Bowlaway

by Elizabeth McCracken

  Moses Mood said, smiling, smiling, “I am dying, honey. Come tend me.”

  “I will,” said LuEtta, “soon.”

  “Then I will take the boy,” said Moses Mood. He went back of her and tried to extricate the baby from its wrappings.

  “What are you doing?”

  “It’s no good for him,” he said. He got her by the hand. Her bowling hand, which fidgeted in his own. “You bitch,” he said under his voice, but now he was not just smiling but laughing. Laughing so he could laugh it off.

  LuEtta thought, We’re in trouble.

  Danger was a cloudburst. Ordinarily she read the signs, thunder nobody else could hear, a greening of the sky, a whiff of ozone. Not today. In the past she had merely stayed away. She would put the baby on her back so nobody could get to him, so she would be able to place her body between him and disaster. Were they in more danger because Moses Mood was in public or less? He cared what people thought of him. That was why he laughed. He thought his laughter was charming.

  She knew he had a gun because he always did. She wasn’t particularly frightened of the gun itself. Not more today than any other day. The baby on her back made it easier to flee, that was another thing. She’d already packed the important object. A year ago she might have thrown herself on Hazel’s mercy and asked to move in, but that was before the child-hating Golda Bastian had taken over the house. “Let go, Moses,” she told him, though then she realized that as long as his hands were occupied he was not fishing for the gun. She wondered how long she might keep up this dancing. The baby was alive. She could heard the ticking in his chest that came before he cried.

  “You’re not scared,” said Moses Mood to his son, or to his wife.

  What was the right response to that?

  Then the door to Truitt’s opened up, and Jeptha Arrison stepped out. He said in a mild, formal voice, “Your lane awaits you, Mrs. Mood.”

  “No,” said Moses Mood. Now he laughed at Jeptha, the idiot who thought he could take a woman from her husband.

  “Nevertheless,” said Jeptha, in a voice of such chivalry it made Moses Mood step back. “I’ll take the babby.” The child reached his arms to Jeptha. Moments before he’d seemed tied to his mother permanently. Now he nearly flew through the air to Jeptha. “Please,” Jeptha said to LuEtta, and he held the door for her, and the three of them—bowler, baby, pinbody—went into the alley.

  “I said No!” yelled Moses Mood, though he was alone on the sidewalk. “No! No!” He was going off like a gun, though he kept the gun quiet in his pocket; he felt its weight. No! No! What direction would he fire in?

  When the news came some weeks later that Moses Mood had shot himself in the other ear, LuEtta was staying with Jeptha and his parents in Attleboro. Mood had left two notes, one that said I belong to the ages and the other Lu, I do not blame you, you see I could not live with myself either.

  “You saved me, Jeptha,” said LuEtta, and he said, “You saved yourself.”

  But that was after Nahum Truitt had made LuEtta Mood bowl for her soul.

  Rattled

  LuEtta felt something poke her calf as she got ready to start her approach. She figured it was one of the cats; there were three now, all black-and-white, prowling Truitt’s. The cats were the only thing that made the baby laugh, which convinced LuEtta that he, like his father, might have a mean sense of humor. Cats don’t laugh back. But the baby was silent, and it wasn’t a cat, just Nahum Truitt on his knees and one hand, jabbing at her with a pool cue. His beard was a thicket. He’d left behind a blue chalk print on her white sock. She pulled her leg closer to her body and cleared her throat, but Nahum looked fixedly at the end of the cue and crawled closer, poking, his pink knit necktie lapping at the floor like a tongue.

  “Mr. Truitt,” she said. He didn’t answer. He poked. “Mr. Truitt!”

  He used the cue as a cane to pull himself to his feet and turned to the men bowling on the next lane, the Salford Half Nickels, the men returned from the war. They were practicing for a tourney in Boston at the Sheaf House.

  “Care to join me in a prayer?” Nahum asked them, plucking a ball from the return. “You’re churchgoing men, I know, but once a week is not enough, you see your wives every single day and you see your pals twice a week, you better find more time for God! Who’s with me?”

