Minna saw it then, the look on Margaret’s face, Margaret who’d been begging for her to come back for years. What could Minna say?
She knew, of course, that Margaret lived in the bowling alley, that she had married the man who claimed to be Minna’s half brother, that she was, in fact, Margaret Truitt. What a thing to have done! All of this she had learned from the lawyers, because her father’s will had been very clear on the matter.
She said, “How’s your husband.”
“Gone,” said Margaret. “Come to the alley.”
“Oh, no. That is one place I’d never go. Do you have children, Margaret?”
Margaret nodded.
“Well then,” said Minna, “that’s lovely. Look after them.”
“You’re the one I love,” said Margaret.
“What?” Minna said, scandalized, and she knew that it was true. It was an old love, paid for, but paid in full.
Careful What You Order Through the Mail
Once the war started in Europe, the ghosts came to Salford like any refugees. Displaced persons except no longer persons: there were so many new dead in Europe the old dead were forced out. The locals objected to these immigrants, their old-timey ways, their unfamiliar smells, their unintelligible utterances. Then the locals got accustomed. Then the locals blamed the newcomers when trouble flared up. The ghost at the Gearheart Olympia was thought to be Dahune Doner, a German contortionist who in his act arrived onstage packed neatly in a box, and had been packed into this box by a jealous rival and left for weeks backstage of a Freiburg theater to suffocate and starve; it was said the mortician could not straighten the corpse to fit it into a coffin. The ghosts of contortionists can fold themselves to handkerchiefs. Sometimes this ghost left the Gearheart to haunt a particular compartment at the Automat, and soured whatever sandwich or soup or slice of pie had been put there. America! Soon everyone knew which door to avoid, though the superstitious Automat owner kept the compartment filled with a chunk of poppy seed cake, replaced weekly.
Elsewhere people discerned the ghosts of the slaughtered tangled up with their slaughterers, dark-eyed mothers with their starved children, and, on the fens, a pack of dogs who’d been shot one by one near Tbilisi—even the animals looked different from American animals, their heads too big and bony; even the ghosts of those animals. The souls of animals are usually too small to be detected with ordinary technology (the ordinary technology being the souls of human beings), but in the case of unexpected mass animal death (zoo fires, poisonings) they clump together and form a ghost about the size of a very old person’s. The ghosts of children are enormous. The ghosts of the very old are worn thin from use.
Arch Truitt had grown up in an apartment over a bowling alley, and late at night he could hear the ghosts, which he believed were in fact science—radio waves, or radiation, or fine magnetic objects rushing to the North Pole. What but the unseen could explain the bursting sense of joy Arch sometimes felt, despite everything? The notion that he was loved by an intangible someone? His body slept in his bed above Truitt’s Alleys but his being was tickled elsewhere and otherwise. Truitt’s Alleys had its own ghost. At least people believed lane five did: every now and then the pins fell over, not all at once but in turn, one into another, till all that was left behind was a 7-10 split, two standing pins like fangs amid the dead wood. Anything might have done it. Roy said nonsense, only physics knocked over the pins on lane five. The city was built on swampland. It was a wonder anything stayed upright for more than half an hour.
Arch tried to explain it to Roy. Life itself was strange. Think of things people didn’t used to believe! Think of the true things that were even now unbelievable! The Earth was, in fact, round. Duckbill platypuses existed and waddled on the other side of the world, where it was also—this was just a fact—winter, though in Salford it was July.
“It’s July in Australia, too,” said Roy suspiciously. They were lying in their beds, putting off getting up to go to work. Summers Arch worked the counter while Roy pinset. Roy wasn’t fat anymore, though he carried his body around as though he were, ponderously. Pinsetting and puberty had thinned him out.
“Yes, it’s July,” said Arch. “But winter. Tell that to an ancient man and he’d never believe you!”
“Try it on Jeptha,” said Roy. “He’s the only ancient man I know.”
“A primitive man. If you traveled back in time.”
“I don’t deal in hypotheticals,” said Roy. “I believe in science.”
“I thought science was all about hypotheses,” said Arch.
He could feel Roy’s fury emanate from the bed, could see it, a cloud rising up, could smell it, the acrid scent of Roy not believing he’d been beat in an argument. Maybe all of the emanations in the alleys were just bad moods of Roy’s, kicking over things, mooning and moaning about. Roy’s mood even now had legs, and round cartoon boots, and distantly, distantly, Arch knew he was about to fall back asleep even though the morning was under way, he was on the downward slope, his own feet just dipped in dreams: where he learned most of the things he knew about the unseen world.
“Who would want to haunt this place,” said Roy, but Arch didn’t think it was a who, exactly, and anyway, being a ghost was like being drafted: you didn’t get to choose where you were sent.
Later that day he saw the ad in the back of his mother’s True Stories magazine:
GHOSTS?
Extranormal researcher
Seeks haunted properties
To photograph & investigate.
Please write care of
Box 231, Eureka, California.
So Arch wrote.
The Ghoster arrived three months later, no advance notice, wearing the kind of cabled Irish sweater designed to camouflage sorrow and poverty. His bald head was trimmed with dark hair, and his shoulders were skewed by a camera bag. He had a handsome, hangdog face. He leaned on the counter and said, “What’s the best time?”
“We have lanes free now,” said Margaret Vanetten Truitt.
“I’m sorry,” he said. From somewhere under the sweater his snaking hand located a card. He handed it to her. Ghosts? Write Box 231, Eureka, California. “I’m here to photograph the spirit.”
“We have no spirits,” she said.
His hand went under his sweater again, and from a lower quadrant of his bulk found a letter handwritten on lined paper. “Arch Truitt says otherwise.”
“Arch Truitt is fifteen,” she said. “He’s at school.”
The man explained to Margaret that he was well known among those Americans who wished to see a ghost. “I spend my life avoiding them,” said Margaret, and he said, “You’re a rare bird.” He had taken a picture of a woman in a San Francisco hotel who’d died of a plunged elevator. The mystery of it: she was not in the elevator itself, but underneath the car, at the bottom of the shaft, murdered, but by who? He’d photographed her forty years after her death, in the hotel lobby. He took a magazine clipping out of his camera bag.
“There she is,” he said. “See? She’s tilting her head.”
Margaret could find nothing in the photo except flash and blur, but she could feel his longing. “Oh yes,” she said, putting her finger to the page. “Yes, there she is. It’s a shame! Fresh out of ghosts, we are.”
“Maybe the fellow who died in the fire,” the man suggested.
“No!” said Margaret. Then, “Nobody died in a fire.”
“Murdered, maybe,” said the man.
“Arch said that?”
“No, no. Found that out myself. This is Bertha Truitt’s place. She had an interesting death, too. I see you’re startled. But you see I do my research. What I heard is it was a crippled man.”
“A colored man, you mean,” said Margaret.
“Not the man who died. The man who set the first man on fire. A crippled handyman who was arrested but let go. Joe the Cripple.”