“Well,” said Joe, “I don’t have too much time—”
“I’ll pay you, of course,” she said.
A month later he was sitting naked on a stool in New York City, surrounded by strangers and entirely relaxed. Men and women: they drew him with bits of charcoal. There were twenty-five faces in the room and thirteen of them were Joe Wear’s.
It was as though he had to be turned into a stage prop before he could turn back into a human being. What had he been? He wasn’t sure. Not human the way the rest of the world had been, because being human meant getting along with other human beings, same as being a fox meant running with foxes. Who thought of him in the world, when he was not in front of them? Not a single person. Though it had been a case of mistaken identity, Manny and Constance had seen him that night. Three months in New York City and he’d concluded that he was as invisible there as he’d been in Massachusetts, and then somebody had said, I know you. Constance particularly. Of course she painted him naked, that didn’t surprise him—what surprised him was that he felt not a single scrap of modesty. He didn’t care. To be looked at was no threat.
Soon enough Joe was posing for artists everywhere in the city, in studios and classes. They liked him for his angularity, the honest muscles of his trade, his ability to hold the most punishing poses for ages, even if it might put him into bed spasming the next day. Then Constance introduced him to yoga. Like laundry for muscles: it was as though he had himself steam cleaned and steam pressed and folded perfectly back into his body’s compartments. He still ached, limped, stiffened up, spasmed, but it allowed him to model day after day.
It was an age of murals: Joe Wear appeared as sailors and Gods, as Columbus arriving in America, as John Smith, as Powhatan greeting him. He had never known what it was like to be beloved. He took advantage of it. An authentic tough among all the artists: he actually knew how to fix things. The artists splinted and patched but no repair they made ever lasted.
At one show, at the Louska Gallery, you could see a two-foot-high plaster maquette of Joe Wear looking at a pink and green watercolor of Joe Wear who was turning his head in the direction of a disembodied leg of Joe Wear, knee like a boulder, foot kicking aside a flying ladder. Joe Wear, the real one, bone and muscle, came to the opening in his coveralls. (The artists loved his coveralls. They asked where he got them but he wouldn’t say. “I came by ’em honest,” he’d say, and they knew it, it’s why, in their dungarees and fishing sweaters and leather sandals, they loved him.) Like Cracker Graham he’d figured out that a casual roll of his cuffs, ankle and wrist, gave him a louche, alluring look. Then he realized short-sleeved coveralls were even more effective. The opening was in March. Another man would have shivered in the thin coveralls and canvas tennis shoes, but Joe Wear loved the cold, the way it made lesser mortals say, “You must be freezing! How do you stand it?” He felt the cold and shook it off, in order to be admired.
When Ethan Olcoff showed up at the Louska Gallery, he was wearing shorts and sandals, a long-sleeved striped sailor’s shirt tucked into a belt. He had dark curls and blue eyes and a long nose that sliced at Joe Wear’s heart. Constance whispered in his ear, “His father invented the shopping cart. You’d think he could afford socks. Well,” she said, pulling back to regard Joe, “I suppose you’ll keep each other warm.”
Ethan’s father had not invented the shopping cart, but he had made certain clever refinements, and moreover had owned a small chain of grocery stores in Tennessee called Purity Markets. “Haven’t you met me?” Ethan liked to say. “I’m the Purity heir.” Ethan was rich, and restless with it, and eleven years younger than Joe. He owned a house in the West Village. Joe gave up his job at the Bowladrome but not the paraphernalia: he, too, would be an artist. He carved figures out of bowling pins, men who seemed, from whatever angle, to be turning away from you. He carved patterns into bowling balls and inked them and made prints, rolling them down the paper. Sometimes he remembered carving legs out of bowling pins for Dr. Sprague, and he thought: I should have done something better with my life, I should have gone into medicine.
He moved into Ethan’s house in the West Village, he who had lived only in rented rooms or dark apartments loaned by his employers. To live somewhere with a dining room, a library, a rooftop garden. It took him many years to sit in a chair after dinner, to just sit, so used was he to walking miles to get his head straight, to avoid the way a ceiling lowered itself like a twisting press upon your bed. To think that home was a place you might want to stay: it was Ethan, of course, who convinced him.
