Setting pins at the Palace Bowl was repetitious work. To do it took rhythm, but not the kind of rhythm that let you forget about what you were doing and think of other things—that was Punk’s advice. A lot of guys had gotten hurt that way, he told us that first night. “It’s easy to let your mind wander away, but you gotta be careful. Work with the rhythm but just make sure you pay attention, and you’ll be all right.” After a while I was able to do that, work with the rhythm but pay attention, yet my mind wandered just the same, and I began to think of other things.
Before I got the rhythm I smashed my fingers and knuckles a few times, and my body ached to where it was just about unbearable, then all of a sudden I felt it, almost heard it, and gave in to the beat. I would be all but dancing to the pattern of the Palace Bowl beat, shuffling, bending, picking up two, three pins at a time in each hand, and over the sound of balls rolling down the lanes right at me and on both sides of my pit and hitting pins and pins hitting each other and the floor as they fell, I could hear that click-click as the pins in my hands touched heads and bodies and feel their smooth cool necks between my fingers. I bent and rose, swinging, using the muscles in my hips, shoulders, stomach, and back for strength, those in my hands and feet for the more detailed work of picking up pins and dancing out of the way of the scramble of rolling wood on the floor of the pit. And once my body began to dance to the rhythm, my mind did, too, and I began to hear it, the melody of past and present, and see the other dancers all round me—Vernon and Punk and Biik in the pits, the bowlers who looked so tiny down at the approach ends of their lanes, Mr. Mountbatten at the bar, Ingrum at the counter, and Miss Winnie smoking at her table, flirtatiously blowing smoke rings—the playing against that the harmony of everything that was happening back home in Duluth and everything that happened before that, too. My mother and dad—he was dead for sure and I suppose she must have been, too—and my sisters, Violet lost and Sis on her own, the federal boarding school at Harrod, and my dreams. My recurring dreams of horses in fields, one brown with white spots, one almost black with a white blaze down his forehead, a round and short-legged pony, an old faded gray blind in one eye, a light brown with eyes as purple and sad as a moose’s. My dreams, the same ones I have to this day: Two girls in dresses and boys’ high-topped work boots riding bareback in a field bounded by a fence and forests, gripping the manes of their horses. The slender girl sits regally, holding the purple-eyed brown’s mane with both hands, her chin high; she half smiles, watching her sister, round faced, with a laughing mouth full of teeth, lift one hand to wave at the sky. In my dreams, the woman in the green-checked apron is holding my hand, her thumb and three fingers circling my wrist in a firm bracelet, her forefinger wrapped around my thumb, so that her dry cool hand is a mitten. “Lookit, Sam. See, there’s your sisters. There’s Violet, there’s Sis. Look, they don’t even see us, them girls!” I wave to my sisters, and laugh with them, although they don’t know it; the woman bends to stroke my head, which is resting against her green-checked hip, with her bony and tender hand. “Them girls, they don’t even know we’re lookin’ at them, do they, Sam?” My mother, I suppose she must be, before she took off for wherever the hell she went. Next I dream of Harrod. When I run away to Maggie’s, I wake up when I get caught by the disciplinarian and brought back to boarding school. Whenever I sleep it starts all over again.
I am an old man now, my dreams the same today as they were when we worked at the Palace, a one-reeler with people, rhythm, and music, sights that play over and over. Girls. Horses. The woman in the green-checked apron holding my hand, bending to stroke my head and my face with her other hand. Her departure. Boarding school. The run to Maggie’s. All that was tied up with the rhythm of work, as I danced with their ghosts, living and dead, danced to the silent song of lives led and lives being lived, accompanied by the drop-roll of bowling balls and the clatter and crash of downed pins.
Before we went to Minneapolis to look for work, me and Cousin Vernon lived in Duluth, with Vernon’s mother, Maggie, and his little brother, Biik. We’d both quit Harrod school, Vernon when he turned sixteen and me the last time I ran away and those bastards finally got tired of hunting me down. We were ready for the army and ready to get into the war but we were too young, and we were really mad about that. Vernon was going to enlist as soon as he turned seventeen, when Maggie could sign for him to go. His brothers Sonny and George were fighting in Africa and in the Pacific, and his cousins, all of the LaForce boys, were overseas, too. Me and Vernon, we were useless, us, and were waiting until the army would take us, like I said. I was going to have to wait even longer than Vernon because I didn’t have a mother to sign for me; meanwhile, we were looking for something to do. Vernon decided that he could stop living off Maggie and we could go down to Minneapolis to look for work.
