Bean Ball
Chris Cleary
The ball is his accomplice, a polyurethane extension of himself hurtling down the lane unappeasable and assaulting unsuspecting pins. It gleams pearl-white, lovingly polished in its off-hours, and regulars, even at the far end, when they see it streak like lightning, know the Zeus of Rocksboro Bowl holds court that day. They call it the Hammer of Justice, mostly for a joke, but he just purses his lips and replies, “Nope. Just me.” Give them any opportunity to brag and they’ll swear he’s a local celebrity. Most total points in league play several years running. Perfect game after perfect game. All hail his Hall of Fame portrait above the rack of rental shoes!
Have a look at his photo there. Newcomers will snicker, will say it conveys ludicrous contradiction. A champion sportsman whose skin has the pallor of spoiled milk. A dangerous grin leering with vampiric thirst offset by greasy bangs ridiculously parted down the middle and crescents of heavy eyebrows raised in something akin to disbelief as the shutter snapped. They will point and smirk, but regulars know better. They yearn to catch a glimpse of the magic. And he’s happy to engage them in boisterous chat—that is, when he isn’t brooding on one thing or another. His voice is phlegmy exuberance and can be heard floating across the lanes and back to the lobby vending machines. That’s Ben Cavanagh.
But never Ben. Back in Rocksboro High, Fannin had dubbed him Bean. For Beanpole. Just look how tall and thin! And so it stuck. Bean. Sometimes Beanie, but that pissed him off. Still pisses him off after nine years. Bean he has gotten used to.
▱
He has just been blindsided by Ashley, who informs him that, holy shit, she thinks she loves him. Ashley is an interesting girl. She still streaks her short auburn hair blue. She still adorns pierced ears with five different rings. The stud in her left nostril still sparkles in lieu of personality, but the stud below her lower lip she no longer sports. She no longer feels the need to tell the world to fuck off. She’s making a concerted effort to be a better person.
Rocksboro High handed Ashley her diploma less than a year ago, and she mounted it in a frame above her bed. The frame is made of papier-mâché. He noticed that the first time they had sex. He is turned on by the sheer variety of lustful noises that can escape her. But these words he has just heard—he doesn’t know what to do with them.
▱
Three months before Ashley’s confession, Bean plops himself into the metal porch chair and lights up a smoke as the Saturday sun rises over the Boone Street row houses. Saturdays are his. Weekdays he owes to the 8 a.m. shift at the Shurston Acme deli counter. Sunday mornings he sacrifices to his Grandma Teezie, attending Mass in exchange for room and board. Friday nights are reserved for beer and weed and World of Warcraft at Dom’s. But Saturday mornings he devotes to sitting and philosophizing. Oh, he’s a very deep thinker.
Across the street, Prezzioli Park awakens to an overweight jogger galumphing around its circumference. That’s his neighbor from across the way, who somehow doesn’t care the park is only one block long and way too small for an exercise venue. Boone to Grape to Terrace to Cotton, round and round and getting nowhere fast. Even Prezzioli with his soulless granite eyes deems him a fool, and he ought to know, for old Prezzioli had been an excellent clown, another of Watsanachu’s favorite sons, a juggler extraordinaire and legend of the Vaudeville stage. Town elders had dedicated this block of real estate to his memory and erected his full-length likeness on a pedestal in the center of the park. Prezzioli stands in tux and tails frozen in performance, managing seven bronze balls at once, two balanced on the fingertips of either stony hand and five secured to the upside-down U-shaped bronze rod anchored at either foot. The Amazing Prezzioli. Nobody had ever seen him drop one. Ever.
Grandma Teezie brings him coffee, sits beside him, and modestly adjusts her housecoat. She was born a Houghton, so she’s got that Houghton height, like Bean has, like her brother Morty had when he was alive, and all of Morty’s boys. And not that it necessarily follows, all of them bowlers as well, but of varying abilities. Teezie knows Ben is obviously blessed. She bides her time by straightening stray strands in her helmet of gray and then cuts critical hawks’ eyes.
“Going to waste another day at the lanes later?”
“Guess so.”
Bean remains stoic. A comment such as this comes every morning with the coffee like a cyanide pastry he’s gotten used to. A cruel cruller. A tart tart.
“Don’t see why you keep going there if you’re not going to do anything with it.”
Teezie sips and stares at him over the rim.
“God’s given you this talent. You got to make the most of it. Let your light so shine.”
Bean knows the parable.
“I like it under the bushel where I am.”
“Besides, you can make lots more money. Just go back and apologize. Show them you’re ready to work with them.”
“I’m not. They’re assholes.”
“You can try harder to get along.”
She pauses.
“Don’t know what you got against money.”
Another pause.
“We both could use some, you know.”
He’s been staring at Prezzioli and the idiot jogger trapped in his orbit, just like his grandma circling him with determination, only this time around she decides to coat the guilt with a compliment.
“Folks here want to see you succeed. We’re on your side.”
“Bushel, Grandma.”
