Gin was the soup of the day. He drank it. He had been so good.
Now he said it to his mother, weeping. “I’ve been so good.”
She answered bitterly, “Well, it surely doesn’t seem like you enjoy it.”
What good was goodness if you did it miserably, they both thought, but in different ways.
Margaret called Cracker. “You better come get your husband,” she said.
Cracker had scarcely spoken to Arch since he’d left. His mother had brought back reports, said he was not drinking, he was making amends, once she got him to go to church she was sure he could return to the marriage.
“I don’t care if he goes to church,” said Cracker, not sure she wanted him to return to her, either, but maybe, maybe. As for church—he hadn’t gone to church since he was ten.
“Darling, he has to go to church. Any day now.”
When Margaret called and said, Come down to the alley, she figured that was it. Arch had gone to church. Just like Arch to go to church on a Tuesday morning, with all the little old ladies at morning mass. But here he was, and she could tell: that man had not gone to church, not unless he’d already drunk the bars and package stores of Salford dry and had broken in to steal the sacramental wine.
He watched her come in, her dear peculiar gait. He tried to pat himself together, as though he were clay: pat pat on his shirt, his pants pockets, his hair, pat pat the tears away. Oh, she would never forgive him, he could see that. Or she would but he’d need to die.
“What’s wrong with you?” Cracker Truitt asked her husband.
“Nothing death won’t fix.”
“Don’t talk that way.”
“I’ll die of this place,” he said. “I gotta go.”
“Where will you go?”
He shrugged. Then he said, “Roy. Roy’ll take me in for a while. Roy’ll make me walk the straight and narrow.”
Roy would make him give up drinking; Roy would get him walking around Lake Quinsigamond in Worcester, would pound his chest and suggest deep breathing. Roy owned a female dog named Leslie who barked in the background of their occasional phone calls, and when Roy said Sit. Stay. No . . . no . . . Good girl, the dog fell silent. Arch was rooting for the dog. He had no intention of going there.
“Who gets custody of me?” asked Margaret.
“You have custody of yourself, Mother,” said Cracker. “You’re seventy-two years old.”
She was weeping. Her handkerchief was small and lavender and paper thin, like her eyelids. “But where will I go? To the home!”
“Of course not. Of course not. Here—”
They put their arms around her in an intricate knot, so they didn’t touch each other. How like her, to make the end of everything seem like the end of her.
“No, you’ll stay at the house, of course,” said Arch. “You live there. For heaven’s sake!”
Margaret had imagined leaving with her son, and she had thought that wouldn’t be so bad, in a way. They’d stay in motels in twin beds. Or if the room had one bed she’d sleep at the foot of his. She’d liked it, these weeks of taking care of him—he was the younger kid, the hobnobber, always talking to somebody else. For a few months she’d been the first person he spoke to in the morning and the last person at night. Why not hit the road together? She’d keep him from straying the way he had. Buy a hot plate to hot up soup. Breakfast in doughnut shops. See New England and its candlepin houses. It was what she should have done years before with Nahum—in her old age, she’d forgotten that he’d invited her and she’d said no, now she could see him walk away from her, she should have hailed him, Me, too, I’ll go!
“We’d miss you, Mother,” said Cracker. “The girls would.”
“Oh, thank the Lord,” said Margaret. “What about you, Arch darling? Will I see you?”
“I’ll try.”
“Trying’s enough,” declared Margaret.
Arch laughed, smeary tears still on his cheeks. “Then I’m a saint. I’m a champion. I’m the best who ever was.”
Later, as she left, he said to Cracker, “Will we get divorced.”
“What for?”
“In case you want to get married to somebody else.”
“Baby,” she said, “rest assured. You ruined me for that.” Her way of being nice, not saying, that for me.
They made Roy come pick him up. Once Arch had been loaded into the car, an absurd Renault 15 he’d brought back from Paris, Roy stood with Cracker on the front porch. “I’m sorry,” he said to her. He wore a green jacket the same color as the car, one shade grassier than pool-table green. “I really am.”