“I’m gonna get a job, Ma, and then I’m gonna send you some money so you won’t have to work all the time,” Vernon told her, “and me and Sam are gonna get ourselves a place to stay.”
“Mmmm, that’s nice,” she said.
Maggie, she had us each take a blanket to roll our clothes in, packed us some food, and gave us five bucks, too; that was Maggie. She told us to go find Louis when we got there; he was living at the Holland House Hotel, close to all his friends on Franklin Avenue, the Av, where the Indians in Minneapolis came and went, all the Chippewas and Sioux, Boozhoos and Howkolas we called them sometimes, and Indians from some other places, too. There was all of a sudden a lot of Indians in Minneapolis then, during the Second World War, coming and going from all the reservations, making money working in the munitions plants and factories, living sometimes six people to a room, sharing with people like me and Vernon who came to work, too, and helping out their relatives back home.
We told Biik he had to stay with Maggie and go to school in the fall. He was pretty mad about that, like we were about not getting to go into the army.
It took us two days and four rides to hitch down to Minneapolis. We slept overnight behind a gas station in Cambridge. Early in the morning the owner woke us up and told us to get the hell out of there. We jumped up pretty quick and gathered up our stuff, that guy saying all the while, “I mean it, you bums, get the hell off my property or I’m getting the cops over here,” till we were out of his sight. Down the street there was a bakery where we bought a loaf of bread and some doughnuts to eat on the road. We ate the bread while we stood at the side of the road just outside of Cambridge with our thumbs out and shared the doughnuts with the farmer who picked us up.
The farmer took us past Forest Lake, and then a Watkins salesman in a checkered suit picked us up and took us all the way into the city. By that time it was getting dark but we knew where the Av was, and it wasn’t hard to find the Holland House. Louis was back from work, and he was glad to see us, asked us what Maggie was up to and if the LaForces were still up on the reservation or what. He introduced us to a couple of men from up north who worked with him at the grain elevators (‘Like you to meet my son, Vernon, and Sam Sweet. Maynard’s boy—you remember Maynard”) and a couple of Sioux from South Dakota. The Sioux were very polite; they shook our hands and told us they were glad to meet us. Louis and the Sioux said if we wanted to go down to the grain elevators with them in the morning we could probably get a job killing rats. “No rabbits down there; if youse boys get hungry youse are gonna have to settle for rats.” The Sioux started laughing hysterically at this good joke on their buddies the Chippewas.
We slept on the floor in Louis’s room that night; it was all right, a pretty good time. Louis was a lot of fun, and we sat around talking till pretty late. When we got up early the bathroom was full of men getting ready to work; a couple of the younger men were wet-combing their hair, but most were just washing their faces and coughing into the sinks; their jobs weren’t the kind you had to comb your hair for.
We got on at the grain elevators just like that and spent our first day in Minneapolis chasing rats and beating them to death with shovels, work that just wore you out. Our job was to kill the rats that lived in the elevators, some of them growing to the size of dogs because of all that grain they ate. The foreman told us each to pick up a shovel, stay out of the grain shovelers’ way, and make sure no rats, dead or alive, got shoveled into the grain that was going to the mill. “We don’t want nothing like rats getting ground up into the flour, boys. You make sure that don’t happen.”
We envied Louis his nice job shoveling grain, where the men inhaled particles of grain dust so fine that it floated like a yellow fog as soon as the shoveling started. Within minutes of starting work the men started to cough. Then they hawked the rest of the day, some of them until they puked, which stopped the cough but not for long. They wore handkerchiefs tied over their faces, like bank robbers. Louis kept his handkerchief tied over his nose and mouth in a square knotted above the backs of his ears and then at the back of the neck. He said it worked for him, and he never puked. He did sweat, though, soaked right through his overalls and shirt, and that fine grain powder stuck to it so that he looked like a big piece of grain himself.
