LuEtta felt something poke her calf as she got ready to start her approach. She figured it was one of the cats; there were three now, all black-and-white, prowling Truitt’s. The cats were the only thing that made the baby laugh, which convinced LuEtta that he, like his father, might have a mean sense of humor. Cats don’t laugh back. But the baby was silent, and it wasn’t a cat, just Nahum Truitt on his knees and one hand, jabbing at her with a pool cue. His beard was a thicket. He’d left behind a blue chalk print on her white sock. She pulled her leg closer to her body and cleared her throat, but Nahum looked fixedly at the end of the cue and crawled closer, poking, his pink knit necktie lapping at the floor like a tongue.
“Mr. Truitt,” she said. He didn’t answer. He poked. “Mr. Truitt!”
He used the cue as a cane to pull himself to his feet and turned to the men bowling on the next lane, the Salford Half Nickels, the men returned from the war. They were practicing for a tourney in Boston at the Sheaf House.
“Care to join me in a prayer?” Nahum asked them, plucking a ball from the return. “You’re churchgoing men, I know, but once a week is not enough, you see your wives every single day and you see your pals twice a week, you better find more time for God! Who’s with me?”
The men looked uneasily at each other. “The YMCA has a team,” said Jack Silver, not a churchgoing man. “Perhaps—”
“The YMCA does not need saving!” said Nahum Truitt. He looked at Jack Silver, who had a ball tucked in the crook of what was left of his right arm. “You bowl thataway? You’ve got a good arm just the other side of you.”
“Right-handed,” said Jack Silver.
“But you’re not,” said Nahum. “The only hand in your possession is of the left variety.”
“I am a right-handed bowler,” said Jack Silver.
Nahum frowned. “It unnerves.”
Jack Silver gave the ball a toss in his abbreviated arm and said, “Your nerves are no concern of mine.”
Nahum shook his head. “All right,” he said. “Whatever serves.” He looked at LuEtta. “I will bowl with the men,” he said over his shoulder to the Half Nickels, as though declining an invitation, and went to stand directly at the foul line. He bobbled the ball from hand to hand as he stared at the pins. Nobody had ever seen him show the least interest in the game. The men worried he would pitch the ball overhand instead of bowling it.
“Sure you want to do it like that?” called LuEtta Mood.
“I’ll do it thisaway,” he said, and flung the ball hard to the side, directly into the gutter.
“You see,” said the captain of the Half Nickels, Pinky DeMuth, unsure whose side he was on, “you have a three-step, or a five-step, or a seven-step approach. Stand back here—”
“I’ll do it thisaway,” said Nahum again. “Gal,” he said in a grand voice. He rested the ball on one hip. “You gamble, I hear.”
“I play money games,” said LuEtta. She and the baby were lodging with the Arrisons now. She needed the money.
“You’ll play me.”
How did a grown man know so little about women! To command her like that, and she the best bowler in the alley. Martin Younkins leaned on his crutches in a thoughtful way and said, “Well Truitt, you might—”
“Gambling’s not a sin?” LuEtta asked.
“Not nearly,” said Nahum. “No, it is not, for what is God besides a gambler? He is locked in a game—”
“I’ll play you,” said LuEtta. The baby as usual was on her back. A child now, really. Still silent and unamused. How did she stand upright with that weight tugging at her? “Dollar a string, progressive.”
“One game,” corrected Nahum. “For your tenancy in the alley.”
The men of Truitt’s Alleys were divided about LuEtta Mood, each one of them divided, not down the middle but cut into pieces like a pie. She had been there longer than any of them: she was practically a piece of equipment. An outdated piece, the lone woman left in the alley. Had to watch your tongue around her (though she never did flinch no matter what was said: she’d heard worse). What did Mr. Mood think of his wife? Didn’t she belong at home? (They didn’t know she had left them.) She was quite a sight. She was a beauty. She was not as beautiful as rumor had it. It was hard to concentrate on your own bowling when she was there, and these days she was always there.
Nahum Truitt they plain disliked.
So when the two agreed to the bet, the Half Nickels weren’t sure which was the Devil and which bowling against the Devil. They just knew souls were at stake.
“One game,” said Nahum Truitt again. “Everything on one game, and whoever wins lets the other alone.”
LuEtta looked at him. “Meaning I own the alley if I win.”
Joe Wear said, “No—”
“All right,” said Nahum. “Why ever not. You beat me, gal, and I happily sign everything over to you.”
Martin Younkins shook his head. All the men did. They wanted a piece of that action! “That ain’t fair,” Younkins said. “She wins, she gets a whole bowling alley, but he wins—”
Nahum took a heroic stance, so noble and statuary you thought a pigeon might alight on his head. “That is how much it means to me, that my alley be free of the feminine influence,” he said.
“Jiminy,” said LuEtta, but she could feel her juddering heart in her chest. She might win the alley. She reached behind and felt the baby’s ankle for luck.
“You want to take that child off?”
“No,” said LuEtta. The baby was sleeping. “This is how I’m used to it.”
“One game,” said Nahum again.
LuEtta Mood had a 103 average, higher than any of the Half Nickels, the Diamonds, the Greystockings, the Kings. She had no trouble at all bowling against Nahum Truitt for her soul: she bowled for her soul every day. She was one of those dead-eyed gamblers, in other words, who bet against themselves every time. Dead-eyed in aim; dead-eyed in the light gone from her as she bowled. Bowling was what she had and she needed it to have a happy ending and that had looked unlikely for a while now. Owning the alley might do it.
Nahum gave her a condescending rolling-wristed gesture. Ladies first.
Every time LuEtta had picked up a ball in the past twenty years she went through these steps. First she felt lucky: she knew that this ball would be a good one. Then she felt cursed, and could see the ball journey down the lane only to drop into the gutter at the last minute. Then she felt scientific: luck had nothing to do with it! Then as superstitious as an ancient, there were forces all about her that wanted her to win but only if she appeased them in the right way, I honor you spirits of the bowling alley, I love you, deliver my ball. Only then would she actually bowl.
She had a three-step approach, absolutely ordinary, and a languid elegant follow-through with her bowling hand. She downed six pins with the first ball. With the second ball she picked up the spare, not neatly, but in pieces, the wood against the nine pin, the nine into the two, the wood spinning into the seven and one. At the end of the alley Jeptha jumped down to the deck to set the pins. The first thing he did was kiss the second ball, still warm from LuEtta’s fingertips, still warm from its triumph.
The men didn’t know he was in love with LuEtta: they believed Jeptha was a child, Jeptha liked games, Jeptha wouldn’t know what to do with a full-grown human woman, Jeptha loved only the pins. It was true: Jeptha’s pinsetting was brilliant, perfect. He was never the least bit off. When Jeptha Arrison set your pins, you knew how they’d fly, every time.