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the pit just as the ball arrived. This was especially bad at night when setting for the leagues. The men were often drunk and threw very hard, so the pins ricocheted and became four-pound wooden missiles, and the setter was tired and simply forgot his timing and wound up bending over just as the ball—sixteen pounds of granite-hard material—cameroaring into the pit like a train. It was, as Harold said later when it happened to him,
exactly
like kissing a grenade. Bones were broken, setters sometimes knocked unconscious, and a night without serious bruises and bleeding wounds was unusual.
    All for seven cents a line. Figuring two lines an hour on each alley, and setting two alleys if everything was working right, it was possible to make twenty-eight cents an hour, plus tips, which they would sometimes slide down the gutter—a dime, maybe as much as a quarter. The best week I ever had I made twelve dollars and forty cents working every night from six to midnight and both weekends, setting for non-league bowlers.
    It was a world Harold didn’t understand, even when I tried to tell him about it, and so one day when he stopped me in the hall and asked me if they needed pinsetters, I was more than surprised.
    “You want to set pins?”
    He shrugged. “I need money and it’s the only job available.”
    “Why do you need money? Aren’t your folks able to help you?”
    He shook his head. “I need the money for anew ham radio transmitter. I want to move up to a forty-watt and make a new dipole antenna as well. I need forty-eight dollars and fifty-seven cents and my father doesn’t approve of my ham ambitions and since there are no other jobs available …”
    And that’s how it happened.
    It was, of course, a complete catastrophe. While I wasn’t athletic I had a fair amount of hand-eye coordination. Harold seemed to have a kind of reverse coordination and would frequently—as he might have said—do
exactly
the wrong thing at
exactly
the wrong time.
    By the end of his first night of setting pins he’d taken a ball directly in the stomach and two pins in the head, had a nosebleed that had splattered his shirt and left him looking like the survivor of a car wreck, and had picked up a limp. At the end of our shift I watched Harold as the manager handed him a dollar and eight cents.
    He looked at the money Ernie put in his hands. He folded the bill neatly, put it in his pocket and staggered down the stairs and out of the bowling alley.
    “Are you all right?” I caught up with him. “I mean, you look …”
    “I am not all right. But I have worked and been paid. If my calculations are correct I need to do this for thirty-six-point-eight more days before I will have enough for the transmitter. A person can do practically anything for a short time if he doesn’t think he has to do it for life. I’m looking at it in this manner. If I thought I had to reset bowling pins in a pit for the rest of my life”—he sighed—“I would hold my breath until I died.”
    It would be nice to be able to say Harold set pins for thirty-six-point-eight more days and bought the transmitter but it would not be
exactly
true because he had been there only four days when Chimmer arrived.
    I’d never thought of Chimmer as working. I just assumed that people would give him money to make him stay away—which I would gladly have done if I’d had any money. But one afternoon he came in and Ernie, always desperate for pinsetters, hired him on the spot.
    It was something from my worst nightmares. To be working at a difficult and dangerous job where injury was not only possible but probable and then to look up and see Chimmer evilly grinning in the next pit over put me very close to my limits.
    But for the first few nights the work was hard enough to keep even Chimmer busy and exhausted. He just took his money and went home like the rest of us.
    By the end of the week, though, he was back in form, making my life as close to hell as he could.