Mad Skills

by Greatshell, Walter

  “What happened to you, though?”

  “You mean that night? Let’s just say all my sins finally caught up with me. But I forgave and asked for forgiveness. I started fresh. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but over time I was able to get clean, pull myself back together. And I was blessed with these two little angels. I won’t lie—sometimes it’s still a struggle. But that’s just life—troubles are put here to test us.”

  “You think so? What happens if we fail the test?”

  “It’s not a matter of failing. All fall short of God. He understands. Anyway, I didn’t mean to hit you with all this—I usually never talk about it, but something about you just brought it all back. Let’s change the subject. I was wondering if your folks might be worried about you.”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t been able to reach them on the phone.”

  “Do you want to try calling again?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Lucy, pass her my cell, would you?”

  One of the little girls rummaged in a beaded bag and handed the phone up to Maddy.

  The woman said, “If you’d rather have some privacy, we can pull over.”

  “That would be great, if you don’t mind.”

  “Not at all.”

  They pulled over at a gas station and let Maddy out. Walking a little way into some trees, she dialed the number, feeling her heart pound harder than it had when she was fighting madmen to the death. It rang twice and picked up.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello, Mom?” Maddy instantly started crying.

  “Maddy! Oh my God—where are you? Roger, it’s Maddy! Honey, are you all right? We’ve been so scared!”

  “I’m okay. I’m coming home.”

  “Oh thank God! Where are you? Can we come get you?”

  “No, that’s okay. I’m with friends; they’re driving me. I should be there soon—I’m not sure how long, but probably either tonight or tomorrow.”

  “Maddy, what happened? Why did you run away? Did something happen?”

  “They told you I ran away?”

  “Dr. Stevens just said that you left the grounds without permission. She was worried you might be having a relapse. Everybody just wants you back, honey.”

  “So they basically told you I’m crazy.”

  “No! We’re all just concerned about you. We want you back safe. Please, honey, tell me where you are. I’m going crazy sitting here.”

  “Mom, I’ll be home soon; and then we can talk about this. In the meantime, don’t worry about me, and don’t believe anyone who tries to tell you I’m having a relapse. I left Braintree because they were trying to turn me into something I don’t want to be. That’s what they do there. They did it to Ben, and they’re trying to do it to me.”

  “Ben? What—?”

  “Ben is alive. Tell his dad I saw him. He had the same surgery as me. They covered it up because they’re using him as a guinea pig for their mind-control experiments, just like they’re doing to hundreds of other people. It’s really twisted. That’s why I can’t tell you where I am, because they’ll come after me. They already have, and a bunch of people are dead because of it. In fact, I better hang up the phone now in case they can trace it. Have the police been there?”

  “Well, yes, of course, but—”

  “Then I gotta go. Love you—give my love to Dad. Bye.”

  “No, wait—”

  She hung up.

  “WELL, this is as far as we go.”

  They had been driving all day and were pulled over at a truck stop near the highway junction. It was getting dark.

  “Okay,” Maddy said, undoing her seat belt. “I really appreciate this, thank you so much.”

  “Wait. Listen, I’ve been thinking about this: Why don’t you come home with us and let us put you up for the night? We’ve got plenty of room. Or at least let me buy you a bus ticket the rest of the way. I’m sure your parents wouldn’t want you out here by the side of the road after dark, and I don’t really like it either. It’s freezing out there.”

  “No, seriously, you’ve done enough already. I’ll be fine.”

  “I know. I know you’ll be fine, but do it as a favor to me and the girls—otherwise, we’ll be worried about you all night.”

  “Uh, gee, I don’t know. That’s very nice and all, but …”

  “Come on, Mary. I promised them we’d do something fun tonight. Do you want to disappoint them? It’s Lucy’s birthday tomorrow. Please join us, or it’ll be a real drag.”

  “C’mon, Mary, pleasepleaseplease,” begged the girls.

  “Well … are you sure?”

