All their husbands smelled bad, and it wasn’t just because they were garbage men. The tips of their thumbs and two fingers were rancid and rough, perpetually sweaty and sour from being jabbed into bowling balls. Two of the guys were gone—one dead and one long missing. The other five were on the other side of the divider wall, flinging their black bombs of glory down the gleaming maple lanes.
All seven of the wives came without fail to Sunset Bowl. They sat at the bar—seven brides for seven bowlers—but never touched a ball. They came there to drink and dish, to smoke and soak up the sound (shouts of triumph, groans of despair, rolling thunder, the melancholy whine of the juke box.) An outsider might wonder why they gathered at the bar so religiously, week after week, when they didn’t care if their husbands had near-perfect games or if their balls careened into the gutter.
One of the wives nursed a gin and Squirt all night long. Another liked her Seven and Sevens strong and no ice. Two of the wives went for plain Genny Cream Ale. One never touched booze anymore, though she didn’t give up sitting at the bar with a pack of Newports and her pink Bic lighter. The oldest, Lottie the war bride, had three shots of peppermint schnapps, a little taste of the old country. And the seventh garbage wife had trained the bartender (depending on the night either Ray or Roy, the Ziller twins) to mix up her own special concoction, which she called an Ajax, because it was, as the TV ads said, “Stronger than dirt.”
There was no leader and no followers and not much of a pecking order. Even with all the disappointments at home, all the haggling over kids, sex, and money problems, each one of them still wore her wedding ring, even Darlene (whose man went out one night to buy some laxative gum and never came back) and Edie (whose husband was rolling night after night in the heavenly alleys.) “Thunder is the dear departed bowling for the Lord.” That’s what Edie told her kids. “When you hear thunder, you hear your daddy. Lightning strikes, right? Strikes and spares.” She didn’t hate Wayne for leaving her with three kids and a mortgage. “Anybody can get killed in a scrap metal compactor accident, right?” He didn’t just fall in. He jumped in to save another guy’s life. A minute later, they both got shot out the back in a three-ton cube of crushed auto salvage. No way to loosen up the steel and plastic and fiberglass, so they went to their next life via the scrap smelter.
Bee liked to say she was a “big busty bottle blonde from Buffalo.” Vi was the loudest, hoarse and braying, and Ivy—the only one who could be called pretty—was the quietest. Lottie still had a German accent and dyed her hair the color of rusted-out tank treads. That left Kathy Ann, the teenaged bride, youngest of the seven, not yet soured by life and by death, not quite reconciled to the fact that her man was going to reek for the next half century.
All the husbands, dead or alive, were garbage men, and for years they’d parked their great stench-wagons out back, out of sight. The wives came in from the strip-mall’s front lot, Vi and Ivy driving alone, Lottie getting picked up by Bee in her so-called Zipmobile, and the other three in a dirty white mini-van.
Sunset Bowl’s neon sign was old and feeble, the colors bleeding into each other. It had shown brightly as a real sunset once, but now it was like a great buzzing bruise. A narrow entryway, easily missed, and a long steep flight of steps, took the wives into the rumble, the smoke and stink.
Vi, ripe as a vine-drooping tomato, red-faced, shiny, with bruises and old scars, said almost every week, “this is where marriages go to die,” but still these wives had not given up.
There were seven stools (the seats patched with duct tape) at the bar for the garbage wives, and seven chipped ceramic ashtrays which were overflowing by the time they headed home. Depending on the type and target of the gossip on a given night, the wives took their places in different spots. But at the far end was always Darlene, who sat with Otto, her de-stinked pet skunk, in her lap. “Cost me a bundle to have the operation, but he’s smarter than any dog or cat. And loyal as hell too. Nobody loves me like Otto does.” She got the skunk after her husband, Otto the First, vanished into the night in search of Feenamint.
Besides the force of habit, the comfort of familiar faces and voices, cheap laughs and booze, and the invisible presence of their men rolling and cursing, the juke box was what kept them coming back. It was a long way, a good thousand miles, to the heartland of the south, but at Sunset Bowl, the jukebox was stocked with country western tunes, some hits, some misses, all of them bitter hymns to dread and suffering. No one played “Stand By Your Man” or “I Fall to Pieces.” The regulars at Sunset pumped in their quarters to hear “Pardon Me, I Have Someone to Kill” by Johnny Paycheck, “Rubber Room” and “I’ve Enjoyed As Much of This as I Can Stand,” by Porter Wagoner. Hank Williams’ “Cold, Cold Heart” got a lot of play, and so did the Louvin Brothers’ tale of woeful worship, “Satan is Real.”
