Читать книгу Midnight Bowling - Quinn Dalton - Страница 10

THE FACT THAT Leo Florida left my seventeen-year-old father in Las Vegas the night he froze at the foul line at the Showboat was reported in Bowling News, Ohio Bowler, and the Sandusky Register. Only one article, the one slightly sympathetic to Leo with a nod to his high scores—“semi-pro material”—mentioned that Leo had at least been kind enough to leave “the young Joseph Wycheski” his car, in which they’d driven out there together. The question was where Leo went and why. My father had always believed that Leo had taken off, and stayed away for years, because he was so embarrassed by my father’s failure. And this was the reason my father had sworn off bowling. He never said this to me, but I knew, and knew just as well not to ask him about it.

It wasn’t that he hadn’t rolled well. He didn’t roll at all. There is probably still footage coiled up in a can somewhere, and you could play it over and over again: my father standing at the top of the lane at the Showboat, four-and-a-half steps back, ball cradled like an egg, perfect form. He advanced to the line, shuffling forward. And stopped. Shook his head. Went back to his point of origin. Advanced and stopped again. Did this a couple more times. Sat down at the line and bowed his head, clutching his ball between his knees until Leo came onto the floor and led him away.

My father, an only child born late to his parents, hardly left their house that spring after he returned from Vegas until his father, a nonbowling quarry worker—thirty-five years in the pits off Milan Road—demanded he get a job. So at the beginning of that summer after his famous failure, my father was onboard as a deckhand on the Neuman ferry line, which runs back and forth to Kelleys Island, and that was how he met my mother, who was on vacation with her family. He found her on the upper deck, face turned to the sun. She was small and beautiful, her brown hair tinged with blond. He was sun-sick at the time, his skin burned and peeling, but he knocked off the patches of dead skin the best he could and introduced himself to my mother, asked her to meet him that night. Just like that. Whenever my father told that story, I couldn’t imagine any boy my age having that much courage. But then, my father had gone from rolling lines on national television to tossing rope coils, so maybe he thought he had nothing to lose.

After the last ferry run of the day back to Marblehead, he took his father’s bass boat and made the four-mile return trip to Kelleys Island. My mother was waiting for him outside the Hoezvelt cottages. They took two of the bikes her family had rented for the week and rode by moonlight to the glacial grooves, which looked like frozen water, petrified crests and troughs of waves. They sat on a beach nearby, and he went swimming out to a buoy and back in the black water to impress her. When he sat dripping beside her and tried to kiss her, she’d slapped him on the ear. I know, because she told me later, that the reason she’d slapped him was because it was the first time she’d thought she might be in love and she was scared.

As for my father—maybe he’d used up his fear for a while. He told her he wanted to drive down to Centerville and take her out on a date that Saturday night, and she said her father was a preacher. He said in that case he’d come on Sunday, when her father was at work. And this made her laugh. My mother had grown up in a family of devout, nonconversational Methodists, and she wasn’t used to humor. She, too, had been born late to her parents, though she had two siblings, a twin brother and sister, twenty years older than she, who lived together all of their lives and never married, a family detail she chose to say very little about. She and my father agreed that if they ever became parents (on this first date, I imagine they were speaking about their own distinct futures, not yet seeing them as intertwined—or maybe this moment was their earliest inkling) they wouldn’t wait so long to have kids; they didn’t want to look like grandparents at their children’s high school graduations, as her own father had, who was seventy-two when she’d gotten her diploma the previous spring.

Whenever my mother told stories about her childhood, which wasn’t often, I imagined it in black and white, like the first part of The Wizard of Oz. Mostly she talked about being bored, about wanting to run away, about moneymaking schemes to fund a bus or train ticket to New York, Chicago, or at least Columbus. She had considered careers in dance, acting, and fashion design—and maybe when she and my father met, those dreams were still clinging to her, a gauzy hope that lit her cheeks and eyes and made him fall in love with her.

After that first date, my mother didn’t get caught sneaking back in her cottage, and my father sped across the glass-gray dawn water in his father’s bass boat and made it to work on time. They got married that Christmas in 1963, and I was born the following November.

