In For a Penny (6 page)

Back when he was single, Ed had bowled in a Tuesday night league. He had enjoyed the bowling alley: the sound of pins falling, the smell of spilled beer from longneck Budweiser bottles, the predictable wit that followed a picked-up spare or a lucky strike. He still had his bowling shirt with their sponsor’s name embroidered on it: Nick and Fergy’s Appliances. But Lisa wasn’t a fan of bowling. That was the long and the short of it. She just didn’t appreciate the art form. She had tried to for a little while, but it didn’t wash, and, as with so many things, his bowling had gone by the boards as their marriage defined itself over time. He still wore the shirt now and then, although it made him feel like a fraud to invoke the names of Nick and Fergy now that he had become an outsider at the lanes.

The dog’s howling stopped abruptly, as if someone had shut the creature up. A long shaft of ruby red light shot straight up into the sky from the darkness of the woods, then blinked out, followed by a half dozen such shafts, perhaps beacons, projected skyward now from the red perimeter lights. He wondered if this was some kind of Air Force or Army maneuver—nighttime war games using infrared lights.

Suddenly cool, he walked across the room to find a sweater in his open closet. Inside hung his retired bowling shirt, a delicate robin’s egg blue that looked silver in the white light cast from the thing on the hillside. It was made of a high-quality rayon that could pass for silk, with royal blue embroidery—sixty dollars’ worth of peerless, hometown American shirt. It occurred to him that it wouldn’t be out of place framed, hanging on a wall, but then the very idea that it had become a mere keepsake depressed him, and he shut the closet door quietly and returned to the window, pulling on the sweater.

The bowling ball trouble had reared its ugly head several months ago, right after the move, when he had gone down to the lanes on San Pablo Avenue with his friend Jerry to bowl a couple of frames. He found that he hadn’t lost his touch, even after two years of abstinence, which had probably made him feel slightly self-satisfied and off-guard, affecting his judgment when, afterward, they had gone into the pro shop. Ed had never owned a ball that was worth a damn, even in his playing days, and he coveted Jerry’s ball, which was a rainbow swirl of colors that would have been right at home in an art museum. It had put Jerry back three hundred dollars, which was a hell of a lot of money, but to Ed it was like the house: these days nothing was affordable, so you bought it anyway.

In the pro shop, Ed had impulsively bought a ball of his own—a jet-black, oversized eight ball, which reminded him nostalgically of the fortune-telling eight balls of his youth. The transparently glossy finish was like water in a well, the sort of thing you sat and stared into, like a tidepool or a fire in a fireplace, and the figure eight itself, pearl white and with its suggestion of the infinite, hovered immensely deep within the black sphere. It had cost him nearly four hundred and sixty irretrievable dollars. The experience had been a little like getting a tattoo—once they drilled it, it was yours—and he had walked out of the pro shop in a rising tide of buyer’s remorse that was in utter conflict with the virgin object that he carried in its fleece-lined bag. Afterward he and Jerry had spent a couple of hours in the Triple Rock Brewery, and Ed’s doubts had dissolved.

It dawned on him now that the red lights in the woods must be lasers. He had read an article about them recently, about what they could do—drill teeth, slice neat little doughnut rings into your eyeballs, blast things to smithereens. Lisa had one that she used as a pointer in her film classes. The idea was unsettling, almost otherworldly. He had been unable to grasp the fine points of the article, why one laser would eliminate an incoming ICBM and another was just a jolly red dot, like the bouncing ball in old sing-along cartoons. …

Sober, he would have known enough not to bring the bowling ball into the house when he got home from the brewery. They had a little detached garage built into the hillside, and it would have been easy enough for him to hide it out there and visit it from time to time, sneaking it out if he went down to the lanes with Jerry. In a year or two, when it was scuffed up, he could have brought it in and made up a perfectly reasonable lie about buying it at a garage sale. But he had blown all of that in his porter-fueled enthusiasm and in the interests of honesty. Don’t lie to your wife; that’s what the good angel had told him, although why God had let the good angel drink beer was more than he could say.

