She stuttered on the approach, her steps too long, and the sleeping baby gave a shuddery sigh, and LuEtta was at the foul line and over it. He yet could win.
The men of the alley watched Nahum Truitt’s expression, neither negative nor positive but zero, the face of a man who knows that any emotion might get him killed. His posture was rigid. His grip had changed, and he put some English on to spin the ball, a tenpin trick rarely seen in candlepin alleys. Some people thought it couldn’t be done, but here was Nahum doing it. He stopped talking to the Salford Half Nickels. While he waited to bowl his next two frames, he put his hands in his pockets and watched LuEtta unmovingly. Then he bowled. Spare, nine, and it was clear Lu wouldn’t catch him. He seemed almost bored by his ability.
It was not God, Joe Wear knew, though of course Nahum would say it was. He was just that good and had hid it, a hustler who’d been waiting to make his move. Every time he disappeared from Truitt’s it was to bowl and hustle in somebody else’s house.
Joe had cleared out plenty of cheats in his years at Truitt’s, men who snuck in weighted balls or wrongly sized, but Nahum owned the place, and as far as Joe could tell he wasn’t cheating, he’d only hustled himself into a bet he was pretty sure he could win. It was too late, even, for Joe to fiddle at setting the pins to give Lu a chance. You could see her heart was no longer in it.
The men of the alleys had abandoned their lanes, their racing forms. A dozen forgotten cigarettes burnt in the tin ashtrays stamped at the bottom TRUITT’S. LuEtta bowled, a tall gal in white leather shoes, her ankles in their thin socks indecent. Her blond hair was brassy. Her form was exemplary. She looked like a deer burst through a window at a train station. She didn’t belong there, she had to go, they would never stop talking about her, they needed to show her the door, for her sake, too. If you were the last of your kind why would you stay.
You stay because of your stubbornness, learned from your mentor. You stay because you think you’ll stop being the last of your kind if you just get by: another of your kind will come find you. One woman surrounded by two dozen men, not one of whom would fight to keep her there, no matter she was Salfordian born and bred, no matter her long association with the eponymous Truitt of Truitt’s Alleys, the one true Truitt. O Bertha, a stranger who came into Truitt’s Alleys now would think Nahum was the significant Truitt. They would think the lone woman was the toothache. When there were plenty of women they caused no trouble at all—why, they were barely noticeable. One woman was an insult, a poison, a gal, a girl, disposable—she would be carried out and dumped in the gutter. The actual gutter, the one of the street. Jeptha Arrison on his shelf looked like he was praying over a four-horsemen leave, a line of pins LuEtta could convert to a spare if they jumped right, but what good would it do?
LuEtta Mood shook her head and shivered. She tried to tell herself that her luck today, two spares, two ten boxes, was a kind of enchantment. To believe it was skill and physics meant she was, as Nahum said, done. What would it have meant to own Truitt’s Alleys, if the man actually gave it up? Leaving her marriage for good. Never leaving Salford. Honoring Bertha—she longed to feel Bertha here but she couldn’t.
In the end the man beat the woman 117 to 101. The loser offered her hand. The winner wouldn’t take it.
“Well then,” said LuEtta Mood, and every man in the place saw how ruined and relieved she looked. “I’ll go.”
“Aw come on,” said Martin Younkins. “He didn’t mean it.”
“I meant it, every pin,” said Nahum. “I meant she must go, she must go, this marks the Common Era in Truitt’s Alleys, we may begin our mission.”
“It’s a bowling alley for Chrissakes,” said Jack Silver.
“Yes, for His sake,” said Nahum. “I do not blame you, gal, for your blindness. I myself were raised to believe there were no difference between man and woman or if yes then it were a small difference, that man and woman were as business partners and everything agreed upon but that an’t true. Indeed, the female sex is smarter and foxier as has been so since the Garden, and therefore the male of the species must be stronger. Only then is it even, in life as in marriage. Goodbye,” he said to LuEtta Mood. “It is time for you to go.”
“Give me—”
“Now,” roared Nahum. He looked sideways at Jeptha Arrison. The man had a daft canine look on his face, openmouthed, trying to make up a mind. Best smack him across the snout. The man even shook hands like a dog, offered it up at a soft-wristed angle, and Nahum took it. Jeptha’s hand seemed to grow in Nahum’s, till one hand engulfed the other. He stretched to whisper in Nahum’s ear. Poor soul, thought Nahum, ignorant of the ways of the world, and me, a stranger, the only one he can speak to.
“I believe,” whispered Jeptha Arrison to Nahum Truitt, “I believe—”
“What is it, child?”
“I believe you’re going to hell,” Jeptha whispered, his voice calm as tar, and when he leaned away the assembled men assumed from the look on Truitt’s face that Jeptha Arrison must have finally bit somebody. LuEtta was already on the sidewalk. Jeptha leaned in again and said, “Me, too. I fiddled the pins for you, boss.”
Then LuEtta and Jeptha were out on the sidewalk in front of Truitt’s Alleys.
“Well, Lu,” said Jeptha. “I suppose there’s nothing for it but get married again.”
“To who?” LuEtta asked wonderingly.
Jeptha took her hand and LuEtta, like Nahum, felt its strange transforming properties, years of pinsetting tenderness and perfect timing. Who had ever understood her so well? The baby woke up then. She could feel his limbs reassemble after a long sleep.
“To us,” he said. “I mean, each other. Will you, Lu?”
She meant to say, I’m already married. Her husband was still then alive. She meant to say, Don’t be silly, I have a child, you cannot be a father. Instead she felt her torso open like a birdcage, and some part of her, either terrible or necessary, went flapping toward heaven, or at least past the belfry of the Methodist Church.
“Will you, Lu,” he said again.
Yes, in a way, she would.
Inside, Nahum knocked the Zeno’s Gum machine off the front counter with one furious elbow. “Gum is for idiots and imbeciles,” he said to the stunned men. “They mistake a piece of gum in their mouths for a thought in their heads.”
Joe Wear Evaporates
In the middle of that night, Joe Wear woke to the shift and shuffle of somebody sitting on the edge of his bed. He’d grown up in an orphanage, he’d been woken in the night by strangers a dozen times. In sleep he was always the same abandoned child found by the wrong person: his first instinct was to pretend he was unconscious till such a time as he could not reasonably do so. Then the grown-up part of him drained of dreams. “Jep,” he said, but it wasn’t Jep.
“These are no bad lodgings,” said Nahum Truitt.
“Suppose not,” said Joe. “Do something for you?”
“Oh, nothing,” said Nahum. “Not bad lodgings at all. Not a bad bed you have here.” He gave a clattering phlegmy sigh. “I have been turned around in the dark, Wear. Give me this.”
By this he meant Joe’s left hand, set on the old flowered counterpane, and by give he meant he would take it in both of his. The kitchen light tossed a bit of pewter from its tin shade onto the bed. Nahum’s hands were as tendinous as most men’s feet; Joe’s hand was the leather mitt of a laborer, muscle and threat. He thought about punching Nahum, what it would mean, how it would feel.
“You’re an oblique one, an’t you, Wear?”
“Beg pardon,” said Joe, not a question.
“An invert. Not of this world. Listen, I recognize.”
His touch on another human being was as ungainly as on an inanimate object. The bones at the back of his hand stood out in shadow like the ribs on a lady’s fan. “I can cure you,” he said, in a voice that might have been threat and might have been seduction. “I’ve done it before, Wear.”