The Schernoff Discoveries

by Gary Paulsen

  All for seven cents a line. Figuring two lines an hour on each alley, and setting two alleys if everything was working right, it was possible to make twenty-eight cents an hour, plus tips, which they would sometimes slide down the gutter—a dime, maybe as much as a quarter. The best week I ever had I made twelve dollars and forty cents working every night from six to midnight and both weekends, setting for non-league bowlers.

  It was a world Harold didn’t understand, even when I tried to tell him about it, and so one day when he stopped me in the hall and asked me if they needed pinsetters, I was more than surprised.

  “You want to set pins?”

  He shrugged. “I need money and it’s the only job available.”

  “Why do you need money? Aren’t your folks able to help you?”

  He shook his head. “I need the money for a new ham radio transmitter. I want to move up to a forty-watt and make a new dipole antenna as well. I need forty-eight dollars and fifty-seven cents and my father doesn’t approve of my ham ambitions and since there are no other jobs available …”

  And that’s how it happened.

  It was, of course, a complete catastrophe. While I wasn’t athletic I had a fair amount of hand-eye coordination. Harold seemed to have a kind of reverse coordination and would frequently—as he might have said—do exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time.

  By the end of his first night of setting pins he’d taken a ball directly in the stomach and two pins in the head, had a nosebleed that had splattered his shirt and left him looking like the survivor of a car wreck, and had picked up a limp. At the end of our shift I watched Harold as the manager handed him a dollar and eight cents.

  He looked at the money Ernie put in his hands. He folded the bill neatly, put it in his pocket and staggered down the stairs and out of the bowling alley.

  “Are you all right?” I caught up with him. “I mean, you look …”

  “I am not all right. But I have worked and been paid. If my calculations are correct I need to do this for thirty-six-point-eight more days before I will have enough for the transmitter. A person can do practically anything for a short time if he doesn’t think he has to do it for life. I’m looking at it in this manner. If I thought I had to reset bowling pins in a pit for the rest of my life”—he sighed—“I would hold my breath until I died.”

  It would be nice to be able to say Harold set pins for thirty-six-point-eight more days and bought the transmitter but it would not be exactly true because he had been there only four days when Chimmer arrived.

  I’d never thought of Chimmer as working. I just assumed that people would give him money to make him stay away—which I would gladly have done if I’d had any money. But one afternoon he came in and Ernie, always desperate for pinsetters, hired him on the spot.

  It was something from my worst nightmares. To be working at a difficult and dangerous job where injury was not only possible but probable and then to look up and see Chimmer evilly grinning in the next pit over put me very close to my limits.

  But for the first few nights the work was hard enough to keep even Chimmer busy and exhausted. He just took his money and went home like the rest of us.

  By the end of the week, though, he was back in form, making my life as close to hell as he could. I’d lean over to pick up pins and he’d slap me in the back of the head, cuff my ear, pour water on my head from the water bottles we brought back to drink from while we worked. Now and then he’d reach over and tip my pins just after I set them. Through all this I worked in a kind of quiet fury. I couldn’t think of any solution except to kill him. I don’t know how long it would have gone on this way had Harold not intervened. By doing so he solved my whole Chimmer problem.

  It had been a long evening and I was a wreck. The leagues were bowling and I was setting pins on the alley reserved for two construction firms. They were pounding back the beers and throwing the balls so wildly the pins flew all over the pit area.

  Chimmer was working next to me and Harold was on Chimmer’s other side. Chimmer’s alley was the funeral-home team. They were very slow and he had lots of time to bedevil me. I worked through it and thought about what Harold had said about doing something for a short time that I didn’t have to do for my whole life. But Harold forgot himself.

  “Why don’t you leave him alone?” he said.

  In the roar of the pins crashing and the machines clanking down, Chimmer didn’t hear Harold. Besides, he was busy pouring water on my back and could only focus on one thing at a time.

  “I said, why don’t you leave him alone?”

  Unfortunately Harold yelled just when there was a lull in the noise. His words boomed through the pits.

  Chimmer swung his big body around, looked at the scrawny, dirt- and sweat- and blood-streaked apparition in front of him and said, “What?” It was as if somebody had tried to stop an earthquake.

  “Leave him alone,” Harold said. “He’s never done anything to you.…”

  And I must confess that for a moment I was grateful that Harold had Chimmer’s attention. I thought, good, I can get to work while he pulls Harold apart. But I knew that I’d have to do whatever I could to help Harold.

  Chimmer set a frame and then reached over into Harold’s pit, caught him by the back of his waistband and threw him over into the pins. Harold stood up and Chimmer hit him in the face and broke his glasses. It was more than I could stand. Harold wasn’t badly hurt and the glasses could be fixed, but there was something about it all—Harold trying to help me, the way Chimmer had hit Harold without warning, the cruelty and unfairness—and I completely lost control of myself.