Vernon got the first one, a rat that didn’t look like any rat we ever saw before. There we were, standing behind Louis, holding our shovels like baseball bats, and Louis was pumping his arms and moving that grain, shoveling like a madman, like all the shovelers were, and in about a minute this big bushy rat almost the size of a porcupine but fast, man that thing was fast, dodged Louis’s shovel and ran right between us. Vernon swung the shovel in this big arc over his right shoulder down toward the floor, skimming right to the rat’s path, and pow! That thing was knocked right out; got it right in the face. Vernon raised his eyebrows at me and smiled, then shoveled that thing up off the floor and carried it over to where the foreman said we were supposed to start our rat pile. “Giizis, heyey-wah!” Louis called to him. “My son, there. Wait till he gets in the army!” he said to the shoveler next to him, this Grand Portage niijii with arms like Popeye’s.
“Shimaaganish, that’s him,” answered the niijii, and began to sing, “Slap that Jap off the map.”
“Wa ha ha, Benito’s jaw!” Louis continued for him in a deep voice, to sound funny, and they started to laugh like crazy, working their shovels so fast they glinted and twinkled in the haze of grain dust.
I didn’t like killing rats; there was this one that I beaned pretty good but didn’t kill it when I hit it, so it lay there twitching and heaving, really suffering, so I had to bash its head in with the shovel. Jeez, that was bad, and there were more like that, too. I had smears of blood on my overalls, especially on the legs; Vernon was splattered all the way up to his face. He really killed a lot of rats, but he ran a lot more than I did and where I got to feeling worn out he got tired to the point he was like crazy drunk. By dinner break he was so wound up from all that running around that his hind end appeared to hover about a half-inch above the wooden bench we sat on to eat the lard sandwiches Louis had packed in the bucket, and his eyes, red-rimmed and teary, blinked excitedly. “You see all them rats? Pow! Ka-pow!” he laughed hoarsely. “P’shoom! Ak-akak-ak-ak!”
“You gonna eat, or what?” Louis asked.
Vernon turned clear around and threw up back of the bench.
After dinner break I looked around at some of the rat killers working with other shovelers, and they didn’t look sick, or excited, or even especially tired. They looked like nothing but overall sacks stiff with sweat that dried out and got covered the next day and the day after that with more sweat and blood and grain dust, overall sacks charging and chasing rats, overall sacks holding inside hope that someday they might work their way up to shovelers.
They paid us in cash at the end of the day; we hosed off our clothes the best we could and washed our hands and faces, dunked our heads under the sink faucets to rinse the dust out of our ears and hair, and walked out of there with Louis and his buddies to get something to eat. We had hamburgers and fried potatoes at this bar near the Holland, Eddie’s, but Vernon and me were too young for a beer so we left when they started buying rounds. We walked over to the Holland, and when the manager saw us come in the door, he said we couldn’t stay there unless we paid for a room, he was sick of that bunch of Indians from Duluth bringing all their relatives in to sleep for free, next one he saw he was calling the cops, and here’s your stuff, boys, if you haven’t got two bits apiece for your room take it and get out, so we picked up our blanket rolls and left.
We walked a while around toward downtown till we found a place to sleep in a park. All snug rolled up in my blanket between Vernon and a squatty little pine tree I looked up at the stars, same ones as were shining down that very same minute on everybody at home, and started to think how if we wanted to kill rats we could be doing that at the terminals in Duluth. But I wasn’t ready to go home yet.
“Hey, Vernon.”
“Wegonen, Cousin?”
“Let’s not kill rats tomorrow, Cousin; how about it?”
“Okay by me.” Vernon was always very easy to get along with.
There was a skinny, worried-looking guy leaning a handwritten cardboard sign next to the doorway to the Palace Bowl. “pinesters wanted,” it said.
“What’s that?” I asked him.
“Pin boys, we’re looking for pinsetters, somebody to set pins, need them right now. You fellas want a job?” His forehead wrinkles moved up and down, opening and closing like a squeezebox when he talked, his voice high and light. “We had two pin boys just enlisted in the navy, need a couple of pin boys right away. You fellas want a job? It’ll be gone tomorrow.”
Me and Vernon followed the skinny guy inside. He stood us by the door and told us, “Wait here, stand right here, I’ll go get the owner.” First, though, he lit a cigarette.
The alley had six lanes and a lunch counter with a bar at one end. It was pretty quiet in there, nobody at the counter eating, just a couple of men at the far lane changing into bowling shoes, and the wood floor creaked as we shifted from foot to foot, waiting. Dark in there. Kind of restful, too, and generally kind of pleasant, was my impression for a second or two. Then I took in my first breath inside the door and my lungs filled with the heaviness of an inhaled large animal, impossible to expel, unthinkable to even cough. The place had a smell that sunk to my chest and stuck in my throat; it felt almost as thick as grain dust but denser, wetter. What was it, anyway? Old wet dog, cigarette butts put out in dirty plates, mothballs, sauerkraut, lye soap, sweat, tired feet. Beer and boiled egg boogit.
