Littlefield

by Scott Nicholson

  He closed his eyes, and the freeze-frame illusion passed, the cacophony of shellac and shouts rushing back at full volume, Chesney warbling about some old heartbreak or another, as if any guy actually had a heart. The ball hung in perfect balance above his wrist, his sweating palm a couple of inches off the surface, fingers hooked in the holes like they were a teenager’s twat on a second date, when you drove them 10 miles out to Baity’s Lake and told them to put out or get out.

  He took a breath, testing his knees, and a spark of early-onset arthritis flared from his right joint. He’d have to compensate, bend with his back, make sure his wrist turned in counterweight. No excuses left, no prayers, no last-second reprieves, no upping the ante.

  At least Elmer had scored himself a visit to Dolly’s, even if he wouldn’t have enough money to cram a twenty in one of the tiny waistbands, maybe getting a wet knuckle in the process. Sure, all the tits were inflatable, but he’d take a rubber ducky over his wife’s sagging sacks of elephant hide any day. Not that he’d much chance for the taking lately. Seemed like the bitch was on the rag three weeks out of the month and rashed up the other week.

  “You gonna roll or you gonna tie up my lane all night?” Mac shouted.

  “You’re breaking my flow,” Elmer said.

  “The only flow you got is the trickle down your two-inch pipe.”

  Elmer lowered the ball. Buddha smiled with all the wisdom a six-pack could deliver, teeth yellow around the plastic tip of the cigarillo. Elmer backed up until the shaft of blown air on the ball return drifted up the sweat line of his spine. “You want in on this, Mac?”

  “I got nothing you want,” he said, his Mario Brothers moustache wriggling as if it were packed with sneeze powder. “You already bowl for free, and you ain’t fucking my wife.”

  Elmer actually wouldn’t mind a go at Mrs. McCallister. Mac had traded down for a younger model, a peroxide bimbo with dead-deer eyes and a rack that would spice up any man’s trophy case. But she was church all the way, one of those three-times-a-weekers who passed out religious tracts featuring cartoon drunks burning in hell. No matter how many times Mac drilled her, Elmer doubted her husband ever reached as deep inside her as Jesus did.

  “Okay, then,” Elmer said, rubbing his fingers together as if itching for cash. “How about if we go for captain of the troop?”

  Jeff, who had risen to the rank of captain of the imitation army in the same manner as those in the real military, shook his head. “No way. You don’t know the drills, you don’t know the protocol, and you don’t know the history.”

  “All you gotta do is stand around saying ‘Ten-hut’ and ‘At ease,’ and throw in a couple of Stonewall Jacksons here and there.”

  “Stonewall Jackson was long dead by the time Stoneman’s cavalry rode through Titusville,” Jeff said, unconsciously twirling one end of his midget handlebar mustache. “This was late 1864, near the end of the war, the final refrain to ‘Dixieland.’”

  Elmer rested his bowling ball against his hip and chugged an amber swig of Old Milwaukee from a plastic cup. Jeff was about to go into one of his boring rants about Sherman’s march, and how Stoneman split off to break Confederate supply lines through the mountains. As Stoneman found out, there weren’t many supplies of any kind in the South by then, and certainly not in the remote Southern Appalachians.

  Elmer didn’t give a damn for history, but he’d been in the N.C. 26th Living History Society for eight years and had sat through Jeff’s lecture a dozen times. As long as Jeff was buying the beer, Elmer could spare an ear.

  “Home Guard met them up the valley,” Jeff said, eyes getting that faraway glaze as if he were looking through the neon-lighted walls and back into time. “The boys in gray were outnumbered five to one but they gave as good as they got.”

  Which wasn’t exactly true. For one thing, the boys didn’t have uniforms, much less gray ones. For another, the Home Guard lost seven men and the Yankees suffered only one casualty, and that one occurred when a green private drank too much whiskey and was thrown by his horse, breaking a leg on the jailhouse steps. And Kirk’s Raiders had split from the Yankee command and set up their own private little war, one where Rebel daughters got knocked up and livestock got stolen. So there was no cause for Rebel Pride in Pickett County. But damned if Jeff would admit a mistake, especially when he got rolling.

  Speaking of rolling, I better put the twist on this baby and nick it a cunt hair to the left.