  “Absolutely. Positively.”

  Maddy thought about it for a second, then said, “Okay. Thanks.”

  “No, thank you. That’s a load off my mind, let me tell you. Okay, there’s one more question I have to ask you, though, and it’s very important.”

  The woman’s face was so serious that Maddy tensed. “What’s that?” she asked guardedly.

  “How do you feel about bowling?”

  PIN Drop Lanes was part of a larger entertainment complex in a shopping plaza on the outskirts of Cheyenne, Wyoming. It was not the type of bowling alley Maddy had envisioned, which was a hangout for fifties rejects with beer guts and greased comb-overs, a place reeking of pine paneling and Pine-Sol and drenched with unforgiving greenish fluorescent light. She had never bowled in her life and wasn’t particularly looking forward to it.

  Walking into the bowling emporium with the three Rasmussens, she was a bit dazzled: The place resembled some disco paradise, only with better music, all lit up with neon and lasers and mirrored balls and black lights. Best thing about it was there were no bowlers of the polyester-slacks variety; the crowd was mostly young families and high-school and college students.

  Donna Rasmussen paid for the lane time and the shoes, then ordered food as the other three went to choose balls. Testing a few, Maddy settled on a green-marbled nine-pounder that fit her fingers nicely. She followed the family down to their seating court.

  All around was the rumble of balls and the crash of strikes, people in silly shoes doing goofy jigs and twirls as they flung their balls down the neon-lit alleys, then the milk-bottle clatter as the pins were racked and reset. It certainly looked simple enough—ridiculously simple, actually—but Maddy could appreciate the pleasure of mindless fun. She needed some. The pizza smelled good, too.

  “Why don’t you take the first shot, Mary?” offered Donna.

  Maddy would have preferred to go last, but the little girls were still lacing their shoes, and Donna was manning the electronic scoreboard.

  “Okay …”

  “Don’t be nervous,” the woman said. “There’s nothing to it. Just do what everybody else is doing.”

  That was the problem: No two people were doing the exact same thing—each person had their own style, with a wide range of fluctuating variables. Not even the good ones got a strike every time. Maddy could do the physics, but having been humbled by her encounter with the scissor-man, she wondered if there were randomizing factors that lay outside her experience.

  Picking up the ball with both hands, she positioned herself at the head of the alley, triangulating on the second pin to the right. Taking a deep breath, she strode purposefully toward the foul line, let her arm swing down, and released the ball.

  It landed at the correct spot, on an ideal trajectory, but its backspin was faster than she had anticipated, an incremental difference in friction that over the length of the alley caused a catastrophic lateral drift. The ball plopped into the gutter.

  “Darn it,” she said.

  Donna laughed sympathetically. “Hey, don’t worry about it. That was actually pretty good for a first-timer. You have good form, but you’re just a little stiff; try to loosen up.” Tapping her head, she said, “It’s not all up here.”

  Food came, and Maddy ate a slice of pizza while Donna and the girls took their turns. They didn’t treat th
e game seriously at all, just horsing around, but they still did better than her pathetic shot. They all hit some pins, at least.

  Then it was her turn again. The pins had been reset, and so had Maddy’s guidance algorithm. This time she didn’t think about it, didn’t try to imitate anyone else, just followed the prescribed pattern, and it was as easy as skipping rope: The ball described a long, parabolic curve, twirling like a planet in orbit as it plunged through the pins and drove them all down.

  “Wow, you did it!” cheered Donna, as the girls clapped and jumped up and down.

  Maddy shrugged modestly. “Beginner’s luck,” she said.

  When her next turn came around she did it again. And then again and again and again … until she won the game by over two hundred points.

  “Mary, you are on fire!” said Donna. “You’ve really never bowled before?”

  “No. Just a fluke, I guess.”

  “I guess! Gosh!”

  By the second game, bystanders had taken notice, all stopping to watch when it was her turn. Even the employees were doing it.

