Cracker mimed covering some casserole. “The Italians left a bunch of covered silver dishes. But he ended up with lids and no bottoms. Oh God, he took it badly. He cried. I don’t know what happened to them.”
“Well then that’s why,” said Brenda. “The war made him compromise his morals.”
Cracker laughed, a creaking gate always. “Sure. I guess. He was pure before?”
“He was always pure,” said Amy, age fifteen, passionately. “That’s why when he did something bad it was poison to him.”
Too often Cracker could not sleep for wondering where Arch was in the world. Years later, even. He never disappeared, as his own father had, he was just a radio station who some days was clear and others nearly overwhelmed by static—though enough of his voice beneath the crackle you still could hope that with gentling he might come through. Had he remarried? Cracker might wonder suddenly in the night. Was he drinking? He called his mother and his daughters on no regular schedule. He and Roy came to see their mother—at the alley, mostly, and then Arch might roll a few frames. Once a year, every other year. His life was a mystery. I’ll tell you everything, he’d once told her, and she’d said, God, no. She was never the type of woman who’d fall for the promise, the threat, of everything. She tried to convince herself she could live on nothing instead.
Men from Mars
Jeptha Arrison hadn’t been born in a bowling alley, not ever, but Arch Truitt was. It was an event that had embarrassed everyone involved so much they never spoke of it: Margaret’s modesty protected by the oak counter, though Nahum had urged her to stretch out on the pool table. Was he crazy? Don’t ruin the felt. Give birth someplace that can be mopped up. The doctor who arrived five minutes too late pronounced the sudden labor and delivery typical. Not for me it isn’t, said Margaret, and the doctor laughed with such condescension it was like a sword run through her body that missed all her organs. She would feel the injury the rest of her life.
Arch Truitt was born in the Bowlaway; that is, Truitt’s Alleys; that is, in the middle of a swamp. Bowling was what he knew in the front part of his brain, before the expulsion. The back of his brain was fenland. Why he had to drink so much. He had to keep up the damp. He was mostly marsh.
They weren’t a walking family, they’d driven everywhere, walking was for layabouts and geniuses. “Dr. Sprague walked,” Margaret once said, “in order to think.” She said it as though a walk was like college. Yes, you could go, but you better be sure you could stick it out, and she surely wouldn’t sponsor you. “Who was Dr. Sprague?” asked Arch, but Margaret only shook her head. Sometimes she thought Roy had inherited some of Dr. Sprague’s seriousness and melancholy, thinking things he shouldn’t; Arch might have inherited his thirst. Never mind inheritance was impossible. They’d never met. He was only maritally part of the family. But couldn’t certain qualities be heavier than others, and drip down through the generations anyhow?
Roy, who’d gone to college, went for walks. He encouraged Arch to come with him. So Arch set off, and, being a swamp, sought out the swamp.
This was in the summer. They lived together in Roy’s enormous Worcester apartment, actually three apartments knocked together, the sort of place that, growing up, Arch had literally dreamt of: a floor plan that made no sense, bedrooms beyond closet doors, a kitchen the size of another person’s apartment in the middle, another smaller pointless kitchen in a far corner. It was big enough they could live in companionable silence when Arch wasn’t on the road or with a girlfriend. The living room was green, like Minna’s living room, which Roy had seen during the war, a vow he’d kept, perhaps the only one. Now they were on vacation, down the Cape, surrounded by marsh. They were out too late on the beach and walking back to their car. Roy had gone ahead—when they were children he was always slower, because of his weight, because of his clockwork. They were men now, and he took pleasure in outpacing his brother when he could.
Arch lagged behind. He was a city kid and the lack of streetlights in nature always struck him as eldritch.
A flash above his head, so bright it had to be fatal or divine. Some bird was saying calmly, as though half-dead, help-help, help-help, help-help. It knew nobody would.
He stopped and listened. Ahead, a salty glow. He walked toward it, and stepped into a clearing, and into a bog.
Which way was home, by which he meant the parking lot?
The bog got its fingers into his shoe.
What happened then: peace fell over Arch Truitt and he sat down. Sat down in a bog. Yes, he was drunk. He could hear strange tinkling music, and across the bog he could see some sort of creature burrowing along the edge.
Who are you?
I mean you no harm.
That’s not what I asked.
Do you mean me harm?
I will help you however I can, Arch thought, and believed it. He’d known that flash of light was not of this earth. It was a spaceship crashing down. Arch tried to stand up but no man is light on his feet in a bog. Once he’d finally managed it the creature was gone. He thought it was. The bog had taken his shoe. Then he saw more lights, orange through the scrubby pines one direction, and a more alien light throbbing the other, and he went toward the throbbing, and found Roy there in the parking lot, next to a police car all alight. Roy’s shoes were in his hands, pants rolled up, feet black with mud.
“Oh my God,” said Roy. He dropped his shoes to the ground and stepped into them in disbelief. “I thought you were dead.”
“Why would I be dead?” asked Arch.
A policeman got out of the car. He was very tall and thin, but with a sweet round boyish face. He would be boyish all his life, you could tell. “You need to go to the hospital?” he asked Arch. He had the worried voice of feigned bravery, alto, marbled with baritone.
“Why on earth?”
The policeman pointed at his bare foot.
“I don’t think that’s a medical condition,” said Roy. “Come on,” he said to Arch. His hands were shaking. This had been an emergency and he wanted to drive away from it.
“What were you to up to?” said the policeman, suddenly suspicious.
“Walking,” said Roy.
“Well,” said Arch.
“Well,” said the policeman with a mean encouragement—everything that had been boyish about him stayed boyish, but spiteful and stunted. “What were you up to?”
“We’re brothers,” said Roy, as though that explained everything.
“I’m talking to him. Your brother.” He examined Arch’s face, eyes, jawline, Roy thought for a family resemblance—was it there? was it convincing?—then said, in a petty, vulcanized voice, “You look familiar.”
At that Arch gave his best smile, the magnanimous one that made you glad to know him. “Maybe from television.”
The cop straightened up. “Oh! Yes! You!” He put his hand out for a shake. Arch took it. “You’re an actor,” the cop said.
“Then you know me,” said Arch.
“Sure,” the policeman said less certainly. “All right, then. You’re OK?”
“We’re OK,” said Arch. “Thank you. Appreciate it.”
The Truitt boys waited for the cruiser to pull away. Then Roy backed into something—a tree?—and there was a sound that went all through the car and dented their hearts, then he pulled forward, backed up again, a vibrating crash—a pole?—and then eased away.
“We should look at that,” said Arch.
“It’s fine,” said Roy.
They swung out of the parking lot. Arch said, “You called the police?”
“You were gone five hours,” said Roy. “I thought you’d drowned.”
Five hours? No, not possible, but on the other hand the orange glow had been dawn—here was the sun, glazing the bay—and they’d left the beach at night.
Roy said, “So now you’re an actor?”
“He recognized me, didn’t he?”
“You look like some Cape Cod cat burglar,” said Roy.
“I am on TV,” said Arch.
“Sometimes. You’re an occasional Saturday afternoon candlepin bowler.”