But no rat blood. We could get used to that. In the meantime, I just breathed waves of that heavy wetness in and out through my mouth; the taste was bad but not as powerful as the smell.
Vernon was breathing through only his mouth, too. “Dice-lookig blace, eh,” he commented. Vernon was always very easy to please.
We could see the back of this big heavy grunting guy bent over behind the lunch counter, replacing an empty beer keg. Skinny walked over and knelt next to him, helping to lift and push the full keg with his long arms, white and dry looking as cigarettes.
“Aaawwrrggghhh,” we heard the big guy groan. “Gaaa that sonovabitch is heavy … rrrggghh.” Then, “Okay, I got it I got it I got it … let go let ‘er go let ‘er go.” They stood up. The big guy had a lit cigarette in his mouth, too. We would find out that everybody at the Palace kept a cigarette going; the cloud of smoke around each person’s head really helped with the smell.
Skinny said, “Montie, there’s a couple of Indian boys over by the door want to set pins. Fellas, this is Mr. Mountbatten.”
The big guy looked us over. “Where you boys from?”
“Duluth,” Vernon answered.
“Where else?”
“Mozhay Point, Lost Lake.”
“Where else?”
“County boys’ home, up by Duluth.”
“Harrod School.”
“That a reform school?” he asked.
No, a lot worse. “No sir, it’s one of them Indian schools.”
“You ever been in trouble?”
“No, sir.”
“You boys pinsetters? You ever set pins before?”
“No sir, never done it before, but we seen it done.”
“You start today, both of youse, right now?”
“Yes sir, we can do that.”
“You got yourselves a job. Follow me.”
Mr. Mountbatten took us through a doorway at the end of the lanes and pointed at the guy working behind the rows of bowling pins. “Punk. Shake hands with the new boys.” And he told us the Palace rules: Punk was the lead; the three of us, me, him, and Vernon, covered for each other; the Palace was open every night; no smoking in the pits; no drinking ever; we had to wear a shirt whenever we left the pits. We could sleep in the storage room with Punk if we wanted to help Ingrum, the skinny guy, with cleaning and anything else he needed done. “Show ‘em how it’s done, Punk; hurry up before more people come in.” He left.
“We got a customer waiting. Watch how I do this. Gotta do this quick. It starts to get busy in here right around now.” Punk took off his shirt, rolled up his pants legs to his knees (“gets hot in here”), and hopped over the partition into the next pit to stand crouched, bent forward, to look through the lined-up pins in the window at the man who was beginning his approach. When the man set the bowling ball down and it came rolling toward the pins, Punk grabbed hold of the bar hanging from the low ceiling and half-jumped, half-swung himself up to a bench nailed high into the back wall, lifting his feet and getting out of the way as the ball crashed into the pins, half of them falling right at Punk, back into the pit, where he had been standing. Punk jumped down off the bench and picked up the ball, rolled it through an opening next to the pin window down the ball return back to the man, who picked it up and began his second approach. He crouched, watching the man throw his second ball, jumped out of the way. Nine pins down. Punk jumped down, picked them up, two or three to a hand, and set them back up. He rolled the ball back and stood crouched for the next frame. “Got it? Watch me again, then one of youse try it.”
It wasn’t too bad once you learned the rhythm, though like Punk said, you had to pay attention to what was going on. It was hard on the shoulders, but harder still on the hands. After a while mine felt like claws, curved to the shape of the pins, and stiff, and they sure hurt, but that kept my mind off my shoulders, which felt like I was carrying boulders on each. Vernon picked it up quick; he always did everything like that, but he was the first one to get hit by a pin when he forgot to get his legs all the way up. Punk saw him sitting on the floor of the pit with his head on his knees, rocking back and forth, and jumped like a pogo stick across three lane pits to pick up the pins. “You gonna make it, Chief?” Vernon’s face was all twisted up by the pain and his eyes were half shut with it, too, but he nodded and got up off the floor to crouch for the next frame. Punk shook his shoulder, half embraced him. “You’re gonna be all right, Chief; here, keep moving, walk it off.”