  I screamed a word I’d read in the Mickey Spillane books. I flew out of my pit and landed on Chimmer’s back, driving him forward and down into his pit.

  He shrugged me off like a fly. The whole thing would have resulted in my complete self-destruction—I had, after all, attacked him and thus committed a form of suicide—except that fate decided to help me out.

  As Chimmer turned I launched a fist at his face. I thought I might as well. I could only die once.

  At the precise instant that I started my swing one of the construction workers threw a ball at something close to the speed of light. I heard a thunder of crashing wood as it plowed into the pins. My fist came up and forward and met Chimmer’s jaw just as a pin screamed over my shoulder and caught him full on the forehead.

  He went down like a stone. The men up front stopped throwing balls for a moment. There was an uncharacteristic silence in the pit. Harold leaned over, holding his broken glasses on his nose, and studied Chimmer.

  “I think you killed him.”

  “No. It wasn’t me. A pin caught him. Besides, you couldn’t kill Chimmer unless you cut his head off and drove a stake through his heart and even then he wouldn’t die for a long time.”

  “Whatever. He’s not breathing.”

  I looked and at first I thought Harold was right, but then I saw Chimmer’s chest rise.

  Still, he was stone cold out. Ernie helped us drag Chimmer up onto the bench. This wasn’t the first time a setter had been knocked cold; Ernie sprinkled some water in his face and studied him professionally. “He’ll have an egg up there but I think he’ll be all right. Who’s going to set his alley till he comes to?”

  I was already setting double but Harold was working only one alley. “I’ll take it,” Harold volunteered.

  Ernie knew better. Harold was still having trouble with just one alley. I nodded. “I’ll help him out.”

  Ernie shrugged and went back up front. He viewed pinsetters as just another part of the bowling machinery, and as long as somebody worked the pits he didn’t care.

  We went back to work and I was kept so busy I almost didn’t have time to worry about what would happen when Chimmer regained consciousness. I assumed it would be bad—figured on him at least maiming me—but the work was so demanding what with my two alleys and taking Harold’s extra one every other frame when he got
behind that I didn’t have a moment to spare on concern.

  The lights that shone down over the pins generated a great deal of heat and soon I had taken my shirt off and was swinging alley to alley like a sweaty monkey, stooping to grab balls, throwing them into the return chute, grabbing three pins in each hand, flipping them into the setting rack and swinging into the next alley. Then I came up only to see Chimmer sitting up on the bench holding his forehead.

  Well, I thought, it’s been a good life.

  “How long was I out?” he asked.

  I shrugged, waiting for the blow. “Maybe twenty minutes.”

  “That hurt. Where did you learn to hit like that?”

  He hadn’t seen the pin. He thought my fist had put him out. “It’s something I read at the library.”

  “About fighting?”

  “Yeah. I’ve been reading up on it. You know, just in case.”

  He smiled and I realized with a start that I had never really seen him smile before. “Can you teach me to do it?”

  I’m not going to say we became friends. If I were to meet Chimmer right now I’d just as soon park a car on him as anything. I don’t think Chimmer could ever be nice—there were no such genes in his makeup.

  But he did stop beating the pudding out of me and he never picked on Harold again because Harold was my friend. My life changed because of that night.

  Harold summed it up as we wheezed home. It was winter and to go from the sweaty, driving labor of the pits into the thirty-below cold of the outside always made us cough and have trouble breathing, especially Harold, who seemed so thin there couldn’t be much lung in there.

  “I think what we witnessed here tonight proves Darwin’s theory of evolution.”

  We were passing the pool hall below the drug-store and I thought that when I became older and much more cool I would buy a leather jacket and pull my Levi’s down to show the crack in my butt and go down there and shoot pool. “What do you mean?”

  “Chimmer. Clearly you have started a step in evolution by nearly killing him.”

  “I didn’t do anything. A pin came across and clobbered him.”

  “Still, he thinks you did and that will have the same effect. He’ll get older and seek a mate and have young and teach his young not to hit people.”

  “No. Chimmer isn’t that smart. But he might teach his young not to hit people when there are bowling pins around, if he ever figures out it wasn’t me but a pin that dropped him.”

  “Exactly my point. That will make the next generation teach their young and then the next and so on. In time the Chimmers will become a peaceful species.”

  “How long?”

  “Two, perhaps three million years. Certainly not soon enough to help the world now.”

  And we walked on. Later I would find that Harold was right, at least in one sense. While I don’t think Chimmer evolved, a change certainly began in me. I decided then that for the rest of my life I would always look for the bowling pin that would help me through the tough spots.

  6. On Angling

  A fish doesn’t know anything, ever, at all, about anything. Which is why fish are so hard to catch.

  —HAROLD ON FISHING WITH WORMS

  The truth is I never saw Harold really fail at anything except fishing. All the other times he got close to failure, came around the edge of it, bumped right up into it, but he always came out ahead in some way.

  Except when it came to fishing.

