Bowlaway

by Elizabeth McCracken

  Close them, Cadey called, so Arch went to close them. They were so heavy it felt like the end, the very end, every time you drew them.

  “Now shut the lights.”

  Arch looked toward his mother behind the counter. She nodded. That was what the home front was, you could plunge a place into darkness and people would accept it. The dark was patriotic. He threw the switch. He didn’t think you could see a ghost in the pitch black, any more than you could see a spiderweb. Such things need light.

  Still, in the darkness you could believe in nearly anything. Every person there sensed the six iron columns, cold and dead and clobbering, like ancestors holding the ceiling up. They could hear a ball roll along alley three, let go when the lights were still on, too late to stop it. It wobbled into the gutter. Then silence, then the miniature guillotine sound of the shutter of Cadey’s camera. Margaret felt the hand of her mother on her shoulder, could hear at the back of her skull a suggestive whistle; Arch had an intimation of his father, about to bellow; Jeptha Arrison was overcome with thoughts of his dead Bessie, whose grave he still visited weekly. Roy, upon the pinboys’ shelf, thought only of himself.

  Every boy becomes, at some point in life, a genealogist, hoping to find a king, if only to settle a bet with other boys. At school they’d had to draw a family tree, and Roy’s was no more than a shrub, while the other boys had cousins and aunts and uncles, even nieces and nephews. He had a brother, and two parents. His mother was an orphan; instead of aunts, he and Arch had nuns. His father, too, was an orphan, though he knew nothing more than that. He had one pale and ludicrous brother. If he wanted more family, he would have to wait.

  He had read the letters his mother kept in the lowest cubby, tied with dirty frayed blue ribbon. He’d worried that they were love letters. From a stranger? Terrible. From his father? Worse. But instead they were from a woman named Minna Sprague who lived sometimes in New York City. From the letters he discovered she was Bertha Truitt’s daughter; from the New York Times index at the public library he discovered that she was a well-known percussionist and singer. She was also black, which stunned him. Here was a picture of her with Duke Ellington; here, eyeing a seedy-looking Bing Crosby. The royalty that he’d longed to find, when he’d made his family tree, but closer. He would not ask his mother about her, because he wanted to keep the facts of Minna Sprague to himself.

  Roy Truitt did not believe in ghosts, but he did in supernatural forces: duty, for instance, and guilt. In the dark he thought he could see things. Not the past, in the form of the dead, but the future, a life in which he did not live above a bowling alley. Go to college, said a voice in the dark. Enlist. My mother won’t let me, he thought, but he knew it was also fear—not of war, or death, but living in close quarters among men who would see all the ways in which he was deficient, the way men always had: his father, the bowlers, the boys at school. His bookishness. His dislike of men. He thought again, I could just go. Go to New York. Find Minna Sprague. Just show up at some club, finding the listing in the paper. After it was over, introduce himself. A kind of cousin, he imagined saying, though officially he was her nephew. When he listened to her records he could never tell whether he wished she were singing to him, I love you so dear it’s murder, or whether he wished to be her, singing to someone else. He understood it did not make sense, but he had this idea that he would one day meet Minna Sprague, and Minna Sprague would save his life. She would recognize that he, like she, did not belong in Salford, Massachusetts.

  In the dark he turned to look at what he thought was the curtain, as though a ghost might be projected upon it. Nothing. Then he started to lower himself off the shelf. Where were the pins? Where was the cellar door? His mother, from somewhere in the center of the dark, said, “Do you see something?”

  Nobody answered.

  She said in a rough whisper, “I do.”

  A noise, an icy one, winding. That fraud, thought Roy, he’s trying to terrify us all, though he felt a muffler of cold air wind around him. Roy was halfway off the shelf. Should he go? Then he heard the pins on lane five fall over, not one at a time but all at once, and this startled him so he dropped down and scattered the pins on his own lane.

  “Lights!” called Cadey. “Lights!”

  Their eyes had been so open in the dark, it was painful to be thrown into light.

  The squealing noise was Jeptha. He was crying, and Cadey sat on the pinboys’ shelf next to him, was taking the man into his lap. “Ssh,” said Cadey to Jeptha. “Ssh. It’s terrible, I know.” He looked at Roy. “I don’t think it’s funny,” he said.

