“Yes.”
Alan rolled another Brooklyn strike.
When he came back, grinning, Ray said: “You can’t trust those Brooklyn hits, boy. Get it over in the right pocket.”
“Up your ass, I’m only eight pins down.”
He rolled, got six pins, sat down, and Ray struck out again. Ray had 116 at the end of seven.
When he sat down again Ray asked: “Do you have any questions?”
“No. Can we leave at the end of this string?”
“Sure. But you wouldn’t be so bad if you worked some of the rust off. You keep twisting your hand when you deliver. That’s your problem.”
Alan hit the Brooklyn pocket exactly as he had on his two previous strikes, but this time left the seven-ten split and came back scowling. He thought, this is where I came in.
“I told you not to trust that whore’s pocket,” Ray said, grinning.
“Screw,” Alan growled. He went for the spare and dropped the ball into the gutter again.
“Some guys,” Ray said, laughing. “Honest to God, some guys never learn, you know that? They never do.”
The Town Line tavern had a huge red neon sign that knew nothing of the energy crisis. It flicked off and on with mindless, eternal confidence. Underneath the red neon was a white marquee that said:
There was a plowed parking lot to the right of the tavern, filled with the cars of Saturday night patrons. When he drove in he saw that the parking lot went around to the back in an L. There were several parking slots left back there. He drove in next to an empty one, shut off the car, and got out.
The night was pitilessly cold, the kind of night that doesn’t feel that cold until you realize that your ears went as numb as pump handles in the first fifteen seconds you were out. Overhead a million stars glittered in magnified brilliance. Through the tavern’s back wall he could hear the Fabulous Oysters playing “After Midnight.” J.J. Care wrote that song, he thought, and wondered where he had picked up that useless piece of information. It was amazing the way the human brain filled up with road litter. He could remember who wrote “After Midnight,” but he couldn’t remember his dead son’s face. That seemed very cruel.
The Custom Cab pickup rolled up next to his station wagon; Ray and Alan got out. They were all business now, both dressed in heavy gloves and Army surplus parkas.
“You got some money for us,” Ray said.
He took the envelope out of his coat and handed it over. Ray opened it and riffled the bills inside, estimating rather than counting.
“Okay. Open up your wagon.”
“He opened the back (which, in the Ford brochures, was called the Magic Doorgate) and the two of them slid a heavy wooden crate out of the pickup and carne d it to his wagon.
“Fuse is in the bottom,” Ray said, breathing white jets out of his nose. “Remember, you need juice. Otherwise you might just as well use the stuff for birthday candles.”
“I’ll remember.”
“You ought to bowl more. You got a powerful swing.”
They got back into their truck and drove away. A few moments later he alsc drove away, leaving the Fabulous Oysters to their own devices. His ears were cold, and they prickled when the heater warmed them up.
When he got home, he carried the crate into the house and pried it open with a screwdriver. The stuff looked exactly as Ray had said it would, like waxy gray candles. Beneath the sticks and a layer of newspaper were two fat white loops of fuse. The loops of fuse had been secured with white plastic ties that looked identical to the ones with which he secured his Hefty garbage bags.
He put the crate in the living room closet and tried to forget it, but it seemed to give off evil emanations that spread out from the closet to cover the whole house, as though something evil had happened in there years ago, something that had slowly and surely tainted everything.
January 13, 1974
He drove down to the Landing Strip and crawled up and down the streets, looking for Drake’s place of business. He saw crowded tenements standing shoulder to shoulder, so exhausted that it seemed that they would collapse if the buildings flanking them were taken away. A forest of TV antennas rose from the top of each one, standing against the sky like frightened hair. Bars, closed until noon. A derelict car in the middle of a side street, tires gone, headlights gone, chrome gone, making it look like a bleached cow skeleton in the middle of Death Valley. Glass twinkled in the gutters. All the pawnshops and liquor stores had accordion grilles across their plate glass windows. He thought: That’s what we learned from the race riots eight years ago. How to prevent looting in an emergency. And halfway down Venner Street he saw a small storefront with a sign in Old English letters. The sign said:
He parked, locked the car, and went inside. There were only two customers, a young black kid in an oversize pea coat who seemed to be dozing, and an old white boozer who was sipping coffee from a thick white porcelain mug. His hands trembled helplessly each time the mug approached his mouth. The boozer’s skin was yellow and when he looked-up his eyes were haunted with light, as if the whole man were trapped inside this stinking prison, too deep to get out.
Drake was sitting behind the counter at the rear, next to a two-burner hotplate. One Silex held hot water, the other black coffee. There was a cigar box on the counter with some change in it. There were two signs, crayoned on construction paper. One said:
Coffee 15c
Tea 15c
All soda 25c
Balogna 30c
PB amp;125c
Hot Dog 35c
The other sign said:
All Drop In counter help are VOLUNTEERS and when you serve yourself you make them feel useless and stupid. Please wait and remember GOD LOVES YOU!
Drake looked up from his magazine, a tattered copy of The National Lampoon. For a moment his eyes went that peculiar hazy shade of a man snapping his mental fingers for the right name, and then he said: “Mr. Dawes, how are you?”
“Good. Can I get a cup of coffee?”
“Sure can.” He took one of the thick mugs off the second layer of the pyramid behind him and poured. “Milk?”
“Just black.” He gave Drake a quarter and Drake gave him a dime out of the cigar box. “I wanted to thank you for the other night, and I wanted to make a contribution.”
“Nothing to thank me for.”
“Yes there is. That party was what they call a bad scene.”
“Chemicals can do that. Not always, but sometimes. Some boys brought in a friend of theirs last summer who had dropped acid in the city park. The kid went into a screaming fit because he thought the pigeons were coming after him to eat him. Sounds like a Reader’s Digest horror story, doesn’t it?”
“The girl who gave me the mescaline said she once plunged a man’s hand out of the drain. She didn’t know afterwards if it really happened or not.”
“Who was she?”
“I really don’t know,” he said truthfully. “Anyway, here.” He put a roll of bills on the counter next to the cigar box. The roll was secured with a rubber band.
Drake frowned at it without touching it.
“Actually it’s for this place,” he said. He was sure Drake knew that, but he needed to plug Drake’s silence.
Drake unfastened the rubber band, holding the bills with his left, manipulating with that oddly scarred right. He put the rubber band aside and counted slowly.
“This is five thousand dollars,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Would you be offended if I asked you where-”
“I got it? No. I wouldn’t be offended. From the sale of my house to this city. They are going to put a road through there.”