Then they all turned to the pins and hoped. Even Roy did, he closed his eyes and tried to see them fall over, pin by pin.
Arch said, “I’ve seen them.” But had he? Had he ever actually been looking at the lane when the pins fell over? He could feel his organs disperse in his torso, a kind of sickness—a thorough bamboozlement. “Roy,” he said. Roy shook his head.
Arch couldn’t explain it. That ghost had belonged to him; it had felt personal and exact. All right, it might not have been his father—but he’d felt something flattening itself against the wall so it could sleep with Arch in his bed. (Maybe it was in his bed even now!) Maybe not even human, just a leak in the pipe of the afterlife that happened to drip drip drip on Arch’s head.
Not bamboozlement. Or that particular sort: heartbreak. Someday somebody will love you but it’ll just be a living girl. A whole string of them. Tough luck.
The Ghoster packed up his equipment that afternoon, the mirrors, the microphones. “It’s too bad,” said Margaret, as though she were at fault but didn’t want to admit it. She gave him an Eskimo Pie from the machine. “Here.”
“What is it?”
“Ice cream.”
“I don’t eat ice cream anymore,” he said. He tried to hand it back. “Time to go.”
“Eat this one,” she said. “Here, I’ll have one, too.” She got a second for herself.
He unwrapped his and examined the chocolate coating. “They gave us Eskimo Pies in the service,” he said. “Taste of home.”
“You fought in the war?”
“A little. It’s good. It’s melty.”
“That’s why don’t unwrap the whole thing. Here, take mine. I’ll take yours. There you are. Where will you go next? Nothing like an Eskimo Pie.”
“Heard about a nineteenth-century defenestration in Paterson, New Jersey,” he said. He had chocolate on his chin, and she knew the ice cream was as cold in his mouth as it was in hers, and that was something. “Over a card game. Seventy years ago. That death’s got some age on it: that’s what you need. I figure you get some time on yours, let the spirit come into his own.”
“So you don’t think it was Roy.”
“Don’t get me wrong,” said Cadey. “I think he’s a jackass. But jackassery and spirit activity may be found in the same place. Might even be the spirit that’s inclining the boy to mischief. He’s young yet. Fresh. The spirit, I mean. He’ll show. I’ll come back.”
She didn’t know whether she should defend Roy. He wasn’t a jackass; he had other flaws that were worse. She said, “Arch would like that.”
“Oh, Arch,” said Cadey. “You tell Arch to keep a lookout for phenomena.”
“Like what?”
He shoved the end of the Eskimo Pie in his mouth so the coating shattered, and wrote out a list.
Cold spots
Mist
Flickering lights
Inconsolable children
Upset in dogs
Moaning
Misplaced items
Ineradicable mold
Puddles of no known origin
Mushrooms
Somewhere a band playing
He signed it in a florid hand, Love K. D., but he forgot to put down any forwarding information. Who was that love meant for, her or Arch or the ghosts?
“K. D.,” she said.
“Yes, Margaret?”
She tried to come up with a question as serious as she sounded, though she’d only been reading his initials out for the first time, wondering what they stood for.
Ghosters, like birders, tiptoeing. Did you see a chickadee, a thrush, a suicide, an accidental decapitation? Don’t scare ’em off with your big feet now. They are precious. We need them.
She tried, “What happened to your wife?”
He shook his head as though seeing it. “Terrible.”
“She was murdered,” said Margaret.
“No, ma’am. But she was sick a long time. One morning I was rubbing her feet, they were always cold, I rubbed and rubbed and the feet stayed cold and I understood that they wouldn’t warm. Got up, called her mother, walked right out of the house and never went back.” Then he said, “Everyone who dies is murdered.”
After a moment, Margaret said, “I don’t believe that’s true. So you left her there, alone in bed?”
“I had done the hard part,” said the man. “Walked away. So you see.” He hefted the camera bag. “What about you,” he said in a knowing voice. “You are alone, too.”
“Do you think,” she began. “Can you tell? If he’s.” She wasn’t sure what she was about to say. “If my husband has entered the spirit realm.” For the first time she wished it were true: she was tired of hoping.
He stared at her a long time, then said, “Yes, Margaret, he’s dead.”
“What does he say?” she asked in a little voice.
He caught her hand in his. He was always doing that, as though her hands were butterflies, to be cupped in his own. Then she knew everything about him, the way he held her hand. That man did not believe in ghosts. What a relief, to understand that he knew nothing about the dead.
He was a fraud, but Margaret had a weakness for fraudulence. Fake cakes in the bakery windows lovelier than any real slice, her husband, her Saturday afternoon movie matinees, the packets of saccharine she sprinkled on her cereal.
He said, “Bertha would want women here. You need them, anyhow. Get in some girls to set the pins.”
“Girls?” said Margaret.
“I can’t talk to the dead,” said Cadey. “No man can.”
“All right,” she said wryly.
His whole face went angular with hurt feelings. His eyes were isosceles triangles. “Really, Margaret,” he said. “You don’t know. You believe in God and I don’t mock you.”
“Believing in God is not believing in ghosts,” she said, but how did he know she believed in God?
She believed in God for the same reason anybody does: it is unbearable to think that our private thoughts are truly private.
I Had to Take Her Apart to Make Her Fit
Apart from his accidental electrocution at the hands of the strength tester, Jeptha Arrison had never been injured on the job. Remarkable for a pinbody, right there where the whole calamity of bowling occurred. He’d never taken a ball to the head or a pin to the ankle; had never strained his shoulder sending the balls back on the return; had contracted no infections of the skin or lungs or blood. If you overlooked the tremors that he hid in his pockets, he was in astoundingly fine shape for a man who’d done manual labor all his life. But setting was precise or it was nothing. When he closed his eyes Jeptha could see the pins and their order but his body could not make it so.
He was born in a bowling alley, and he planned to die in one.
That’s what he said to his friend William Burling Jeter Jr., who claimed he was the oldest man in Salford, and who was Margaret Truitt’s most hated customer.
“You could do it,” said William Burling Jeter Jr.
“I will,” said Jeptha. “That has been my plan all along.”
Meanwhile he would listen to the lectures of William Burling Jeter Jr., which was itself a kind of death. Jeet was certainly the oldest man in Truitt’s Alleys, a loiterer, a bore, who never bowled but hung around. He had igneous features, hardened, fluid. His dark eyes glinted amid his freckles.
“I did my service for the Union,” Jeet said. “Nearly too old for that, too!”
“Are you even American?” Margaret asked. Oh, she hated him. She thought he had a kind of Japanese-y look, but that might have been only old age. His accent, too, seemed more geriatric than geographic. “Where did you come from? I don’t remember you.”
“Been here since the beginning,” he said. “I knew ’em all. I was here when Bertha Truitt made her entrance and her exit, and all the acts between. Honey,” he said to Margaret. “Come on, honey, smile for me.”
“No thank you,” she said.
“Some hot nuts, then? Give me a scoop of hot nuts.”
“Do you have a nickel?”
He waved away the question. “I’m the oldest man in Salford.”
“I doubt it.”
“You doubt it? Who then?”
“Not you, is all I know. Jeptha, maybe.”
“I’m a youngster,” said Jeptha, wishing the two of them would stop bickering. It was keeping him alive and that was not his wish.
“He is not the oldest man in Salford!” said Margaret.