“You don’t seem sorry.”
“Of course I am,” he said. Then, “I mean, I should have apologized years ago. For my lack of gumption. I sometimes wonder—”
“Oh no,” said Cracker. “No, for Pete’s sake. You would have hated me soon enough.”
“I doubt that,” said Roy. When he had seen Cracker Graham’s mouth was as wide as ever, her lipstick as red, her long limbs as tan, he did not feel a flutter in his heart, but a snapped cable. If Arch had destroyed her looks he would have been happier. He’d only smudged the outlines.
“I would have been terrible to you,” she said again. “I just don’t have a sympathetic heart.”
He laughed. “Are you kidding? What have you done with your life! You’re a professional sympathizer! You think I would have been more work to sympathize with than Arch?”
They looked to the Renault. Arch had passed out in the passenger’s seat, his cheek smashed up against the window. He looked peaceful and plastic.
“A lot more,” she said. “I mean, you deserve it, but tons.”
What a thing, to marry into a family! What could be more perilous? And yet people did it all the time. They married and had children, every child a portmanteau, a mythical beast, a montage.
Arch did not abandon his family. He visited the girls, and sent postcards whenever he traveled, all the places candlepin bowling took him: Springfield, Massachusetts; Providence; Sacco, Maine.
Dearest girlies, I have been to the beach. A seagull took my roast beef sandwich! I think I may join the draft dodgers and go to Canada, not that I have a draft to dodge but because I would, if I had to, I wish I had when it had come to me. I didn’t even know it was possible. Love, Daddy.
“He didn’t even see combat,” said Cracker, reading it. “His big excitement is he stole a bunch of silver lids.”
“Lids?” said Amy.
Cracker mimed covering some casserole. “The Italians left a bunch of covered silver dishes. But he ended up with lids and no bottoms. Oh God, he took it badly. He cried. I don’t know what happened to them.”
“Well then that’s why,” said Brenda. “The war made him compromise his morals.”
Cracker laughed, a creaking gate always. “Sure. I guess. He was pure before?”
“He was always pure,” said Amy, age fifteen, passionately. “That’s why when he did something bad it was poison to him.”
Too often Cracker could not sleep for wondering where Arch was in the world. Years later, even. He never disappeared, as his own father had, he was just a radio station who some days was clear and others nearly overwhelmed by static—though enough of his voice beneath the crackle you still could hope that with gentling he might come through. Had he remarried? Cracker might wonder suddenly in the night. Was he drinking? He called his mother and his daughters on no regular schedule. He and Roy came to see their mother—at the alley, mostly, and then Arch might roll a few frames. Once a year, every other year. His life was a mystery. I’ll tell you everything, he’d once told her, and she’d said, God, no. She was never the type of woman who’d fall for the promise, the threat, of everything. She tried to convince herself she could live on nothing instead.
Men from Mars
Jeptha Arrison hadn’t been born in a bowling alley, not ever, but Arch Truitt was. It was an event that had embarrassed everyone involved so much they neve
r spoke of it: Margaret’s modesty protected by the oak counter, though Nahum had urged her to stretch out on the pool table. Was he crazy? Don’t ruin the felt. Give birth someplace that can be mopped up. The doctor who arrived five minutes too late pronounced the sudden labor and delivery typical. Not for me it isn’t, said Margaret, and the doctor laughed with such condescension it was like a sword run through her body that missed all her organs. She would feel the injury the rest of her life.
Arch Truitt was born in the Bowlaway; that is, Truitt’s Alleys; that is, in the middle of a swamp. Bowling was what he knew in the front part of his brain, before the expulsion. The back of his brain was fenland. Why he had to drink so much. He had to keep up the damp. He was mostly marsh.