My father never said he was unhappy with my mother. Once he said to me he wished she’d slapped him harder, brought him to his senses. But that was after she started working at the Emmanuel, a store-front church that had moved in after Zleigman’s Shoes closed, and she started bringing home slippery little pamphlets with pictures of a blue-eyed Jesus looking sadly down from the mount, or from a cross, with what I later recognized as just a hint of sex in his eyes—something I knew better than to mention. Another time, when my father replaced the roof of our house himself, he told me to keep in mind that the root of “mortgage” was old French for dead. Many, many times he told me that, when it came to marriage, I should wait. The reasons, whatever the specifics, always had to do with keeping the Wycheski Plan on track.

He didn’t have to worry. I couldn’t think about anything else. There were notes home from my teacher Mrs. Turner about my loss of focus, but she had it all wrong. My focus had simply shifted.

My mother felt it, too. Of course we talked about our days at dinner the way we’d always done, but she was no longer in the same orbit with my father and me. It never occurred to me to think about how this felt for her.

For my father, and so also for me, what mattered was bowling a perfect game. Leo teased us about it. “Perfection is a nice side-effect of winning,” he said whenever he heard us talking about it, how we’d come close, or where we’d fallen short. My father ignored him, and told me to do likewise. But by then things had eased between them. They seemed to me like the old men at the bar when they came back from fishing, telling different stories about the same catch—calling each other liars but laughing it off just the same.

Maybe my father’s quest mattered even more to us both when the first wedges of pain forced their way into his knees, then his shoulders, and then all his joints. The year I turned eleven, he was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. His doctor warned him that there may be only a few years, given his young age at the time of diagnosis, before a wheelchair claimed him. Over the years, he slept less and less. He woke me up many nights once I started high school, nudging my shoulder with the toe end of his sliding shoe, his bag in his other hand. “C’mon,” he’d whisper, and I’d pull on sweatpants and follow his slow progress downstairs and out to the car. Sometimes Leo was just closing up, but he’d let us in anyway, and there we’d be on Lane 3, with the whole town asleep. Most nights, Leo’s nephew, Donny, would be there, too, and I wondered if he’d even gone home for dinner. Of course, I never asked. I was there because my father wanted me there, and that was enough for me. Sometimes, with everything dark and just the lights along the lanes glowing against the spaceship-dotted carpeting, I felt as if we were sailing, the whole place a ship skimming over the lake.

During those late-night practices, my father taught me the roll was in the release. The perfect strike lived in the grip, in the swing of my arm, in the lift off my fingers, in the letting go. He talked about how good I was, and how I could do anything I wanted with an arm like mine. By that time I was almost as tall as he was, and though I had my mother’s coloring (my brown hair tinged blond in the summers, just like hers), I was broad shouldered and skinny like him. When I looked at my arms and wrists and hands, I could see a smaller version of my father’s same lines, and sometimes I wondered if the pain he was enduring was lurking in my own joints.

And for all he did to hide it, he suffered more and more as the years passed. It didn’t matter how many tournaments I won, how many trophies he placed in our window, which I would quietly take down and hide in my room so as not to seem to be boasting to the neighbors. It didn’t matter that I lettered as a freshman at Sandusky High. That was the year he started taking so many prescriptions that he needed a special box to keep them straight—different ones to help him sleep, to control nausea, to give him a steadier hand at Engineered Fittings (“A job is a job, isn’t it?” he’d say when I asked him how was work). His body was freezing up as surely as it had at the Showboat in Vegas, and no one could stop it.

Still, I had this feeling that if I got good enough, if I could roll a perfect game, maybe I could stop it. Correct action could perhaps prevail after all. I started looking for any advantage. So I asked him if I could get one of those just-out urethane AMFs that was designed for the new regulation lane conditioners, unlike the old models that were made to go on oil. He always said soon, soon—when he had time to research it, when he could talk to my mother, when we had the money.

And then, seven years to the day after I first walked into the Galaxy Lanes, on the afternoon of my sixteenth birthday in 1980, my father and I stood inside the doorway, unzipping our jackets to let some heat in. Chelsea, who already had her driver’s license and a new car to go with it, was going to take me out later for dinner and a movie, and possibly some beer pinched from her father’s garage cooler. But the most important thing was cradled in my arms like a baby: my own AMF Angle, still in its box, glittering gold-green through the cut-out window.

