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By Root 501 0

’t see the entire office, in fact we are looking in at the office from about six feet up in the door a foot from it on a stone step level with the office floor, we are just about as high as The Shadow’s nose as we look in with The Shadow whose hawk visage slants from us in a Huge. My father never looks up, except briefly, coldly, to see who it is, then a mere look of the eye signifying greeting–in fact no greeting at all, he just looks up and down again with that bemused perused expression my father always had, as though something was reading him and eating him inside and he all wrap’t and silent in it. So St. Louis, his face doesn’t budge anyway, just addresses the three– ”Ca vas? (it goes?)”— ”Tiens, St Louisl Ta pas faite ton 350 Tautre soir–ta mal au cul (you didn’t make your 350 t’other night, you got a sore ass).” This being said by Vauriselle, a tall, unpleasant fellow that my father didn’t like–no answer from St. Louis who has just a fixed hawklike grin. Now Sonny Alberge, tall and athletic and handsome, became Boston Braves shortstop in a few years, with a big clean-teeth smile, a real bumpkin boy in his prime at home, his father was a little sad shrivelly man who adored him, Sonny responded to his father like an Ozark hero grave and Billy-the-Kid tender, but with French Canadian stem gravity that knows what’s coming to everybody in Heaven later on inside Time–it’s ever been so in the bottom of my soul, the stars are crying down the sides of Heaven–Sonny says to Louis– “Une game?” St. Louis’ grin though moveless gains significance, and he opens his blue hawklike lips to say with sudden surprising young man voice “Oaf–and they look at one another the challenge and cut out to bowl– Vauriselle and Joe Plouffe (always a short solid wry listener and chieftain among the heroes of Pawtucketville) follow– my father’s left alone in the office with his papers, looks up, checks the time, slaps cigar in mouth and cuts out following the boys in a thing-to-do of his own, fiddling for keys, bemused, as someone yells out at him in the next view

SCENE 23 (as he steps down from office with fat busy proprietor key look at chain from pocket), from the auras of smoke and pooltable glow a dark shaded man with a cuestick in the pissy background of cans and wood is calling “Hey, Emil, il mouille dans ton pissoir (it’s raining in your toilet)—a tu que chose comme un plat pour mettre entours? (got anything like a pan to put under?)” There’s another poolshark in the dark green background of blue rain evening in the golden club with its dank stone floor and shiny black bowling balls-In smoke–shouts (as Emil my father is muttering and nodding yes) (and St. Louis, Joe, Sonny, Vauriselle cross the scene in file, like Indians, Shadow’s removing his coat)— “Pauvre Emil commence a avoir des trou dans son pissoir, cosse wui va arrivez asteur, whew!—foura quon use le livre pour bouchez les trous (Poor Emil’s starting to have holes in his pissery, what’s gonna happen now, whew! we’ll have to use the book to block the holes!!!)” “Hey la tu deja vu slivre la—(Hey didja ever see that book?)” a poolshark in the light, young Leo Martin saying to LeNoire who lived directly across the street from the club, on Gershom, adjoining Blezan’s store, in a house that always seemed to me haunted by sad flowerpots of linoleum eternity in a sunny void also darkened by an inner almost idiot gloom French Canadian homes seem to have (as if a kid with water on the head was hiding in the closet somewhere)—LeNoire a cool little cat, I knew his kidbrother and exchanged marbles with him, they were related to some dim past relation I’d been told about–ladies with great white hair periwigs sewing in the Lowell rooms, wow– LeNoire: (we’re watching from the end of the plywood wall, but almost on alley Number One at this spread-out smoky scene and talk) “Quoi?—Non. Jaime ra ca, squi est? (what, no, I’d like that, where’s it?” LeNoire says this from a crouch over his cueball– He was a very good bowler too, St. Louis had trouble beating him bowling–faintly we see brown folding chairs