“You can finally be someone.”
“Bushel, Grandma.”
“You’ve got the greatness in you.”
“Bushel, Grandma.”
Withering silence as Bean stares off the front of the porch for one complete jogging circuit. Boone to Grape to Terrace to Cotton.
Teezie is finished with her sermon, at least for this morning. She signals this with a heavy sigh, rises, and walks to the railing to focus on the statue.
“I was a little girl when they put that thing up. Looks kind of run down now if you ask me. They need to send someone out. Take care of that graffiti at least.”
She spies the daily newspaper lying just inside the gate, rests her coffee cup on the porch rail, and descends steps to retrieve it. The rail is slightly beveled, and Teezie has placed the cup too close to the edge.
Bean eyes the precarious situation. He motions inconspicuously with two of his fingers and nudges the cup back an inch.
▱
Bean clocks in at the Acme. Dons a hairnet. Lugs a block of processed ham into the slicer. Begins to prep the party platters. Rolls of ham and turkey and roast beef, cubes of cheese to be stuffed into the maws of folks hostage at meaningless gatherings. Cubicle jockeys who swear they would quit one of these days rather than have to laugh again at the boss’s stale inanity. Bridge club biddies who all know their grandchildren and no one else’s are bound for six-figure salaries. Neighbors who anchor themselves to backyard picnic tables to keep from confronting this or that ethnic slur about running the mower so goddamn early in the morning.
He carts the lot of platters onto the floor and stacks them in rollaway refrigerator units. At the end of the beer aisle, a man with red-framed reading glasses lolling on his bumpy chest gasps to nobody in particular, heavens, he nearly forgot the zinfandel for that night. Bean gnashes teeth. They’re all the same. Posers and hypocrites. God strike him dead if he ever gets that way.
The new girl at the register catches his eye. Short stuff. Young thing. No doubt tight pussy. He recalls Rhonnie. Rode her all those years he rode the gravy train of the PBA until he told them to go fuck themselves and she told him pretty much the same. Harsh lesson about where allegiances lie. But he misses those evenings when he knows for sure all the pins are going to come crashing down. Cradling the ball, his fingers finding the holes, gliding in and out, massaging until he finds the right grip, and then the smooth approach, a ballet of sorts, one fluid movement, graceful with no hesitation, and the rolling rumble on the well-oiled boards, and the climactic collision. Rhonnie breathless. She also swore he had a gift. Swore he could make her cum just looking at her across the booth at Chili’s as he fingered the edges of his vampire’s lips. He is the ugliest son of a bitch she has ever seen, but the ecstasy is undeniable. He misses the game. So easy to wobble them and then knock them down. Don’t need to be a muscleman for that. He misses that control, that sense of achievement.
Note to self, he thinks. Talk to the new girl before the shift ends.
He is finished stacking platters and returns to his bunker behind the glass case of cold cuts. A middle-aged woman, self-absorbed in her world of middle management, retrieves a box of baking soda from her cart and eyes it doubtfully. She decides against the purchase and carelessly abandons it on top of the platters.
Bean gnashes teeth again. As she flees the scene, he leans on the glass case and flexes two fingers. The wheels of her cart suddenly jam, instant standstill, and the collision spills the latte down her blazer. She fights furiously, but the cart no longer moves. Bean snickers at the futility.
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When Ashley asks the Chili’s waitress for a margarita, Bean is surprised. He didn’t figure her for a margarita girl, but first impressions are always deceiving, and who can truly know people anyway? Like what lured her in when he asked to meet after work. The man who stared back at him in the breakroom mirror had prepared him for her resounding no, but apparently she fancied him a rebel and said, “Sure. Why not?”
“Hell, I’m no rebel,” he says as he grips his beer mug. “I’m just honest with myself.”
“Yes, yes, you have to be,” she whispers with insistence, nervously tapping rim salt into her drink. “You can’t live somebody else’s life.”
“No, you can’t.”
He recognizes the approach.
“Like when I went pro.”
“You mean your bowling? I’d heard about that, you know, when I was hired, but I didn’t hear about what happened, I mean, why you stopped.”
“Oh, I didn’t stop. I do it ’cause I enjoy it. And I’m on a league team. But the Bowlers’ Association, well …”
Rhonnie had made him submit his scores and the rest of the paperwork, had even helped with the application fee. Bought him proper clothes and done his hair up nice. Handled his tournament appearances. Handled the money he won. Handled his grandmother, who soon learned to keep her mouth shut and be satisfied with what Rhonnie let him give her.
He did very well for a time. He earned his qualifying round exemptions. He began to be mythologized as Mr. Three Hundred, that queer, gangly fellow lounging uncomfortably between frames, overwhelmed by the attention and bewildered into silence, an Ichabod Crane who had seized the Horseman’s head and made it his own. But when he saw the ESPN cameras, it hit him like a sucker punch.
“You’re a star!” Rhonnie trilled.
“The hell I am,” he replied.
“It’s all paying off!”
