Deceit

FOUR

I’d joined a bowling league.

It was kind of by accident. The town’s bowling alley, Muhammed Alley-it was owned by a failed middleweight named BJ who thought the name was hysterical-doubled as the town’s best bar.

I don’t mean it had a nice decor, had an interesting snack menu, or was frequented by hot-looking women.

I mean it was badly lit, sparsely filled, and in need of fumigation. It smelled like used bowling shoes.

When I first came to Littleton, I was in fugitive mode. I wasn’t seeking company; I was consciously avoiding it.

For a while, I managed to do a fairly good job of that at Muhammed Alley.

BJ doubled as the bartender, and unlike the general image of small-town barkeeps, he was blessed with no perceptible curiosity. Other than asking me what I wanted and quoting the bill-three margaritas, no salt, came to $14.95-it took several visits before he uttered an excess word.

That word-or two words, actually-was nice play, spoken only in my general direction, the result of center fielder Steve Finley making a tumbling circus catch in center field.

I was perfectly content with the lack of social interaction. I drank in the loneliness like I drank in the tequila-in small, bitter sips.

After a while, company found me.

One of the two insurance men in town-Sam Weitz, a transplanted New Englander with an obese wife suffering from type 2 diabetes-started drinking more or less the same time as I did. Generally late evening, when most everyone else was headed home to their families.

Not us.

Unlike BJ, Sam was imbued with curiosity. Maybe you get used to asking lots of personal questions in the insurance business. He struck up a conversation and stubbornly kept it going, even when confronted with my mostly monosyllabic answers.

One thing led to another.

Being that we were drinking in a bowling alley, one night he actually suggested bowling.

I was on my third margarita, already floating in that pleasant state I call purple haze, in honor of Hendrix, one of my musical idols. After all-doesn’t enough alcohol let you kiss the sky?

I must’ve mumbled okay.

I bowled a ridiculous 120 that night-making generous use of both gutters. Surprisingly, I kind of enjoyed hurling a heavy ball down a wooden alley, sending pins scattering in all directions-at least a few of them. I saw a kind of life metaphor in those flattened pins, how they reset just like that, virtually daring you to knock them down again. There was a lesson there about pluck and resilience, which I thought I might make use of.

Eventually, we were joined by Seth Bishop, self-confessed town hell-raiser-at least back in high school, where he was voted least likely to succeed, a prophecy that turned out to be pretty much on the money, since he nowadays subsisted on welfare and occasional Sheetrock jobs.

The local Exxon owner-Marv Riskin-rounded out our foursome.

After a while, we joined a league-Tuesday nights at 8.

One night Sheriff Swenson made an appearance, noticed I was keeping score, and told the league president to check the card for accuracy.

When Seth asked me what that was about, I told him I’d run into a little ethics problem in my last newspaper job.

“Boned your secretary?” he asked, kind of hopefully.

“Something like that.”

Tonight we were playing a team comprised of Littleton’s lone chiropractor, one of its two dentists, a doctor, and an accountant. No Indian chief.

Near the end of his second Bud, the doctor started talking about the body from the car.

They’d brought him the accident victim so he could fill out the death certificate. There was no coroner in Littleton, which made him the de facto ME.

“He was charred pretty good,” the doctor said. “I don’t get to see a lot of burn victims. Not like that.”

“Thanks for sharing, doc,” Seth said.

“Some of his insides were intact,” the doctor continued, undeterred. “Not a pretty sight.”

“Can you change the subject, for fuck’s sake,” Seth said. “What about a nice 18-year-old girl who OD’d? Don’t you have any of those?”

The doctor didn’t seem to get the joke. When he began describing in great detail what a burned liver looked like-apparently like four-day-old pate-Seth leaned in and said:

“Let me ask you something, doc. Is it true what they say about doctors? I mean do you get, what’s the word… immune to naked pussy after a while? It doesn’t do anything to you anymore?”

Sam, who was preparing to bowl, stopped to wait for the doctor’s answer. It appeared as if he was busy conjuring up images of naked pudenda being lasciviously displayed for the doctor’s enjoyment. Back home he had a 280-pound wife gorging on cream-filled Yodels.

“That’s an ignorant question,” the doctor said.

Calling Seth ignorant wasn’t really going to offend him. “I’ll take that as a no,” he said.

“Have they ID’d him yet?” I asked the doctor. I was nursing a Coors Light, having figured out that tequila and getting the ball to travel down the center of the lane were mutually exclusive. The headline of my story was:

Unidentified Man Dies in Flaming Car Crash

The doctor said: “Yeah. They found his license.”

“It didn’t burn up?”

“He had some kind of metallic card in his wallet that acted like insulation. They were able to make out his name.”

“Who was he?”

“I don’t know. Dennis something. White, 36, from Iowa.”

“Iowa? That’s funny.”

The doctor squinted at me. “What’s funny about it? It’s a state, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, it’s a state. I was just ruminating on the great cosmic plan. A man from Iowa runs head-on into a salesman from Cleveland on a highway in California. It’s kind of funny, don’t you think?”

“Actually, no.”

Sam had rolled a seven, and now was edgily eyeing a difficult two-one split. He took a deep breath, sashayed into his delivery, and sent the ball straight down the middle, missing all three pins.

“There is something funny, though,” the doctor said.

“Other than that roll?” I’d dutifully recorded Sam’s score. It was crunch time; we were twenty pins behind with only five frames to go.

“He was castrated.”

“Huh? Who?”

“The deceased.”

“You mean in the accident?”

The doctor lifted his Bud, took a long sip.

“Nope,” he said. He slid out of the seat-not without some difficulty since he was a good thirty pounds overweight-and rummaged through the rack for his ball.

“What do you mean?” I had to shout a little to make myself heard over the din of the alley, but it was like trying to speak through a raging thunderstorm.

The doctor lifted a finger to me: wait.

He bowled a strike, then went into a victory dance that reminded me of the Freddy, a spastic-looking step from the sixties I’d caught on an old American Bandstand clip. After he settled back into his seat and meticulously penciled in an X, he said: “I mean, he was castrated.”

“When?”

“How do I know? Some time ago, I guess. It was done surgically.”

Seth must’ve overheard us.

“He had no balls?” Seth asked.

The doctor shook his head. “You want to say it louder. The people in the back of the alley didn’t hear you.”

“He had no balls?” Seth shouted. “That ought to do it.”

“You’ve got a problem, son,” the doctor said.

“You have no idea, pop.”

I tried to tally up what number beer Seth was on-I guessed seven. Not to mention the Panama Red he’d toked out in the parking lot.

“Why would someone have been castrated?” I asked the doctor.

“Good question.”

“Well, is there any medical reason?”

“Not really-testicular cancer, maybe-but both testicles would be highly unusual. Not like that.”

“Poor guy.”

“I’d say so. By the way, that’s confidential, okay? Don’t put it in the paper or anything.”

“I think everyone in the bowling alley might’ve already come into this information.”

The doctor blushed. “Me and my big mouth.”

Or Seth’s.

That night I had a dream. I was 9 years old and being chased down an empty road by a man trying to steal my entire marbles collection.

The clumsy symbolism wasn’t lost on me.