If I fall off the roof, she thought, and the idea filled her with pleasure. She put a lemon drop on her tongue and was surprised to find not a tooth in her mouth. She’d left them at home. She was so light she’d fall silent as any New England precipitation, and in the daylight whoever found her would wonder what height she’d fallen from, an airship or heaven, an addlepated stork. Dropped from the claws of the Salford Devil, flying down Mims Avenue. The Salford Devil herself, a flying woman, but old, weary. They’ll think I killed myself. That’d be a funeral! That’d show them! But she didn’t like to cause trouble and so she went backward onto the roof. Not so light after all. As soon as she fell the bruise began to form, dusk of skin pressed up against the dusky tar paper of the roof in the dawny light. Above her, some wooly clouds unraveled like a chewed sock. Not a cloud in the sky, she thought bitterly: how it ought to be. Joe used to sleep up here—he had told her so—and then she could see his face, squinty and sad. Alone, he made it sound, but she wondered. Not too many places a man like Joe Wear could go with a sweetheart, in those days or these, and her heart was filled with benevolence for him and then the benevolence drained away. Good. Drive ’em out. Let ’em find other neighborhoods to ruin.
Oh, the wind would teach her a lesson for that, it grabbed the hem of her nightgown and pulled it up past her haunches to the underside of her tiny breasts. I’m not wearing underwear! she thought, as though somebody had stolen it, but she never did when she slept: even a pious woman needed airing out. There was the wind, puzzling over her lower anatomy. She began to weep with the shame and pleasure of it. Nobody had touched her below the waist since that old fraud her husband and nobody would, not even for purely sanitary reasons. She would not go to the home, to have immigrants wipe her bottom, no matter what her children said. She would not have her bottom parted and cleaned by strangers, or even by family, though here she was parted, the wind was parting her, her bottom in the back and in front what Nahum called, intolerably, her nelly. Old Mr. TV saw everything. I will die of exposure! Less embarrassing to be seen by someone her own age but also worse, worse, and with enormous effort she rolled underneath the lip of the roof as though under the sooty wing of one of God’s own angels.
When they found her bed empty and unmade they could not imagine what had happened. She couldn’t have left it on purpose, she who believed an unmade bed was as sordid an object as found in a modern home. Where’s Margaret? They searched every corner of the house, and the yard, and the Bowlaway, and the public library half a mile away. The police went door-to-door.
Where was she? Had she taken the train? Had she started to walk? Had she been pulled from her window by a kidnapper (you’re coming with me, don’t forget your purse) and been driven far away in a dark car? She had wandered off again, she was old, the family was prone to wandering. But to disappear so thoroughly. And also: When? There was a whole stretch of hours they had not seen her.
They should have put her in the home, where she would have disappeared the usual way, via slow evaporation.
Fathers Fore
Arch went to college bars to drink away his guilt. He, who had never been to college, believed college students were honest. They wouldn’t rob you, anyhow. They wouldn’t kill you. They were dumb, in their way—this idea he got from Roy, that any grown man could outdrink them and outthink them. Then he was sitting in Father’s—which number? Too? Fore? Won? he couldn’t remember—in odd company when the lights came on. The bars closed at 2:00 A.M. and the package stores hours before that but Arch was a drinker who’d fallen in with drinkers: they were still thirsty. Two boys and one quiet girl. It was essential they have another. Where could they go? “I got a bottle at home,” said Arch. “I got a car,” said one of the boys. Arch rode up front. He knew how drunk they all must have been; he was full of admiration at the driver’s skill, this long-haired beetle-browed boy. The other boy (shorter, in a flat scally cap) sat in the back with the girl (Italian, Arch thought, brown hair parted in the middle, blue jeans and a plaid shirt shot through with gold thread). He felt the rattling of the car but he thought they were holding still, it was the road that was moving beneath them, under their wheels and far away behind them in the dark.
If the night had gone differently, Arch might have woken up the next morning, astounded to have survived the mere drive home. What a stupid thing to do! he might have said to Cracker, who would have answered, It’s time to forgive yourself. Drink at home, if you have to drink. Instead, he unlocked the door to the Bowlaway and said to the kids—Jordan, Terrence, and somebody else, Arch couldn’t remember whether the girl was Jordan or the beetle-browed boy was. Terrence was the cap. “Come in,” said Arch. They all did.