  “All right, we’ll stick to a ticket to Titty Palace,” Elmer said, patting the ball. “You’re the captain and the rest of us volunteers ain’t nothing but cannon fodder. But that’s on the field. Here in the alley, you don’t give no orders.”

  “Unless it’s for another pitcher of beer,” Mac said.

  “That mean one on the house?”

  “You’re going to drink me to the old folks’ home,” the bald man said.

  “Mac, you’ll be nickel-and-diming on the shuffleboard court,” Elmer said. “Your basic situation won’t change a bit.”

  Mac’s eyes twinkled. The guy had a good air about him, never let crap stick. Maybe that’s why he got a looker for a wife and Elmer was stuck with the saggy-tit version of the Elephant Man. Sure, Mac’s kid Dex was a little hooligan, swiping his old man’s rubbers and riding his skateboard in town without a helmet, but he was smarter than Elmer’s oldest son, Jerrell, the genetic Eldreth. Bobby had them all beat on grades and looks and batting average, but then you got to that little problem of him maybe being somebody else’s kid, so Elmer couldn’t muster much pride in that.

  “You bowling or jerking your roosterneck?” Jeff said. When the conversation had shifted to the upcoming Civil War event, he’d sat a little straighter and squared his shoulders. Jeff’s posture remained ramrod at the scorer’s table, his wavy hair a little like that Elmer had seen in pictures of General George Armstrong Custer, who had cut his teeth as a Yankee officer before riding to infamy in Sioux country. Blonde, almost-girlish hair. Blonde like Bobby’s.

  Focus on nicking the ten.

  “Okay, maybe this will make you choke on your grits.” Elmer backed to the lip of the wooden platform, sizing up his run. He rubbed his left forearm for luck and glanced down at the glossy finish. His distorted reflection stared back, the neon lights throwing an aurora borealis across the curved landscape. He tilted his head so he could see the Buddha Dude in the ball’s surface. The chair was empty.

  He looked over to the next scorer’s table. The Buddha Dude was gone, probably headed for a chili dog and cheese fries. So much for sucking karma from somebody else.

  Jeff tapped his 7-Up can against the scorer’s table. “Stalling won’t save you.”

  Elmer glanced at his shoes. The strings were neatly knotted. But the psychological edge was getting to him. You couldn’t roll when you were hallucinating, and he hadn’t done any hard drugs since high school. Still, he’d learned a lesson during those teen years, back when hope wasn’t hopeless and the future stretched out like an eight-lane highway lined with cheap gas pumps and cheaper highway hookers.

  When things got fuzzy, you focused right in front of your face. Which was what he did. The ball became his universe, its weight the solid evidence of reality, the straining fingers clutching the holes as if they were the clefts leading up out of a dark well. He had a bumper sticker on his truck that said, “When the going gets weird, the weird go bowling,” a slogan Mac had printed up when the alley first opened five years back.

  Now Mac was driving a Beamer and Elmer was driving a rusty-assed truck. Jeff was captain in the regiment and Elmer was a common private. Buddha Dude was off somewhere talking to a tree and Elmer was aiming for a thousand-to-one shot. Didn’t get much weirder than real life.

  He breathed, centering, letting his muscles tighten and relax. The ten-pin seemed larger now, bloated, as if it had taken on water. He felt eyes on him, several eyes, and he knew the bowlers in the next lane over had stopped to see the outcome. Somewhere, maybe from th
e other side of the tinted windows or the dark chaos of the videogame room, Buddha Dude was probably plotting Elmer’s reincarnation as a toilet seat.

  “Fuck ‘em all,” Elmer whispered, taking the first step and bending from the waist. His wrist curled in a slightly unnatural position, sweeping down so he could roll the ball off his fingers with a little reverse English. As he snapped his fingers free and kicked his right heel behind him, balancing on his left foot, he thought he had a chance.

  A little one, maybe down to only five-hundred-to-one, but still a chance. The ball spun out as smoothly as if he were shooting a marble, fighting to get a bite on the slick wood of the alley. Halfway down, it began a gentle break and hooked toward the gutter.

  A gutter ball was just as bad as a single pin. Both worthless.