  “I don’t—”

  “Playing tricks on your family that way.”

  “Roy,” said his mother.

  “It wasn’t Roy,” said Arch. He could feel his father, he was sure of it. Even in the light the air was changed, was sharp with dissatisfaction.

  “It was you?” his mother said to Roy.

  Arch said, “I believe in ghosts.”

  “Lucky for you,” said Cadey, “so do I.”

  At the end of the week, Saturday morning, Cadey arrived with a stack of photographs in a paper envelope and began to lay them out on the front counter, all four sides, dealing them out like some sort of game. He came behind the counter, where Margaret stood—you’d expect a man that big to give off heat but he was cold as an icebox, why he wore that sweater, his fingers as bloodless as stalactites. The Truitts were there. Margaret, who wanted Cadey to stay. Arch, who believed in ghosts. Roy, who did not believe in ghosts but whose innocence could be proven only by evidence of their existence.

  “Where’d you develop these?” asked Arch.

  “Drugstore,” Cadey said sadly. Slap, slap, slap: the photos went down. It was true, you could see what wasn’t there, namely women. In black and white the alley looked like a boys’ reformatory.

  A test. Was there an order to how the man arranged the snapshots? They became children again, who wanted to be first and right and rewarded. At first they could see no light in the pictures and then that was all they could see, glint and glance and gleam.

  “I think I see it,” said Arch, leaning over a picture of lane five. The ten pin, back right corner, seemed lifted off the ground, no ball or pinboy anywhere near, a pale curl of something at the top. He looked in every corner of the picture, trying to find a face, or a hand, trying to feel a presence. He pointed. “There.”

  “Nope,” said Cadey.

  “This one?” said Roy of a photo taken from outside the alley, looking in, planks of light coming off the window. He was a cynic, he reminded himself, but he could still feel the clammy cold that had wrapped around his neck in the dark.

  “Left the flash on. You should be able to tell that.”

  “Here,” said Margaret, picking up the oddest, quietest picture, a lost tin solider on his side—from this angle the oval plinth he stood on looked like liquid flooding from his feet.

  “No,” said Cadey, taking it from her hand, “I just liked the composition.”

  Jeptha wouldn’t look. He was shaking his head. “It’s a bad business,” he said, “sniffing out ghosts. Don’t believe in it.”

  “You’re the one who told me!” said Arch, incensed. For the first time in his life he felt fatherless. He felt he might float into the air. “You said always!”

  “No, no,” said Jeptha. “Oh, you nice Archie. I don’t believe in doctors, nor in the FBI, nor in prospecting for gold. I don’t believe in looking.”

  Cadey nodded at that. “He’s right. There’s nothing. Sometimes no matter how you wish for it, eh, Mr. A?” He raked the photos together and tamped them into a pack.

  “But the light!” said Margaret. In the black-and-white movies Margaret loved, when a person died the soul pulled away from the body perfect and monochromatic, as though death were a printing press, the body a plate, the ghost an impression. Of course you could photograph it.

  “Smoke and flashbulbs and the angle of the overheads. Sorry,” said Cadey. “Be
lieve me, nobody’s sorrier than me.”

  Then they all turned to the pins and hoped. Even Roy did, he closed his eyes and tried to see them fall over, pin by pin.

  Arch said, “I’ve seen them.” But had he? Had he ever actually been looking at the lane when the pins fell over? He could feel his organs disperse in his torso, a kind of sickness—a thorough bamboozlement. “Roy,” he said. Roy shook his head.

  Arch couldn’t explain it. That ghost had belonged to him; it had felt personal and exact. All right, it might not have been his father—but he’d felt something flattening itself against the wall so it could sleep with Arch in his bed. (Maybe it was in his bed even now!) Maybe not even human, just a leak in the pipe of the afterlife that happened to drip drip drip on Arch’s head.

  Not bamboozlement. Or that particular sort: heartbreak. Someday somebody will love you but it’ll just be a living girl. A whole string of them. Tough luck.

  The Ghoster packed up his equipment that afternoon, the mirrors, the microphones. “It’s too bad,” said Margaret, as though she were at fault but didn’t want to admit it. She gave him an Eskimo Pie from the machine. “Here.”

