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C
HAPTER
S
IX

S
OMETIMES ALBERT
Robeshaw wrote little profiles for the Stone City newspaper. He would drive around waiting for someone to catch his eye: an ice skater, a hobo, a bat ­biologist —someone doing something different that could be told in four hundred words.

Late one afternoon he happened on Sandra Zulma practicing sword moves with a yardstick by the war memorial. She paused in her routine as Albert introduced himself.

“I'll tell you my story,” she said, “but first you have to buy me a drink.”

Albert agreed, thinking this would make a good beginning. They crossed the street and walked down to a tavern called Bruiser's, Sandra tapping the yardstick on the sidewalk like a blind woman.

Albert bought beers, took them to the booth, and opened his notebook to an empty page. Sandra talked as Albert took notes. After a while he stopped taking notes.

According to Sandra, she had come to the Midwest in a tunnel that ran beneath the ocean. She didn't know how long this took. Months, probably, or a year. The tunnel was smooth and well lighted at first but eventually became dark and cold and narrow. She starved and stumbled; the rocks cut her hands and feet. Finally she collapsed, falling into a deep sleep.

When she woke her hair had grown long and matted, her clothes turned to rags. She saw a light that had not been there before. Either she'd walked without knowing or someone had moved her. She crawled to the end of the tunnel, coming out on a ledge above a river.

A troop of Boy Scouts waded across and handed up a canteen of water and she drank it all down and stood howling above the Scouts while flocks of birds flew from the ravine.

“I wonder if you shouldn't talk to someone about your stories,” said Albert.

“I'm talking to you.”

“Someone more like a doctor.”

Sandra set the yardstick on edge, and there it stood. “Doctors don't know anything. What is your blood pressure? Do you have thoughts of hurting yourself or others? That's what they know. Don't be afraid. You will never find a truer friend than me. We can sleep together in the Continental Hotel.”

Albert drew an exclamation point on his reporter's notebook. “I'm not sure this is working out,” he said.

At that moment the owner of the bar came up from the basement with a bottle of tequila. When he saw Sandra he hurried across the barroom.

“What did I say about that stick?” he said.

“Remind me,” said Sandra.

“You're not to come in here with that.”

Sandra smiled. “Well, too bad, because I already have, and this is a public place.”

The True Value yardstick of wheat-colored wood and black fractions lay across the table with Sandra's hand hovering.

“If you can take it from me,” she said, “I will scrub tables in this bar for one year without pay.”

“I wouldn't even
want
that.”

The bar owner and Albert reached for the yardstick, which jumped to Sandra's hand. She slashed the stick through the air, hitting the man in the throat. He fell back, knocked over a chair, dropped the bottle he was carrying, and held his neck with his hands.

Albert and Sandra stepped from the booth, holding opposite ends of the yardstick and circling each other as in some ritual. A smile came over Sandra's face, and a reddish light shone around her white hair. She yanked on the yardstick, Albert lurched forward, and she struck his face with the heel of her hand, at which point he let go. She backed to the door of Bruiser's as Albert and the bar patrons gathered warily around her.

“First one to move is the last one to get up,” she said.

They considered the sequence implied by the threat. With one hand behind her back, Sandra found the doorknob and slipped out of the bar. They saw her walking past the window.

“Is she a friend of yours?” said the barman.

“I just met her,” said Albert.

“That crazy fuck does not come in here again.”

Don Gary's tombstone dealership closed for the day, and Lyris sat on the steps, waiting for Albert and looking at the moon above the city. Don Gary locked the door and walked past her in his brown saddle shoes.

“Goodnight, Miss Darling,” he said.

“Goodnight, Don.”

Lyris liked it at night when she was alone and Albert on his way. She felt free and original with him, their old lives like train cars uncoupled and falling away.

When he drove up she got in the car and kissed him. He had a bruise under his eye and driving home told her of his attempt to interview Sandra Zulma.