  One of them, a good-looking young guy not much older than Maddy, came over, and asked, “How’d you learn to bowl like that?”

  “I didn’t. I’m just on a roll tonight. Pure luck.”

  “That’s a hell of a roll. Wish I’d have a roll like that. Do you live around here?”

  “No, I’m just passing through.”

  “That’s too bad. I’d ask you to join our league.”

  “I wish I could.”

  “Me too. If I were you, I’d think about going pro. You’re a machine.”

  Though meant kindly, these words caused a cold breeze up Maddy’s spine. You’re a machine. There it was, all her fears of the past week distilled into one tidy sentence. She was one frame away from a perfect score of 300, which would have no doubt triggered some kind of hullabaloo—on the back wall she could see the bowling awards and photographs of past winners with their prizes. She had never won anything in her life, much less anything related to sports.

  As a tall, skinny girl, Maddy had often been pushed into sports, everyone assuming she would be good at things like basketball or soccer … until they saw her play. Madeline exhibits a distinct lack of body awareness, was how one of her middle-school coaches put it, which was a nice way of saying she was totally uncoordinated, all knees and elbows. For years, right up through high school, everyone insisted she would grow out of it, that it was nothing but a temporary phase caused by a growth spurt. Just you wait, they said. Well, she was tired of waiting—she wanted to win!

  “Go for it, Mary!” Donna said. “You can do it!”

  The whole place was watching as Maddy picked up her green ball and took a stance. Just as she had a dozen times before, she breathed deep, then strode three quick steps and flung the ball down the lane. It looked perfect, skimming across the varnished boards like a top. It looked so good that even when it started going wrong, floating too wide, nobody believed it—they thought it would magically correct itself. But no: The ball did not make any last-second sharp turns. It teetered on the edge of the gutter and clipped the far outside pin as it dropped.

  The room deflated with an audible sigh. That’s it, someone said.

  Donna was still enthusiastic: “Come on, honey! Knock ’em down!”

  There would be no 300 now, all the pressure was gone, but a few folks lingered to see Maddy make the pickup shot. Winding up one last time, eyes watering, she threw the ball dead center into the pins. It crashed through them like a wrecker, so fast and dirty it hollowed out the middle and left the rest standing, two on one side, one on the other. The standing pins looked like actors on a bare stage, doing Pinter. Then the gate came down and knocked them in. It was over.

  “HEY, Rick, come here.”

  “What?”

  “Did I see you talk to that chick just now?”

  “What chick?”

  “The one who flubbed the money shot.”

  “What about it?”

  “Come quick, I want you to see something.”

  “What?”

  “In my office.”

  Rick Callas didn’t have much interest in whatever Mr. Barnstable, the surly floor manager, had to tell him, but he went along, expecting to be chewed out. For what, he wasn’t sure, but with Mr. Barnstable, it didn’t take much. Talking to a girl, though? Rick had never been forbidden from fraternizing with customers as long as he did his job, but maybe someone had complained. Was it possible they thought he had interfered with the girl’s game, caused her to screw up? That would suck.

  “Here,” his boss said. “Take a look at this.”

  The manager was pointing to the screen of his computer. There was a news site on, showing a picture of a girl’s face. In the picture, she looked happier, younger, but except for the bangs and the braces, she was a dead ringer for the teenage girl he had just spoken to out on the floor.

  The text read: MENTAL PATIENT SOUGHT

  Recovering neurological patient Madeline Zoe Grant, 17, of Denton, Colorado, was reported missing Sunday by doctors at Idaho’s Braintree Institute, where she recently underwent experimental surgery.

  “Miss Grant suffered debilitating brain injuries, but thanks to our program of deep-cortex stimulation, she has begun to show signs of full recovery,” says Dr. Alan Plummer, Chief of Neurosurgery at Braintree. “Obviously she has recovered sufficiently to leave the grounds on her own, but without proper care, she may be delusional, paranoid, possibly even violent or suicidal. It’s important that she be found before she can become a danger to herself or others.”