  “What is it?”

  “Ice cream.”

  “I don’t eat ice cream anymore,” he said. He tried to hand it back. “Time to go.”

  “Eat this one,” she said. “Here, I’ll have one, too.” She got a second for herself.

  He unwrapped his and examined the chocolate coating. “They gave us Eskimo Pies in the service,” he said. “Taste of home.”

  “You fought in the war?”

  “A little. It’s good. It’s melty.”

  “That’s why don’t unwrap the whole thing. Here, take mine. I’ll take yours. There you are. Where will you go next? Nothing like an Eskimo Pie.”

  “Heard about a nineteenth-century defenestration in Paterson, New Jersey,” he said. He had chocolate on his chin, and she knew the ice cream was as cold in his mouth as it was in hers, and that was something. “Over a card game. Seventy years ago. That death’s got some age on it: that’s what you need. I figure you get some time on yours, let the spirit come into his own.”

  “So you don’t think it was Roy.”

  “Don’t get me wrong,” said Cadey. “I think he’s a jackass. But jackassery and spirit activity may be found in the same place. Might even be the spirit that’s inclining the boy to mischief. He’s young yet. Fresh. The spirit, I mean. He’ll show. I’ll come back.”

  She didn’t know whether she should defend Roy. He wasn’t a jackass; he had other flaws that were worse. She said, “Arch would like that.”

  “Oh, Arch,” said Cadey. “You tell Arch to keep a lookout for phenomena.”

  “Like what?”

  He shoved the end of the Eskimo Pie in his mouth so the coating shattered, and wrote out a list.

  Cold spots

  Mist

  Flickering lights

  Inconsolable children

  Upset in dogs

  Moaning

  Misplaced items

  Ineradicable mold

  Puddles of no known origin

  Mushrooms

  Somewhere a band playing

  He signed it in a florid hand, Love K. D., but he forgot to put down any forwarding information. Who was that love meant for, her or Arch or the ghosts?

  “K. D.,” she said.

  “Yes, Margaret?”

  She tried to come up with a question as serious as she sounded, though she’d only been reading his initials out for the first time, wondering what they stood for.

  Ghosters, like birders, tiptoeing. Did you see a chickadee, a thrush, a suicide, an accidental decapitation? Don’t scare ’em off with your big feet now. They are precious. We need them.

  She tried, “What happened to your wife?”

  He shook his head as though seeing it. “Terrible.”

  “She was murdered,” said Margaret.

  “No, ma’am. But she was sick a long time. One morning I was rubbing her feet, they were always cold, I rubbed and rubbed and the feet stayed cold and I understood that they wouldn’t warm. Got up, called her mother, walked right out of the house and never went back.” Then he said, “Everyone who dies is murdered.”

  After a moment, Margaret said, “I don’t believe that’s true. So you left her there, alone in bed?”

  “I had done the hard part,” said the man. “Walked away. So you see.” He hefted the camera bag. “What about you,” he said in a knowing voice. “You are alone, too.”

  “Do you think,” she began. “Can you tell? If he’s.” She wasn’t sure what she was about to say. “If my husband has entered the spirit realm.” For the first time she wished it were true: she was tired of hoping.

  He stared at her a long time, then said, “Yes, Margaret, he’s dead.”

  “What does he say?” she asked in a little voice.

  He caught her hand in his. He was always doing that, as though her hands were butterflies, to be cupped in his own. Then she knew everything about him, the way he held her hand. That man did not believe in ghosts. What a relief, to understand that he knew nothing about the dead.

  He was a fraud, but Margaret had a weakness for fraudulence. Fake cakes in the bakery windows lovelier than any real slice, her husband, her Saturday afternoon movie matinees, the packets of saccharine she sprinkled on her cereal.

  He said, “Bertha would want women here. You need them, anyhow. Get in some girls to set the pins.”

  “Girls?” said Margaret.

  “I can’t talk to the dead,” said Cadey. “No man can.”

  “All right,” she said wryly.

  His whole face went angular with hurt feelings. His eyes were isosceles triangles. “Really, Margaret,” he said. “You don’t know. You believe in God and I don’t mock you.”