They weren’t a walking family, they’d driven everywhere, walking was for layabouts and geniuses. “Dr. Sprague walked,” Margaret once said, “in order to think.” She said it as though a walk was like college. Yes, you could go, but you better be sure you could stick it out, and she surely wouldn’t sponsor you. “Who was Dr. Sprague?” asked Arch, but Margaret only shook her head. Sometimes she thought Roy had inherited some of Dr. Sprague’s seriousness and melancholy, thinking things he shouldn’t; Arch might have inherited his thirst. Never mind inheritance was impossible. They’d never met. He was only maritally part of the family. But couldn’t certain qualities be heavier than others, and drip down through the generations anyhow?
Roy, who’d gone to college, went for walks. He encouraged Arch to come with him. So Arch set off, and, being a swamp, sought out the swamp.
This was in the summer. They lived together in Roy’s enormous Worcester apartment, actually three apartments knocked together, the sort of place that, growing up, Arch had literally dreamt of: a floor plan that made no sense, bedrooms beyond closet doors, a kitchen the size of another person’s apartment in the middle, another smaller pointless kitchen in a far corner. It was big enough they could live in companionable silence when Arch wasn’t on the road or with a girlfriend. The living room was green, like Minna’s living room, which Roy had seen during the war, a vow he’d kept, perhaps the only one. Now they were on vacation, down the Cape, surrounded by marsh. They were out too late on the beach and walking back to their car. Roy had gone ahead—when they were children he was always slower, because of his weight, because of his clockwork. They were men now, and he took pleasure in outpacing his brother when he could.
Arch lagged behind. He was a city kid and the lack of streetlights in nature always struck him as eldritch.
A flash above his head, so bright it had to be fatal or divine. Some bird was saying calmly, as though half-dead, help-help, help-help, help-help. It knew nobody would.
He stopped and listened. Ahead, a salty glow. He walked toward it, and stepped into a clearing, and into a bog.
Which way was home, by which he meant the parking lot?
The bog got its fingers into his shoe.
What happened then: peace fell over Arch Truitt and he sat down. Sat down in a bog. Yes, he was drunk. He could hear strange tinkling music, and across the bog he could see some sort of creature burrowing along the edge.
Who are you?
I mean you no harm.
That’s not what I asked.
Do you mean me harm?
I will help you however I can, Arch thought, and believed it. He’d known that flash of light was not of this earth. It was a spaceship crashing down. Arch tried to stand up but no man is light on his feet in a bog. Once he’d finally managed it the creature was gone. He thought it was. The bog had taken his shoe. Then he saw more lights, orange through the scrubby pines one direction, and a more alien light throbbing the other, and he went toward the throbbing, and found Roy there in the parking lot, next to a police car all alight. Roy’s shoes were in his hands, pants rolled up, feet black with mud.
“Oh my God,” said Roy. He dropped his shoes to the ground and stepped into them in disbelief. “I thought you were dead.”
“Why would I be dead?” asked Arch.
A policeman got out of the car. He was very tall and thin, but with a sweet round boyish face. He would be boyish all his life, you could tell. “You need to go to the hospital?” he asked Arch. He had the worried voice of feigned bravery, alto, marbled with baritone.
“Why on earth?”
The policeman pointed at his bare foot.
“I don’t think that’s a medical condition,” said Roy. “Come on,” he said to Arch. His hands were shaking. This had been an emergency and he wanted to drive away from it.
“What were you to up to?” said the policeman, suddenly suspicious.
“Walking,” said Roy.
“Well,” said Arch.
“Well,” said the policeman with a mean encouragement—everything that had been boyish about him stayed boyish, but spiteful and stunted. “What were you up to?”
“We’re brothers,” said Roy, as though that explained everything.
“I’m talking to him. Your brother.” He examined Arch’s face, eyes, jawline, Roy thought for a family resemblance—was it there? was it convincing?—then said, in a petty, vulcanized voice, “You look familiar.”
At that Arch gave his best smile, the magnanimous one that made you glad to know him. “Maybe from television.”
The cop straightened up. “Oh! Yes! You!” He put his hand out for a shake. Arch took it. “You’re an actor,” the cop said.