We each took two lanes, and when they were both full, we didn’t stop moving at all; it took everything we had, for hours and hours, even days it seemed; twice the skinny guy showed up with hot dogs, which we ate between games. We drank water from a bucket in the corner, guzzling and slurping from the metal dipper, and kept it up until all of a sudden the place was down to one lane and Punk told Vernon to sit down, he’d take that one and finish up.
The last people bowling were Ingrum and his date, this woman I’d seen through the pin window sitting at the counter smoking and sipping coffee most of the night until the bowlers were gone and the lanes were empty. She peered down the lane into the pit window before she picked up her ball. “Punk! Punk, how are you, honey?” She had a huge smile with a lot of teeth, and an enormous bust, like two bowling balls in her shirt.
“Oh, I’m fine, Miss Winnie. We got two new boys here; like you to meet Sam and Vernon. Friends of mine.”
“Pleased to meet you, boys; any friend of Punk’s is a friend of mine.”
Ingrum told us to come out and sit with him and his friend; the night was over. We felt a little shy so sat at the table back of them and watched them bowl. We could see right away that Ingrum could really bowl; he started out looking kind of funny, sort of running on his tippy-toes, but then on that last step he turned graceful and set the ball down so gently you couldn’t hear a sound, his right leg lightly extended and crossed behind his left heel. Miss Winnie wasn’t too bad, either, but she was kind of clumsy, not graceful at all like Imgrum, and self-conscious about her dress, which she smoothed and tugged down in front and back every time right after she let go of the ball.
“One ninety-five to one forty-two. Beat the pants off you again, didn’t I, Winnie?” Ingrum’s eyebrows, forehead wrinkles, and Adam’s apple moved up and down suggestively. “Beat the pants right off you! Haw! Haw!”
“Naughty, naughty, Ingrum; and in front of the boys, too.” She giggled and shook a finger at him.
She was nice enough to me and Vernon, flirted a little when she asked us where we were from, how we got to the Palace, then started giving us the third degree like she was Grandma LaForce or one of those other old ladies up at the reservation, instead of this white lady big as a man, with shiny red lips and big yellow curls on top of her head and these little drawn-on crescent moon eyebrows. Where did we live in Duluth, she wanted to know, why didn’t we live on a reservation, how did we get to Minneapolis, how did we like Minneapolis, did everybody live in teepees up north. “I heard the Indians up there are wild, just wild. And drink? You boys don’t drink like that, do you?” She didn’t mean any harm I guess. “Say, did you get supper? Montie, did these boys get to eat? Boys, are you hungry?”
“Well, whatta you think? I’m getting them something right now, Winnie, got some hard boiled eggs left over, and fried potatoes, lot of onions. Here Punk, Chief, Shorty—come and fix yourselves a plate.”
“Mr. Mountbatten’s all right,” whispered Punk, “and Ingrum, too, though he’s got some funny friends. You’ll see what I mean, but they won’t bother you. Miss Winnie either. I say it takes all kinds: everybody’s different and everybody minds their own business, know what I mean?”
We nodded; sounded fine to us. What did he mean, anyway?
Miss Winnie stood, smoothed and tugged her dress down over her front and behind again, and waited, giving Ingrum this look, tapping her toe impatiently, until he stood, too, then Punk and me and Vernon did, too. Mr. Mountbatten didn’t pay any attention. She said, “Excuse me, fellas, must go powder my nose,” and walked over to the can, her backside waggling back and forth, not a bad walker for a woman of her size and shape.
“Wish I had that swing on my back porch!” Ingrum sang it in a thin tenor, a man in love.
She looked back over her shoulder, hands on her hips like Betty Grable. “Oh, you! You are a naughty boy!” she called back with a deep giggle.
Vernon raised his eyebrows at me and pointed with his mouth, so slightly nobody else would notice him noticing, toward Miss Winnie, who was opening the door marked “Gentlemen.”
Punk caught it. “He ain’t allowed to use the ladies’ room,” he whispered to explain.
Mr. Mountbatten was all right, like Punk said. He treated us fine: paid us every Saturday night, good as clockwork, right after the Palace closed, fed us a decent meal at the end of each day, didn’t mind if we took a little time off on the weekday afternoons, so long as there was one of us there to set up. He kept back a dollar a week out of our pay, which he put in an envelope for each of us in the safe. When we needed money we’d have it, he said; it was a good habit to get into while you’re young. By the end of summer we each had a pretty good-sized stack of bills in our envelopes, maybe ten, twelve dollars.