  “Believing in God is not believing in ghosts,” she said, but how did he know she believed in God?

  She believed in God for the same reason anybody does: it is unbearable to think that our private thoughts are truly private.

  I Had to Take Her Apart to Make Her Fit

  Apart from his accidental electrocution at the hands of the strength tester, Jeptha Arrison had never been injured on the job. Remarkable for a pinbody, right there where the whole calamity of bowling occurred. He’d never taken a ball to the head or a pin to the ankle; had never strained his shoulder sending the balls back on the return; had contracted no infections of the skin or lungs or blood. If you overlooked the tremors that he hid in his pockets, he was in astoundingly fine shape for a man who’d done manual labor all his life. But setting was precise or it was nothing. When he closed his eyes Jeptha could see the pins and their order but his body could not make it so.

  He was born in a bowling alley, and he planned to die in one.

  That’s what he said to his friend William Burling Jeter Jr., who claimed he was the oldest man in Salford, and who was Margaret Truitt’s most hated customer.

  “You could do it,” said William Burling Jeter Jr.

  “I will,” said Jeptha. “That has been my plan all along.”

  Meanwhile he would listen to the lectures of William Burling Jeter Jr., which was itself a kind of death. Jeet was certainly the oldest man in Truitt’s Alleys, a loiterer, a bore, who never bowled but hung around. He had igneous features, hardened, fluid. His dark eyes glinted amid his freckles.

  “I did my service for the Union,” Jeet said. “Nearly too old for that, too!”

  “Are you even American?” Margaret asked. Oh, she hated him. She thought he had a kind of Japanese-y look, but that might have been only old age. His accent, too, seemed more geriatric than geographic. “Where did you come from? I don’t remember you.”

  “Been here since the beginning,” he said. “I knew ’em all. I was here when Bertha Truitt made her entrance and her exit, and all the acts between. Honey,” he said to Margaret. “Come on, honey, smile for me.”

  “No thank you,” she s
aid.

  “Some hot nuts, then? Give me a scoop of hot nuts.”

  “Do you have a nickel?”

  He waved away the question. “I’m the oldest man in Salford.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “You doubt it? Who then?”

  “Not you, is all I know. Jeptha, maybe.”

  “I’m a youngster,” said Jeptha, wishing the two of them would stop bickering. It was keeping him alive and that was not his wish.

  “He is not the oldest man in Salford!” said Margaret.

  William Burling Jeter Jr. laughed with happiness. “Then bring him to me.”

  “The oldest man in Salford is dying,” Margaret said. “He’s in a hospital. Or he’s in bed. The oldest man in Salford doesn’t have time to waste in a bowling alley, begging for hot nuts.”

  “I’m not begging, honey,” said William Burling Jeter Jr. “I’m just fine. Somebody else will get me my hot nuts.”

  “They’re mine,” she said, “so I don’t know who.”

  “That nice Archie,” suggested Jeptha.

  He always did, that nice Archie, that profligate kid. Meanwhile Margaret wasn’t going to smile for William Burling Jeter Jr. unless she knew who he really was. She turned to the old man, but his face was amused and aggravating, so she just said again, “They’re my hot nuts.”

  “I know it, honey,” Jeet said. “You hold ’em close. Hey Jep. I ever tell you I saw Sally Rand?” Only William Burling Jeter Jr. could make a story about a burlesque dancer dull—he began in the lobby, and lingered by the refreshment stand—Bud orange soda, made in Watertown, Massachusetts; Necco Wafers, made in Cambridge, Massachusetts, brought—if you didn’t know!—by the explorer MacMillan to the Arctic so he could bribe the Esquimaux. It took a long time to get to Sally Rand herself. “I believe she was not nekkid behind her bubble but garbed in long underwear, still I’ll be damned—Jep, hey Jep—hey, hey. Help!”

  Midafternoon on a Saturday. The bowling stilled slowly. There is always shouting in a bowling alley: you want a beer, it’s time to go, your mother’s looking for you. Now the place fell quiet.

  The silence scared William Burling Jeter Jr. even though he was the one who’d sounded the alarm. “Look,” he said to Margaret Truitt.