The only unhappiness was that Joe Wear could never really love Ethan’s cooking. “Tell me how you like it,” Ethan would ask, spooning the bouillon over the darling quenelle, and Joe would panic. He had been educated and liberated a thousand times over by then, he was a dumb kid brought up in the Dolbeer Home who knew the difference between chiaroscuro, sfumato, and contrapposto, a Hepplewhite foot from a Queen Anne, he’d learned music, he’d learned poetry at least a little, but a dumpling was a dumpling was a dumpling to him and he refused to pretend otherwise. Their friends tasted Ethan’s food and their eyes fluttered. “How do you do it?” asked Constance, tasting Ethan’s Poulet au Pot, and Joe thought, but did not say, It’s boiled chicken. Once a year they had a screaming fight about it. Constance said, when Joe told her, “You’re not fighting about the food, the food stands for something else.” No: they were fighting about the food. Who could take food that seriously, and that frivolously, at the same time?
He could still remember what it was like to be fifteen and hungry, actually hungry, and the beautiful drama of finally eating.
Joe had thought of Bertha Truitt over the years. She was the first unconventional person he’d ever met. Bertha Truitt was why he had not turned away from Manny and Constance outside of the Bowladrome in 1931: he recognized them, they were Bertha’s countrypeople, he might emigrate and join them. Then the oddity of oddities: one day, at one of Ethan’s parties, Bertha Truitt’s daughter showed up with a crowd of musicians. She was a singer, a good one, and a drummer—Joe couldn’t tell how good. He didn’t know about drumming. Jazz was one of the dull spots in his understanding, alongside abstract art.
It was odd to figure out the connection, but no odder than anything else in his life. Minna got along with Ethan but was wary of Joe, though he had once carved her a little cow out of a bowling pin. Maybe because he had. They didn’t know what they wanted from each other.
Ethan had been dead two months when the call came. Joe Wear lived in the house in the Village alone, among the fish forks and the soup tureens. The moment Ethan had died, in Cedars Sinai, of pneumonia, Joe’s inclination had been to join the army, though he was eighty years old and a pacifist. There must be some way to be shipped far away from home and killed, for a good reason, in another country.
Roy Truitt explained that they’d found a will, an old one. Not notarized, but it left the alley to Joe. They would talk to a lawyer—
Time was he might have said yes. It’ll be mine then. I’ll have it. Once he had people who loved him he’d seen how ill he’d been treated all the years before that. By Bertha, he’d thought, but if she’d left him the alley after all—then he realized he’d been at peace with Bertha some time.
Well, he’d come to see the place. Not to own it, of course. Just to see it before it was demolished.
Phillipine Square had been revised. The Gearheart Olympia was now the Salford Cinema, with four screens, advertising real butter on their popcorn, as though real butter on popcorn weren’t an ordinary human right. A sports bar, a women’s clothing shop that looked like it had seen better days, with outfits hanging in the window both revealing and frumpish: turtleneck halter tops, batwing minidresses. Sutherland’s Grocery was still there, with its pygmy shopping carts. A car mechanic. Cessidia’s Bakery, going strong, aniseed scented. A dry cleaner’s. Summertime, and all the brick and asphalt heated up.
Joe Wear arrived by subway—the subway stop was ne
w, too, a direct line from South Station in Boston. He stood across the street from Truitt’s Alleys, though it wasn’t Truitt’s Alleys anymore, but the Bowlaway: the sign in fancy script was beat up, the B faded and cracked. owlaway. A cursed place. Roy Truitt had told him there’d been a murder, his brother, it had been in the papers. Nobody would bowl there ever again.
Joe had forgotten the angles of Salford, how none of the streets met one another straight on. They looped and slanted. They radiated. He crossed the street and knocked on the glass door—plate glass, put in since Joe had left—and a man came from the inside to unlock it.