Donny was working the call boxes; he waved to me from the counter. I waved back. I could smell a tickle of chalk in the air, and I breathed it in, the way you do when you’re home. Because I was, standing there with my father, checking out who was rolling that Saturday morning as the fall chill seeped from our clothing. I loved the place. I loved how it all fit together, each area with its purpose: the lines of shoes behind the counter, the rows of balls like huge Christmas ornaments, the dark-paneled lounge, where the low red velvet couches looked slouchily dangerous, even though they were faded by then from sunlight that came through the glass emergency exit Leo had installed to meet fire codes. The pro shop and arcade. And then the lanes: twenty-four of them, each crowned with rounded, chrome-trimmed ball returns like little spaceships, the red triangular hubs in the middle with the shiny hand driers and the call box if you needed a manager to set splits for practice or fix a sticking sweep. Fanned around the returns were the booths and chairs for the different teams, and behind them, the consoles where you kept score, with their fold-out drink holders and ashtrays I had to clean out each night if I closed.

My father looked at me and smiled, tapped the box in my arms. He was feeling good that day. This was the ball I’d go pro with, he had already explained. I hugged it to my chest and smiled back.

“Now, we know the local color and you’ve got the city tourney in the bag, right?” My father paused, and I finally looked up from my gleaming new ball. He was waiting, eyebrows raised, a crackle of electricity in his gaze. “Right?” he said again. I nodded.

“Then there’s district. We could even skip city if we want to. And then you’ll qualify for state.” He scanned the lanes, rubbing his chin. Leo was behind the counter as usual that day, handing out a pair of rentals, phone pinched to his ear—this was before Donny put in the second line. My father chewed his bottom lip and then nodded—he’d decided on something. “Now Leo’s going to want you to do the scratch division this year, and we know why, because you’ll make him look good. But you might not have time for that. Then again, it’s pinfall only.”

“And the JTBA, that’s scratch, too,” I said.

But my father wasn’t that excited about the Junior Bowlers Tournament Association. A kid my age from Mount Vernon had just started it that fall, and there’d only been a couple of events, and there was no route to go national. But I liked that there wasn’t a girls’ division, though that was only because the participant numbers were still so small.

I shifted from one foot to the other. I squinted down at my ball, and the glitter seemed to float just above its blue-green surface. I wanted to roll it right then, though I knew that even if Leo could drill it that day, I’d have to wait a couple of days for the grips to set.

My father, meanwhile, had moved on to how we should convince the PBA to agree to full membership instead of just the junior even though I was only sixteen, or maybe we should just get through the current season, and after that my birthday wouldn’t be that far off, and we’d have a better case if I was closer to seventeen. Which was the age he’d been when he went to Vegas. He had that look on his face—wide-eyed now, jaw set—that I imagined he’d had when he stood at the top of the lane at the Showboat, just before something in him gave.

And that was what made me ask if he was sure.

“Sure about what?” he asked, that flash again in his eyes.

“Just because I’m so young,” I said, meaning because you were so young.

“We’re doing this right,” my father said then. “Textbook.”

I nodded. I was on board, as long as I could roll that ball. My mother would be none too happy about how much it had cost, but I knew that what mattered more was that my father and I had our plan, and that we were prepared.

My father headed for the lockers, and I followed. Only the slightest hitch in his stride suggested he might be feeling less well than he acted. We passed Leo at the counter. He still had the phone pinched to his ear, but he nodded to us as we passed and jerked his head toward the pro shop to say he’d be right there.

“The Tour,” Leo had always said when people asked him what it was like being a pro, “is a great place to starve.” He was quoting someone on this, I’m sure. But in his case, timing had worked in his favor, and when he’d come back to town after his ten-year absence, Bern Schnipke, his old boss and the former owner of the Galaxy, had been ready to retire. And then it turned out when Bern died, he’d left everything to Leo, even his house and the furniture inside it. Another item in the timeline, if Leo were to tell it, was when Eddie Elias from over in Akron started the PBA to increase the purses and standardize the sport, which might’ve seemed to be a good idea, but which Leo said took the soul out of bowling. He said things were better when Walter “the Cigar” Ward had made his name in the Cleveland All-Stars, always rolling with an unlit stogie in his mouth and racking up more 700 series than anyone else in history. Or Tony Sparando, who was nearly blind, out of New York, or Joe “Bick” Wilman out of Chicago—you could know Leo ten years and he’d come up with some name you’d never heard of who’d broken all the records back in the day—and not only that, he’d fixed them drinks and fixed them up on dates with barmaids when they’d come through town. And there were his days setting up match plays down at the State, where the bookies took bets from traveling salesmen, small-time players, call girls, and fixers. He made them feel at home, since they couldn’t get into the country clubs, where their bosses, sponsors, and johns worked other deals.

