“You think there’s some intelligence making demands? Demands that must be obeyed? Arch, that’s just you. Not your heart wants. It’s you. You want.”
Arch put his hands on himself, at his clavicle, his lungs, his waist. Even from the outside, he could feel the way longing and love radiated from his torso. His heart pumped. It desired things. It moved those desires to his brain, where they displaced thought, duty, plans. “I can feel it,” he said. He stood up, to display his whole body, its regions and faults.
“It’s a fiction,” said Roy. “Something the medievals made up to get out of things, and it caught on. Your heart is a brute organ. It traffics in blood. That’s all.”
“Not only,” Arch insisted.
“Only. You’re your head. Or your whole body. You come in one piece, anyhow. Do me a favor. Every time you want to say my heart, just tell the truth. My heart wanted? No. I wanted. I longed. I broke, to be honest, you can say that, too. That is what I say to you now. I am in front of you, and I am breaking. I can feel myself break.”
At the end of the semester, the Friday of his brother’s wedding at Salford City Hall, Roy Truitt, visiting lecturer, was found on the other side of the state, stuck in the trench coat of the tiny French professor, she of the at-the-ready clean underpants, the beautifully wrapped sandwiches. When she found him thrashing on the floor of her office, Roy looked like he was wearing some sort of psychiatric restraint. Caught in the act. He would be fired. He wanted to say “I’m not here.” He wanted to say “I’m elsewhere.” He wished he were at the wedding after all.
“Mais qu’est-ce se passe?” said the French professor.
“Lady,” he said staring up at her, he an out-of-shape incompetent Houdini, no escape, no next semester. Had she really spoken French at him? She was from Secaucus, New Jersey. He should call her mademoiselle. Still, he liked the toughness of the word in his mouth, so he said it again. “Lady, lady. All sorts of things happen in this world. This is only one of them.”
He Went Up
Arch Truitt came home from the war; got married; was given, for his troubles, Truitt’s. “It’s yours now,” said Margaret, though she wouldn’t give up her stool behind the wooden counter, nor neaten her stacks of dime magazines, nor sign over the deed. “Make any changes you like.”
“All right,” said Arch. The first thing he did was to order a new sign, light up letters that said BOWLAWAY.
“You can’t just rename the place,” said Margaret. “Surely. It’s a sad name, don’t you think? Bowlaway. Bowl away what?”
“Troubles,” said Arch. “Sorrow. Hours. Whatever you don’t want, bowl it away.”
He hauled the mannequin up from the basement where he’d stored her, and wired her again to one of the iron columns. He put her high enough that people couldn’t rub her cloth face. One of her eyes had nearly been worn away already; she seemed to wink. But visitors could reach her feet. The right one grew burnished, the left one stayed fine and dark: people always reach for the brighter spot, where other hands have been.
“Jesus Mary and Joseph,” said Margaret. “Where did you find her?”
“Around,” said Arch. “I love her.”
She would be the one piece of history: Arch would modernize the Bowlaway. The first thing to go was the oak counter in the front, which had given the place the feel of a train station, or post office, or public library, where you might present yourself for official stamping. You could not enter without passing by whoever stood or sat there; whoever stood or sat there felt, variously, like a prisoner, a priest, a jailer, a mannequin in a shop window, a bird in a birdhouse. Arch had it ripped out.
“Why?” said Margaret.
“We need the room for the house shoes.”
He’d already placed the order: eight dozen pairs of rubber-soled oxfords, each rentable for a nickel. Maybe that would convince Margaret to retire. She’d always been a persnickety woman, but her persnicketiness acquired teeth as she aged. She had a particular horror concerning the ground and the human foot. Feet were the lowest part of the human anatomy. She didn’t even like seeing a stranger’s anklebone.
“How wonderful!” Margaret said when the house shoes came in.
“You don’t mind?” said Arch.
“Keep the lanes much cleaner! We won’t have the general public dragging in who-knows-what on their shoes!”
The shoes meant that Margaret spoke to everyone, asked them a piece of personal information. Sometimes the men didn’t know their shoe size and had to defer to their wives, or asked Margaret to look and guess. (These numbers Margaret committed to memory, to show off the next time.) Afterward, she wielded a giant can of Shu-ke-Ko disinfectant, which she sprayed into the open mouths of the shoes. A smart shot left, a smart shot right, miraculous sanitation! What she loved most was the warm leather of the returned shoes, the dark mushroomy smell of their recent occupation. The big shoes of the big men were her favorite. When those came back, Margaret pinched them together at the instep and felt the snug heat off the insole before she chilled them with her can of disinfectant. If she could have got away with it, she would have slipped her feet into them, for foot-to-foot communion. She had always hated feet because she had always loved them.
The long bar along the left wall went next, and the gum-stained pool tables, and Arch put in machines in their place: cigarette; baseball; a red Coke machine with glass bottles that you pulled out longwise by the neck. A jukebox (a terrible choice, in such clatter); pinball machines, a whole line of them, with the newest invention, flippers, and a big sign that said FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY: NO WAGERING. A new strength tester. A love rater. HOT STUFF, the love rater told Arch Truitt.
“Oh dear,” said Cracker, who turned out to be A COLD FISH.
“See, darling?” said Arch. “It’s broken, it doesn’t know what it’s talking about.”
What Arch wanted removed was not just the old oak, nor the unused and outdated amusements, but also the past entirely: the alley his father had presided over, all the possible ghosts. The Ghoster, K. D., had ended up publishing a small article in True Ghost Stories, illustrated with his inconclusive photos, undoctored, and including the story of Leviticus Sprague, M.D., an apparent victim of spontaneous combustion who one night had gone up. So the Bowlaway got some ghost tourists, witch-ridden and twitchy people who’d gone to Salem and figured they might as well make the trip south to Salford: the quiet sort who dressed like puritans themselves, as well as the loudmouths who liked horror movies. Ghost tourists rented lanes and then didn’t bowl, trying to keep the racket down. One day the Bowlaway was visited by a pair of women who called themselves combusters, a pair of sisters with tallow complexions and kerosene breath. You could tell they longed to burn, to be burnt, to burn somebody else. The brunette sister had sweet cutthroat dark eyes, the other was a champagne-cork blonde; the one as excitable as a book of matches, the other as still as unpoured accelerant. They’d brought a plaque they wanted to put up that said,
ON THIS SPOT
LEVITICUS SPRAGUE, M.D.
A VICTIM OF SPONTANEOUS COMBUSTION
“he is missed”
“No,” said Arch Truitt. No more of the past. No more of the forgotten past.
“Why not?” said the brunette. He felt a flutter of admiration for her. She seemed the sort of woman who might murder in the name of love.
“All right,” he said at last. But nobody knew where the spot was, and the plaque was installed behind the counter, where it could be hidden by the house shoes.