When Buster heard about how we had jobs and a place to stay he thought he wouldn’t go back to school in the fall but would hitch down to Minneapolis instead. Maggie didn’t want him to go but then Louis went up for a visit and told her that he could bring Buster back with him. She fixed her youngest a bedroll and packed them some food, like she did for everybody who left her house, walked them to the corner, and then went back inside the house to her room, to cry where nobody could see her. To Maggie, Buster was still Biik, her baby boy, her last one to leave and the only one she didn’t have to send to boarding school.
Buster was small for his age, too small to set pins, Mr. Mountbatten said, or anyway too small to set pins for pay. He could stay with us if Punk didn’t mind, and could help out a little and eat supper every night, but not for pay. Miss Winnie thought a boy that age should really be in school and not hanging out at a bowling alley every night where God knows what kind of people come and go. She offered to take him to her boarding house to live; Biik seemed to bring out her motherly side.
“You can sleep in my room; there’s a nice class of people where I live, and there’s plenty of room. I’ll put a little cot in there for you right next to me, and you can go to school. A boy like you should be in school, make your mother proud.”
Biik was speechless. I could hear what he was thinking, how he wasn’t going to sleep on a cot in a rooming house next to some fella named Miss Winnie.
Vernon told her he’d promised Maggie not to let his little brother out of his sight.
Vernon met Dolly one night not long after we started at the Palace. She came in to bowl with her girlfriend and their dates, a couple of guys who looked like they should be in the army. This offended Vernon, who gave his lanes to Buster and put on his shirt to go get a drink of water at the counter, so that he could pass close enough to get a good look at those draft dodgers out with those two good-looking girls.
“Hey, Sitting Bull, can you bring us four beers?” one of the guys asked. Vernon kept walking. “Hey, you! Whoo! Whoo! Whoo!”
“Crazy Horse! What does it take to get some service around here?”
“He ain’t a waitress; he’s a pin setter.” Ingrum had walked over to their lane. “You gotta go up to the counter to get your beers. And we can’t serve the young ladies; they don’t look twenty-one to me.”
The draft dodgers bowled badly—maybe that was what kept them out of the army, Buster said. Vernon didn’t say anything, just kept avoiding those balls that the two bums were throwing as hard as they could, trying to knock out the pin boy or break his legs, and lining up the pins that were crashing wildly, erratically, but also sporadically as the draft dodgers drank their beers. He returned the balls as hard as he could to the bums but returned the girls’ more gently. The taller one, the one they called Dolly, was better than the guys and had a pretty good approach, Punk thought. We looked out at her through the pin windows and could see he was right. She took her time about it, squinting to line herself and her ball up with the pins, then taking four slow and controlled steps, hefting the ball with her right arm like she didn’t use the left at all (‘Needs a little more control from that left arm, her release’s a little early, but she’s got it,” Punk said). She looked strong, had muscular-looking arms and legs. On one calf she had a big maroon birthmark. She rolled a fourteen-pound ball with ease. If somebody who knew what he was doing could work with her she could get to be pretty good, better than Miss Winnie, if she kept it up, was Punk’s opinion.
On her ninth frame Vernon kept Dolly’s ball. He put his shirt back on and carried the ball out of the pit and to her lane himself, showing her a chip that might keep it from going straight, and offered to help her find a better one. It took them a long time; Dolly told her friend and those bums to go ahead and finish without her. She came back to the pits and for the rest of the night stayed off to the side of the last lane, sipping coffee and watching Vernon work without his shirt, stretching her neck like Olive Oyl in order in order to peer through the little window to the pin pit. He walked her home, and she came back the next night, and the night after that, and most nights after that, except for the Monday nights she went to roll bandages at the YWCA and Wednesdays, which were Girls’ League night at the Baptist church. Mr. Mountbatten told us we weren’t allowed to have girls back in the pits, so Vernon watched her through the pin window. Usually she sat with Miss Winnie at the table next to the bar, where Winnie could keep an eye on Ingrum and all the ladies who she was sure were after him. The two of them smoked a blue fog around their table.
