Rooster (18 page)

In a way, Rooster felt more sorry for Tim than he did for the others. Roseann and Percival seemed to know that their lives weren't right. Dorothy-Jane-Anne had known that. Tim was happy with his, though. He thought he had it all.

When he arrived home, he began preparing for Thursday. First, he asked Irving if he knew anything about bowling.

“Me?” said Irving from his spot at the kitchen table by the window. He'd been reading the sports pages of the newspaper.

“Just a shot,” said Rooster, kicking his shoes off by the back door. “Just wondering if you had any tips you could pass on. I don't know. Maybe you used to bowl a lot when you weren't playing baseball.”

Irving closed the paper. “I don't mean the bowling. I mean, you're asking me if I know anything? As in, you're asking me to give you a hand?”

“Hey, I'm sorry if I've never done it before, all right? I've never been in a position where I've actually had to do something important before, either.”

“So now this bowling project is important?”

Rooster took a seat by the table. “Yeah it is,” he said.

“When you started it, you told your mother not to worry because it wouldn't take up any of your time.”

Rooster raised his hands off the table, palms up. “I was wrong, all right? I was wrong about everything. About the Strikers. Elma. Me.”

“You?”

“I thought I had it all figured out. I thought I knew what was going on.”

“And now you don't or now you do?”

“Now I don't, but I think I do.”

Irving nodded. “Incredibly enough, that makes sense to me.”

Rooster stifled a small smile. “I'm not surprised.”

“I was hoping it would come to this, actually,” said Irving.

“You were?” Rooster frowned.

“It's a sign that you're growing up.”

“How?”

“Look at you. You're a seventeen-year-old boy asking for help to make a group of mentally handicapped people better bowlers. Does that sound like something you would have done six months ago?”

Rooster shook his head.

“You better believe it's not.”

“So do you know anything about bowling?”

Irving took a sip from the coffee cup next to the newspaper. “Nope,” he said. He put the cup down. “But I do have a little booklet that may be of some interest to you.”

“A booklet?”

Irving sat back in his chair and folded his hands on his belly. “The day I got called up to the Twins, I phoned my brother. He wasn't home. I said to his roommate, ‘Where the hell is he? I gotta talk to him.' His roommate said, ‘I think he's gone bowling.' I said, ‘What? Peter's never thrown a bowling ball in his cotton-pickin' life. What the hell's he doin' at a bowling alley?' ‘He's in love with a bowler,' his roommate said. So when I finally got hold of him, and I was finally able to tell him what was going on, he was sitting on his bed in his bedroom reading this little booklet called ‘Let's Go Bowling.' He was studying the stupid thing to impress this girl he was in love with.”

“Does this story have an end?” said Rooster, who frequently grew impatient with Irving's long way of saying things.

“It has a happy end for you. When Peter and this girl broke up, he gave me the booklet as a memento of the day I was called to the majors.”

“So you have it, is that what you're telling me?”

“In the closet. I'll go get it for you. I'm sure it has everything you'll ever need to know about bowling.”

“Why didn't he keep it?” said Rooster as Irving lifted himself off his chair.

“Peter died of an aneurysm a year later. Almost to the day. I was back in the minors by then. In one year I went from the greatest day of my life to the worst.”

Rooster remained in his chair as Irving went into his bedroom to get the booklet. He looked out the same window that his mother and Irving spent many hours staring through and wondered what else he was going to learn before the project was over.

14

T
he booklet proved to be most helpful.

“I wish I'd had this a month ago,” he said to Puffs and Jolene as they walked to the store after school Thursday. He'd brought the booklet with him so he could study it during social studies. “It tells you everything. It even shows you how to keep score.”

“Has scorekeeping been a problem?” said Jolene.

“Not unless you count the times when they're actually bowling,” said Rooster. “When they're on the bus or tying up their shoes, no, they don't even talk about it.”

“In other words, yes?” said Jolene.

“That's another way of putting it.” He went through it again after supper. In addition to the rules of score–keeping, he became familiar with such scoring terms as head pin, corner pin, foul, split, aces and chop-off. He learned bowling terminology like approach, backswing, count, dots, arrows, channel, frame. He read about the benefits of spot bowling, particularly for beginners, and reviewed several times the small chapter on How To Bowl Correctly: “First, the player should be relaxed. The correct grip, stance and follow-through should then be practiced.”

He even acquired tips that he could pass on, like telling the Strikers to make sure they kept their wrists straight so the ball wouldn't twist as it left their hand, and to align themselves with the darts on the lane for sighting their target spots.

“What exactly is a target spot?” said Puffs later that night as Rooster shared what he had learned.

“I'm assuming it's a pin,” said Rooster, the booklet open in his hand. “But check this out. Pretend I'm talking to them. ‘Hey, guys. Remember now, approach the line with confidence. It's the only way you'll acquire poise and body balance.'”

“It says that in there?”

“It says exactly that in here. Word for word.”

“That's some very impressive advice you're handing out.”

“You think so?”

“For sure. I don't know if they'll be able to understand it, but if Mrs. Helmsley is standing near you, she'll fall off her feet.”

“That would be interesting to see.”

“What if they ask you for a demonstration?”

“I've thought about that.”

“What if they say, like, ‘Can you show us that bit about the body balance, please?' What are you gonna do?”

“I've already told them I blew my knee out in the World Bowling Championships in Bern, Switzerland, two years ago.”