“Then you know me,” said Arch.
“Sure,” the policeman said less certainly. “All right, then. You’re OK?”
“We’re OK,” said Arch. “Thank you. Appreciate it.”
The Truitt boys waited for the cruiser to pull away. Then Roy backed into something—a tree?—and there was a sound that went all through the car and dented their hearts, then he pulled forward, backed up again, a vibrating crash—a pole?—and then eased away.
“We should look at that,” said Arch.
“It’s fine,” said Roy.
They swung out of the parking lot. Arch said, “You called the police?”
“You were gone five hours,” said Roy. “I thought you’d drowned.”
Five hours? No, not possible, but on the other hand the orange glow had been dawn—here was the sun, glazing the bay—and they’d left the beach at night.
Roy said, “So now you’re an actor?”
“He recognized me, didn’t he?”
“You look like some Cape Cod cat burglar,” said Roy.
“I am on TV,” said Arch.
“Sometimes. You’re an occasional Saturday afternoon candlepin bowler.”
“I’m an actor,” Arch said peaceably. It was only occasional these days. “Maybe I never was that good a bowler, I just acted as though I was one and the pins believed me.”
“What on earth are you talking about?”
Arch felt as though he understood his own life for the first time, not spelled out in words, not something he could translate to another human being, but shining all around him as the car moved through it. He should have taken that talent elsewhere. He could have been an actor. He could have been nearly anything. He still could change his life.
“I saw a UFO,” said Arch. “That’s what took me so long.”
“You saw a cop’s flashlight.”
“I heard music.”
“Must have been a boardwalk on the other side of the bay. Sound carries across water.”
“I know sound carries across water.”
They drove a long time in silence, and Roy said, “I believe you.”
“Believe me what?” asked Arch.
“What you said. About the spaceship.”
“The UFO,” said Arch, thinking it sounded more scientific. But the ship, the object, wasn’t the point: it was the creature who’d spoken to him thought to thought. He couldn’t work out how to put it.
“Yes,” said Roy. “I believe you.”
Arch studied Roy, resolutely piloting the old Renault. A perversity to dr
ive that car in the States. Nobody knew how to fix it, and they weren’t inclined to try. Roy’s face, as always, was that of a captain who’d vowed to go down with his ship, but not quietly. “You don’t believe in UFOs,” said Arch.
“I believe you,” said Roy.
“You don’t believe in ghosts.”
“Whatever you tell me, Arch,” said Roy, and he looked away from the road for a moment, and his eyes were filled with tears, “I believe. I owe you that.”
Arch sat back. For a moment he was irritated at Roy—these tears! this pity! when Arch himself felt entirely happy and at peace—and then he accepted the belief (but not the pity), the brotherly affection, as he had accepted plenty of things from Roy over the years. Roy was a monk; Roy renounced things not for God but for his brother.
As for Roy himself—it had come upon him then that if any living human could talk to the dead, to the galactically misplaced, to babies dreaming in their prams, it was his brother, as innocent a sinner as ever lived.
Home. Before Roy got out he said, “I think we should open a bowling alley.”
Arch nodded. He said, “You hate bowling.”
“I don’t,” said Roy. “In another life I might have loved it. We’ll do everything differently.”
“Tenpin.”
“Sure, why not,” said Roy. “Half and half. Stay at home. Run the pro shop.”
“All right,” said Arch. “I will.”
Roy got out and looked at the back of the Renault. The bumper was half off, and there was a crack in the rear window.
“Vandals,” he said.
Arch laughed.
“Vandals,” said Roy threateningly.
“OK,” said Arch. After all, he was changed; he believed, too. He knew things now that Roy didn’t and he looked toward the blue morning sky to confirm them. There was a finial atop the nearby church steeple that Arch had never noticed before. A message from another world. It fattened and diminished, fattened and diminished. It flew away. It was a pigeon.
He always looked for it afterward, and he always missed it.
Bowlaway Page 27