  Elmer planted his feet and stared after the ball as if he were a gunfighter about to draw. The alley had fallen silent during his roll, except for Chesney’s crooning about a woman who should have treated him right.

  “He’s got it,” Mac said, with the surety of someone who’d seen a few six-tens in his day.

  “Bull run,” Jeff said, just as the ball glanced off the edge of the pin. The pin whispered with the contact and kicked to the left, wobbling as it fell. It gave three pathetic spins, like a crippled break dancer at a high school prom, and then rolled across the lane into the six. The six staggered and fought gravity, then lost.

  Elmer turned and wagged his fingers at Jeff as if they were hot pistols, then did a half pirouette and thrust his fat ass at his nemesis. “Got you, Possum Face. Smoke that shit for breakfast.”

  The metal sweeper descended as the last pin dropped, setting up a virgin rack for Elmer’s last ball.

  “Don’t go singing to the fat lady,” Jeff said, mangling the pet phrase of those who never gave up. “I’m still up by five.”

  “I can get five in my sleep,” he said.

  Mac had come from behind the counter to watch from the edge of the scorer’s area. “Sleep’s about all you’re getting in bed these days. Nice roll, though.”

  Elmer removed his ball from the return queue, giving it first an affectionate pat, then a dry kiss. He usually blamed the ball for bad rolls and never gave it credit for the strikes, but after nailing his first-ever six-ten, he was in a generous mood. And he’d be in an even better mood after winning those race tickets.

  He curled the ball, relaxed, and approached the line, falling into a smooth motion.

  The man in gray appeared just in front of the lead pin. Elmer thought at first it was one of the alley employees, fishing out a stuck ball or unjamming a rack. Except when Mac was on duty, the cheap son of a bitch ran the show all by himself. And this guy wasn’t messing with equipment, he was walking up the buffed and shining lane toward Elmer in dusty, cracked boots that had more holes than leather.

  Elmer’s fingers were already relaxing and he couldn’t stop the momentum of the ball. He gave out a croak and lost his balance, the ball bouncing two feet in front of him with a bone-crunching thwack.

  “Hey, no dribbling allowed,” Mac snapped. “I’ll sweep up the splinters with your ass if you do that again.”

  Elmer stared at the sudden man, seeing more of him, the ragged scratchy-looking clothes—uniform?—and a cap tilted over his face. And beneath the brim of the hat, nearly lost in shadows, was the gleaming bone of a fleshless grin.

  The ball meandered another twenty feet before it slipped into the gutter and into the mysterious depths where pulleys and levers pushed the ball back uphill to the scorer’s table.

  The man in gray had disappeared.

  “You see that?” Elmer said.

  “Yeah, pretty damned pathetic,” Jeff said.

  “The man—he got in my way.”

  “Yeah, and the sun was in your eyes and the dog ate your homework and you forget to throw money in the plate at church.” As the metal arm descended and swept the pins away, Jeff stood and grabbed his jacket. “I’ll take a rain check on Titty Palace, but you can bring the race tickets Monday.”

  The end of the lane held only pins, not a bone-faced man in scarecrow battle gear, and an electronic banner on the scoreboard scrolled the words “Push for next game.” Elmer wasn’t going to do any pushing. Now that he’d had a moment to process the image, he realized the man had been wearing a ratty kepi, a Civil War cap. And the uniform had been wool, like the replica clothing Captain Jeff Davis insisted his men wear for the living-history re-enactments.

  “I’m going to start charging if you’re going to stink up the joint like that,” Mac said as Jeff strutted away in his tight-assed officer’s march.

  “That guy was walking in the lane when I rolled.”

  “Some bastard steps on the parquet I spent all week polishing, I’ll shoot his ass.”

  Elmer knew Mac kept a gun hidden behind the counter, but he wasn’t sure bullets would do much good against the unknown soldier. “You didn’t see him?”

  “Hell, Elmer, you only had two pitchers. Not near enough to justify a hallucination.”

  Elmer finished his beer, hand shaking so much he spilled foam down his chin. If he drank enough, maybe he’d wash the vision of the soldier from his brain. If not, at least maybe Vernell and the brats wouldn’t be so dog-fucking ugly when he got home.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Room.

