Alex and his buddy are playing adjacent machines at the room’s far end, a Shoot The Moon and a Mercury, their mist-damp heads silhouetted against the sleek painted rockets of the glowing backglasses. Alex is good: he tilts his machine with subtlety and skill, lecturing as he plays. Pinball’s true appeal, he’s saying, resides in its embodiment of the stiff social mechanisms that ensnare us. To play is to strike at them in effigy. Pinball and jazz are the two finest things your country has given the world, and they arise from the same spirit of opposition.
Stanley moves past them to an Arabian Nights machine. He drops a dime and the backglass lights up: a veiled bellydancer, a turbaned sultan ringed by busty harem girls. The sultan is smug, portly, reading aloud from a massive book; Stanley thinks of Welles and grins. He figures he doesn’t have much time, so he draws back the plunger, launches the first ball, and lets it drain. He does the same with the second, and the third. Then he starts to play for real, racking up points in a hurry, slowing down when he feels Alex loom behind him. Not bad, Alex tells him when the game ends.
Thanks. Not too shabby yourself.
I used to play quite a lot in Paris. I’ve rusted a bit, I’m afraid.
Stanley puts his hand in his pocket, comes out with another coin. Time for one more game? he says.
Why not? The fish will wait, I suspect.
You wanna win back some of your cash?
As Alex plays—warping the cabinet with the pressure of his knees and elbows, deforming the course of the little silver balls—Whitey and his hammerhead sidekicks exit, flipping Stanley the bird as they go. Claudio seems to relax a little. A light breeze filters through the windows, and Stanley can see moonlight on the waves; the rainclouds must be blowing through. The pinball cabinet groans against Alex’s weight. Score lights climb the backglass; the machine clunks and dings.
Soon it’s Stanley’s turn. He doesn’t even look at Alex’s score. Moments after he’s launched his first ball Alex begins to laugh; he takes a fin from his billfold, creases it down its middle, lays it across the lockdown bar. Ah, but you’re a good fucking con, Stanley, he says. Go as long as you can, now. It’s worth five just to see you play, you magnificent bugger.
Stanley never tilts; he’s never tried, isn’t really sure how. He touches nothing but the flipper-buttons. The left is a little tacky; sometimes he can see where the ball’s going but can’t do much about it, and that gets on his nerves. His eyes track the streak of silver as it ricochets between bumpers. The trapholes light; the machine vomits replays. Three million points. Four million. Five. Claudio, bored, taps out a mambo rhythm on the tin bucket with his fingertips. Stanley’s still on his first ball. Sweet christ, Alex whispers to Claudio. I’ve not seen anything like it.
Eventually the machine maxes out. Stanley pockets the fin, then tears off the replays and hands them to Alex. So, he says, who’s ready to go fish?
They find Stuart and the others near the entrance channel to the new marina. Stuart and Milton are at the water’s edge, staring into the swash, outlined against the emergent moon. The others sit farther back on the dry sand, beside empty buckets and scattered shoes. The group has grown: Lyn’s here, with three other women, faces Stanley recalls from the coffeehouse. One of them plays a soft melody on a guitar. Charlie’s nearby too, a little apart, nursing a bottle from a paper bag.
One of the women greets Claudio by name; he must’ve met her last night, while Stanley was with Welles. While Claudio talks to her, Stanley slips off his shoes to join Milton and Stuart. As he approaches, Stuart signals caution with a raised hand, and hisses for silence, although Stanley isn’t making any noise.
Stanley crouches between them, watching the surf. A couple of slender silver fish—maybe six inches long—swim in the backwash of the last wave, there for an instant, then gone. Hey, Stanley whispers. What’re we looking for?
Stuart squints at the ocean, his heavy features fierce and alert. Fish, he says.
Another silver fish zips through the shallows, furrowing the water with its smooth back. Stanley looks at Stuart, then at Milton. What do we do when we see ’em? he says.
Catch ’em, Stuart says.
With what? We got nets?
Don’t need nets, Milton says. Just use your hands. You grab ’em, you drop ’em in the bucket. They come right out of the water.
Stuart’s still wearing his purposeful Bomba-the-Jungle-Boy expression, scanning the white foam. Stanley looks past him. Probably twenty or thirty small fish cruise along the water’s edge between here and the stones of the half-finished jetty. Turning north, he spots even more. What are they supposed to look like? he says.
Like big sardines, Milton says. Five, six inches. Skinny and silver. You’ll see a few males at first: those are the scouts. They case the beach, make sure everything’s a-okay. Then the ladies make the scene, to lay the eggs.
Stanley points. Are those the scouts? he says.
Milton and Stuart hunch forward. Each presses a palm to the wet sand, balancing on it, and shades his eyes from the moonlight with the other. In this position they look like a couple of gargoyles, or stone lions. Well, I’ll be damned, Milton says.