But the present, I always got the feeling, was a bit faded for Leo. He had bills to pay, leagues to coach. That’s the way I saw him then—worn out, irritated, but a fixture. He was my friend Donny’s uncle, and I still didn’t know then why he’d come back to town in the first place after leaving my father in Vegas and then disappearing. My father had never discussed it and Leo hadn’t either until the day I came in with that ball.

My father and I stopped by our locker to get our bags and shoes. Beyond the pro shop, the arcade sounded like a giant ringing jar of change.

“Damn racket,” he said, as if the place hadn’t been loud before. He reached for my bag, but I grabbed it before he could try to lift it. I had the AMF under my other arm. “Look at those skinny necks,” he said, jerking a thumb at the arcade, where, in front of each machine, a boy flailed and swerved with the screen action as if plugged into a socket.

Donny had talked Leo into putting in Pong, Galaga, Space Invaders, and Asteroids, and the newest, Pac-Man—and now the place was packed every day after school. Before the arcade, it was dead on the weekdays except for the retiree leagues and team practice.

“They ought to try a game with real skill,” my father said, winking at me. We stopped at the Lustre King ball polisher, and he dug in his pocket for two dimes, handed one to me. You could choose Gloss, High Gloss, or Super High Gloss. My father put his dime in the slot and chose Super High Gloss, as always. I chose High Gloss. It was a personality test, I think. My father wanted things perfect, and I did, too, but some part of me could live with good enough. If he thought his pain was a punishment for not living up to his own standards, he never said so.

Leo was grinning when my father and I came back to the counter. He reached across and clapped my father on the shoulder, and my father did a good job of not wincing. He hadn’t told Leo anything; I knew that.

“Hey, hey Joe-Joe!” Leo said. He loved his bowling stars, even his former ones. They were good for the game and good for business. Then, to me, “You ready to drill that ball?”

I looked at my father and he smiled back at me. He was as excited as I was. “Yeah, let’s go in there,” he said. “I’m thinking top weight positive, and maybe she’s ready for the fingertip grip, what do you think?”

Leo put up his bowling hand like a traffic cop, the fingers twice as thick as his left-hand set. “Whoa there, Joe,” he said. “Only room for two in the drill room. I’ll give her some options.”

My father pursed his lips, looked away. “See you over there, then,” was all he said to me. I could’ve maybe protested, but I didn’t want my father to feel I was defending him, to give the impression he needed defending. I watched my father walk away—he’d adopted a slow stroll intended to look casual rather than careful. If Leo noticed, he hadn’t mentioned it. He stepped through the swinging door, and I followed him into the pro shop, a tiny square room with new balls on curved, Astroturf-lined shelves. Behind that room was a closet with a counter on one side and a modified mill press on the other. I carried my sliding shoe so I wouldn’t scuff it on the linoleum.

Leo opened the box and held up the ball. “So these things are going to be the next big wave,” he said, as if he doubted it. But he knew better. He may not have liked it, but he knew. “So Wyecheski Junior is sweet sixteen. How’s the old bleeder anyway? You still like it?”

He meant my White Dot. The covers were so soft they’d soak up conditioner from the lanes and you had to keep wiping it off. Overall, I liked it because it was easier to hook than a Black Beauty. “I don’t know,” I said. I felt loyal to it in a way. I had an uneasy feeling that I might be betraying it. Leo looked at me, bushy eyebrows raised. He was starting to go gray by then, specks in the hair around his temples. I straightened up, and it seemed to me that he wasn’t as tall as I’d always thought. “My mom’ll be mad,” I said. “It cost a lot.”