Neither Joe Wear nor Roy Truitt was what the other had expected. Joe Wear wore a suit both expensive and casual—what the clothing in the window of Belinda’s Boutique hoped to be—in a pale blue gabardine, with a pleated shirt beneath. He had a ruched face, beautiful broad shoulders—he was a mythical creature with the body of a youth and the head of a geezer, though his body hitched when he walked—and a haircut that, like his clothing, spoke of money. Steel gray hair, and a glorious white mustache, the sort that reminded you that only certain men should be allowed mustaches. Roy Truitt was fifty years old by then, his red hair ebbing away, which was a shame, thought Joe: it was a face that could have used a good head of hair. He did not look like his mismatched parents, nor like an averaging of their qualities. He looked like a bowler.
“Mr. Wear. I’m Roy Truitt.”
“Roy.” Joe patted his own pockets, as though for protection. “This place.” Then he said, surprised, “I hated this place.”
“It’ll do that. Let me get the lights.”
They shook hands absentmindedly in the way of New Englanders, a kind of tired duty that was more intimate than the glad-handing of any other region of the country.
Truitt’s had been renovated piecemeal over the years, but the change, to Joe Wear, was total. Automatic pinsetters, of course, the pinboys shelf ripped out. Blue plastic benches to sit while you waited your turn, and overhead projectors for the score sheets. The long bar had been replaced by a series of machines: pinball, ice cream. Somebody had left the video Ping-Pong plugged in. Ghosts played it.
Joe Wear’s wooden counter was gone. He’d imagined standing behind it. Trying it on for size: a bit of time travel. But it had been demolished, replaced with a long glass counter along the wall, behind it all the empty matching shoes arranged by size. What would happen to those shoes?
Above the pin decks, wooden cutouts: an angry anthropomorphic ball, legless but with cocked arms, charging at a cringing crying pin, beneath them the die-cut slogan BOWL! FOR THE FUN OF IT!
“This place,” said Joe Wear again. “You got a buyer?”
“Not yet. This is my first time here since—” Roy shook his head. “Burn it to the ground, is my opinion. My sister-in-law’s, too. Betty. Arch’s wife.”
“Make sure and look in the safe,” said Joe Wear. “Before you light the match.”
“What safe?”
“In the cellar.”
“Yeah, I don’t think that’s been used in all the time I’ve been here. My old man is the last person who opened it.”
“You should check.”
“He would have cleaned it out.”
“I’m telling you.”
“What is it that you think is in there, Mr. Wear?”
“Gold bars. Ham sandwiches. Who knows. Gold bars,” he said again.
“Well, I’ll have to get the door blown off.”
“Seventy-six; thirty-three; two.”
“Is that—you remember it? Must be somebody’s birthday.”
“It’s nobody’s birthday. You should look. I’ll write it down.”
“You’ll come with me,” said Roy Truitt in a pleading voice. He caught Joe Wear by the elbow. The man was in his eighties, Roy should have left him alone, but he knew he needed him, and for the first time in his life, maybe, he thought he could ask another person for what he needed. “We’ll look together.”
Joe Wear patted Roy’s hand. “All right. I can do that.”
The cellar stairs were the same, board risers, a splintery banister.
“Can you make it?” said Roy.
“I can make it yet,” said Joe Wear, clinging to the banister. Splinters dug into his hand.
The basement smelled mineral and ancient, like its dirt floor. There was a slope of empty liquor bottles in one corner, and the enormous safe, black, funereal, a hearse, a mausoleum, painted with flowers and the words EXCELSIOR SAFE & LOCK CO., SALFORD MASS.
Joe Wear said again, “Seventy-six; thirty-three; two.”
It was empty. “I thought it would be,” said Roy.
“There’ll be a false bottom. Bertha loved a false bottom. You got something? Here—” Joe handed over his penknife. It was important that Roy Truitt do the work himself.
“Oh,” Roy said. “I see.”
It took some prying up, but there it was. No ham sandwiches, but nestled below a thin steel plate: twelve pounds of gold, not in bars—not in big bars, as Roy imagined, despite himself—but little ones. “Ingots,” he said. “Bullion. These can’t be real.”
“Believe they are,” said Joe Wear. He knew it for a fact. When he’d left decades ago, he’d taken two of them. “Bertha put her faith in gold all her life.”