  The men looked uneasily at each other. “The YMCA has a team,” said Jack Silver, not a churchgoing man. “Perhaps—”

  “The YMCA does not need saving!” said Nahum Truitt. He looked at Jack Silver, who had a ball tucked in the crook of what was left of his right arm. “You bowl thataway? You’ve got a good arm just the other side of you.”

  “Right-handed,” said Jack Silver.

  “But you’re not,” said Nahum. “The only hand in your possession is of the left variety.”

  “I am a right-handed bowler,” said Jack Silver.

  Nahum frowned. “It unnerves.”

  Jack Silver gave the ball a toss in his abbreviated arm and said, “Your nerves are no concern of mine.”

  Nahum shook his head. “All right,” he said. “Whatever serves.” He looked at LuEtta. “I will bowl with the men,” he said over his shoulder to the Half Nickels, as though declining an invitation, and went to stand directly at the foul line. He bobbled the ball from hand to hand as he stared at the pins. Nobody had ever seen him show the least interest in the game. The men worried he would pitch the ball overhand instead of bowling it.

  “Sure you want to do it like that?” called LuEtta Mood.

  “I’ll do it thisaway,” he said, and flung the ball hard to the side, directly into the gutter.

  “You see,” said the captain of the Half Nickels, Pinky DeMuth, unsure whose side he was on, “you have a three-step, or a five-step, or a seven-step approach. Stand back here—”

  “I’ll do it thisaway,” said Nahum again. “Gal,” he said in a grand voice. He rested the ball on one hip. “You gamble, I hear.”

  “I play money games,” said LuEtta. She and the baby were lodging with the Arrisons now. She needed the money.

  “You’ll play me.”

  How did a grown man know so little about women! To command her like that, and she the best bowler in the alley. Martin Younkins leaned on his crutches in a thoughtful way and said, “Well Truitt, you might—”

  “Gambling’s not a sin?” LuEtta asked.

  “Not nearly,” said Nahum. “No, it is not, for what is God besides a gambler? He is locked in a game—”

  “I’ll play you,” said LuEtta. The baby as usual was on her back. A child now, really. Still silent and unamused. How did she stand upright with that weight tugging at her? “Dollar a string, progressive.”

  “One game,” corrected Nahum. “For your tenancy in the alley.”

  The men of Truitt’s Alleys were divided about LuEtta Mood, each one of them divided, not down the middle but cut into pieces like a pie. She had been there longer than any of them: she was practically a piece of equipment. An outdated piece, the lone woman left in the alley. Had to watch your tongue around her (though she never did flinch no matter what was said: she’d heard worse). What did Mr. Mood think of his wife? Didn’t she belong at home? (They didn’t know she had left them.) She was quite a sight. She was a beauty. She was not as beautiful as rumor had it. It was hard to concentrate on your own bowling when she was there, and these days she was always there.

  Nahum Truitt they plain disliked.

  So when the two agreed to the bet, the Half Nickels weren’t sure which was the Devil and which bowling against the Devil. They just knew souls were at stake.

  “One game,” said Nahum Truitt again. “Everything on one game, and whoever wins lets the other alone.”

  LuEtta looked at him. “Meaning I own the alley if I win.”

  Joe Wear said, “No—”

  “All right,” said Nahum. “Why ever not. You beat me, gal, and I happily sign everything over to you.”

  Martin Younkins shook hi
s head. All the men did. They wanted a piece of that action! “That ain’t fair,” Younkins said. “She wins, she gets a whole bowling alley, but he wins—”

  Nahum took a heroic stance, so noble and statuary you thought a pigeon might alight on his head. “That is how much it means to me, that my alley be free of the feminine influence,” he said.

  “Jiminy,” said LuEtta, but she could feel her juddering heart in her chest. She might win the alley. She reached behind and felt the baby’s ankle for luck.

  “You want to take that child off?”

  “No,” said LuEtta. The baby was sleeping. “This is how I’m used to it.”

  “One game,” said Nahum again.

  LuEtta Mood had a 103 average, higher than any of the Half Nickels, the Diamonds, the Greystockings, the Kings. She had no trouble at all bowling against Nahum Truitt for her soul: she bowled for her soul every day. She was one of those dead-eyed gamblers, in other words, who bet against themselves every time. Dead-eyed in aim; dead-eyed in the light gone from her as she bowled. Bowling was what she had and she needed it to have a happy ending and that had looked unlikely for a while now. Owning the alley might do it.