  It all started one summer night when we were setting pins. Ernie was going to close the bowling alley over the weekend—his slowest time—and sand and varnish the alleys.

  “A whole weekend,” I said as we left the bowling alley. I had almost four dollars saved and I thought of movies—there was a horror film showing on Saturday night—or maybe buying a stick model of a B-17 bomber that I wanted to make or just spending the whole time at the swimming beach down on Crooked River trying to work up the courage to dive off the high board when none of the girls was looking. Or be really brave and do it when they were looking. If they looked. Ever.

  “I want,” Harold said slowly, “to go fishing.”

  For a moment it didn’t register. “We could go to a movie.…”

  “No. I wish to go fishing.”

  “You mean fishing … like outside? You?”

  “Wherever the fish are. That is where I want to go fishing. You are good at this, aren’t you?”

  “But Harold, you don’t—”

  “I don’t what?”

  That stopped me. I was going to say that he didn’t do things outside. We had tried skiing and nearly died and as far as I knew he spent the rest of his time indoors working on his ham radio equipment or reading technical bulletins. I couldn’t even get him to go swimming in the town swimming area down on Crooked River. He was no hunter, and the only times we bicycled anywhere together were just to get from one building to another. He got sunburned walking across the yard—and that was on a cloudy day.

  “I don’t what?” he repeated.

  “You don’t fish.”

  “Exactly why I want to go fishing. To learn. It’s the manly thing to do and I want to be more manly.”

  “Manly?”

  “Exactly. You will teach me. The way you taught me the art of hunting.”

  I winced, remembering. He had wanted to hunt. I used a .22 single-shot and let him try the .410 shotgun. We just went into the brush, a small stand where I had seen grouse earlier. Not over ten acres of trees and willows. Harold got lost four times, shot two stumps, a clump of newspaper, and just missed the end of his foot. He finally bagged a grouse so, in his eyes, he was successful. I can still hear his shot whistling over my head.

  “But you don’t have any gear, anything …”

  “So what do we need—a hook, some string? How hard can it be? People do it all the time.”

  “Harold, fishing is … is more …” I thought suddenly of early morning light, casting a plug out into lily pads close to the shore of the river for northern pike, of the slashing pull when they struck, of the line hissing through the water; of feeling for suckers and carp with a snap hook below the dam and eating them smoked in iron-wood smoke. “It’s just more.”

  “Then that is what you’ll teach me. All about what makes it more.”

  And because we were friends and he was the only reason I wasn’t flunking worse than I was, I decided to take Harold fishing.

  I almost changed my mind when I met him in front of his house early the next morning. I’d brought two old spring-steel rods (this was well before fiberglass or carbon rods existed) with thumb-buster casting reels on them, all so ancient I’d bought them for a dollar at a garage sale. I had a small metal tackle box with some hooks, sinkers and bobbers, a couple of silver spoons in case we got to lure casting, a lard can half full of worms and dirt, all tied across my handlebars. I also had a sack with some sandwiches in it and two candy bars.

  Harold came out of his house looking like a wrinkled page from Field and Stream magazine. He was wearing an old felt hat, an older cotton vest covered with pockets and loops, and a wicker creel slung over a shoulder. He had an honest-to-God fly rod in a tubular cloth case.

  He was also wearing hip boots, which he had tied to his belt at the top. The whole outfit was at least three sizes too big.

  “Harold …”

  “What?”

  But I shook my head. “Nothing. We’re going north out of town to a backwater I know about—can you ride your bike like that?”

  “Like what?” He threw a leg over his bicycle, held the fly rod case across the handlebars, tipped up the front brim of the felt hat and smiled at me. “Let’s go.”

  It was perhaps two miles to the fishing spot, and he pedaled all the way in those hip boots. I thought I’d have to slow down but he kept up, and when we arrived at the river backwater he hopped off his bike ready to go. “All right, how do we catch fish?”

  “We’re going to fish with worms.”

&n
bsp; “Worms.” He shook his head. “I read in a magazine that fishing with worms isn’t sporting. It’s too easy. We’re supposed to use lures, flies, plugs and things.”

  “Those are too hard at first. We’ll do worms, then work up to other stuff.”

  At last he agreed and opened the rod case he was carrying and pulled out an absolute beauty of a split-bamboo rod; handmade, hand-served, hand-varnished and so elegant it took my breath away. I had heard of such rods, read about them in magazines, but I’d never seen one and only knew them as something to dream about, to worship.

  “Where’d you get that rod?”

  “This old thing? It was in the garage, up in the loft, wrapped in a piece of canvas. I was up there doing research—”

  “On rats, I know.”

  “—on rats and I ran into it. Why—is it a good one?”

  “Could I see it?”

  He handed me the rod in four sections and I assembled it, oiling the metal ferrules on the side of my nose as I’d read to do in Field and Stream so they wouldn’t stick, flexing the rod, feeling the perfect balance. It felt alive, a kind of glowing life in my hand.