The Underworld by Kevin Canty

Author:Kevin Canty
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

“I’m just so fucking tired of it,” Jordan says. “All the fucking sad faces. I can be sad on my own. I don’t need their fucking help.”

“I know what you mean,” Ann says.

“I mean, boo-fucking-hoo,” Jordan says. “Then they all go home at night and sleep in their own beds.”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“I don’t, either.”

Jordan takes a sip from her little glass.

“Maybe we should go out,” she says.

“Maybe we should.”

“Get out of the house for a change.”

“I just don’t like everybody looking at me,” Ann says. “I just feel like everybody’s looking at me. You and me. All of us.”

“Fuck them.”

“That’s right.”

“Fuck all of them. They don’t know. They think they know but they don’t.”

They put their jackets on. It’s raining in the bushes outside, not much. A drizzle. Jordan’s got a nylon windbreaker that reads RIVER CITY LANES on it, along with a bowling pin that seems to be exploding. It’s a warm rain, for once.

“Buck’s?” says Ann.

“Let’s drive somewhere,” Jordan says. “Let’s go someplace where we don’t know everybody. Spokane or someplace.”

“I don’t want to get pulled over.”

“Nobody’s going to write us up. We can do anything we want to, for now, anyway. Go anyplace we want to go.”

“Let’s go to your bowling alley, then,” Ann says. “Let’s go bowling.”

This seems like a better idea on the sidewalk in front of her house than it does half an hour later, when they’re in the blinking neon daylight of the bowling alley, drunk, with pins clattering down and music blasting out of the jukebox. It all runs together into a noisy blur of light and sound. They get a lane and a score sheet and some drinks and then they get the shoes, Ann had forgotten about the shoes, she hasn’t been bowling since high school—and even then she had a horror of the shoes, the places all those other feet had been. She slips her own nice Keds off and puts her feet into the bowling shoes and feels the ancient contamination in them. Oh, she hates this.

“Okay,” Jordan says. “Ready to bowl.”

“Don’t you need a ball?”

“Oh, yeah,” says Jordan. They go to the rack of house balls in black and pink and swirly green, those finger holes in each, contaminated like the shoes. Ann guesses at the size and weight and ends up with a purple one, a friendly enough color. The finger holes are a bit too big but this is all right with Ann, who remembers, now, her old fear of hurling the ball and getting yanked along with it by one of her fingers stuck in a hole. Not that anything like this had ever happened. It just seemed possible, in a horrible way.

“I don’t know if I can do this,” Ann says.

“Fuck you,” Jordan says. “We’re here. We’re bowling.”

They take their lane, try to remember how the score sheet works. They think they know and then Jordan hits all the pins down on her second try and it turns out they can’t remember.

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