“You heard me. So don’t act like you didn’t.”
“Come on, don’t make such a big deal out of it. I won’t do it next time.”
“There won’t be a next time,” I said, starting the car and backing out of my parking spot. I was getting tired of his antics. If he didn’t want to get help, I wasn’t going to make him. Let him do whatever the hell he wanted. I turned the dial on the radio, changing stations. I was looking for the news, but the folk and country station came first and I settled on that instead. My father had been in a folk band before he met my mother, and I’d grown up listening to that music at home—that was how I’d become interested in playing guitar.
Fierro took off his cap and ran his fingers through his hair. “I liked those people. Seriously.”
But that was the trouble. I could never be sure he was serious. “Yeah, whatever.”
“And the group leader, what’s-his-name, he was nice.”
“Rossi.”
“Seems like a good guy.”
“He is. You’re really going to be back next week?”
“I said I would, and I will. Wanna go bowling?”
“It’s getting late.”
“Dude. It’s only nine.”
I thought for a minute. “Let’s go to Desert Arcade.”
“Nah. That place is lame.”
“You want to go bowling or not?”
I drove down the highway until I saw the bright new sign for the Pantry—so bright you could see it from a block away—but the restaurant was already closed by the time we pulled into the parking lot. Only the bowling alley next door was open. I didn’t know why I’d wanted to come here or what I was hoping for, exactly, but ever since I’d seen Nora at McLean’s, I’d been under the grip of nostalgia.
“It’s pretty empty,” Fierro said when we walked into the arcade.
And it wasn’t hard to see why: the carpet was threadbare, the lighting was bland, the video game consoles were old. But there were ten perfectly polished lanes and plenty of room to play. I went up to the counter, and old Mr. Baker put away his newspaper and stood up. I’d gone to high school with his son, A.J., but I could tell he didn’t recognize me; I looked different without all that weight I’d once carried.
Fierro and I ordered a couple of games and rental shoes, then walked across the concourse to lane 2. Three lanes down from us, a family of five was halfway through their game. They were in matching shirts—green jerseys with white trim on the side and a league name embroidered on the back. The Pin Pushers. They were laughing at some private joke, excited at the evening that lay ahead. We started bowling. It was ’80s night and I hummed along with songs I’d first heard when I was in grade school, but Fierro said he didn’t know half of them. He’d grown up in Havana, Texas, and only moved with his mother to Desert Hot Springs when his parents split up. “They didn’t have music in Havana?” I said. “I thought you guys liked to mambo.”
“We didn’t even have a radio,” he said. “My dad was looking for things to sell to pay for his heroin, and when he found out I was hiding the radio under my bed, he took it from me and beat me up. I was eight years old. First thing my mom did when we finally moved out to California was buy us a stereo.”
He told me stories like this all the time. At least I have some good memories of the old man, I thought. My father was a drunk now, and a belligerent one at that, but he’d once been a decent father and a good husband. Helping with homework, running to the store for milk, showing up at PTA meetings. On Saturdays, he would get up early and make breakfast for the whole family—not just pancakes, but eggs and bacon and potatoes and fresh orange juice—after which we would all gather in the living room in our pajamas to watch a movie. But that last weekend, in the middle of a repeat of Freaky Friday, my mother had started to cough and couldn’t stop. I said we should call the doctor, but my father thought she’d put too much hot sauce on her eggs; he patted her knee and told her to drink some water. Two days later she died, and our family fell apart like a house of cards.
Now my sister lived only five miles from me, but our encounters were uncomfortable, which was one reason I’d asked Fierro to come with me to her barbecue the previous weekend. We’d sat under string lights on her deck, enjoying our grilled chicken and potato salad, and then she’d asked me how I was sleeping. When I told her I might have to go back on Ambien again, she’d turned it into a recruiting opportunity. Gave me a diagnosis of what ailed me and how I could fix it. All of which led to an invitation to one of her Bible study groups. Meanwhile, my dad sat in the big lawn chair, drinking and holding forth on the war in Iraq. He’d served in the Army Reserve, did a brief stint as an equipment-repair technician in Kuwait during Desert Storm, and somehow that made him an expert. But he’d never had to see intestines hanging like garlands from a pomegranate tree, never had to break down someone’s door at three a.m., never had to hold a gun on a mother while the males of the household were rounded up, never had to put a tourniquet on what was left of Sanger’s arm, never had to walk past the bodies left behind on the street, their eyes and noses and mouths obliterated by militias from one faction or another. Talking about the fallen came more easily to those who hadn’t witnessed the falling. So we’d had another one of our arguments, him insisting that Saddam was a threat to our freedoms, that we’d liberated the country from a tyrant, that we’d helped the women, and me asking him what Saddam had to do with our freedoms, where those WMDs were, and how those bombs were working out for the women. These arguments had long ago become rehearsed. Circular, even. It didn’t matter what I said, my father would always return to the same point. Saddam was a bad guy, we’re the good guys. The two of us weren’t fighting about the war, we were fighting about something else, something that had lain unspoken between us for many years.
“Bam!” Fierro said. He’d just scored his first strike of the game. “You’re going down, dude.” He sat in a swivel chair, spreading his legs in a self-satisfied way, and took a swig from his Coke.
“We’ll see about that,” I said with a laugh. I picked up a ball and, coming up to the foul line in stride, released it and hit eight pins.
“We should get us some of ’em bowling shirts,” Fierro said with a glance at the family in the lane nearby. “We could be The Deadly Pins. Wait, no. The Mortal Pins! How’s that?”
I picked up another ball and went back to the line. I knew before I threw it that I’d hit the last two pins and score a spare. The thing about Fierro was, he was a good player, but he was easily distracted. He missed two easy shots because he kept chattering. I beat him handily.
After the game, I drove him back to Desert Hot Springs. The moon had already risen and the streets were empty and quiet, but there was some kind of outdoor celebration in his apartment complex, with loud music playing and kids splashing in the pool. He eyed the partiers wearily, then got out of the car and reached through the open window to shake my hand. “See you next week, brother.”
I got back on the highway, taking my time going home. Under my headlights, the yellow lines that marked the edge of the lane passed ceaselessly. I’d turned in my final paper for the spring semester, and I had hours and hours to kill before I could hope to fall asleep. Dolly Parton’s “Do I Ever Cross Your Mind” came on the radio and, whether because of the mood it set or because of my bout of nostalgia, I found myself thinking again about that dinner with Nora, going over every detail as if to sear it in my mind.
Efraín