Bowlaway

by Elizabeth McCracken

  In Salford’s Plocker Park—they’d arranged to meet by the frog pond; it was spring and the water boiled with spawn—Margaret walked right past him, despite the black suit she knew very well. What percentage of him had that beard been? For a moment he felt that peculiar combustion of uncertainty and nerve that is the engine of a fraud. He could keep on walking. Either he’d leave for Maine immediate, or he’d stick around Salford, incognito, peering through windows at his family from time to time. But no. There was her dear back. She was looking for him. He would not leave alone. It was possible after all to tell her things.

  “Meg,” he called.

  April in Salford is a tossed deck of cards, every day like the others and unlike them, too. Yesterday it had been sixty-five degrees; today it was brighter but twenty degrees colder. Nahum Truitt’s face felt interrogated by both the chill and the sun and now by his wife, who stared at him then seemed slapped.

  “Your beard!” she said. “Your beautiful beard! Nim!” Then, ominously: “You lost a bet.”

  He could never tell whether Nim was a nickname or a persistent misunderstanding. “I did not, missus, for heaven’s sake, how would I gamble my beard away?”

  She had set her basket down and doffed a glove to investigate his face, as though it still might be an optical illusion. “I don’t know. But you could do it. Did you keep it?”

  He caught up her hand. “It’s gone to the barber’s furnace,” he said, though he did not know if there was such a thing. What happened to shorn beards? Were they ghosts or corpses? “He were welcome to it.”

  “You lost a bet to the barber,” she said.

  “The barber is rich in beards, the barber can have any beard he likes. No,” he said. “This morning I awoke and I remembered what I once said to Joe Wear and I thought I wanted a good clean chin for a good clean start.”

  “Are you married to Joe Wear?” she asked.

  It were a marriage of sorts, thought Nahum. “Listen,” he said to her, but kindly. He had been surprised by many things in his life—the bodily cold of his baptism, seasickness when he’d planned to be a sailor, a poison-eyed demon ransacking his camp that turned out instead to be a particularly bumptious raccoon, a naked lady upon a beach who oscillated between beauty and rapaciousness—“Sir,” she’d said to him, “have you seen my Larry,” and he could not tell whether Larry was a child or a husband or some sort of terrible slang for something she was offering up, something he did not want but might should have accepted. He’d been surprised by hunger often, and by fatherhood, and by the invention of the motorcar and by seeing the name NAHUM TRUITT in the Orono Messenger—but nothing surprised him more than his particular love for his odd little second wife. He loved her more than she loved him. Opalescent: that gets to the heart. Her thoughts were beautiful, but really only ever for show. Maybe that would help, eventually.

  “What I said, Meg, to Joe Wear, all these years ago: let us see if the Commonwealth of Massachusetts needs me. I do believe the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has rendered its verdict in the negative. It does not. I were born in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and it sput me out once and I believe it is getting ready to duplicate the effort. Let’s away to the State of Maine, Meg. Can we? To the ocean. Build a house of rock. Our own house. As many sides as would please my darling. A duodecagon. Boys’ll hunt and fish. We’ll be ourselves. State of Maine,” he said, and he clasped her chilly hands.

  “No,” she said.

  “But why?”

  “Our business is bowling.” She handed him a sandwich wrapped in wax paper.

  “It is not,” he said, filing the sandwich in his jacket pocket. “That were an accident we both ran into and now it is bankrupting us. Let’s walk away from the wreckage of it. Give it to Jeptha. Leave it to the cats. I were never meant for the world of men. I say, Meg, you must choose.”

  “Choose what?”

  “Choose me,” he said. “Over the alleys. Let me tell you who I am, Margaret, let me deliver you the truth—I have good news! I have—”

  She shook her head in disbelief. “I’ve written to Minna,” she said. “She’ll help us.”

  “Who?” he asked, but he knew who.

  “Your sister. I’ll write again. I’ll ask for help. Give us the Octagon, at least. Let us live there.”

  “But how did you? Wherever did you locate her?”

  She hesitated. “I wrote to her through her uncle Mr. Sprague, who is a friend of mine.”

