Tilt

Extra Ball

Cliff Dingley pulled a mustache hair from his mouth,

A single hair that had been bugging him since just after Miranda had plunged the ball.

She was on her second multiball of this ball, so the hair had been bugging him for a while.

When Miranda had cradled the last two balls of the multi, one in the crotch of each flipper, Cliff reached in and pulled.

The hair was all white.

Some of the delivery drivers from the internet platforms called him Mario. He was aging out of that nickname.

Maybe he’d dye his mustache.

Online ordering had saved his business, Pepperoni Jabroni’s.

Cliff had saved the business in the 80’s himself because he loved it growing up.

Drivers from all over picked up his pizza to deliver to destinations he never would have sent “his guys”, especially not with gas prices so high.

His own online portal had been a godsend, orders humming in off the little printer mounted across from the oven, always with a gentle dusting of flour that seemed to  hang in the air of that part of the kitchen.

Miranda blew her brown hair from her eyes, spit pressed the lock to her head, and flipped the ball from the right flipper to the left ramp, now needing six consecutive Monster Loops to light extra ball.

No one lingered at PJ’s anymore.

They ordered online and either had the pie delivered or picked it up when they were told via computer screen the pizza would be ready.

No one, not one single soul, walked in off the street anymore.

Except Miranda.

And she didn’t come for pizza.

She came to beat Cliff Dingley’s high score on Turtle Pond Tremors pinball.

Cliff didn’t know Miranda very well. 

His attempts to get to know her better were met with witty deflections and expertly orchestrated changes of subject.

Cliff, an only child adopted by a family of Welsh descent who looked like a video game plumber who might own a pizzeria like the one Cliff did, knew one thing:

Nobody in the world cared about his vintage pinball machine, or his vintage pinball machine high score, but Miranda.

The high scores were easy to erase, and Cliff could have done it. He could have let Miranda set her own high score and set her personal best, continuing to top it.

He realized, late after close once, when he almost erased his score, that if he did that she might never come back.

Not that he needed the ten bucks or fourteen that she poured into the game each week.

Hell, he offered to open the machine and put hundreds of credits on there for her. That was simple too.

Miranda refused his offer.

“I wanna keep it completely legit, Cliffy.”

Today, with an extra ball, Miranda had a legit shot at breaking the high score Cliff had set sometime around Christmas of 2004.

Even he hadn’t been able to top it since.

Miranda’s initials were on the board two through five, the maximum number of winner’s initials the game saved.

MMW.

Miranda Marie Woods

Cliff Dingley couldn’t be sure that anyone had been unkind to Miranda Marie Woods.

She always came in alone.

She was pleasant, always, but not friendly.

She was obsessed with beating something.

Maybe she worked in a hospital and did things that were meaningful every day.

Cliff wasn’t certain about much.

He tried to be her friend.

She resisted.

Maybe because he was older.

Maybe she had dozens of friends and they went to lavish parties when she wasn’t in Pepperoni Jabroni’s 

Miranda’s second ball drained when she needed one more Monster Loop for extra ball.

She‘d have to trigger the revolution before the game registered that the second ball was gone.

She flipped the ball up, but it caught the edge of a saucer, the small circular indents in a pinball game that collect the ball for scores and lit features, then kick them back out onto the playfield.

Miranda’s last chance went off course and hit a post.

She hip checked Turtle Pond Tremors gently to try to give herself a chance to keep that ball in play.

The machine tilted, the backglass going dark.

Cliff remembered when teenagers would line up to play. 

Kurt Rothwick once picked up the machine and moved it halfway to the rest room door.

Back then, the tilt feature was being triggered every other game.

The glass used to have burn marks from cigarettes.

Cliff had learned to work on the machines himself because he got tired of calling the techs.

“Dammit,” Miranda said. “I thought that game was gonna be the one.”

She looked at Cliff.

“Tough break,” he said. “I think the wood on the edge of that saucer is worn.”

Miranda shrugged.

If he could read her mind, he would say she was thinking that things had always been a bit against the grain for her, that paths hadn’t worn in her favor.

It was just a guess.

Miranda put her initials in Hi Score 3, bumping down her lower scores.

She thanked Cliff, gave him a little wave, and walked out.

Her shirt was kind of dirty.

Her gait was a glorified scuffle.

There was something, something sad about her.

Cliff wasn’t a shrink.

Some of his own problems had been solved for him by technology, through no real effort of his own.

BaShawn Winan was in the kitchen, calmly tossing dough for a small.

Dinner rush was at least 40 minutes away, and that rush would be in the form of a humming printer, and not people.

***

Cliff Dingley got his toolbox from the office.

With a little effort, he could erase his high score and elevate Miranda to the top.

But that would be the opposite of what she wanted, the opposite of what was even right, ethical, reasonable.

It would be a fix that created a bigger problem than the original.

Cliff unlocked the game, grabbed the apron and lifted the playfield.

Inside every pinball machine is a tilt bob weight on a pendulum

Around that weight is a detector ring.

The detector ring is a solid piece of metal. It can’t be altered in any way.

But Cliff knew he could lower the weight itself, which gives the weight more room to swing, and makes the game more forgiving.

***

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