While she showered, I drove to the store to pick up new filter pads. It was a simple chore, I’d done it many times before. But this swamp cooler was a little more difficult because I had to work around the turtledove’s nest, all while she—or was it he?—hovered worriedly around me. I unscrewed the panels and pulled out the pads; they were filled with dust, sand, and pollen. The metal braces that held them in place were old and rusty, but I managed to ease out the pads. By then the sun was fully out; I could feel beads of sweat traveling down my spine. With a brush I cleaned the trays, leaving a trail of dirt on the ground. Then I slid the new pads into place, the braces closing around them with a satisfying click.
I called to her to turn the cooler on and was glad to hear the motor starting with a roar. After tossing the old pads in the trash bins, I went back inside. I found her standing across from the vent, eyes closed and arms wide open, enjoying the cool air. “I might not move from this spot,” she said. Her hair was down on her shoulders, the way I liked it, and under her white shirt her nipples looked brown and hard. In three quick steps I reached her and, with my hands still dark with dirt, drew her to me.
A.J.
Running a bowling alley means having to worry about two things. There’s the mechanical part—the pinsetter machines, the sweeping bars, the ball returns—and then there’s the people part. By far the hardest part of the job is dealing with people. I don’t mean the staff. We had some good employees at Desert Arcade, including one guy who’d been with us since my dad opened for business in the 1970s. I mean the customers: parents who allowed their kids to wander down the lanes, idiots who pitched a second ball when the first one didn’t come back, league bowlers who threw a fit when they didn’t score a perfect game. The challenge was dealing with all of them without losing my temper or my smile. It was a struggle sometimes. But I had to help out my dad, who was seventy-eight years old and had trouble keeping up with his business.
Both of my parents were old. In fact, they’d given up trying to have a baby by the time I was born. My mom was forty-four when she had me, my dad forty-nine. It was a miracle, they said, having their prayers answered after so many years. Every miracle has a cost, though, that’s what I’ve come to learn, and it’s not always paid by those who owe it. When I was a little boy, people would stop my dad and me at the community park or the grocery store just to tell him how cute his grandson looked. “Look at those blond curls,” they’d marvel. He would always correct them. “That’s my son,” he would say. At some point, he got tired of it. He stopped holding my hand when we went out, so it wouldn’t invite questions or comments from total strangers. It was easier for him, I guess. Not for me.
My mom, on the other hand, she never cared what other people thought. Even though her age kept her out of the PTA’s social circles, she volunteered in the school cafeteria at lunch and helped organize the Halloween carnival every year. We spent a lot of time together, especially on weekends when my dad was at the bowling alley for fourteen hours straight. I get my love of dogs from her. She’s always had dogs, sometimes four or five at a time, all of them sable-and-white rough collies. They’re a fantastic breed—smart, trainable, extremely devoted. When I was in middle school, my mom started breeding them and entering them in dog shows all over California. She and I would drive hundreds of miles to compete with one of them, and I got to see a lot of the state that way.
You’d think that spending so much time with my mom would have made it easier for me to talk to girls, but it didn’t. My mom was old and plain and agreeable, and the girls at my school were young and pretty and looking for trouble. Whenever I tried to impress them, it backfired. They’d roll their eyes or laugh. Do you know what it does to a boy when a girl laughs at him? Every time it happened, I tried to think of something clever to say, but that only made it worse. And I really hated that everyone called me A.J., which wasn’t my name, it was just a nickname that a teacher had given me in kindergarten, and somehow it stuck, even with my family. I spent most of my time with my dogs. They were less complicated than people.
Everything changed in freshman year. I’d always been a skinny kid, but I was pretty strong and flexible, and during tryouts Coach Johnson saw something in me. Natural ability, you could say. He put me on the wrestling team. There were fifteen of us across five weight classes, and already ranked second in the county even before I joined. What appealed to me about wrestling was the simplicity of it—you didn’t kick a ball or use a racket or wear elaborate gear, and you didn’t depend on someone else to help you score a point. You relied only on yourself, on your own ability. I fell in love with wrestling. Unless I was sitting in class or taking care of my dogs, I was training at the gym.
Coach Johnson taught me a lot, maybe more than anyone has ever taught me before or since. “Remember,” he would say, “what you practice on the mat has to be practiced off the mat. Focus. Speed. Opportunity. FSO. You’ve got to be watchful, quick, and seize any chance you get, because life will rarely give you a second shot.” We won all our matches that season, and got a statewide ranking for the first time in our school’s history. Between my training, my diet, and the fact that I grew a foot during that year, I looked amazing. It sounds conceited to say it, but I don’t know how else to put it: I looked amazing.
By the time I started sophomore year, it was the girls who tried to impress me, by decorating my locker or making playlists for my training runs. One day in biology, Mrs. Barron asked us to split into small groups for a new project she had for us, an illustrated booklet on cellular respiration. I hated group projects because of that awkward moment when everyone chose their friends and I was left scrambling for a partner. But right away someone tapped my shoulder. It was Neil Gilbert, a lame kid with oozing acne on his face. My secret nickname for him was Crater Face. “Wanna do the booklet together, A.J.?” he asked.
“I’m already doing it with Stacey,” I said, and turned back and winked at Stacey Briggs. That was another thing about being on the wrestling team: it had given me some confidence.
“Yeah, we’re working together,” Stacey said, flashing me a smile. She wasn’t quite as pretty as Maddie Clarke, the girl everyone had a crush on, but she had a great personality and was always up for anything. I used to call her Energizer Stacey. She lived up to it, too, because she did all the writing for the project. She made up a cast of characters for the story, like Hermione the Human, Petunia the Plant, Ginny the Glucose, Moaning Myrtle the Mitochondria, and I penciled all the illustrations and inked them in full color. It took me a week, but our project booklet looked like a graphic novel.
I spent a lot of time at Stacey’s apartment because her parents were out of the picture and her brother Lee didn’t mind that she brought me home. He liked that I was on the wrestling team, said that wrestling was part of Greek and Roman culture. “It’s a civilized sport,” he said as he stretched his legs on the coffee table, “not like some of that savage stuff you see nowadays.” He was watching Falling Down on television. It was an early scene, when Michael Douglas walks into a convenience store to ask for change so he can make a phone call to his daughter, but the Korean clerk wants him to buy something first.
“Why doesn’t that guy just give him the change?” Stacey asked as she sat down on the couch next to her brother.
“Because all they care about is money,” Lee told her. “You kids want some popcorn?”
“Not me,” I said.