Roy Truitt was panting, sitting in the dirt by the safe. He said, in a heartbroken voice, “Well, they’re yours, then.”
“Nope. It ain’t bowling related, even.”
“‘And all contents,’” said Roy.
“You couldn’t pay me to take it,” said Joe Wear. “I don’t need it and even if I did—no.”
“There a curse on it?”
Joe Wear laughed.
Roy said, “Might explain some things. Well, we’ll give it to the widow Truitt.” Roy was shocked at how mocking that sounded. “My sister-in-law. Betty. Cracker.”
Now that he was on the ground, Roy wasn’t sure how he was going to stand up. He was old now, stiff and stout, concerned all of a sudden with stepping off curbs, standing up, crossing one leg over the other. Worse to do it in front of an audience.
“Let’s see if my legs’ll hold me,” he said.
“You got a limp there, I noticed.”
“Once upon a time my mother broke my ankle,” said Roy, which sounded so awful he laughed.
“Margaret did? She drop you as a baby?”
He shook his head. “With a bowling ball. Mother of the Year. I was eighteen.”
“Margaret Vanetten!” said Joe Wear. “Though somehow—no, I believe she would. It fits.” He offered a hand to Roy Truitt, who shook his head and pulled himself up on the safe. “Me, I have a birth injury. If you wondered.”
Roy nodded. Then he said, with some pleasure in his voice, “The old man used to talk about you.”
“Christ,” said Joe Wear. “Really? I hate to think what he said.”
“He cursed you,” said Roy cheerfully.
“No surprise there.”
“For your absence.”
“He liked an absence himself.”
“I guess he did.”
“Do you—” said Joe Wear, and then he stopped, he wasn’t sure what he was going to ask.
He had thought over the years of Dr. Sprague, Jeptha Arrison, even Margaret. Bertha Truitt, of course. But the person who troubled him decades later was Nahum. He could make no sense of the man, the strange compelling heat at the heart of him, the meanness that could kick in, the way he would abruptly turn and tease. Hurry up, Joe Wear, stop dancing. The way he might come back with a box of maple long johns from the bakery and offer one, fine, and then a second, all right, here comes the third, well it’s yours now you’ve touched it—he would badger and insult until Joe had somehow eaten five just to shut him up.
How old would he have been? Ancient, but he was a con man, he might have conned death.
“Your father’s not still alive?”
“No matter how you do the math,” said Roy. “Let�
�s go up.”
Genealogy says that things happen in chronological order, but also all at once: we wouldn’t be interested in this nineteenth-century cobbler from Salem, North Carolina, if he were somebody else’s dead. While your quiet life is occurring over here, in Eastham, Massachusetts—a yearly vacation with another family in a rented house by Coast Guard Beach—you are surrounded by sixth cousins. One of them is vacationing in a time-share in Provincetown, minutes away, and another is in Foxbury, Ohio, tending to his dying wife, who as it happens is also your twelfth cousin—this will be discovered not by you, but by his great-granddaughter, in another twenty years—and your other sixth cousins are spending their money wisely, and are going bankrupt, and are converting to the Bahá’í Faith, and are having their pubic hair removed (for surgery in one case; for aesthetics in another), and are attempting to donate a box of old books to the public library book sale. The ordinary person understands a handful of relatives: parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, the more palatable first cousins. People look into genealogy to find ancestors, but ancestors beget descendants in all directions, until the little boat of your family is swamped with cousins of every degree and removal. It’s possible that one or two will be interesting but mostly the study of genealogy will make you believe that being one of your people is common as dirt. Well, it is.
Upstairs, Roy Truitt turned on the rest of the lights, lit up the wooden Bertha who had been looking down at them all along, a crick in her fabric neck. She’d been wired up on the iron column since LuEtta Mood Arrison had brought her back. The two men didn’t see her yet.
“I’m sorry about your brother,” said Joe Wear. “I’ve heard that’s bad, to lose a brother.”
Roy Truitt rubbed his face. “There’s no word for it.”
“Heartbreaking,” said Joe Wear.
Bowlaway Page 31
