The Other Americans(33)
“I’ve never been out of the country. We went to Mexico once, but I was, like, nine months old. It doesn’t count.” I reached for the second half of my sandwich. “You probably travel a lot.”
“Not really. We couldn’t go to Morocco when I was little because my dad was afraid he’d get arrested, and then later when we finally went, all we did was go from house to house, visiting relatives. We didn’t go to museums or monuments or anything.” After a moment she said, “But I saw acrobats at the market in Marrakesh.”
She asked what books I read, what shows I watched, and she really listened when I answered. We didn’t have the same taste. I loved The Simpsons; she never watched it. I devoured the Harry Potter books; she’d given up on them after the first two. She raved about Zora Neale Hurston; I hadn’t read her. We agreed on Mark Twain and The Princess Bride, but about nothing else in between. She had long hair in which her earrings got tangled every time she shook her head. I had an urge to reach across the tray and untangle them for her.
Then Sonya Mukherjee came to find us; the matinee was about to start. “Come on, you guys. Everybody’s already inside.” Nora stood up and held out a hand to help me off the ground. That morning she had been just another girl, but by the time I’d raised myself off my knees she was the only girl. For weeks afterward, I felt tethered to her. It was her face I looked for first when I got to school, her smile I tried to draw when I made a joke, her body I hoped to brush against when we were in line. I spent my time waiting for first-period English and fifth-period music, bookends to endless days of boredom, but I could never find another moment with her. She was always rushing from one place to another, as though she couldn’t wait to leave this town forever.
Then we graduated and faded out of each other’s lives. When I saw the name Guerraoui on the case board at the police station, I felt as if I’d received a notice that had been lost in the mail. It reminded me of Nora’s kindness that day on the field trip, which was why I had gone to her house to offer condolences. But tonight at McLean’s was something else. This time she had looked at me differently. Something might have started between us. But then the war came up and she’d turned fierce. Righteous, even. In a way, I found it touching. No one had argued with me like this ten years ago. When I’d told my old man that I’d dropped out of college for the Marines, he’d struggled to get out of his chair, already drunk at four in the afternoon, and when he was steady on his feet he clapped an arm on my shoulder, and told me he was proud of me.
Anderson
The lady detective came into the bowling alley around noon, when I was still hoovering the carpet on the concourse. I used to have a guy who did this, emptied the trash, too, and cleaned the bathrooms, but I had to let him go, so I did the hoovering myself, or sometimes A.J. did it for me. The little lady stood against the bright light from the entrance, and at first I couldn’t see her face, only her figure. I turned off the vacuum cleaner with a kick. “Can I help you?” I asked. I could tell she wasn’t here for a game, she was dressed all formal like, in a business suit, and she carried a notepad in her hand. As she stepped out of the light, she unclipped a police badge from her belt, and that’s when I realized she was here about the hit-and-run with the guy next door.
What happened was a terrible accident. We need a lot more lighting and signals along the highway. You could drive for miles out here without coming across a single lamppost or a stoplight. Some people don’t remember this, but the intersection of the 62 and Old Woman Springs Road used to be called “Crash Corner” because of how often accidents happened there. Gruesome ones, too, with body parts mangled into car parts right there in the middle of the road. The state put in a special sign and a left-turn lane, but the crashes kept happening at that intersection until they installed a light signal. That was in 1973, the year I opened my bowling alley. A long time ago.
See, my wife had come into a bit of money from her grandmother in Sacramento, and we were trying to figure out how to use it. Back then, there wasn’t a whole lot to do in a town like ours—that’s what gave me the idea to open a bowling arcade. A lot of sweat went into it. I bought the land, found an architect, got the permits, hired a contractor, the whole thing. You should’ve seen how many people showed up for the grand opening. I remember it was the week before Christmas and Helen, that’s my wife, she put up a ten-foot Douglas fir on the concourse, all trimmed with lights and smelling like heaven. To this day, whenever I smell Christmas trees, I think about the grand opening. It made the front page of the Hi-Desert Star.
Helen was a little ball of energy, always looking for ways to grow our business. She came up with themes for our specials, got us a good deal on advertising with the local radio station, convinced some of our friends from church to start a bowling league. We did really well for a few years. But after A.J. was born, she lost interest in running the bowling alley and wanted to spend all her time with the baby. Even after he started school, she didn’t want to go back to work. She was always waiting on him hand and foot. I warned her, I said, “You’re spoiling that boy, Helen,” but she waved me off, said I was being too harsh on him. She didn’t get involved with the business again until after A.J. went off to college in Fullerton.
By then, though, there was another bowling place a few miles down the highway, and the movie theater, and the drive-in, and all of those bars and restaurants. People had more options for what to do on a Friday night. And Helen wasn’t the same, either. She started getting the shakes on the left side of her body. Resting tremors, the doctors called them. Still, we managed to make a decent living. We worked for ourselves, we had no complaints. The Muslim guy moved in next door in 2002, I think it was. He bought the place from old Mrs. Swenson, who used to run it as a greasy spoon, hot dogs and burgers and such, and later he turned it into a full-service diner. What happened to him was a terrible accident. And to be honest, it’s a matter of time before it’ll happen to somebody else because that crosswalk gets so dark at night. Like I said, we need to have some lighting on the road and maybe even a stoplight.