Lisa had been puzzled by the ball at first, full of disbelief. If she hadn’t seen the receipt, he might have convinced her that he’d picked it up for $29.99 at Kmart, but his planning had been faulty. Following her puzzlement had come a measure of angry unhappiness. It was no problem
now
to see that a hugely expensive bowling ball might have had this effect on her, but at the time Ed’s rationale for the purchase had sounded as brilliant as Newton to him. Lisa had shown him their skyrocketing Visa bill and accused him of domestic crimes. She was pregnant, for God’s sake. The baby would need a cradle, a high chair, an advanced degree from a good university. Of course he hadn’t been able to use the ball, ever, and yet it had remained a sore spot in their marriage, the straw that could break the camel’s back if it ever landed there again. Buying the eight ball had quite simply wrecked bowling forever, like the stolen diamond that the heiress could never wear in public. Calling up its ghost last night had been an error.

No more errors, he told himself as he heard Lisa roll over in bed. You don’t need to be right to be happy: that would be his thought for the day. You could reach for the brake as easily as the accelerator. She put out her arm now and patted the place where he should have been. He wondered if his absence would wake her up, and he heard the rising shriek of the whistle noise out in the woods again. She raised herself blearily onto her elbows and looked around the room, as if trying dreamily to make out the source of the noise. The dog resumed its howling.

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know,” he said, turning toward the bed. She sat up, pushing her hair out of her face.

“Some kind of thing up in the hills,” he told her. “Dwarves playing nine pins, maybe.” With my bowling ball, he thought, surprised to find the anger rekindle itself so easily. He would have to watch it.
Cover the brake
—that was what the good angel would whisper to him.

“What are those noises?”

“There’s something going on up there in the woods, maneuvers or something.”

“Maneuvers?”

“Yeah, lights, too. Take a look.”

She sat up and slipped on her bedroom slippers, joining him at the window. “That’s
weird,”
she said. “It looks like something from a UFO movie.”

The idea spooked him, and he realized that he had been thinking the same thing. Whatever was happening was unearthly.

“God,” Lisa muttered, “look at
that”.

Ed stared out the window in disbelief, his mouth open: a vast moving shadow slowly ascended from the forest floor. At first he thought it was an optical illusion, but the thing continued to rise from the trees, a black, circular patch of darkness that hung now in the air, hovering just above the tree line. White lights revolved within it. It seemed to Ed that he could see the stars shining straight through the sphere, a translucent black sun encircled by a white aura.

“It’s a flying fucking saucer,” Lisa whispered.

He couldn’t argue with her. It looked like the Death Star, blotting out the sky.

The rest of the neighborhood was waking up. There were voices from down the block; a door slammed. Lisa pulled on her clothes and turned toward the stairs. “Let’s get moving!” she said, her voice full of sudden anxiety.

Her frightened tone was infectious, and Ed realized that he was holding his breath. He felt vulnerable and exposed standing there in his boxer shorts, and as he stepped across the bedroom to grab his jeans from where he had tossed them last night, a siren started up somewhere down the block, shutting off within seconds, followed by the sound of someone talking through a loudspeaker or bullhorn. Ed caught the gist of it. “Shit!” he said out loud. “They’re evacuating us!”

He heard Mr. Bord, his neighbor, shouting across the street, and an answering shout from Bord’s wife. Lights were coming on all over the neighborhood, and he heard a car engine starting up. He went after a fresh pair of socks, then headed for the bathroom, the word “evacuation” going around in his head.
Brush your teeth
, he thought,
who knows when you’ll get another chance. … He
pulled out his little travel kit from under the sink and sorted through it: razor, toothbrush, mini deodorant. Where would everyone go? Some kind of shelter probably, a school or church somewhere. To hell with that; he and Lisa would find a hotel. He wasn’t spending the night on a cot in a school auditorium.