  Madeline’s parents have issued a reward for their daughter’s safe return and ask that anyone seeing the girl should not approach her directly, but please notify law-enforcement personnel immediately.

  “They were just showing this on TV, and I looked it up,” said Mr. Barnstable eagerly. “Does that look like her or what?”

  “Yeah, kind of …”

  “Are you kidding? It’s definitely her!”

  “I know, but she can’t be the same one. Like an escaped mental patient is going to come in here and bowl a 300. Be real.”

  “She didn’t bowl a 300. Anyway, who knows what crazy people can do? I’m telling you, that’s either her, or it’s her freakin’ twin sister.”

  “I heard them call her Mary, not Madeline.”

  “So what? They both start with M. Hell with this, I’m calling.”

  “Go ahead, but you better hurry.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “They just left.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  SILVER BIRCH

  DONNA drove them to her house, a rustic wooden cabin in a grove of cottonwood trees, surrounded by a low adobe wall. There was no lawn, only a plot of indigenous succulents. It was too dark to see much, but Maddy could tell that it was a pretty spot, more homestead than suburb, somehow sheltered from the encroachment of slash-and-burn residential developers. A cross-eyed Siamese cat met them at the door, frantic for attention.

  “This is nice,” Maddy said.

  “Thanks. Yeah, we put a lot of work into this place.”

  “You and the girls?”

  “Well, them, too, but I meant me and Barry—my fiancé. We’re gonna get married when it’s finally finished.”

  “Congratulations. When’s that?”

  “At the rate we’re going, never.” She laughed.

  “Does he live here?”

  “Yeah, unless I’m in town. Then he stays with his folks. We meet up during the day at their house, or we go out with friends from church, nothing unchaperoned. Probably sounds pretty weird, but we’re trying to preserve the sanctity as best we can.”

  “No, I get it.”

  “You have to understand: We’ve both had histories, if you know what I mean, so this is something that makes us feel more worthy of grace. It’s a token.”

  “Hey, you know, whatever works.”

  The little girls dragged Maddy
on a grand tour of the house and yard while Donna made coffee. Then they all sat and watched The Empire Strikes Back on television. Maddy started nodding off as Yoda was tutoring Luke in the Jedi arts. When she jerked awake, Luke was battling Darth Vader.

  “Look at you, you must be exhausted.”

  Maddy’s eyelids were drooping. “No, I’m okay,” she said. “Just been a long day.”

  Donna turned off the TV. “Let’s get you fixed up for bed. Come on, girls, help out.”

  They brought in a load of blankets and pillows, and made the couch into a proper nest. The little girls were dragging, too, but helped without complaint.

  “If you get cold,” Donna said, “just shove another log into the woodstove.”

  “I’ll be fine, thanks.”

  “Okay. Well, sleep tight, then.”

  “You too. And thank you.”

  “My pleasure, Mary. Good night.”

  “’Night.”

  Donna turned off the light and went upstairs.

  Maddy had dreams of silver. Silver vans and silver arms and long silver needles. A forest of silver birch trees with flame-bright leaves and black eyes watching her on their knotty trunks. Silver roots sunk in folds of rusty clay, water puddling red in the cracks.

  Maddy was holding hands and hopping from stone to stone so as not to smirch her dainty white shoes, her Sunday shoes. Looking back, she could see, far off through the trees, a sunlit clearing and a little mound of earth. The sight twisted her heart like a vine tomato, and Maddy asked, How come Lukie died?

  Because God said so, replied a soft, childish voice.

  Maddy turned to see that she was not holding hands with her mother, but with her baby brother. His eyes were closed as though trusting her to lead the way. She had never heard him talk before, didn’t realize he could. He was wearing his Sunday suit of brown plaid shorts with a matching jacket and cap. His face was rouged and powdered a lifelike pink, but when he opened his eyes, they were silver.