“You did?”

“No. But if they ask me for a demo, I might have to.”

“How do you know Bern is in Switzerland?”

“I don't, and with my luck, one of them will be from there. But that's okay. I'm on their side now. We're all friends.”

“Weren't you before?”

“I don't think so,” said Rooster, after taking a moment to think about it. “It may have seemed like it, but I don't think we were.”

That night, he went to the bowling alley and waited by himself for the Strikers to arrive. They came in more quietly than usual.

Mrs. Yuler was with them. “I heard Elma wasn't going to be here, and I just thought I should stay for a few minutes at least. They were upset today. They know this is their first trip down here since last week.”

In honor of Dorothy-Jane-Anne, Rooster wrote her name at the top of the score sheet. It was an idea he had thought of earlier. He then marked each of the tiny squares with the symbol used for strikes.

“So she won the game?” said Roseann, who watched intently as he made the markings.

“Do you think that's a good idea?”

“Uh-huh. Yes. I do,” said Roseann. “I think it's a good idea.”

“You know what else I thought of?”

“No. What else?”

“You get to bowl first because you were her roommate, and I know how much your friendship meant to her. She told me that the last night she was alive. She said one of the things she liked best about Common House was that you were her roommate.”

Roseann's face was about five inches from Rooster's nose as he spoke to her. She stared at him through her smeared, dirty glasses, which he hardly noticed anymore. He thought only of the father who wouldn't keep his hands off her.

“She really said that?” said Roseann.

“Do you think I'd make that up?”

“No. I don't think that. I'm not saying that.”

“Well then? It must be the truth, right?”

“Yes. I guess so.”

“Well, it is the truth. That's what she said to me. That's one of the last things she ever said, how much she appreciated your friendship.”

“She really said that?”

“Yes, she did.”

“That's the truth?”

“That's the truth.”

Roseann smiled. “I knew that before you did, you know.”

“I'm sure you did. Good friends always know each other very well.”

“I knew that before you did.”

Tim and Percival walked over to the scorer's table to see what Roseann and Rooster were doing. Rooster showed them the score card and asked them what they thought of it.

“I think it's good,” said Tim, lighting up. “I think it's really good. I think that's a really good idea. Yup. That works for me. That's okay.”

Percival solemnly nodded his approval.

“I have another one for Dorothy-Jane-Anne,” said Rooster. He stood up so he could address all of them together. “Tonight, instead of talking, and instead of not talking at all, like you did with Elma, we're going to use hand signals. Thumbs-up means ‘Good shot.' Thumbs-down means ‘Better luck next time.' Double thumbs-up means ‘Awesome.' One finger means ‘I have to go to the bathroom.' Two fingers mean ‘I need a drink of water.' How does that sound?”

They liked it.

“You guys bowled very well when you weren't distracted with all the talking, but some form of communication between teammates is a good thing. I don't want you ignoring each other.”

Tim silently gave him the thumbs-up. Roseann picked up the first ball and started the game.

As they bowled, a woman joined Mrs. Yuler and watched the Strikers. Rooster, sitting at the scorer's table, booklet in hand, learning on the fly how to actually track the scores of all three of them, did not get up to meet her. However, he did call out on occasion for Tim to keep his back straight and for Roseann to release the ball when it was a bit closer to the floor. “It rolls better,” he said to her. Percival he left alone.

They repeated the same procedure the following Monday. Dorothy-Jane-Anne's name went on the top of the score sheet. Every box beside her name was filled with the strike sign. Roseann bowled next. Then Tim. Then Percival. The hand signals remained the same. Rooster quickly became competent as a scorekeeper. The advice he'd been calling out began to make more sense.

“Just look. The dart on the floor is only fifteen feet away. Those pins are sixty feet away. So it's easier to hit the dart than the pins. Line your feet up with the darts back here and aim for them when you throw the ball. It's called spot bowling. It's the way beginners learn how to bowl.”

“I'm not a beginner,” said Roseann. “I've bowled before.”

“I know that. But I'll bet your scores will get better if you aim for the darts instead of the pins.”

She aimed for the darts. Her score improved by ten points.

After the game, Rooster led them into the lounge area for a surprise.

“What is it?” said Roseann. “What are we doing here?” “This is our last time together before Thursday's final bowling session,” said Rooster, who had cleared everything with Mrs. Yuler earlier in the day. “So tonight, I thought I'd treat you all to a pizza. We can call it our wrap-up party.”

“A pizza!” said Roseann.

“How did you know I liked pizza?” said Tim, who could barely contain his excitement. “I thought I had kept that a secret. I thought nobody knew that.”

Rooster looked at him and raised his eyebrows.

“That's a joke,” said Tim. “That's my idea of a joke. That's a little joke of mine. I get my brother all the time with that one.”

Even Percival seemed impressed. “What flavor?” he asked.

“One half is pepperoni. The other half is ham and pineapple,” said Rooster. “I asked Mrs. Yuler what your favorite kinds were. She said this would make everybody very happy.”

The pizza arrived a few minutes later. They ate and talked about bowling.

“You know what we should get?” said Tim, between bites. “You know what we need? You know what we should have? We should have team T-shirts. Team bowling shirts with little words on them that say The Strikers.”

Rooster stared at Tim in amazement. “You know, Tim, that's a fantastic idea.”

“You think so?”

“I really do. I'll get right on that. I'll get on it right away so we can have our shirts for Thursday.”