Above the pit, eleven-year-old Arch Truitt closed his eyes. It would be hard to fall asleep. Not impossible. He knew he shouldn’t but the sensation of surrender was sneezily delicious. Perhaps if he closed his eyes and held still, he could balance, he could sleep for ten seconds, his body was already asleep, the sleep was reaching his head—
A pinboy is not a parrot on a perch or a horse in a field. Halfway through the first string of his pinsetting career, Arch Truitt dozed off and fell onto the lane. He woke up as he hit the pins, cheek first, was conscious long enough to get thwacked between the shoulder blade by the third ball of the box, rolled by Mack Constable, and was sent back to dreamland by the four pin knocking him on the head. The noise, the beer, the smoke—it took a moment for anyone other than Mack Constable and his teammates to notice the boy on the lane. Mack was a bowler, he’d been trained not to cross the foul line, but he hollered and pointed and then everyone noticed, and everyone was stuck. It was as though Arch had appeared from nowhere, in the family tradition. His right shoe and sock had been knocked clear off.
“Don’t move him,” Margaret shrieked, “his spine, Roy!”
But Roy was stunned, too, till Jeptha Arrison hurdled the lanes and scooped Arch up, taking care not to skid in the ham of the splayed-open sandwich. He carried him down the gutter and brought him to the benches. Margaret closed her eyes, clung to the counter. If Arch were dead or broken, she wanted somebody else to make the diagnosis. Roy was there. Roy would tell her. Roy loved bad news.
“Is he paralyzed?” asked Roy, worriedly.
“It’s nobody’s fault,” said Jeptha.
“Oh God,” said Mack Constable.
Outside: Arch’s eyes fluttered as he returned to them. Inside, the world fluttered, returned to Arch. “ARE YOU PARALYZED?” Jeptha Arrison yelled into those opening eyes, and Arch didn’t know the answer, he’d never been paralyzed before, he didn’t know what it felt like. A long list of things he didn’t know: why his head hurt, how he’d got to the bowlers’ benches, why one of his feet was so cold, how long he’d been gone from the conscious world, who put that bite of ham sandwich at the back of his mouth right where it could choke him.
The men looked down, Jeptha, Mack, Bill Semb, his brother Roy, Dutch Goldblatt. He could feel the heat of the whole Saturday afternoon league radiating around him. His neck hurt, and his face. He lifted his hand to his cheek and the crowd cheered.
“Not paralyzed!” called Bill Semb, just as Jeptha Arrison twisted Arch’s exposed big toe nearly off.
“Ow!”
“The boy is entire!” called Jeptha.
Roy lowered his mouth to his brother’s ear. He whispered, “You’re drunk.”
“I fell asleep,” said Arch, but his brother was right. It was Saturday, June 26, at 2:30 P.M., the Year of Our Lord 1935, the eleventh year of Arch Truitt, and Arch was drunk, not for the first time.
If not for beer, Arch Truitt might have become a pickpocket, a sneak thief, a Peeping Tom, a second-story man, a spy: what interested him were the secret compartments of adulthood, the things grown people cupped their hands around. Wallets, sex acts, lit cigarettes, whispers into ears. What things went on! So he went looking, and the first place he looked was a left-behind beer glass, and what was there satisfied his curiosity, piqued it, satisfied, piqued, satisfied.
Arch drank beer ends. The warm of it, the way it went down the middle of your tongue then rolled to the edges bubblier in some places than in others; the way it spread out first at your shoulders and then at your hips. It tasted of bread infused with gold, a flavor inseparable from the way it unlaced his muscles, his way of thinking. It was as though his body ordinarily was a darkened room. Beer turned on the lights, warmed the furniture. Made him happy to be there. Filled him with joie de vivre (which is fatal in nearly all cases). He could drink beer for the rest of his life, he thought.
Margaret refused to let Arch pinset after his accident. “He’s too sleepy,” she said, “it’s dangerous for him.” As though sleepiness were hemophilia. One side of his body was bruised like an autumn shadow. “He never fought sleep, not even as a baby,” said Margaret. She said it in a voice of admiration: he was a pacifist in the Army of the Wakeful. Let others fight sleep, let Arch act as distraction, sacrifice himself to his pillow and satin-bound blanket.
“He’s lazy, you mean,” said Roy.
“He’s sleepy,” said Margaret. “He can’t help it. Look at him. He’s meant for something else. Great things.”
“Aren’t I?” cried Roy.
His mother looked at him. The truth was, she knew nothing about fate, or destiny, or even tomorrow, but she knew she needed someone to take care of her and only one of her sons was capable. “Oh Roy,” she said. “Not all of us are.”
Margaret didn’t mean to be cruel. She was only stupid; she’d had ideas put in her head. It felt to her later as though these thoughts had physically been put there by Nahum, solid thoughts she never could have manufactured on her own. Arch reminded her of Bertha, friendly and ruthless; Roy of her, a left-behind person who would always strive for love. What was keeping her in Salford, when everybody else had left? Duty. Some people were built for it and others weren’t.
A Painted Kangaroo with a Pair of False Wings
The wreck of Supersum still stood in those days, boarded up by the city. A colony of birds nested in the belvedere. Nocturnal, pelagic, monogamous, mysterious, ordinary dun-colored birds, but nobody knew what they ate, or where they went.
The Audubon Society wrote to City Hall. Something must be done about the house, they said.
We’ll tear it down, said City Hall, who’d been meaning to look into it for some time. They just had to write to the owner first.
You can’t! said the Audubon Society. Not now!
Why not?
We’d thought these birds were extinct! To see one—
—are you sure you saw it.
—yes, said the Audubon Society coldly. Quite sure. As sure as we can be. Now, these birds only come inland to breed—
Like sailors! said the old woman at City Hall.
Some people, said the Audubon Society, say that they’re the ghosts of drowned sailors. They hover over the ocean to feed. They patter. They flutter. It’s amazing to see, if you could see it, but mostly you can’t.
And they’re extinct?
We thought the Cross-rumped—what we have here—was. The Ringed might be. The New Zealand: almost certainly. We know so little of these birds.
Then how do you know they’re them?
They are no good at walking, said the Audubon Society, ignoring the question. They never really do, their legs are so weak. But their wings! They can fly forever, or so we think. Amazing birds. Little married couples. They trade off incubation of the egg, father then mother then father then mother.
Just one egg?
One egg is enough, said the Audubon Society in a prim voice.
The old gentleman at City Hall believed in the birds. He’d seen something flying home to the belfry in the early morning. What the old man thought: there were birds in the Octagon, and if the Audubon Society believed they were these extinct seabirds, then they were. The belief made it so. It was like love.