“Show me the safe.”
“I can’t,” said Arch.
“I think you can.”
“Knock it off, man,” called the other guy to the Cap. You could hear the bravery in the middle of the words, but he couldn’t quite force it all the way to the edges. “Got it,” he said, as he found the outlet and plugged in the Ping-Pong game.
Terrence turned and regarded him with disgust. “What’s your name?” he asked, as though he suspected the guy was just the kind of jerk who didn’t have one.
“Marcus,” said Marcus. “Let’s go.”
“Shut up, Marcus,” said Terrence.
Marcus tried the door, but Arch, like his mother, had locked it behind him. He wanted to go home. Cracker would be furious, and would forgive him. That’s what he needed.
“I’ll let you out,” said Arch, finding the key.
“Not going,” said Terrence. “Show the safe.”
“Don’t be a child,” said Arch. Then he looked at Terrence and saw that he was a child, a kid. Not a twitchy small guy, just not full grown, and the boy’s childishness suffused Arch’s heart and ossified it. Arch thought he’d never hated somebody so much in his entire life. Terrence Fanning, his little steel eyes and overripe lips. “You fucking boy: when there’s a grown man telling you what to do, you do it.”
The kid turned. Unhappiness gave him a hunchback. I’ve done it, thought Arch, he’s going. Then the guy came charging at him, shoulder first. He knocked Arch off his feet, into lane three.
On the ground the two of them stared at each other. Terrence Fanning weighed nothing at all; Arch would knock him off once he caught his own breath. They were both doomed, which is to say they’d both always courted that feeling of doom. They loved it, the shadow over the sun that meant your own fuckups were not personal: they were ordained and condemned by God. Neither could help himself. “Fuck you,” said Arch from the floor.
Moments before, Arch had seen him with flashbulb clarity, every pimple, the fine wales of his corduroy cap. Now Terrence Fanning disappeared into a column of rage. He was gone. He couldn’t see Arch Truitt, either. The flame of fury had shot up all around him. How had they gotten here? They didn’t know.
A bowling alley is a warehouse for blunt objects. Terrence Fanning belonged there; he was a blunt object; so was the ball he picked up in his hand; so were the wailing witnesses behind him. Neither doomed man was looking at the other. They jolted, jolted, hollered.
When it was over Terrence Fanning stood up. There was a candy smell that he knew came from his brain and meant his life was over. Candy required candy: he walked behind the counter and helped himself to several rattling boxes of Lemonheads and Boston Baked Beans. His shoes were bloody; he picked out a pair of piebald bowling oxfords with the size stitched on the heel, larger than he usually wore because he was self-conscious about his little feet. Somebody was weeping. It was him.
“Give me a ride home,” he said to Marcus, who was also weeping. Only the girl was dry-eyed. That was just like a girl, and he wanted to hit her so they’d match.
“We have to call an ambulance,” she said in a steady voice.
“He’s dead,” said Terrence Fanning, age seventeen, of Adams Road in the Nonantum neighborhood of Newton, Massachusetts. Now he was calm, too. He stubbed out the tears on his cheeks with the heels of his hands. “Give me a ride, Marcus.”
“What about the safe?” asked tearful Marcus.
“There is no safe,” said Terrence Fanning.
Behind them, Laughing Arch Truitt whispered into the floor, “Don’t leave me.” Who was he talking to? “Don’t let me,” he said. He didn’t finish the sentence. He could hear the ball that had done him in wobble stickily down the gutter toward the pins. He didn’t want to be saved. He only wanted somebody—the calm girl, the terrified boy, his gray-eyed murderer—to sit beside him as he died. Nobody did. His mother was close by, of course, but already dead, and no company at all. They would find her on the roof the next day, as they swept through the crime scene, the Bowlaway, old Bertha Truitt’s, her body an answer to one mystery, but not to most.
5
Among the Artists
After giving up Superba Minna Sprague saved everything that had touched her, imagining a museum about her extraordinary family—her father’s family; she had inherited everything—but it was a hodgepodge, a hash, a gallimaufry. Her children didn’t want it: they lived spare and settled lives in the Midwest, of all places. Easier if there had been a single story. Her father, the distinguished black doctor and writer. Or Almira the cellist, who composed music in her farmhouse bedroom till the day she died, age eighty-six, the last of her siblings. Benjamin the businessman and gentleman farmer. Even Joseph, the quietest Sprague, who made strange visionary drawings on grocery store bags with pencil and saved them in wooden egg crates. Almira had thrown out all the drawings but one after Joseph’s death, though she had saved dozens of his fine white shirts, which Minna now owned. If you knew Joseph—in another life he would have been the hero! the genius! instead of the most minor Sprague—if you’d known him the drawing, now framed in Minna’s parlor, would have meant something. Here was Almira, her body like a cello; here was Benjamin built of barrels and wheat. The sun on the horizon was a dozy eye about to close. Where was Joseph himself? The graphite hand in the corner reaching down, pinching a penciled pencil, as though the drawing were drawing itself. But nobody knew Joseph anymore but Minna, and the drawing was only picturesque, one more detail among too many details. You couldn’t make sense of it. She wished she owned all the drawings and damn the shirts. No, keep the shirts. She was, like some of the men who collected her recordings (always men), a completist. It was like a vitamin deficiency.
So when Roy Truitt called her she said, “I want everything.”
“Oh,” he said. “I mean, I was calling about the bowling alley—”
She did want everything. But you couldn’t ask. Or you could ask, but then you’d have to laugh it off as a joke, which she did now. She’d helped him out and then she’d never heard from him. “Of course not. I don’t need anything. My children don’t want it. That godforsaken place.”
“You have children,” he said, in a voice of irritating wonder.
“Yes, I have children,” she said. “Grandchildren, too. What do you think?”
There was a long pause. She couldn’t tell what he thought, though she was generally good at discerning the various discomforts that incited silence.
“It’s nice to hear your voice,” he said at last.
“I never heard from you.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I—I’ve had a hard time.”
“Did you end up teaching?”
“A little,” he said. She had saved his life, in order that he might bungle it in ways he’d never foreseen. He’d blamed her, he saw now, though really he should have thanked her. “Now I own a bowling alley, somehow. Not my mother’s. I don’t know how it happened. Thank you,” he said. “I should have—anyhow, the alley, Truitt’s, was left to somebody. We’re trying to track him down. Joseph Wear. We’re not sure—”
“I know Joe,” said Minna. “Let me get you his phone number.”
All those years before, thirty-nine years old and suddenly liberated, there were a lot of things that Joe Wear had never done. He had never been out of New England—the farthest he’d gone was to New Hampshire, to see his aunt Rose and her new family one summer day, where he verified his dislike of lakes, and cabins, and Protestant ministers. He had never danced. Had his picture taken. Had a dream of flying and woke to earthbound disappointment. Married, of course. Had a pet. Bought a piece of furniture himself: not so much as a pillow. Been at ease.
(Never danced? Not once.)