“Your dad’s the one bringing home the paycheck,” he said, shrugging.

“Leo,” I said. “You know my mom.” She didn’t come to the lanes except for tourneys, but even when I won, she congratulated me as if she were really trying to comfort me instead. She called Leo “the Blob.”

“A lovely woman,” Leo said, smiling. He set my new AMF in the machine. He leaned against the cinder-block wall, one foot crossed over the other, one hand resting on the ball. He patted it like the top of a child’s head. “I’ll bevel it so you come out clean,” he said. “And listen, if I could have all the time back in my life I spent worrying about what someone else thought, I’d be ten years younger.”

I considered saying that was fine for him; he wasn’t living with my mother. He wasn’t watching her go through the bills, her eyebrows hitched up with worry. My father was working reduced hours by then, a deal the union had worked out. But it was temporary, we all knew, a step that would lead us to even more uncertain territory. Leo didn’t have to watch my parents tiptoe around that fact, my mother folding the paper to the classifieds, hiding the circled ads under the phone book. In fact, Leo had never married, which didn’t surprise me, and not just because I couldn’t imagine it with him being fifty by then, his belly pooched out under his favorite Beers of the World shirt with all the labels in different languages. It was just that I couldn’t imagine him ever loving anyone that much. And I had this feeling, even after seeing him almost every day all those years, that he could disappear again the way he had after my father had frozen up at the Showboat. I’d come by some morning to practice and the doors would be locked and no one would know what had happened. Maybe Donny would take over.

“Maybe I’ll wait,” I said. “It’s like you said, a good bowler can roll with a rock, right?” I didn’t want to wait, of course. But I wanted him to tell me not to.

“It’s all the same to me, Wycheski.” He bent to lift my White Dot out of my bag and turned it around. He put his fingertips on the holes, but he couldn’t even get the first digit in. “You can do fine with this,” he said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I said.

Leo spun the ball on his finger and caught it in his palm like a Globetrotter, all while looking straight at me. “You think anyone’s pining over what happened to your father out there in Vegas?”

Obviously, the answer was no. I shook my head. I was shocked he’d brought it up. Since I’d never heard Leo talk about Vegas in connection to my father, I could believe it wasn’t quite true, like those stories your parents tell you when you’re little—about how babies are born or why a fair number of men in our town were missing limbs or seemed a little nervous—because they figure you’re not ready to know the truth.

“No, no one’s sorry about it anymore, probably not even him,” Leo was saying as he stuffed my White Dot back into my bag. “He’s got this idea that you’ll go pro someday, right?”

“You think I can’t?” I said.

Leo nodded. “That’s right. I think you can’t.”

I stared at him. “Thanks, coach.”

“Look here, Wycheski. When I was a kid working in the basement down at the State, no one wanted to be the last one out of those lanes. You know why?”

“Why,” I mumbled, not really asking. I felt dizzy with his dismissal; I reached carefully behind me for the counter so I wouldn’t knock too hard against it if my knees gave.

“The place was haunted. That’s why.” Leo gave me a look. “You believe in ghosts?”

“Sure,” I said. If an adult asked whether you believed in something, you believed. It was good policy.

“No you don’t,” he said. I shrugged.

“When I started down there as a pin boy, it was like as if you fell into a movie. You’d have all kinds of stars come through there after a show upstairs—Shirley Temple, Marilyn Monroe, even. And the bowlers,” he shook his head and looked at the floor as if words had escaped him. “The Budweiser team came there once, back when they had Weber, Carter, Bluth, all of them. Bluth shot 834 once, unheard of in those days. But that’s not my point. My point is that a kid I worked with down there had a seizure one night and choked on his tongue, and after that you could hear a ball rolling down the lane after everybody cleared out. You were the last one out, you got to hear him rolling a few lines after work.”

Leo squinted at me as if he wasn’t sure I deserved to hear the rest.

“Okay,” I prompted.

“Okay, here’s the thing. I was a cheat. Not for myself, but I’d bunch the pins for guys I liked so they’d get more strikes, and they tipped me in. I didn’t believe in all that. So I never heard the ghost ball.”