  Nahum was glad to see her cheeks flush at the lie of friend. Margaret had no friends. “No,” he said. “I am done with all Spragues.”

  “Nim—”

  “No,” he said. “From Spragues I seek nothing, from Spragues I expect nothing. Bertha Truitt renounced her own people for them.”

  “She was an orphan before she met Dr. Sprague,” said Margaret.

  “Ah,” said Nahum. “But not alone in the world, is my meaning. My meaning is me. She gave up me. I made her the offer, I said, Mother if you marry him, that’s the last you’ll see of me, I will walk away, here I go, here I am off walking, Mother, say the word, and she did not, and it were. The last, I mean. Till she died. She hasn’t writ back, the girl?”

  “Not yet,” said Margaret. Then, “Your beard.”

  “My beard is not the topic,” said Nahum.

  “Your beard,” she repeated. “I can’t think of anything else till it’s come back.”

  By then, she’d been through so many abandonments and deaths. Everything in her life had fallen through. She was an orphan, too, of course—you’d think orphanhood was both hereditary and contagious! Well, it is, most people pass it along to their children.

  “She’s your sister,” said Margaret to Nahum. “She loves you no matter what. Shall we sit?”

  There was no term for the issue of your first wife’s second marriage. He took the sandwich out of his pocket, regarded it, replaced it. He had not had so much as a bite and he was choking on it. To Maine, then, alone, or else he would deliver himself to his debtors, he would sink into them and expire. But if he went, he owed nothing. “My appetite has gone to Maine,” he said. “I will see you anon.”

  He kissed her. Without the beard it felt to both of them at once distant and overwhelming, like jumping off a cliff. Margaret had expected his bare face would be cold but it was as warm as any other part of him, and she almost suggested that since Jeptha wasn’t expecting them and the boys were at school, they should go home to bed. But that wasn’t her way, and instead she said, “Anon. Is that soon?”

  “Soon enough,” he said.

  I was never made for a world of men. By men Nahum had meant human beings, as people always did in those days. A world of women would have killed him outright. He had a ham salad sandwich warming in his pocket for supper. It hadn’t occurred to him that Meg would say no to Maine. She had only ever denied him things if they cost too much money. He would not get on the train at the Salford Station, where somebody might see him, though who would recognize him without his beard? His face hurt. Heart, too. To Boston, then, to disappear into a crowd. Would he see his sons again? Did they suspect he was a fraud? Roy would, soon enough, and Roy would tell Arch, Roy liked to ruin things. If Nahum had had daughters instead of sons he wouldn’t have fooled them so long but he might have been forgiven. Sons didn’t forgive. He knew that much. Well, he’d die anyhow. Might as well give them more room at home: they wouldn’t have to recoil from him, shrink themselves so as to make space for their unwieldy father. He didn’t understand that his absence would be as large as his presence, the exact same dimensions, cast from his body like a bronze sculpture. Durable as bronze, too.

  The Noise of Ordinary Thunder

  It’s time to train the boys,” Margaret Truitt told Jeptha Arrison.

  “The boys,” said Jeptha.

  “My boys. Train Roy and Arch to pinset. We must make some changes here.”

  The changes Margaret brought to Truitt’s Alleys meant it survived the Depression, the wa
y all cheap entertainment did: by its very cheapness. For ten cents you could bowl; for nothing at all you could sit and watch. Mornings men went out to look for work but by the afternoon the lanes were full. Margaret put in leagues, held exhibitions, money games that went on all day, or all week, or all month, best of three or ten or a hundred games. Cocked hat bowling, where only three pins were set at each corner of the pin triangle. Food, too. Margaret never did get far from the ham dinners she cooked for Bertha Truitt and Dr. Sprague, but within the ham arena she was a minor genius—of thrift if nothing else. She roasted the ham in her little kitchen over the alleys, then filled her icebox with ham sandwiches wrapped in wax paper. If she really liked you, she’d offer to run up and fix you a plate of ham and eggs. Three times out of ten the eggs were perfect, frilled and brown on the edges, and the ham nearly hot through; mostly, she pummeled the eggs as she fried, spilled the yolks and tore the whites. Leftover ham was deviled, or turned into hash, used to flavor potato salad, served over spaghetti in a ketchup gravy, chopped into pots of beans. Some people thought she stirred minced ham into her wacky cake, though that was almost certainly not true: she merely used cups of flour in everything she cooked, so that any recipe had a hint of cake to it. Finally the coda to the ham, a pot of split pea soup flavored with the bone, served with dry brown bread. When pea soup showed up for lunch at Truitt’s, the men knew that actual ham was coming soon. Margaret was vain about her cooking, she required compliments and gratitude, which she then batted away. “Ah, no,” she said, “no, no,” but you could tell how pleased she was. She never charged a cent. Everything that involved men was a war, to Margaret Vanetten Truitt: you had to feed your troops.