Ray or Roy, nobody could tell them apart, was the first one to notice the stranger. He cracked open a Cream Ale and placed it (there was no sliding of bottles or glasses on the bar’s gummy surface) in front of Edie, then turned to see a figure coalesce out of the pearly haze. She was alone, didn’t carry a bowling bag, and—all the wives were sure of this as they turned one at a time to follow the bartender’s captive gaze—had never been there before.
When it was all over, when the deed was done, none of the wives could agree on what the stranger had looked like. “Beautiful” was too strong a word, but she certainly didn’t belong among the garbage wives, the local alone-drinkers, the bowlers who yelled through the pass-through window between games for beer, the old lady who bought drinks for the occasional passably-handsome guy who’d stopped in on the way home from work.
Though the wives would all swear later that the song wasn’t on the juke box until the stranger appeared, now came the Monroe Brothers’ plaintive wail.
Oh, sinner you better ready
Oh, you better get ready hallelujah
Oh, sinner you better get ready,
The time’s a coming when the sinner must die.
“That’s right,” the stranger said, still keeping her distance from the bar and the seven wives. Whiteness—that much the wives would agree on afterward. Clear, flawless, milky-pale skin. What she wore, how she did her hair (and even if it was blond or brunette, black or Irish red), her shoes, her figure, her sexy-wry smile: none of them recalled her the same way. Except for her complexion. “She sure had pretty skin,” Ivy said, in a sad whisper. “Made me want to reach out and touch her.”
The verse of the song was short:
Oh God gave Noah the rainbow sign
It won’t be water, but be fire next time
Time’s a coming when the sinner must die.
The stranger pointed to Roy-or-Ray and said, “What’s the best thing you’ve got?”
It took him a minute to understand. Nobody came to Sunset Bowl to drink good liquor. “Well, there’s a bottle of Wild Turkey 101 that’s hardly been touched.”
“A round for all the ladies,” the stranger said. “On me.”
Once in a while the seven wives had the bar all to themselves. Tonight, for a good hour, nobody emerged from the dimly-lit stairway. The gray-haired souse who usually anchored the far end of the bar hadn’t shown up. None of the bowlers came around the divider wall for refills. The balls kept rolling and the teams kept up their chatter and complaining, but it felt as though they were all very far away now.
Out of the juke box, the Monroes poured their warning.
I thought I heard all the preachers say
You better get down on your knees and pray
Time’s a coming when the sinner must die.
The bartender opened a cabinet and took out the bottle. He rubbed the dust off on his sleeve and set eight shot glasses up on the splotched and grimy bar top.
“I don’t drink no more,” Ivy said, with a quaver in her voice.
“That’s okay,” the stranger said. “You’re fine either way. But I don’t want to leave you out. You’re all part of this.”
“Part of what?” Vi was always the first one to argue or push back on anything. “Who the hell are you to—”
“Not hell. No such thing.”
Darlene hugged Otto the skunk closer as the stranger approached the bar. “What do you want with us?”
“First, take a sip or two. Not bad, not bad at all.”
Darlene tasted the bourbon, and had to admit it was fine.
“You’ve got a decision to make. You ladies have to choose which one of your husbands is going to say goodbye tonight, goodbye for good.”
“Bullshit,” Vi said, though without her usual bluster.
Ivy gazed into the shot glass and as if delving into its mystique. “You’re saying we’ve got a choice? This is for real?”
“What are you?” Kathy Ann asked. Not “who” but “what.” The youngest, only married a year, still she understood some things the older wives never let themselves dwell on.
“White Light,” the stranger said. “I’m the White Light that everyone sees at the end.”
“Bullshit,” Vi muttered, but she didn’t refuse the shot of fine bourbon.
“So, you’re the Grim Reaper?” Edie said, also sipping at the mellow amber nectar.
“This isn’t the Middle Ages or some horror movie crap. Do you see a big scythe or a monk’s robe?”
“Then what are you?” Kathy Ann asked again.
“White Light.” She said it as a name. “What everybody sees at the end of the tunnel. Only once in a while things get a little out of whack, not exactly according to the usual set-up. So instead of people going to the White Light, she comes to them sometimes.” She threw back the shot of bourbon, set it on the bar top and nodded for a refill. “One of your husbands is going to go tonight. It doesn’t matter which one. It’s up to you ladies to decide. One of them will see me and I’m White Light.”
“You’re crazy.” That was from Bee.
“You give me the creeps. Get the hell out of here.” That was from Edie.
“I told you already: no such thing as hell. Or heaven. Pearly gates, puffy clouds, harps and all that foolishness. None of it is real.”
