At night Joe sat at the kitchen table and let the black-and-white cat pace the top, butting up against him. What was at the corner of a cat’s mouth, that they needed so much affection focused there? Never mind. He did not think the cat was the ghost of Leviticus Sprague, as some of the bowlers suggested, but he did believe the spirits were acquainted.
The man who said he was Nahum Truitt had no interest in The Game, not the business side nor the playing of it. He would say, when Joe Wear explained something to him, “I understand only the souls of men.” Sometimes he’d watch the bowlers and examine their movements with such intensity he ruined the game. You almost thought he was studying how to be a human man. He took a room at the YMCA down the street, though Joe Wear offered the apartment. “You pay rent?” asked Nahum. After a moment, Joe said, “Part of my wages.” “Well then, no need,” said Nahum, “moreover: the place has a case of cats.”
“This is till we get settled elsewhere,” he said sometimes, or “Till we decide for sure concerning the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.” He referred, always, to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the State of Maine. Either he felt there was a strong distinction, or he just liked the lard of extra words. We was royal, or referred to him and his wife back in Maine, or the partnership of Nahum Truitt and God: there was no telling. His beard thickened. The stand of his hair seemed to be cut daily, but from a distance. He gave up his minister’s collar and took to wearing dark pants and a vest striped like mattress ticking. He drew no salary from Truitt’s Alleys.
“That’s all right, boss,” he’d say to Joe Wear. “You just put it in the bank.”
He’d vanish for weeks then show back up, sometimes wilder and sometimes barbered. “A great success!” he’d tell Joe Wear. “Our revival. We saved dozens of souls up in the State of Maine. Oh, at first they resisted, at first they clung to their bottles and their gambling, to their sin, to their darkness—isn’t that a terrible thing, Joe Wear, how the darkness fools you into thinking it’s a boon, fools you into thinking it’s interesting—but they come to us eventual! Hundreds!”
“I thought you said dozens.”
“I reckon hundreds,” said Nahum Truitt.
At any moment, Nahum Truitt might drift away, end up on a boat or in the belly of a whale, go back to the Church of the Woods and his Wife of the Woods and whatever else (children, grandchildren, a lobster farm) was in the Goddamn Woods. Nobody believed that this so-called Nahum Truitt was a child of Bertha’s. The height of him, the denunciations, the way he talked. You could die of boredom. You longed to. They imagined Nahum Truitt would close the bowling alley and convert it to a storefront church, or a mission.
Instead, he merely wanted to ban women. He’d come to the conclusion on one of his forays to the Woods in Maine.
“Men need a place to come together in fellowship,” said Nahum. By now Joe Wear knew a few places where that happened. Once liquor got pushed into the basement he discovered that’s where Massachusetts kept a lot of interesting things, but he didn’t think that was what Nahum had in mind. “They need a place of recreation and exercise where they may speak their minds to one another without interference. Are we bowlers? Yes, we are bowlers, but we are also Christian men, and when Christian men gather in a place of understanding and decency, they may come to know God.”
“What would your mother think?”
Nahum frowned. “You tell me.”
“She wouldn’t like it.”
At that Nahum looked nearly moved. “Yes,” he said sadly. “She would hate it. That was like her. What would she say?”
“She would say,” said Joe, trying to conjure her voice up. He could not even quite disinter her face from his memory, though he would recognize her particular lolloping walk from a distance. “She would say, The game is for all, Joe Wear.”
“Not to you,” said Nahum. “What would she say to me?”
But Joe Wear couldn’t imagine. At last he tried, “Nahum Truitt, let women bowl.”
“We shall install a pool table,” said Nahum.
“We shall?”
“Get a pool table, Joe Wear,” said Nahum. “Get two, so that more men may commune. But first, clear out the gals.”
The Angel of the Alleys
Mostly the women had gone anyhow, home to their children and families, to speakeasies, to other hobbies. LuEtta Mood came every Saturday with her new baby strapped to her back so that you could only see his comically fat head. The first time, pregnant with Edith, she’d been unnerved that she had a living thing inside of her; the second time, a mortal one. She’d denied her imagination at every turn and so had been surprised by a boy who looked nothing like Edith, with the black hair and pug nose of a foreign prince. She did not feel as though she knew him yet, though he was six months old.
“Sorry, Lu,” said Joe Wear, the first Saturday of Nahum’s reign. “New rules. No women.”
“Rules? On whose authority?”
“New owner. Mr. Truitt. Who else’s?”
LuEtta Mood was taller than Joe Wear. She leaned over so she could rest her bust on the glass counter in a territorial way. “This is Bertha Truitt’s house,” she said. Her chin was substantial. It possessed a certain force when she pointed it at him.
Then Jeptha Arrison was pattering down the gutter like a tightrope walker.
“Lu!” he called. “Lu!”
“Hello, Jep. Now, Mr. Wear,” said LuEtta, who’d never called him so, “you tell your new boss you informed me but I said no.” She pulled out her shoes from her satchel. “I came to bowl. I bowled here opening day and I will bowl closing day. Call the police if you like.”
“I’m not going to call the police,” said Joe, irritated.
LuEtta made herself tall as she could. She fluffed her bloomers to their full blossom. “I won’t go.”
“Won’t she?” said Jeptha Arrison, in a voice of terror. “Won’t she? Joe, me neither, I won’t go neither, I’ll stay with Lu and the babby.”
“Were you asked to go?” said Joe. “Are you a woman?”
“Not so’s I noticed,” said Jeptha.
“You’ll pinset for me,” said LuEtta, and Jeptha put his hand to his chest and said, “’Pon my honor and always.”
Who’s that gal?” Nahum asked Joe that afternoon. “I recall saying no women. Our mission is a bowling mission, I remember distinct I told you this, and we preach to men. Men fail to speak their minds when women are around, for fear of contradiction. That woman there looks especial contradictory. She especial contradictory? She looks terrible contradictory and contrary.”
“She’s all right,” said Joe. He disliked it when Nahum stood behind the counter with him: the man was an elbower and shoulder shover, a whisperer of confidences that added up to nothing, an animated overcoat who only wanted you to don it, no matter the weather. “Won plenty of trophies in her time. I wouldn’t bother with Lu. Worry about the cats.”
“Cats and women,” said Nahum. “Which is worse? Both species cold as ice and fishy to boot. Gal! Gal! Gal!”
Lu didn’t turn her head.
“I’ll get her out,” said Nahum, darkly. “What’s that fool doing setting her pins? Hey! Hey! Pinboy! Don’t set her pins.” He elbowed Joe Wear in the elbow; it hurt. “Is he deaf?”
“Might be, all these years. He’s all right.”
Nahum looked at Jep. “If that’s all right I hate to think.”
But Jeptha Arrison was not all right, he was struck, he was vibrating, he was pinsetting for LuEtta Mood, connected to her as though by piano wire. The ball, he swore, was still warm from her palm, faintly whiffish of her perfume.
He loved her.
Jeptha Arrison had not been kicked in the head, leastways not by a horse, not actually. His father had tried to make him a jockey but Jeptha didn’t care for horses, their oil derrick heads and black eyes, their mouths all the way at the bottom of their snouts. “I like cows,” he told his father at the Rockingham Track, where he’d been brought for employment. Jeptha’s father had looked around, shook his head. A skewbald mare sneezed and whips of sticky spit lashed from her mouth. “Well,” his father said, “I don’t know any of those ladies, you’ll have to find cows yourself. Marry a farm girl. I don’t know any of those, either.”
“I won’t marry a farm girl,” Jeptha said.