  Nahum gave her a condescending rolling-wristed gesture. Ladies first.

  Every time LuEtta had picked up a ball in the past twenty years she went through these steps. First she felt lucky: she knew that this ball would be a good one. Then she felt cursed, and could see the ball journey down the lane only to drop into the gutter at the last minute. Then she felt scientific: luck had nothing to do with it! Then as superstitious as an ancient, there were forces all about her that wanted her to win but only if she appeased them in the right way, I honor you spirits of the bowling alley, I love you, deliver my ball. Only then would she actually bowl.

  She had a three-step approach, absolutely ordinary, and a languid elegant follow-through with her bowling hand. She downed six pins with the first ball. With the second ball she picked up the spare, not neatly, but in pieces, the wood against the nine pin, the nine into the two, the wood spinning into the seven and one. At the end of the alley Jeptha jumped down to the deck to set the pins. The first thing he did was kiss the second ball, still warm from LuEtta’s fingertips, still warm from its triumph.

  The men didn’t know he was in love with LuEtta: they believed Jeptha was a child, Jeptha liked games, Jeptha wouldn’t know what to do with a full-grown human woman, Jeptha loved only the pins. It was true: Jeptha’s pinsetting was brilliant, perfect. He was never the least bit off. When Jeptha Arrison set your pins, you knew how they’d fly, every time.

  This time LuEtta took three balls to knock down seven pins. Nahum’s turn.

  The Salford Half Nickels winced to watch Nahum Truitt bowl. He had taken off his jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeves, tucked the awful organ-pink necktie into his vest. An ossified man, all knuckle and claw: he held the ball with the tips of his fingers. Generally it was against Joe Wear’s ethics to let a man bowl in such an amateurish way. (Joe had locked the front door and joined the crowd to watch.) The man didn’t have a chance against the Angel of the Alleys anyhow. Few men who visited Truitt’s could hope to touch her, never mind an awkward inexperienced man of God. God himself (surely a tenpin man; surely God loved clarity, the promise of perfection) might have a hard time against LuEtta Mood.

  What would she do when she won the alley? Cast out all the men as Nahum had wanted to cast out the women? Drive them out with a stick like snakes? Leave it to the cats and girls?

  Bertha Truitt had never done that. Bertha Truitt had not seemed to care for men but did not find them a nuisance, had spoken to them as though she were their equal, and that was maddening, but LuEtta Mood had the infuriating air of superiority. She thought she was better than. Leastways, she was trying to convince herself of it.

  There was the ball clutched in Nahum’s fingers, daylight all around it. He took his place at the foul line and bowled. No approach, no follow-through, and yet he knocked ’em down. Three pins, then five pins, then two for the ten box. Martin Younkins marked it in chalk on the board.

  The pinboy, a malnourished flop-haired ten-year-old named Leslie Bish, had been eating rock candy off a string, and now he set the candy on the shelf and jumped down to roll the balls back to the boss. His hands were never clean, and he set pins loose and sloppy. He took no pleasure in it: they might as well have been milk bottles at the carnival, saplings planted along a path. Sometimes he kicked one or two over as he worked. Even if he’d done it well, there was nobody to praise him beyond Jeptha, and the older boys had told him to steer clear of Jep, not because he’d interfere with you but because once he got a notion you were a listener he would never stop talking. Leslie Bish’s mother needed the money he made. That was true of all the pinboys except Jeptha himself, who tsked on his shelf and regarded the pins with sorrow.

  He looked after the pins because he was not allowed to look after the pinboys. They wouldn’t let him. “Go away, Jeptha,” they said, though he was the only man among ’em and he felt he’d earned the right to boss ’em around a little. How did it happen, that he had been bossed around by men when he was a boy and by boys when he was a man? Never mind. He would tend his lane.

  Jeptha Arrison spoke to the pins. Loved them. Bowling he didn’t care for, he had never bowled in his life, it was a foolish waste of time though he would not say so to the bowlers he adored. But the pins he understood. Here comes the interloping ball, once, twice, third time, then he jumps down—Mother Jeptha! for he is as a mother to them—to tend to his darlings, his pinlings, his knocklings, his flocklings. “Here dear,” he says to the ten pin, the five pin, the three. He remembers where they stood even now that they’ve tumbled. “Here four, here five—oh dear, no, you have split yourself. Poor thing, you’re broken beyond saving.” See him toss the pin away.