“And you’re the White Light?” Ivy’s voice was even quieter than usual. Getting a nod, she lifted the shot glass, as though considering what it would taste like, what it would feel like, but then set it down.
“If this is supposed to be a joke, it ain’t funny,” Kathy Ann said. The song ended with a mournful sigh from the Monroe Brothers. The juke box clicked and hummed and out of the speakers came Hank Williams, singing “Praise the Lord, I Saw the Light.”
The stranger nodded, as if acknowledging applause. “That’s me.”
“What’s you?” Darlene was usually the last one to figure things out.
“Hank was a walking talking drinking stinking disaster area,” the stranger said, “But he got some things dead right. He saw the light and he didn’t fight it. Whiskey and Falstaff beer and a couple of shots of morphine and chloral hydrate and he saw the light. Dead in the back of his powder blue Cadillac with the blanket falling off him. He was ice cold when they found him.”
“You’re trying to tell us that you were there?” Ivy asked.
“You could say I’m everywhere. But right now I’m right here. And you ladies don’t have much time to decide which one of your husbands is going to say goodbye for the last time.”
They all felt the peacefulness in her voice. And at a 101 proof, the Wild Turkey was also softening their resistance. “Well, my Wayne is done gone,” Edie said. “We couldn’t have a real wake. The undertaker said there was no way to work out the parts that were him in that crushed up hunk of scrap. So, leave me out. I got nothing to say about it.”
“And Otto the First, damn him, damn his guts and his constipation gum, is long gone.” Darlene gave her pet skunk a couple of strokes the whole way down his white stripe. “Haven’t seen or heard from him in years.”
That left five other garbage wives.
“We really get to decide?” Vi said. “Then go on over to the lanes and find my son of a bitch husband Joey. He’s been sniffing around Pammy, that fat whore on the Lawn Patrol team. They’ve got those goddamn bright green shirts. You can take her too. Both of them, tonight. Go on. I don’t even want to say goodbye.”
White Light asked if the others agreed to that.
Lottie said, “Maybe you better take my George. He’s got the melanoma and it’s spreading. The doctor said he’s only got a year or two left. Soon enough he won’t be able to lift a ball. It might be all for the best.”
Bee downed her bourbon. “Well, I found Lou last week in the garage playing around with his old service revolver. Russian roulette—that’s what they call it, right? I don’t know if he’ll really do it, but it scared the living shit out of me.”
“Looks like we’ve got plenty of good possibilities,” White Light was almost purring. “What about these two?” Ivy was sitting next to Kathy Ann. White Light lay a gentle hand on Ivy’s shoulder and ran the plush of her thumb along Kathy Ann’s cheek.
“We’ve only been married a year.” The youngest garbage wife’s voice was full of pleading. “Well, a year and a few weeks. I know Darren goofs off too much and gets to work late sometimes, but he’s not really a bad sinner. He’ll shape up once we have the baby. And he’s so young. Some of these others have had years and years. They had their chances.”
“You’re knocked up? We need to plan a shower.” Bee was the one who liked a party with all the trimmings. “You shoulda told me sooner.”
Kathy Ann gave her a pained smile. “I was kind of waiting. I haven’t even told Darren yet.”
Ivy placed her hand on White Light’s, as though to keep it there. “Marv and me aren’t really married,” she said. Some of the wives knew this and some didn’t. It was no shock to anyone, and no big secret, but her confession changed the feel in the barroom. Cigarettes were perched on the rims of ashtrays, the tips glowing, smoke rising as if sending up ghost-signals. “So maybe you should count him out. It’s got to be a real legal husband?”
“I don’t need to see your paperwork.”
“We’ve been together since the day I turned eighteen. Went off with him and never looked back. So maybe—”
“Living in sin,” Bee announced, then broke up laughing.
“You’re one to talk,” Vi said, jabbing out her menthol with a dozen other butts. “You were fooling around with that guy—what was his name? The one with the drunk leprechaun tattoo. We all knew and nobody gave you any shit for it.”
The voices were getting tangled, one wife talking over the top of another, cutting in, pushing back.
“I’m just saying.”
“Well, maybe you shouldn’t. Nobody here has been an angel.”
“Except Ivy. She was a virgin when she run off with Marv. Least that’s what she always said.”
“We all said a lot of bullshit. Any more of that Wild Turkey left?”
“Well Joey wouldn’t be so friendly with Fat Pammy if you weren’t such a bitch sometimes.”
“Look who’s talking.”
“And why do you think Lou has been fooling around with that pistol? Your place is no bed of roses.”
“It’s nothing. He’s just a little boy playing with toys.”
“Marv said— ”
“Marv doesn’t know shit.”
