Bowlaway

by Elizabeth McCracken

  Minna looked at the nest in her hands and decided a nest was sufficient. Let everything else rot. Here were her father’s intentions.

  “Let’s go,” she said to Margaret.

  She remembered Margaret as a cabinet of a woman, functional, extra, but nervous, cedar scented, lavender tinted. A graspingness. You will always, always, always be my baby, she said to little Minna. Or was that her mother? The sad truth: she could not fully untangle Margaret and Bertha. One baked inedible cakes. One sang a song called “After the Ball.” One carried her around the house long after she was too old and when Minna had said no, that’s enough, had burst into tears.

  It was hard to walk down stairs while carrying a bird’s nest. The fresh air stirred up Margaret’s fire. “See?” she said. “Still standing after all this time.”

  “It’s not safe.”

  “We’ll make it safe.”

  “I’ve already given it to the city.”

  “You give away too much!” said Margaret Vanetten.

  “I have enough.”

  “You do.” Margaret sat down on the lawn as though she might need to be removed with dynamite. She was the one who mowed the grass, as a kind of a promise and a prayer. The house looked like a prison. You could not judge houses or people from the outside.

  “Well, I can’t keep it,” said Minna. When they’d left all those years ago, she hadn’t known she would never live in Salford again, never see her parents, never hide in the wedge-shaped closet in her room to listen to the house from inside the house. The closet had smelled of herself, mown hay and milk, a hint of hairdressing. That smell was gone, and Minna—though she stood here in the city limits with her old baby nurse—was gone, too. The Octagon, the Wedding Cake, Superba, Supersum. Within a month the city would raze the place. There was no way to save it, not even for ornithological reasons. It was as though she were seeing the house from a great distance as it moved away, goodbye, goodbye. She said to Margaret, “What would I do with a house like this? I have a career I need to get back to. I leave for New York this afternoon.”

  “Oh,” said Margaret, then, “Take,” then, in a childish voice, “Why did you even come here?”

  Minna saw it then, the look on Margaret’s face, Margaret who’d been begging for her to come back for years. What could Minna say?

  She knew, of course, that Margaret lived in the bowling alley, that she had married the man who claimed to be Minna’s half brother, that she was, in fact, Margaret Truitt. What a thing to have done! All of this she had learned from the lawyers, because her father’s will had been very clear on the matter.

  She said, “How’s your husband.”

  “Gone,” said Margaret. “Come to the alley.”

  “Oh, no. That is one place I’d never go. Do you have children, Margaret?”

  Margaret nodded.

  “Well then,” said Minna, “that’s lovely. Look after them.”

  “You’re the one I love,” said Margaret.

  “What?” Minna said, scandalized, and she knew that it was true. It was an old love, paid for, but paid in full.

  Careful What You Order Through the Mail

  Once the war started in Europe, the ghosts came to Salford like any refugees. Displaced persons except no longer persons: there were so many new dead in Europe the old dead were forced out. The locals objected to these immigrants, their old-timey ways, their unfamiliar smells, their unintelligible utterances. Then the locals got accustomed. Then the locals blamed the newcomers when trouble flared up. The ghost at the Gearheart Olympia was thought to be Dahune Doner, a German contortionist who in his act arrived onstage packed neatly in a box, and had been packed into this box by a jealous rival and left for weeks backstage of a Freiburg theater to suffocate and starve; it was said the mortician could not straighten the corpse to fit it into a coffin. The ghosts of contortionists can fold themselves to handkerchiefs. Sometimes this ghost left the Gearheart to haunt a particular compartment at the Automat, and soured whatever sandwich or soup or slice of pie had been put there. America! Soon everyone knew which door to avoid, though the superstitious Automat owner kept the compartment filled with a chunk of poppy seed cake, replaced weekly.

