In For a Penny by James P. Blaylock Read Free Book Online Page A

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