  If asked about her husband she would shake her head and say, “Gone.” Let people interpret that as they might. It was as much as she knew herself. She knew they thought she was embarrassed.

  She wasn’t. Not embarrassed but alight. Chronic, debilitating, volatile: how love always manifested in her.

  She might be anywhere at all when it happened, the intimations of his body crawling over her, his breadth and warmth, his fiddle and grasp. The shaggy fog that had always let her know they were in the same building, even if she were upstairs at the sink and he just back from the bank, walking through the alley doors. Now he was gone but they were in the same building, if she could just find the right door, which would open into the right corridor, which would lead her to his bed, no matter where in the world. But if there were another woman in it! No memory of a living man could have that power. He had to be a ghost, come to worry or comfort her.

  She could not get over him. Any day now, he might return! Then she would kill him. At night, in the same way she’d been staggered to discover, once married, the force of her desire, now she was staggered by her bloodthirst. At night she knew he was alive. She would murder him. Obliterate him. With her hands, with a candlestick, with a bowling pin hidden in the pleats of her nightgown: she’d bludgeon him, stump him, take him apart. Then she’d go back down the hallway to Massachusetts and burn her nightgown in the furnace.

  Once she’d read about a woman whose husband had been killed in battle. His heart was taken from his body, delivered from the battlefield to her, and she placed it in a glass box and stared at it seven hours a day. With love? Yes, but of the furious kind. How else could you stare at a heart?

  She wanted his. He’d left no relics except his sons, and those she knew she couldn’t keep.

  It’s noble work, setting,” said Jeptha Arrison. He’d grown portly; in the striped alley coveralls, he had a prow like a ship’s. Roy and Arch wore coveralls, too. Impossible, thought Arch, not to feel great in uniform. Impossible, thought Roy, to feel like anything but an idiot dressed in the same outfit as other people. His own weight was spread around his body, and he disliked how the coveralls made him aware of his undershorts. “Noble,” said Jeptha again, as though contradicted. “What’s that you have with you, Archie?”

  Arch was eleven. For his first day of work he had packed a comic book—Favorite Funnies—and a ham sandwich on a folded-over piece of bread.

  “You’re not going camping,” said Roy. “It’s not an overnight trip.”

  Arch saluted him with the deckle-edge of his sandwich.

  “I see no harm in it,” said Jeptha.

  Roy hated the bowling alley and the bowlers, grown men who called him names. They called him Spot for his freckles, and Tubby and Doughnut and Speedy. They called him Tiny and Babe. In bed he could suck his stomach into concavity and tell himself it wasn’t so bad. He could strum the wings of his rib cage, feel the muscles in his thighs. At the bowling alley, though, he was just a fat kid, a sullen boy with odd ears, one gibbous, one flush. His freckles were the splotchy sort. Nobody else in the family was fat, nobody bookish or sour. Where had he come from?

  But his brother, Arch: even years later, when he was dead of misadventure, what people said of Arch was that he was fun. He loved fun. He had his father’s bristling hair, his father’s hooded eyes though bigger, and limpid, and blue.

  For a while Roy and Arch sat on the pinboys’ shelf and watched Jeptha as he set the pins with an educated air. Some life in him yet! Training the Truitt boys to pinset gave shape to his weird head, made him light on his feet again.

  “One pin,” he said, pointing to the front of the steel deck, where the first pin was to be stood up. “Two pin. Three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.”

  “All right,” said Roy. “I know how to count.”