  Elsewhere people discerned the ghosts of the slaughtered tangled up with their slaughterers, dark-eyed mothers with their starved children, and, on the fens, a pack of dogs who’d been shot one by one near Tbilisi—even the animals looked different from American animals, their heads too big and bony; even the ghosts of those animals. The souls of animals are usually too small to be detected with ordinary technology (the ordinary technology being the souls of human beings), but in the case of unexpected mass animal death (zoo fires, poisonings) they clump together and form a ghost about the size of a very old person’s. The ghosts of children are enormous. The ghosts of the very old are worn thin from use.

  Arch Truitt had grown up in an apartment over a bowling alley, and late at night he could hear the ghosts, which he believed were in fact science—radio waves, or radiation, or fine magnetic objects rushing to the North Pole. What but the unseen could explain the bursting sense of joy Arch sometimes felt, despite everything? The notion that he was loved by an intangible someone? His body slept in his bed above Truitt’s Alleys but his being was tickled elsewhere and otherwise. Truitt’s Alleys had its own ghost. At least people believed lane five did: every now and then the pins fell over, not all at once but in turn, one into another, till all that was left behind was a 7-10 split, two standing pins like fangs amid the dead wood. Anything might have done it. Roy said nonsense, only physics knocked over the pins on lane five. The city was built on swampland. It was a wonder anything stayed upright for more than half an hour.

  Arch tried to explain it to Roy. Life itself was strange. Think of things people didn’t used to believe! Think of the true things that were even now unbelievable! The Earth was, in fact, round. Duckbill platypuses existed and waddled on the other side of the world, where it was also—this was just a fact—winter, though in Salford it was July.

  “It’s July in Australia, too,” said Roy suspiciously. They were lying in their beds, putting off getting up to go to work. Summers Arch worked the counter while Roy pinset. Roy wasn’t fat anymore, though he carried his body around as though he were, ponderously. Pinsetting and puberty had thinned him out.

  “Yes, it’s July,” said Arch. “But winter. Tell that to an ancient man and he’d never believe you!”

  “Try it on Jeptha,” said Roy. “He’s the only ancient man I know.”

  “A primitive man. If you traveled back in time.”

  “I don’t deal in hypotheticals,” said Roy. “I believe in science.”

  “I thought science was all about hypotheses,” said Arch.

  He could feel Roy’s fury emanate from the bed, could see it, a cloud rising up, could smell it, the acrid scent of Roy not believing he’d been beat in an argument. Maybe all of the emanations in the alleys were just bad moods of Roy’s, kicking over things, mooning and moaning about. Roy’s mood even now had legs, and round cartoon boots, and distantly, distantly, Arch knew he was about to fall back asleep even though the morning was under way, he was on the downward slope, his own feet just dipped in dreams: where he learned most of the things he knew about the unseen world.

  “Who would want to haunt this place,” said Roy, but Arch didn’t think it was a who, exactly, and anyway, being a ghost was like being drafted: you didn’t get to choose where you were sent.

  Later that day he saw the ad in the back of his mother’s True Stories magazine:

  GHOSTS?

  Extranormal researcher

  Seeks haunted properties

  To photograph & investigate.

  Please write care of

  Box 231, Eureka, California.

  So Arch wrote.

  The Ghoster arrived three months later, no advance notice, wearing the kind of cabled Irish sweater designed to camouflage sorrow and poverty. His bald head was trimmed with dark
hair, and his shoulders were skewed by a camera bag. He had a handsome, hangdog face. He leaned on the counter and said, “What’s the best time?”

  “We have lanes free now,” said Margaret Vanetten Truitt.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. From somewhere under the sweater his snaking hand located a card. He handed it to her. Ghosts? Write Box 231, Eureka, California. “I’m here to photograph the spirit.”

  “We have no spirits,” she said.

  His hand went under his sweater again, and from a lower quadrant of his bulk found a letter handwritten on lined paper. “Arch Truitt says otherwise.”

  “Arch Truitt is fifteen,” she said. “He’s at school.”