Back at the apartment Lyris led Albert by the hand to the bathroom, where they stood looking at the welt on his cheekbone in the medicine cabinet mirror.

Albert said it was nothing but Lyris insisted on treating it. She washed and dried her hands and took a small green bottle from the medicine chest.

Albert sat on the toilet lid looking up at the light fixture as she painted antiseptic beneath his eye with a stiff black brush built into the cap of the bottle.

“Now it looks really terrible,” she said.

Then, for no reason other than play, she painted a stripe under the other eye.

“Now you're a football player.”

“She never hit me there.”

“Oh, I like this look.”

They went into the bedroom and closed the door. The room was dark except for the light from the windows.

He undressed her, rolled her black tights down. Lyris breathed slowly, fingers trembling at her sides. Being with Albert was more than she'd ever expected. They liked making love in the early hours of the night, when time lay like emptiness before them. They liked being close to coming. The blue light from the street made a halo around the bed.

Two hours went by. The softest kiss of the night and they rested, flat on their backs beneath a sheet. Lyris traced with her fingers the marks she had painted on his face. Albert slept. She crossed his body with her leg and lay her head on his shoulder. This was the best, the most bearable loneliness.

Lyris's bad dream was of places—rooms in the orphanage, in foster homes, in Grouse County. Other rooms she did not know yet, maybe would never know.

She saw them from above. Apparently she was on some kind of catwalk. The rooms went by one by one as in a slideshow, dimly lit and empty of people, with tables and chairs, beds and cupboards. Maybe the future had come, when everything alive would be swept away.

All Lyris had to do was decide which room should be hers and claim it. But it was a long way down. The fall could hurt her. It seemed more logical that she should just appear in the room but that didn't seem to be happening. Meanwhile her chance to be anywhere at all was slipping away, leaving her stranded in this cold nowhere, and she called for help.

“What is it?” said Albert. In confusion he'd gone to the windows.

She slid on her back across the mattress and took him by the arm, pulling him to the bed.

“Help me wake up,” she said.

Ned Kuhlers was the most influential lawyer in Grouse County. Once Dan's adversary, he was now his biggest client. He had an office above the park with a tropical fish tank running the length of the reception area.

Ned's secretary pushed a button on the intercom. “Dan Norman's here.”

“Get that bastard in here.”

Dan entered Ned's office and sank into a green leather chair with brass grommets running along the seams.

“What's different?” said Ned.

“The clock is slow, the fern is dying, and there's a stain on the paneling that appears to be oil of some kind,” said Dan. “Likely you were eating at your desk and shook up a bottle of salad dressing and the top wasn't on right.”

Ned laughed. He'd boxed flyweight in the merchant marines and would sometimes move his hands fast to make people flinch.

“Correct on some counts,” he said. “Anyway. You will like this. My client had a car accident. He pulled out on 33 and plowed into some other guy. Now, we're not contesting fault. We had the stop. So be it. But it turns out the other driver is a bowler. Do you bowl?”

“Not often.”

“I know. The pins go up, they come down, so what. But this guy loves bowling so much that it gives him pain and suffering not to.”

“Since the accident.”

“They say he'll never bowl again.”

“Too bad.”

“Yes, but for the simple fact that he is bowling,” said Ned. “Just doing it where he won't be seen. Moved from the Rose Bowl in Morrisville to Rust River Lanes.”

“In Romyla.”

“Tuesdays at nine o'clock.”

“Probably trying to get his form back.”

“You're either bowling or you're not bowling.”

“You want pictures,” said Dan.

“I want video.”

“What's he look like?”

Ned tossed a manila envelope across the desk and Dan caught it.

Dan figured he could use a partner, as one lone-wolf bowler might notice another. He asked his assistant Donna, who was always up for anything undercover. She'd been Woman A in Lord Norman's exposure of sexist hiring patterns at Airstream Creamery in Morrisville.