  Jeptha turned and frowned; his white hair had comb marks in it. “The pinbody’s the boss. Nobody thinks of that. No bowler’s so good she can overcome a bad pinbody. You set the pins perfect, every pin where it ought be, just in the middle, then it’s science for the bowler: she’ll know how the pins’ll fly. But a sloppy pinbody means there’s no telling. Even just a little off changes the whole game. Some bowlers know it. Some bowlers’ll offer you money to set one way for them and another for the other bowler. Cheats, I mean. Don’t take money.”

  “Pinbody?” said Roy.

  “What Bertha called us and so me, too, I say pinbody. Now, she was a bowler, Bertha Truitt. This,” he said, and he indicated the alleys, the men at the approaches, their mother the only thing female in the place. “Truitt’s was for women. Even your mother bowled in her day.”

  “Mom?” said Arch.

  Jeptha nodded. “So then. You set the pins fast as you can but part of the job is you must feel and feel the pins and balls, looking for wrongness. The cracked or wobble footed. The chipped or unbalanced. Honor in bowling is the pinbody’s job. Yes, your mother,” he said to the boys. Nobody thought Jeptha kept much of anything in that lopsided sack of his head. Sawdust. Folk songs. It was best that way. Nahum Truitt wouldn’t have tolerated him there otherwise. But he remembered everything. “She was not the finest of the ladies—bowlingwise, I mean—but she was good, and game. Now, boys, to your stations.”

  Above the pit, eleven-year-old Arch Truitt closed his eyes. It would be hard to fall asleep. Not impossible. He knew he shouldn’t but the sensation of surrender was sneezily delicious. Perhaps if he closed his eyes and held still, he could balance, he could sleep for ten seconds, his body was already asleep, the sleep was reaching his head—

  A pinboy is not a parrot on a perch or a horse in a field. Halfway through the first string of his pinsetting career, Arch Truitt dozed off and fell onto the lane. He woke up as he hit the pins, cheek first, was conscious long enough to get thwacked between the shoulder blade by the third ball of the box, rolled by Mack Constable, and was sent back to dreamland by the four pin knocking him on the head. The noise, the beer, the smoke—it took a moment for anyone other than Mack Constable and his teammates to notice the boy on the lane. Mack was a bowler, he’d been trained not to cross the foul line, but he hollered and pointed and then everyone noticed, and everyone was stuck. It was as though Arch had appeared from nowhere, in the family tradition. His right shoe and sock had been knocke
d clear off.

  “Don’t move him,” Margaret shrieked, “his spine, Roy!”

  But Roy was stunned, too, till Jeptha Arrison hurdled the lanes and scooped Arch up, taking care not to skid in the ham of the splayed-open sandwich. He carried him down the gutter and brought him to the benches. Margaret closed her eyes, clung to the counter. If Arch were dead or broken, she wanted somebody else to make the diagnosis. Roy was there. Roy would tell her. Roy loved bad news.

  “Is he paralyzed?” asked Roy, worriedly.

  “It’s nobody’s fault,” said Jeptha.

  “Oh God,” said Mack Constable.

  Outside: Arch’s eyes fluttered as he returned to them. Inside, the world fluttered, returned to Arch. “ARE YOU PARALYZED?” Jeptha Arrison yelled into those opening eyes, and Arch didn’t know the answer, he’d never been paralyzed before, he didn’t know what it felt like. A long list of things he didn’t know: why his head hurt, how he’d got to the bowlers’ benches, why one of his feet was so cold, how long he’d been gone from the conscious world, who put that bite of ham sandwich at the back of his mouth right where it could choke him.

  The men looked down, Jeptha, Mack, Bill Semb, his brother Roy, Dutch Goldblatt. He could feel the heat of the whole Saturday afternoon league radiating around him. His neck hurt, and his face. He lifted his hand to his cheek and the crowd cheered.

  “Not paralyzed!” called Bill Semb, just as Jeptha Arrison twisted Arch’s exposed big toe nearly off.

  “Ow!”

  “The boy is entire!” called Jeptha.

  Roy lowered his mouth to his brother’s ear. He whispered, “You’re drunk.”