  His dad usually kept it locked, but Vernon Ray had checked out the Internet and learned a trick called “lock bumping” that had allowed him to snap open the flimsy hollow-core door without breaking anything. He saved his break-ins for special occasions when he knew his parents would be away for an hour or more. Mom was out shopping and it was Dad’s bowling night, so he had some time.

  Plus, since the weird incident in the Hole, he’d felt a calling to The Room as if some deep religious secrets lay behind the door. “The Room” had never been officially named; it was the spare bedroom in their three-bedroom mobile home, and Vernon Ray figured that was probably why his parents had never given him a sibling: Dad would have had to move his collection. Since Dad always referred to it as “The Room,” that’s how Vernon Ray thought of it.

  The mobile home was quiet, and it seemed the whole trailer park had taken the night off. Usually Saturdays were an around-the-clock cacophony of stereos, drunken laughter, revving engines, and TV sets, punctuated with the occasional shattering glass or fistfight. A clock ticked in the kitchen, its rhythm recalling the ratta-tat-tat of the snare drum he’d heard in the Hole.

  Vernon Ray bumped his hip into the door, twisting the knob as the wood yielded slightly and the tumblers rattled. The lock sprang and he swung the door open. Vernon Ray switched on a bedtime reading lamp that emitted a diffuse glow. The strange, bluish light made the contents of The Room even more unreal, like exhibits in a museum.

  Books with leather-bound covers, many of them rare and fragile, lined shelves covering one side of the room. Among his dad’s collection were one-of-a-kind personal items like diaries and letters, as well as history books and biographies with low print runs. An autographed copy of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s memoir, one of the first tell-all celebrity bios ever published, was also in the collection, sealed behind a sheet of Plexiglas. The aging paper gave The Room an aroma of decay and must, much like what Vernon Ray imagined Grant’s Tomb smelled like.

  Vernon Ray had read many of the books. Not from Dad’s collection, of course, but modern reprinted copies he’d found in the public library or public-domain scans posted on the Internet. Vernon Ray ran the soft light over the shelves, but he wasn’t interested in two-dimensional history at the moment. He took a few steps deeper into The Room, careful not to step on anything fragile.

  An obstacle course of period antiques covered the floor: hand-hewn chairs, a maple church pew, blacksmith’s and furrier’s benches. A saddle rode the blacksmith’s bench, moth-eaten wool blankets and rusty cast-iron tools stacked beside it. The other furniture was parted to make way for a black cherry roll-top writing desk that
his dad used for the sole purpose of penning out marching orders for the N.C. 26th Living History Regiment. It was as if his dad’s fantasy life intersected with these solid relics only when vital to the mission, an act of discipline that proved Capt. Jefferson Davis was the only man fit to command the regiment.

  The smell of old wood and leather blended with that of the paper, but it aroused nothing in Vernon Ray. Instead, he navigated between the pieces of furniture and reached the Grail. He tilted the light up so that it glinted off the muskets, revolvers, bugles, medals, insignia, and a cavalry sword with an ornate brass handle.

  Several of the pieces were replica, but one of the medals bore the deep dent of a musket ball, suggesting it might have once saved the life of the wearer. Powder horns and sheathed Bowie knives dangled from rawhide strings. A tin canteen in a canvas satchel hung by a strap, and underneath it a mess kit, coffee pot, and other steel cookware were arrayed as if readied for breakfast.

  A card table bore a papier-mâché diorama designed to mimic Titusville, complete with the surrounding mountains carefully labeled with their traditional names: Cracker Knob, Eggers Ridge, Calloway Mountain, Tater Hill, The Balds, and, rising over the valley like a tsunami wave, Mulatto Mountain. A tiny white flag, bearing a meticulously rendered image of the Home Guard’s insignia and glued to a toothpick, was poked into the highest point of Mulatto Mountain, in the approximate location of The Jangling Hole. His dad had invested six silent months working on the diorama, alone with the door closed.

  The last two months had been spent arranging lead-cast miniature soldiers, ordered through collector’s catalogs. An HO-scale train track ran through the valley to mark the narrow-gauge tracks that had once carried Tweetsie into town. The real rails were still there, running along the foot of Mulatto and parallel with the back street of downtown and an old creek, but the last train had run in 1931, when the dwindling profits of timber clear-cutting collided with the Great Depression.