This time LuEtta took three balls to knock down seven pins. Nahum’s turn.
The Salford Half Nickels winced to watch Nahum Truitt bowl. He had taken off his jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeves, tucked the awful organ-pink necktie into his vest. An ossified man, all knuckle and claw: he held the ball with the tips of his fingers. Generally it was against Joe Wear’s ethics to let a man bowl in such an amateurish way. (Joe had locked the front door and joined the crowd to watch.) The man didn’t have a chance against the Angel of the Alleys anyhow. Few men who visited Truitt’s could hope to touch her, never mind an awkward inexperienced man of God. God himself (surely a tenpin man; surely God loved clarity, the promise of perfection) might have a hard time against LuEtta Mood.
What would she do when she won the alley? Cast out all the men as Nahum had wanted to cast out the women? Drive them out with a stick like snakes? Leave it to the cats and girls?
Bertha Truitt had never done that. Bertha Truitt had not seemed to care for men but did not find them a nuisance, had spoken to them as though she were their equal, and that was maddening, but LuEtta Mood had the infuriating air of superiority. She thought she was better than. Leastways, she was trying to convince herself of it.
There was the ball clutched in Nahum’s fingers, daylight all around it. He took his place at the foul line and bowled. No approach, no follow-through, and yet he knocked ’em down. Three pins, then five pins, then two for the ten box. Martin Younkins marked it in chalk on the board.
The pinboy, a malnourished flop-haired ten-year-old named Leslie Bish, had been eating rock candy off a string, and now he set the candy on the shelf and jumped down to roll the balls back to the boss. His hands were never clean, and he set pins loose and sloppy. He took no pleasure in it: they might as well have been milk bottles at the carnival, saplings planted along a path. Sometimes he kicked one or two over as he worked. Even if he’d done it well, there was nobody to praise him beyond Jeptha, and the older boys had told him to steer clear of Jep, not because he’d interfere with you but because once he got a notion you were a listener he would never stop talking. Leslie Bish’s mother needed the money he made. That was true of all the pinboys except Jeptha himself, who tsked on his shelf and regarded the pins with sorrow.
He looked after the pins because he was not allowed to look after the pinboys. They wouldn’t let him. “Go away, Jeptha,” they said, though he was the only man among ’em and he felt he’d earned the right to boss ’em around a little. How did it happen, that he had been bossed around by men when he was a boy and by boys when he was a man? Never mind. He would tend his lane.
Jeptha Arrison spoke to the pins. Loved them. Bowling he didn’t care for, he had never bowled in his life, it was a foolish waste of time though he would not say so to the bowlers he adored. But the pins he understood. Here comes the interloping ball, once, twice, third time, then he jumps down—Mother Jeptha! for he is as a mother to them—to tend to his darlings, his pinlings, his knocklings, his flocklings. “Here dear,” he says to the ten pin, the five pin, the three. He remembers where they stood even now that they’ve tumbled. “Here four, here five—oh dear, no, you have split yourself. Poor thing, you’re broken beyond saving.” See him toss the pin away.
Not mother then, but God. Mother is more powerful, mother can heal with love because she plays favorites. When you’ve split in half God will not pretend you haven’t. God Jeptha sits above the pins and waits. When the world is destroyed, he resets it. Makes it stand again.
Leslie Bish’s sticky fingers would spread sugar everywhere: down the return to the bowler, then onto the lane, then back to the pinsetter’s hand. It would degrade every part of play. Jeptha nearly called out to Nahum to say this. A money game was a serious thing, it required honesty and evenness. But LuEtta’s place in the alleys was at stake, and so he kept quiet, the first sin Jeptha Arrison ever committed in the name of bowling but not the last.
Nahum bowled again. First ball two. Second ball five. He’d knocked over one more for sure with the third, but the six pin was still thinking about going down, the six pin was fighting off sleep—and Leslie Bish jumped down early and kicked it over himself.
“Hey now!” Nahum Truitt yelled. “Pinboy! Get out of there.”
Leslie Bish raised his head. He was thin and oily as a mackerel. He was only ten but he’d been fired before, for sleepiness and inaccuracy. He reached to scoop up his rock candy, but it was already stuck to the side of his pants and with gravity’s help was trying to undo his pocket.
“All right, Wear,” Nahum Truitt called. “You’ll set for me.”
“Ah no,” said Joe Wear. “Jeptha’ll set for you both.”
“Not that moron. He’ll fiddle it. You’ll set for me.”
Why did Joe Wear agree? He should have gone out the door with Leslie Bish to drown his sorrow in rock candy or needle beer. Instead he walked down the lane. He felt everyone judge his lubberly gait.
“’Lo, Joe,” said Jeptha, but Joe shook his head.
Once Joe Wear had been the pride of Les Miserables, but that was years ago and moreover this was not a wager he wanted a hand in. Already he could feel the splinters he’d picked up setting. What if LuEtta did win? Would she fire him? Sell the alley at a good price? She was better than anybody in that alley except Joe Wear himself, who bowled every night, and even on his days off went to the Sheaf House in Boston for the money games there. He should be bowling for ownership of the alley.
“I’ll do for both lanes, you like,” said Jeptha, but Joe had already finished. He had spent plenty of time in the pits over the years, checking the metal plates the pins stood on, cleaning up shattered pins, surveying the wood of the lanes from all angles, but he hadn’t sat up on the pinboys’ shelf since he was a teenager. He was stunned to measure just how much bigger he’d grown. Up close Jep was almost heartbreakingly graceful, going from toe to toe, a hummingbird amid the trampled blossoms.
“I could set for both, Joe Wear,” he said in a hurt voice.
“’Course you could.”
“I’m honest as the day is long.”
“I know it.”
“My love is for the game.”
“I don’t doubt that.”
“I’m honest,” said Jeptha again. “I can’t go back to the horses. No man can, once he’s left them. It’s the alley for me, Joe. I was born here and I’ll die here.”
“You weren’t born here,” said Joe Wear.
“In a way.”
“No,” said Joe. “No man is born in a bowling alley. Anyhow LuEtta will win and I will be fired and you may be the manager.”
Jeptha shook his heavy head. “He’s spooked her. She’s done for.”
Then it was Joe’s turn to jump to the plate to set. Nahum had left just the king pin. Joe was altogether too big a man for this job, a pigeon impersonating a hummingbird, his big boots with the iron in the heel clanking against the plate. Still, his body remembered the odd pleasure of the task, tucking a pin in his armpit while he set another, letting the tucked pin roll down the inside of his arm into his hand. Candlepins had no up or down: unlike ten pins, you could set them on either end. Of course, he, Joe, could fiddle it. He could set the pins in such a way that Nahum could never knock them all down. He could rig it so LuEtta would win for sure. He looked at her. She did not seem spooked. She was bowling as true as she ever had, ahead by eleven pins.
“You done, gal?” Nahum Truitt bellowed.