“He did a whole year at community college.”
“If he’s so smart why’s he driving a truck? He’s no better than the others.”
“I heard, and I’m not saying from who or where, that Otto didn’t just have problems with his bowels.”
“Jesus. Leave that alone, will you? He’s been gone for years.”
“Who the hell is picking these songs?” Out of the juke box came Hank Williams’ “Angel of Death.”
The wives got quieter, though like a stew pot with the flame underneath turned down, they were all still simmering. Each one knew the answer to Hank’s question: “Are you ready to meet the Angel of Death?”
“If there’s no heaven and no hell,” Kathy Ann ventured to ask, “then what happens afterward?”
White Light took Kathy Ann’s hand. “You meet me.”
The girl jerked her hand away. “You said you were here for a husband.”
“That’s right, but maybe not one of the guys on the team.” She nodded toward the pass-through window, a little square giving a glimpse of the far side.
“Then who?”
“Roy, or is it Ray—anything left in that bottle?” White Light asked.
He poured again and now they all could see the tremor in his hand.
“Roy’s married and Ray’s not,” Edie said.
“And which one have you been fooling around with?” Vi trained her bleary eyes on Edie.
“None of your business.”
“Somebody’s gonna die tonight. Maybe it’s your man. We all know about you.”
“Wayne got himself killed, the damn fool, ten years ago,” Edie said. “So that means I’m no adulteress. Maybe it’s not all on the up and up, but I’m not married anymore. I can do whatever I want, with whoever I want.”
“Unless he’s married.” Darlene aimed a piercing glance at the man behind the bar. “And I’ll bet you a hundred bucks you can’t tell which one is which.”
Edie glared back. “I should never have told you nothing.”
“You haven’t been real careful about it. We all got eyes and ears.” Ivy joined in. “Which one is it, Roy or Ray?”
“Both, I’d bet.” Bee gave her a sneer. “You may not be married, but one of them is.”
The bartender was edging away, toward the storeroom door.
“Stay where you are,” White Light commanded. It wasn’t loudness nor harshness, and there was no implied threat, but those four words froze him in his tracks. “Are you Ray or Roy?”
He shrugged, as though he didn’t know.
“You’ve been sneaking around with Edie for a long time,” Kathy Ann said. “Everybody knows it.” She hesitated, backtracking. “Or your brother.”
“I’m not so sure there are two of them.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“You ever seen them together?”
White Light held her hands out to the barkeep, as though in welcome. “Just like Hank. You saw the light. Praise the Lord.”
“But I’m not—”
“Liar,” Lottie snarled. “You’re going to hell.”
White Light sighed, shaking her head. “No such thing.”
“Well, there should be.”
“You’re really not going to tell us which one you are?” Darlene asked.
“Does it matter?” Roy-or-Ray got out another shot glass, poured himself some of the good bourbon and drank.
“But there are two of you, right? One married and one not.”
“I said, don’t be stupid,” Bee growled.
“And I want to know,” Darlene asked. “Who’s who and what’s what.”
The bartender closed the door on the pass-through window exactly as the song ended and the juke box stood glowing, almost throbbing, but silent.
Kathy Ann whispered, “He’s the one you come for.”
Vi rapped her shot glass on the bar top, like a judge rapping her gavel. “We got to vote.”
“Take him,” Ivy said. “If there really are twins, then his brother will be back tomorrow. If not—well, then we really know.”
Bee nodded. “We had a little fling once. Then he said we was done. Just like that.”
Lottie said she didn’t care who had to go, as long as it wasn’t her George. Not yet. “He’s got a few good months left.”
Darlene petted her skunk, murmuring, and then seeming to listen. “It’s up to you, Edie. What do you think?”
“Ray or Roy,” she said. “You best get ready.”
The bartender came around from his place, wiped his hands on his apron and said just one word. “Okay.” Then he and White Light went through the swirling smoke, up the stairway, and were gone.
“Any of that bourbon left?” Bee said at last.
“A shot or two.”
“Hand that bottle over here. I need another drink,” Bee said.
Ivy hadn’t tasted liquor in ten years; she passed her still untasted initial shot of Wild Turkey to Edie.
“You need this more than Bee.
Vi raised her glass to make a toast. “Here’s to Roy.”
“Or Ray.” Kathy Ann’s shot glass was empty, but she raised it anyway.
“He might’ve been a cheat and a liar, but he but he was a good man behind the bar.”
Without anyone putting in a quarter, the juke box came to life again. It was Hank again, doing the old gospel tune, “Where the Soul Never Dies.”
No sad farewells
No tear-dimmed eyes
Where all is love
And the soul never dies.