  The man explained to Margaret that he was well known among those Americans who wished to see a ghost. “I spend my life avoiding them,” said Margaret, and he said, “You’re a rare bird.” He had taken a picture of a woman in a San Francisco hotel who’d died of a plunged elevator. The mystery of it: she was not in the elevator itself, but underneath the car, at the bottom of the shaft, murdered, but by who? He’d photographed her forty years after her death, in the hotel lobby. He took a magazine clipping out of his camera bag.

  “There she is,” he said. “See? She’s tilting her head.”

  Margaret could find nothing in the photo except flash and blur, but she could feel his longing. “Oh yes,” she said, putting her finger to the page. “Yes, there she is. It’s a shame! Fresh out of ghosts, we are.”

  “Maybe the fellow who died in the fire,” the man suggested.

  “No!” said Margaret. Then, “Nobody died in a fire.”

  “Murdered, maybe,” said the man.

  “Arch said that?”

  “No, no. Found that out myself. This is Bertha Truitt’s place. She had an interesting death, too. I see you’re startled. But you see I do my research. What I heard is it was a crippled man.”

  “A colored man, you mean,” said Margaret.

  “Not the man who died. The man who set the first man on fire. A crippled handyman who was arrested but let go. Joe the Cripple.”

  “Joe Wear,” asked Margaret. It was a shock to hear the word crippled, to realize that’s what Joe was to other people.

  The man took out a tiny book, and opened it to reveal notes written in a barbed-wire cursive. “He was in love with some hired girl who got fired by the family, and the crippled man decided to avenge her.”

  “Me?” said Margaret.

  “Not you,” said the man, “a long time ago. No, you’re far too young.” He peered again into the notebook. “‘The pins fall over for no reason.’”

  Margaret had known that the police had suspected Joe Wear of setting the fire. The two men had been at loggerheads—whatever loggerheads were; Margaret saw Joe and Dr. Sprague like lumberjacks standing on fallen trees gliding down the river, each wanting to go first—no, not loggerheads, they plain hated each other. But Joe Wear had never been in love with her. She knew that much. Didn’t she?

  She said, “Subsidence.”

  The man looked out over the lanes. “Possibly. Is that man dead?”

  Margaret turned to look—a spirit? A ghost? But it was only Jeptha Arrison, sleeping on the pinboys’ shelf. Margaret was about to explain, but then she saw him, on his stomach with his head turned toward them, gray in the face. They stared at him for a long while. He gave a rattling sigh, and rolled over. Since the war had started it was nearly impossible to hire pinboys, but then again there weren’t many men around to bowl. You couldn’t hire little boys any longer. That was illegal.

  “Only Jeptha,” she said. “I’m Margaret Truitt.” She stuck her hand out for a shake.

  Just like that the man’s eyes were filled with tears. He caught her hand between his. “My late wife’s name was Margaret,” he said. “I won’t need a thing from you. I’ll take some photos. Then, depending on what we find, perhaps some moving pictures. I understand, you say, We don’t have spirits or we don’t want spirits or how do we get rid of spirits if we got ’em. Customers don’t like ghosts, you might think, but they do. Look at Salem! Look at the Continental Hotel!” He nodded at the photo of the hotel elevator; he was still holding her hand. “You may find business better than it’s ever been.”

  She didn’t want the man to find a ghost but she also didn’t want him to go. He was a big man, and Margaret loved big men the way some women loved big dogs. Their very presence comforted her; she thought she particularly knew how to talk to them. “Well,” she said. “We could use the business. You start looking. Find me a ghost. Make it a good one.”

  Arch spent the week following the Ghoster, whose name—he thought—was Cadey. He’d imagined a ghost seeker’s instruments would be astonishing, made of whiz-bang plastics and fireproof glass and plutonium, with knobs and screens, automatic pens and a clock with luminous hands that had the ability to go spinning back through history. Maybe all that material had gone to the war effort; after all, they had torn down the cast-iron ball returns for scrap and replaced them with wood. What the man carried: an ordinary Brownie camera and a scrapbook filled with snapshots and clippings, a small tape recorder. Similarly, the words ghost hunter had conjured up in Arch’s head a man of energy, excitability. But Cadey was slow, dolorous, piscine. He seemed to swim through the alley.