They drank in the dark of the alley, whiskey that Arch kept under the counter, mixed with Coke from glass bottles pulled lengthwise from the upright vending machine. “Don’t you have a key?” asked Terrence the Cap, as Arch counted out quarters. “Somewhere,” said Arch. “All the keys of the world are somewhere.” The key was on his key chain. He unlocked the machine and swung the door open so they could help themselves.
“Wicked,” said Jordan, or not-Jordan, the boy.
“What kind of bowling is this?” the girl asked.
“Candlepin.”
“What the fuck is that,” said the girl.
“Language,” said Arch. “You’re not from New England.”
“Sorry. Pennsylvania,” said the girl. “You own this place?”
“No,” he said. “Mr. Joe Wear owns it. I just work here.” He said, “Oh well.”
The bowling-alley gloom had taken the gloss out of the girl’s hair. Arch wanted to know what her name was. He was old enough to be her father. Arch had no designs on her, not so much as a doodle, except that he wanted her to like him. Terrence the Cap and Beetle-brow were trying to figure out how to turn on Pong till Terrence gave up and went to rifle through the candy behind the front counter.
Arch was a grown man looking after children. “Maybe it’s time to call it a night.”
Terrence the Cap unwrapped his candy. A Sky Bar, the worst kind of candy there was, five compartments of not quite chocolate filled with not quite caramel, not quite coconut, not quite fudge. “You got a key to this safe?” He kicked at the small lockbox under the counter.
“Nah,” Arch said. “They don’t trust me with it.”
“It’s dark in here,” called the beetle-browed boy.
“Bowling alleys aren’t famous for their light,” said Arch.
“You got electric,” said the Cap.
“Don’t want to attract the cops,” said Arch. Which was true enough. He’d had too much of the police, with his mother missing; he didn’t want them to find him drunk and out of place. He should be holding a vigil. Candlelight: she’d like that. If only she knew he was burning himself down from the inside. She’d been missing six weeks, was surely dead, but who knows where. He looked at his company. Where had they come from? No, not just how they had all ended up here, middle of the night, the Bowlaway, but who were they, who did they used to be? These children, they were so young, they used to be babies. They might have been nice babies. He tried to see it, their round baby heads, the pudge of their arms.
“What’s in the safe?” Terrence asked.
Arch got up to lean on the counter. He looked at the safe. It would be empty—Ida Jane, the night manager, would have taken the day’s receipts to the night depository—but that wasn’t a good story. Nobody ever wanted a safe to be empty. “The Doomsday Code,” he said.
“Nah, mush,” said Terrence. “Really.”
What Arch hadn’t realized: they were all strangers. The girl and the beetle-browed boy, one of them named Jordan; the guy in the flat cap, who was younger than the other two; Arch. They had met that night. The girl (her name was Julie, she’d only said her name was Jordan) was on the edge of dropping out of Radcliffe, she wasn’t failing but she knew she would; the beetle-browed boy, Marcus, was from Florida, and had enrolled at BC only to discover how much he liked to drink; Terrence the Cap was only ten miles away from home, seventeen years old, underage, in debt, in trouble, and already (he’d decided) doomed. Terrence had seen in Arch a countryman, drunk and frayed. Pliable. Starved for admiration. Terrence tried to pick up the safe, but it was bolted beneath the counter.
“Leave it alone,” said Arch.
“Whose place is this?” said Terrence.
“The boss’s.”
“Who’s that?”
“Mr. Joe Wear,” said the girl.
“Why not call it a night,” said Arch. He tried to make his voice paternal. In the fridge upstairs Arch kept a six-pack of beer he didn’t intend to share.
“Is there another safe? A bigger one?”
“No,” said Arch. “Yes.” There was a safe in the basement, enormous and flowered, though they had never in his memory used it: just another one of those ancient objects that had come to rest and never moved. Why hadn’t they? A safe might have changed everything. “All right,” he said, “it’s time to go.”