Dan told her to dress naturally, but when he arrived at her house she came out wearing an orange mohair half-sleeved sweater, a strapless white dress with black polka dots and flared skirt, shimmery green anklets and heels. She got in the car, gathered the papery folds of the dress, and shut the door.

“Let's do some bowling,” she said.

“Nice outfit, but the idea is not to draw attention,” said Dan.

“Say you were doing something secret,” she said. “Wouldn't the person trying not to draw attention be exactly the one you'd worry about?”

“That almost makes sense,” said Dan.

Romyla served as a bedroom town for both Morrisville and Stone City, though the Romylans did not like the term, as it made them seem less than the whole show. Rust River Lanes had eight alleys on Main Street in a building that had once been a bank. A big pin stood on the roof of the building, but it was not lighted, so at night it looked like an apparition.

Dan and Donna got shoes from the counter and glasses of beer and took a lane two up from the man who had been broadsided on Route 33. A sign on the wall set out the rules.

NO SMOKING

NO LOFTING

NO CURSING

NO FIREWORKS

NO GESTURES

Dan placed a small and cunning video recorder on the scorer's table. The works were concealed in a Fanta pop can with a button on top that turned the camera on and off. Lynn Lord had made it himself. They called it the Fanta cam and it took HD video and stills.

Everyone's hands are low at some point in their bowling delivery, but Donna kept her hands low throughout. She wove her way to the line as if herding small animals in a party dress.

The ball rolled slowly, and the pins fell wearily in on themselves, leaving splits. Dan's release point was inconsistent, and he'd usually end up with a blister on his thumb. Together they seemed bad enough to be innocent bowlers.

The target of their investigation bowled like a man on the tour. He whipped his arm around and finished with gloved hand held high and pins flying like pheasants from grass.

When it got to be ten-thirty and they had bowled long enough to seem credible, Dan drove Donna home and parked beside the tall and narrow house in Mixerton where she rented the top floor.

“We make a good team, teammate,” she said.

“Ned will be happy.”

“Who cares.”

“He's the client.”

“You knew when you asked me. I knew. I didn't say anything.”

“Knew what?”

“You wanted my company. People need each other's company. That's all right.” She smoothed her dress. “I made myself nice. Life goes on a little while and then it's over.”

“Donna, I didn't mean to give you the idea that, um, well, that this was—”

“And I suppose all my ideas come from you.”

“I didn't say that.”

“You don't know what you're saying.”

Dan leaned down to give her a friendly kiss or maybe she was right and he didn't know what he intended. Anyway it's not what happened.

They made out in the car, her dress rustling like fire. He pressed her hair back and kissed her lips. He knew he'd feel terrible when the kiss was over, but it seemed natural as could be in the moment.

A car drove down the quiet road, the light passing over them. Dan got out of the car and went around to open her door. Millers swarmed around a streetlamp.

“Do you want to come up?” said Donna.

“Truth is I do, Donna. But what I ought to do is go home.”

“Okay, Dan. But you know what?”

“What?”

“Some things are not serious.”

Louise kept thinking of Lyris and Albert's apartment. At an estate auction in Chesley she outbid competitors for a fine oak table and a copper pan rack and had them delivered to the third floor of the Kleeborg Building.

That night after closing she took her toolbox and went upstairs. The table and rack waited in the hallway. Albert answered the door in his stocking feet.

“Hi,” he said. “I was just watching a special about the yeti.”

“How's he doing?”

“He might be a bear.”

“That's no fun.”

“Is that Louise?” called Lyris from inside.

“Yeah,” said Albert.

“Tell her she's got to stop.”

“You can't keep giving us stuff,” said Albert.

“Don't you like them?”

“The table I love. The other thing I don't know what it is.”

“I'll show you.”

The kitchen had an island and Louise and Lyris climbed onto it to install the pan rack, which would hang suspended from chains. Lyris held the hardware while Louise drilled holes in the ceiling as thin columns of powdered plaster drifted down.