. That's the morning.

Sekiguchi will come up at half nine and want the throat closed. He will. And I'll say what I said the other three times: you can see a closed throat, that's the whole problem with it, it's the first thing anyone checks. Vacuum's stopped. He's moved to the fifth row.

Anyway — tap what you like, it's real, it stays. Nobody undoes nails.