On slow nights Dolly and Vernon bowled, and we watched them through the pin windows. Vernon didn’t look much at her when they were talking, or when she looked at him, but when she bowled he stared like he was at the movies. He was fascinated by every single thing about her, that was plain to see: The port wine birthmark shaped like a palm tree, her chain-smoking, how she’d made enough working at a laundry to support her mother before she died. Her arms and shoulders, big and muscular from handling the mangle at the laundry. Her blue sweater that matched her eyes. Dolly looked right at Vernon when he talked to her, those nearsighted, sky-colored eyes seeking and reading in his nearly black ones what he was too bashful to say, squinting a little just like when she was concentrating on the pins. She treated me and Buster like we were her own little brothers, Punk like a friend she and Vernon were always happy to see. She’d never been to Duluth, she said, had always wanted to see Mozhay Point.
Louis bought a car, an Overland Red Bird—remember that car? He got it so he could drive up to Duluth to visit his true love, Maggie. When he got back to Minneapolis, he stopped by the Palace to tell us that a whole bunch of the LaForces were staying with Maggie, but that even with all those people around she was real lonesome for her boys, asked him to tell us we were welcome to come home anytime.
The day Vernon turned seventeen Mr. Mountbatten made a Victory cake in the morning, before the Palace had any business, and boiled up a potato sausage and cabbage for a birthday party lunch. He gave Vernon a present “from the Palace” wrapped in white tissue paper, a wallet with five dollars in it. Ingrum and Winnie gave him box of handkerchiefs. Dolly came over after work and sat with Winnie while she watched Vernon work. It was a quiet night for Dolly. Winnie tried to teach her how to blow smoke rings and French inhale, but Dolly’s attention was all on Vernon. She sat with her legs crossed, twirling her right foot round and round while she smoked cigarette after cigarette, holding them right up to her mouth between her first and second fingers, inhaling one right after another, watching Vernon set pins through the little window at the end of the lane. She knew he’d be leaving, going into the army, now that he was seventeen, that Maggie had promised to sign for him.
“Watch me, now, Dolly, and then you try it. You take a puff, then just keep it in your mouth, but don’t breathe with your mouth at all. Just stick out your bottom lip a little and breathe in with your nose,” Winnie instructed. “Like this.”
Dolly roused herself and tried. She was polite, like Vernon, both of them so easy to get along with. They were like two peas in a pod, I thought, just alike. She French-inhaled a few times to oblige Winnie, but anybody could see her heart wasn’t in it. Her eyes were watery from smoke and sorrow at Vernon’s coming absence. She didn’t want to be the only pea left in the pod, a person could sure see that.
So, it was time to get back to Duluth. We gave Mr. Mountbatten a week’s notice so he could find some other pin boys. That week Dolly came to the Palace every night except for Red Cross night at the girls’ Y; she skipped Girls’ League at church. She sat with Miss Winnie French-inhaling and blowing smoke rings while she watched for glimpses of Vernon at the ends of the two lanes he worked. “Pretty soon I’m going to remember seeing these little glimpses of Vernon in back of the pins way at the end of the alley, and I’m gonna wish for that again, wish I could be back here tonight seeing him through the pin window, wish I had that little bit,” she thought. “I’m gonna spend my days thinking of him while I’m at work, just like now, but I won’t be able to see him at the Palace at the end of the day.”
“Hey, Winnie, know what I’m gonna do? When Vernon’s gone I’m gonna learn how to knit and make him a pair of socks.”
“He’ll like that, won’t he? Know what, I’m gonna save my sugar rations, and Ingrum can give us his, too, and we’ll make some fudge to send to him.”
“See this? I bought this bride magazine for when he gets back. It’s got all these wedding dresses in it, and things you can do to make your place all dolled up? And ideas for keeping things nice, too.”
“Honey, you and Vernon are going to be happy as kings, that’s for sure.”
“As soon as he gets back.”
“That’s right, honey. As soon as he gets back.”
“And I’m gonna have a baby, too.” Dolly’s nose began to redden.
Winnie covered Dolly’s hand with her own. “You’ll have lots of babies, honey. As soon as he gets back.”