  Not mother then, but God. Mother is more powerful, mother can heal with love because she plays favorites. When you’ve split in half God will not pretend you haven’t. God Jeptha sits above the pins and waits. When the world is destroyed, he resets it. Makes it stand again.

  Leslie Bish’s sticky fingers would spread sugar everywhere: down the return to the bowler, then onto the lane, then back to the pinsetter’s hand. It would degrade every part of play. Jeptha nearly called out to Nahum to say this. A money game was a serious thing, it required honesty and evenness. But LuEtta’s place in the alleys was at stake, and so he kept quiet, the first sin Jeptha Arrison ever committed in the name of bowling but not the last.

  Nahum bowled again. First ball two. Second ball five. He’d knocked over one more for sure with the third, but the six pin was still thinking about going down, the six pin was fighting off sleep—and Leslie Bish jumped down early and kicked it over himself.

  “Hey now!” Nahum Truitt yelled. “Pinboy! Get out of there.”

  Leslie Bish raised his head. He was thin and oily as a mackerel. He was only ten but he’d been fired before, for sleepiness and inaccuracy. He reached to scoop up his rock candy, but it was already stuck to the side of his pants and with gravity’s help was trying to undo his pocket.

  “All right, Wear,” Nahum Truitt called. “You’ll set for me.”

  “Ah no,” said Joe Wear. “Jeptha’ll set for you both.”

  “Not that moron. He’ll fiddle it. You’ll set for me.”

  Why did Joe Wear agree? He should have gone out the door with Leslie Bish to drown his sorrow in rock candy or needle beer. Instead he walked down the lane. He felt everyone judge his lubberly gait.

  “’Lo, Joe,” said Jeptha, but Joe shook his head.

  Once Joe Wear had been the pride of Les Miserables, but that was years ago and moreover this was not a wager he wanted a hand in. Already he could feel the splinters he’d picked up setting. What if LuEtta did win? Would she fire him? Sell the alley at a good price? She was better than anybody in that alley except Joe Wear himself, who bowled every night, and even on his days off went to the Sheaf House in Boston for
the money games there. He should be bowling for ownership of the alley.

  “I’ll do for both lanes, you like,” said Jeptha, but Joe had already finished. He had spent plenty of time in the pits over the years, checking the metal plates the pins stood on, cleaning up shattered pins, surveying the wood of the lanes from all angles, but he hadn’t sat up on the pinboys’ shelf since he was a teenager. He was stunned to measure just how much bigger he’d grown. Up close Jep was almost heartbreakingly graceful, going from toe to toe, a hummingbird amid the trampled blossoms.

  “I could set for both, Joe Wear,” he said in a hurt voice.

  “’Course you could.”

  “I’m honest as the day is long.”

  “I know it.”

  “My love is for the game.”

  “I don’t doubt that.”

  “I’m honest,” said Jeptha again. “I can’t go back to the horses. No man can, once he’s left them. It’s the alley for me, Joe. I was born here and I’ll die here.”

  “You weren’t born here,” said Joe Wear.

  “In a way.”

  “No,” said Joe. “No man is born in a bowling alley. Anyhow LuEtta will win and I will be fired and you may be the manager.”

  Jeptha shook his heavy head. “He’s spooked her. She’s done for.”

  Then it was Joe’s turn to jump to the plate to set. Nahum had left just the king pin. Joe was altogether too big a man for this job, a pigeon impersonating a hummingbird, his big boots with the iron in the heel clanking against the plate. Still, his body remembered the odd pleasure of the task, tucking a pin in his armpit while he set another, letting the tucked pin roll down the inside of his arm into his hand. Candlepins had no up or down: unlike ten pins, you could set them on either end. Of course, he, Joe, could fiddle it. He could set the pins in such a way that Nahum could never knock them all down. He could rig it so LuEtta would win for sure. He looked at her. She did not seem spooked. She was bowling as true as she ever had, ahead by eleven pins.