“Bring down my purse! The big one!” Lisa shouted up at him. He found it on the floor at the top of the stairs. What the hell else? He checked his wallet, which lay on the nightstand. Eighty bucks and two credit cards. That would do the trick. They could easily find food and shelter, even if they had to drive down south, maybe over to the coast toward Halfmoon Bay or Davenport. He pictured the freeways heading out of the Bay area, clogged with people fleeing the saucers, and it dawned on him that they might possibly never be back.

“You coming down?” Lisa had turned on all the lights in the house.

“Yeah!” he shouted. “I’m just grabbing a couple of things!” He hauled his tweed coat out of the closet. Extra socks and underwear wouldn’t be a bad idea, either. And his bowling shirt! There was no
way
he was leaving that behind.

“They’re
saying
something!” Lisa shouted up at him, and he went to the window over the street and opened the casement.

“Do not panic!”
a voice ordered, horribly magnified by whatever device the man was speaking through. It was coming from a fire truck, apparently, creeping up the street, its light revolving. Ed was distracted by the sight of Mr. Bord coming out through his front door carrying a cardboard box, a heavy box, from the way he was stooped over.

“… the neighborhood cleared in twenty minutes,” the truck was saying. Twenty minutes—they had some time yet! He walked to the opposite window again and looked into the hills. The inverted saucer still hovered there, a jet-black orb emitting a white corona, and he was reminded at once of his bowling ball, out in the garage along with the rest of his stuff, with the rest of his
life
, it seemed to him now.

He caught sight of the several books on the nightstand shelf—his bedside books, the marked-up copies he read and reread over the years, all of them keepers. He dumped the books and clothes onto his spread-out tweed coat along with his travel kit, then pulled the plug on his bedside lamp and laid that in among the rest, making a bundle of it. The lamp was an antique, with a mica shade shaped like a wizard’s cap and a solid copper post on a globular base that looked like an enormous pearl. Like the books, it was irreplaceable. He thought suddenly about his train set, his comics and record albums and God-knew-what-all out in the garage. His little bundle of stuff looked pitiful to him, and he saw that in some indefinable sense this small parcel was a living history: the life of Edward Kelly illustrated by a lamp, some books, an old tweed coat and a bowling shirt.

He headed downstairs, holding the bundle inconspicuously behind Lisa’s king-size purse. She met him in the living room, where she had already been rifling through the big drawer full of photos, loading them into a box. The parakeet cage sat by the front door, cleaned and replenished with food and water. Ed handed Lisa the purse and headed straight for the door.

“What’s that stuff?” she asked. “Your
lamp …?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Travel kit.” But he was already out the door, fumbling in his pocket for the car keys. He opened the back door of their Ford Escort, put his stuff on the seat, and then sprinted up the side of the house. The gate was nearly blocked by yesterday’s empty boxes, and he picked a few up, pitching them back down the path, then kicked the rest aside in order to swing the gate open. He strode to the garage door, pulled it open, and flipped on the light, but instead of going in after more of his things now, he turned and sprinted back down toward the car, picking up two of the empty boxes in mid-stride. Virtually all of his neighbors were carting crap out of their houses. The air was full of the yap and howl of dogs barking and people hollering to each other. He could still make out the shrieking and humming from the woods, a counterpoint to the noises of earthly terror up and down the block.

He dumped the books into the bottom of one of the empty boxes, then packed the lamp in carefully, shoving the clothing in around it to protect the shade.

Lisa came up behind him, carrying a box of her own. “What are you doing?” she asked skeptically.

“What everyone else is doing,” he said. “Loading the car. One box for me and one for you, share and share alike.” He smile genially, taking the box from her and putting it on the seat, next to his own, realizing that he hadn’t chosen his words very well. This was no time to start implying things.

She lingered for a moment, as if there was something she wanted to discuss, but instead she grabbed the other empty box from him and headed toward the house. After three steps she stopped again and turned around. “We’ve got a
lot
of stuff to take,” she said raising her eyebrows at him.