He felt like nothing more than her investment.
Section 13 of the rulebook was his escape route. His professional appearance began to falter. He rarely shaved. He smoked and drank in his name shirt. Tournament directors levied fines. For once unusually perceptive, Rhonnie accused him of self-sabotage, but he looked askance at his trophies, hawked, and gurgled, “This is me. Warts and all.”
“Bullshit, Ben!”
“My name is Bean.”
Of course, not all of this he reveals to Ashley, just enough to prove he has his principles, that he’s his own man. He sips his beer and pretends to consult the Chili’s menu, coolly awaiting her adulation.
“That’s so noble of you, I mean not letting anyone tell you what to do, even if it means giving up all that money. It’s so sad really. I mean tragic in a way.”
Bean coughs and looks away. He figures she’s a bit of a simpleton and expects him to don a long, black cape and stand at the edge of a rocky cliff and peer into the turbulent waters below.
“Why do people have to be so cruel?” she whimpers, and then repeats what he’s sure will become her personal mantra for him, “So tragic. Really so tragic.”
But she doesn’t know the half of it. Tragic is a mother dead and a father taking off before a child turns fifteen, and uncles and aunts treating him like a rental until the grandmother steps in and reclaims him for a Holy Ghost that doesn’t exist in the first place. Tragic is the humiliation of something confessed and rejected over and over. Then he wised up and ran from those fuckers like the plague.
“Oh!” She reaches across and seizes his wrist. “Have you ever read Twilight? You really have to read that series. I think you’d really, really like it!”
Bean sucks his teeth, doesn’t see the point of further delaying the inevitable. He extends two fingers and slowly massages his temple.
“Okay. Do you have a copy I can borrow?”
“Sure I do. On the shelf in my bedroom.”
“Well, let’s get it then.”
That night, when her mother and younger sister are out, he notes the papier-mâché frame around her diploma.
▱
He rides high for the next three months, seeing Ashley every Saturday night, even though it means missing some league games, but that’s all right, because he no longer feels the compulsion as strongly, the compulsion he has at the top of every frame as he rises from his seat and shuffles to the ball return, the compulsion to stare down the lane and reel off the names of the ten people who have conveniently arranged themselves sixty feet away in the shape of a triangle.
They take in a scary movie at the Empress on the Ridge. As they wait for it to start, she natters on and on about what so and so said on Twitter, even though he has told her at least five times already that Twitter is just a bunch of babies looking to be liked. As they walk back through the lobby, she shocks him with a brilliant idea.
“It’s still early. Why don’t you let me meet your grandmother tonight?”
He’s silent as he allows the crowd to push them through the double doors and spill them onto the avenue sidewalk. He tells himself he doesn’t really care one way or another. They wouldn’t have to stay too long, and if Teezie starts in on him, it would only make him seem more of an irredeemable bad boy. Besides, it might even shut her up about finding a nice girl to settle down with. After all, Ashley’s last name is O’Dowd. Solidly Irish.
Still, he debates with himself, and only when they reach his car does he pipe up, “Sure. Let’s just make it quick.”
He can’t find an open spot on Boone, so he pulls around to Terrace and walks her through the park. Prezzioli is oblivious to their presence. His insipid grin remains chiseled into his face. At his feet, spray-painted in red upon his pedestal, an anarchy symbol and an illegible scrawl resembling something like KAOZ RULZ. The night air is warm. Bean feels the back of his shirt sticking.
“You sure you want to do this?”
“Of course. I wouldn’t have brought it up if I didn’t.”
“Just make it short and sweet. Hi and bye.”
“You afraid she’ll say something embarrassing? ‘Why, he’s just my little Bean! My wittle Beanie-Weanie!’”
“Stop that!”
His tone is hostile, and she takes the hint.
“Okay. I’m sorry. It’s just I want to get to know you better.”
“You know me just fine.”
“Well, no, I don’t. I just think, I don’t know, I just think it’s time we, you know….”
“No, I don’t know.”
“Are you going to make me say it? Holy shit, I think I love you.”
And there it is. Blindsided. Bean feels his breath escape him. He turns and walks away. When he finally forces himself to inhale, he smells sulfur.
Ashley stares upward into the evening sky with a look that conveys—if anyone would bother to read it—the realization of having said something she shouldn’t have. She collapses onto the bench beneath one of Prezzioli’s outstretched arms.
Bean feels physically sick. The word echoes in his head. He hears it again and again, and he runs from it like the plague. He gathers the nerve to turn back. Her face is in her hands. He glances at the juggler’s delicately poised ball overhead and, as if his life depended on it, viciously flexes two of his fingers.
Chris Cleary is the author of four novels: “The Vagaries of Butterflies,” “The Ring of Middletown,” “At the Brown Brink Eastward,” and “The Vitality of Illusion.” His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Virginia Quarterly Review, The Broadkill Review, Gargoyle Magazine, and other publications. His short fiction has been anthologized in the award-winning “Everywhere Stories.”