He stopped and looked at me again, as if trying to decide whether I’d gotten his almighty point. “Look out there,” he said. I looked over my shoulder; through the door I could see the usual run for a Saturday: parents with their kids doing grandma rolls, retired leaguers getting their practice rolls in, guys from school cranking the ball as hard as they could down the lane, their girlfriends rolling limp-wristed, the best way to get tendon strain. And my father, already at Lane 3, leaning slowly forward on the bench and putting on his shoes. I looked back at Leo, biting my lip to steady myself—all those little tricks my father had taught me: a quick bite on the inside of the cheek can distract you from your fear and help you get back your focus; blow on your wrists if you start to feel dizzy, deep breaths. All those tricks, and none of them had worked for him after all.

“If you believe you’re like them, you’re like them, just having fun,” Leo continued. “You can’t just be good. You have to want to win.”

“I win a lot!” I said. My voice quivered, which infuriated me. I thought about what my father had said, about how you could be talented, but without a plan you’d get nowhere. But we had a plan, and it was a good plan. The whole situation had gotten confused. “I’ve been Junior Bowler of the Year for three years!”

Leo waved at the air. “Your father thinks you’re God’s gift. So what are you going to do? You want to go pro, fine. Your dad may have bad nerves, but he can help. But if you really want to win, you come see me again. I’ll get you ready. Just no talking about it. I don’t want everyone bugging me.”

I swallowed. I knew he was saying my father wasn’t good enough to make me a pro. I knew he would think that even if he’d been aware that my father was sick. I hated him for saying it. But I hated even more that I believed him. “Drill the ball, Leo,” I said, bearing down on my voice so it wouldn’t shake.

“Here,” he said, handing me the finger-sizer. “You’ve got some skinny digits, lady, but let’s see if you’ve changed any.” He winked at me, and then he was back to the behind-the-counter Leo, the good-time guy. But there was still that layer beneath, like the weight in a ball. Or like the deeper you go in water, the colder it gets. I was pretty sure that if I’d brought up the ghosts again, he’d ask me what the hell I was talking about.

Turned out, my fingers had gotten a half-size thicker since he’d drilled the White Dot for me. Leo said it was good we were sizing in the afternoon, when your hands swelled; that way he wouldn’t drill too tight and risk making the ball hang. You could dislocate a finger that way, he told me, filing each slug to soften the edge. “The professional treatment, that’s what you’re getting,” Leo said, blowing away the dust. It hung in the air for a moment, a glittery cloud. I couldn’t wait to roll that ball, and at the same time, my throat ached. It was maybe the first time I remember being heartbroken. It was the first time I understood the word.

Leo ended up drilling my ball the way my father suggested. He just didn’t want to take orders from a guy he used to coach, was what I thought. I hated him for that, too. And yet what he’d said about winning seemed to be about more than just being good. Or even perfect.

He finished drilling the fingertip holes and said he’d slug it deeper if I didn’t like it. He put it in my hands, and I slid my first knuckles in, the holes still friction-warm. “You’re going to have to give it some time,” he said then, watching me try it. “It’s gonna be like as if you’re starting over.”

“I know, I know,” I said. I thought he meant about going pro. I was thinking about the next tournament, and how it would be to sail that ball. I was thinking about my father, and how I wanted to do everything we planned. Everything. I wanted to stand at the head of that lane at the Showboat, go all the way. Settle an old score. If Leo could help me do that, I’d take him up on it. But the credit would go to my father, every bit. “I’ll put my time in,” I said.

“No,” he said. “You’re gonna have to get used to it is what I mean. Try it out and I’ll adjust it, and then we’ll put in the grips.”

So, for a short time, I had two coaches—an official one and a secret one—Leo behind me and my father on the other side of the glass, who I could see at the top of our lane then, pulling his arm straight across his chest to stretch the muscles. Everybody had been waiting for me to beat him, my father included. I hadn’t yet, though plenty of times I’d rolled well enough to do it. “The key is,” my father would say after each game, “You have to try for the perfect strike whether you’re competing or not.”

But I knew Leo saw it differently. He’d say you only have to win when you’re in the game.

In fact, the first time I met him for a practice, which I scheduled right after school when my father would still be at work, Leo put it like this: “The world cares about the what, not the how. The sooner you understand what I mean here, the better off you’ll be.” Turns out he knew that better than anyone.