Louis drove us back up to Duluth, where Maggie signed for Vernon to enlist in the army. He ended up in Italy, somewhere, Dolly thought, from what she could get out of his letters. She wrote to Maggie every couple of weeks whether she’d heard from Vernon or not. After a while Maggie invited her to stay with her in Duluth, and Dolly got on at the Lincoln Laundry DeLuxe, ironing shirts. They moved to a duplex apartment with two bedrooms, right around the corner from Dolly’s work. In the evenings Dolly knit socks for Vernon and the LaForce boys, too. When she started to really show and had to quit the DeLuxe she had more time and started some for me and Buster. She read that bride magazine over and over and got the place really dolled up, kept it nice. When we got word that Vernon was missing in action she stayed inside the duplex and didn’t go out at all. The baby was born right there in the duplex. Maggie told people that the baby was hers and that Dolly was watching the baby to help her out so she could go back to work at the mattress factory. Nobody believed it but they were too polite to say.
Buster went back to school and got a job at the hospital as a dish washer. The ladies in the kitchen liked him, he said, and made sure he had a big supper before he started work every night. I heard that the shoeshine stand in the White Front bar could use help, and got on as a shine boy. When it was busy, and Emil the main shine boy had to help Whitey at the bar, it was my job to tend the stand by myself. That was easy work: men would climb up the step to the high chair, and I would sit on a little bench cleaning their shoes, rubbing polish in and shining them up. When it wasn’t busy at the bar, Emil took over the stand and sent me out to find business on the street, where I would walk around with the shoeshine kit, a wooden box with polish and saddle soap, rags and brushes in it, asking men if they wanted a shine. I’d have to take the stuff out of the box, and they’d put one foot at a time up on the box, and I’d have to kneel. That was harder work, and I had to hustle because I got paid by the shine.
I gave Maggie some money whenever I got paid, and Buster did, too, and you would think with all those people, the LaForces and everybody else, always coming to her house and staying there, they’d all be giving her some money and she’d be doing all right. But that’s not the way it was. Some people worked, some didn’t. Some gave her money, some didn’t. Some shared what they had, and some didn’t.
When I turned eighteen I joined the Marines; Buster was so jealous and mad that he frowned and made faces until the kids around the house started making fun of him. One day one of his buddies brought him to a boxing gym to try it out; he took a liking to the sport and showed talent, became a local celebrity. Still, he was impatient. Maggie signed for him to enlist in the army when he turned seventeen. By then Japan had surrendered; he was part of the occupation. We sent Maggie our allotment checks for her, Dolly, and little Robert Vernon. I know she shared what she had with anybody who needed it, including those allotment checks. That’s the way it was with Maggie.
I remember a night, one of the times when I ran from Harrod and was at Maggie’s, when she lived in that house back of the grain elevators. I remember she had a fire going in the backyard, and us kids were sitting on the back steps watching the sparks fly each time Sonny and Mickey reappeared like ghosts from the dark of the elevator yards with more wood and tossed it on top of the pile. It was late spring and sure cold out; our backs and backsides, too, were freezing, but our faces and hands were hot from facing the fire. Maggie and George were poking into the ashes with sticks, turning charred wood over to find the potatoes that she had set in there to bake. Some of the LaForces were down from the reservation, staying for a while, and they had brought a couple of the Dommage kids, mean little kids we had to watch around Buster because they took his bottle to drink when nobody was looking, and they hadn’t brought anything along to eat, as usual. Maggie gave them the first potatoes, took them out of the fire with her bare hands and split them so the white potato inside shone like the moon under the night sky, then handed them to the LaForces and the Dommage kids, too, like they were really important company, like they were doing her a favor eating her food. George bent over real close to his mother like he was helping her dig, and I could hear him whisper, “Why do you keep doing this? They’re a bunch of bums. Why should we be feeding them? It’s our food, and it’s our money. They act like we’re rich or something. They’re never gonna pay us back.”
“Look at us, how lucky we are—we’ve got enough to share,” Maggie answered. “We’re rich enough.”
The way it was with Maggie is, she always worked; at the mattress factory or cleaning hotel rooms or making baskets or beadwork to sell. She always worked, and so we did, too. That was other people’s business, whether they worked or not, she said. Just like it was our business that we worked. When you went to work you could be your own person, didn’t have to ask people for things all the time. We could see that. You could do what you wanted with your money. What Maggie wanted to do with her money was to give it away; a person who felt rich enough to do that would never be poor, she said, and a person who thought he didn’t have enough to give away would never be rich. “She died poor. Worked hard all her life and never had nothing, but she would give you the shirt off her back,” like George said. “She gave it all away.”
He was right. In George’s eyes, Maggie worked hard and died poor. In her own, she lived and died rich.
She was the richest person I ever knew.