  “Hetty Dubois,” he said, pointing to a page from a magazine. “Died of a plunged elevator. Not in it, under. Murdered, but by who?” Arch looked. A figure knit of light: he could see it, her head, her beaded dress, her flat kid shoes, feathered hat. “Here’s the Peddler of Ogunquit, Solomon Kamp. Here’s little Bobby Kent, hanged in a barn. The Dark Lady of Union Station—we don’t know her name, alas. Still a mystery. Perhaps that’s why she hasn’t moved on. But here she is. See? In front of the newsstand. Her head. Her arm.”

  “They’re people,” said Arch.

  “Of course they’re people,” said Cadey. “Were. What else?” He looked across the alley. “The thing is, you don’t know that you’ve got the ghost till you develop the film.”

  “But what do you think?” asked Arch. “What do the readings say?”

  Cadey shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t know. You got a historical case of spontaneous combustion, that’s for sure. But whether there’s a haunting—” He saw the look on Arch’s face. “I’ll take more pictures this week. Then we’ll know.” Cadey tilted his head and pointed his nose at the ceiling.

  Arch tried to feel a ghost. His father, or a fraction of him, something glowering and clumsy. He looked at his mother to see if anything had come over her: peace, or unease. He didn’t know which his father’s presence would induce in her. Cadey touched his own nose as though to adjust it.

  “You smell something?” Arch asked.

  “Beer,” said Cadey, giving Arch a sideways look. “No, I’m divining. The tip of the nose is a sensitive instrument. Why it succumbs to frostbite.”

  “You feel something, then.” Arch examined the air in front of Cadey’s face, but all he could really see was the man’s nose twitching in a circular way like a dog’s. Arch’d only drunk one beer that day, left behind by an old man on lane one, and suddenly he understood that to the old man, Arch was a ghost: a beer-thieving phantom.

  Cadey sneezed, but angrily. He gazed along the back wall. Jeptha knelt oddly on the pinshelf, glowering at them like a gargoyle.

  Grief was what made him handsome. A doleful beauty. Still Margaret thought he was overdoing it. In his camera bag he carried his wife’s childhood teddy bear. “Sweet!” said Margaret, and the man pulled out the bear and displayed it. Out in the open the bear wasn’t sweet; it was a haunted object, one eye replaced with a horn button, the other glass and accusing, a slip of pink tongue reattached in some battlefield surgery, belly fur worn away to warp and woof. As though only he had evidence of loss in this world.

  “Poor love,” said Margaret.

  “Me or the bear?” asked Cadey. He danced the bear up Margaret’s arm.

  “You need to stop,” s
he said to him. “The photography, I mean.”

  “Can’t. I’m writing a book.”

  “Write a book about something else.”

  “What else is there?”

  “I don’t know. Marry again, big handsome man like you.”

  “Ah no,” he said. He gave her a dazzling, woebegone smile. She knew it was pity; it felt like love. “I’m done with that.”

  He was done with lots of things, he told her. Restaurants, candy, newspapers, parties, cars, airplanes, living in houses. He slept in hotels and traveled by train.

  What he needed was to fall in love with another woman, but she saw he was too vain. Ordinary happiness would be a dent in his armor. Happiness was everywhere, like dropped coins. You might feel lucky to pick it up and put it in your pocket, but what could it really buy you?

  To be haunted! That set you apart.

  Close ’em,” Cadey said to Arch. He gestured. “The blackout curtains.”

  The blackout curtains were floor-to-ceiling black velvet weighted down with metal at the hem, intended to shut out not the outside light from the bowling alley, but the bowling alley light from the outside, in case of enemy attack. Salford held air raid drills all the time, according to the whims of Norman Riker, the air raid warden, who liked—he wouldn’t deny it—to make the whole town seem to fall dead at one time, the citizens in their houses or caught in their cars. Did they feel dead themselves, or did they only seem dead to him?