I was stuck on Hello.
Like I said, it had been awhile. I used to be able to manufacture flirtatious banter with no trouble at all. Of course, that was back when I was manufacturing news stories. Perhaps they went hand in hand, creating fiction about other people or myself. Isn’t that what people do in the gloom of bars-make up personas they hope will get someone else to like them?
Now that I wasn’t making things up anymore, I was finding it difficult to construct a complete sentence to Anna.
I managed.
Hello, Anna, I wrote.
Good thing my coil wire came loose again or it might’ve been awhile before I saw your message.
I briefly considered whether that might’ve occurred to Anna as well and if she might’ve loosened it on purpose. No-believing that for one instant was the height of hubris.
I was hoping I would run into you again. I was considering driving to Santa Monica and taking a seat on the Third Street Promenade until you passed by. Are you still in town? If so, I’d love to buy you a drink. Or an island. Whatever it takes.
After I sent it, I thought it smacked of desperation.
Too late. There might be a way to cancel a sent e-mail, but I didn’t know it.
It reminded me of high school. Blabbing something into the phone and instantly regretting it.
Then again, maybe she was desperate, too.
There was a lot of desperation going around these days.
BOWLING NIGHT.
Muhammed Alley was unusually crowded. Unusually noisy, too-even for a bowling alley. For some reason the women’s league had been forced to switch nights.
Sam began the evening by propositioning me about buying life insurance again. I declined again.
Seth was another matter. He was acting weirdly hyper-a 2-year-old in dire need of Ritalin. Every time he threw a strike, he gave an impromptu rendition of “Who Let the Dogs Out”-the guttural choral part. Ooho-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh, accompanied by a series of Lil’ Kim-like pelvic thrusts.
Some of the women bowling four lanes down froze in mid-throw to watch him, as if they couldn’t quite believe what they were witnessing.
I questioned Marv about my car problems.
“Coil wire, huh? Bring it in and I’ll take a look,” he said. “Gratis.”
“Thanks.”
“No problemo.”
Marv was famously low-key, the kind of person who might actually watch grass grow and get a kick out of it. A demeanor you’d want at the other end of a suicide hotline. If I ever contemplated offing myself again, I’d call Marv.
Now I was contemplating other things.
The accident investigation was going nowhere. When Sheriff Swenson returned my call-after several days-he’d greeted my news about Cleveland having no record of Ed Crannell with a barely suppressed yawn. It was an accident, he reminded me. Meaning, who cared about finding Ed Crannell?
There was also the intriguing but ultimately unfathomable note from Benjy.
And there was Anna.
She’d actually gotten back to me.
I’ll take the island, she wrote. Palm trees and warm water preferable. While you’re shopping, I’ll take a cosmo.
It was kind of pathetic how happy I was to receive three lines. As if she’d whispered the three little words. I immediately e-mailed her back. We were meeting tomorrow night at Violetta’s Emporium, the only decent Italian restaurant in town.
I was surprised to realize I was feeling magnanimous and even happy-at least hopeful. But then, happiness is reality divided by expectations, and expectations had clearly risen.
When I noticed Seth being confronted by two pissed-off men, I was initially ready to offer them a beer.
Something had evidently escaped my attention. I was scoring tonight; I was contemplating scoring tomorrow night. Two men were yelling at Seth for some unknown reason.
“Let’s take a walk outside,” one of them was saying.
Seth was resisting that suggestion.
“Go fuck yourselves,” he exclaimed. He was holding his bowling ball in his right hand, swinging it loosely up and down as if considering using it as a weapon.
Sam was attempting to intercede.
“Let’s all calm down, shall we?”
“Keep out of it, fatty,” one of the men said. “Fuckwit here insulted our ladies.”
Insulted?
Then I understood. Seth had been doing the dog thing and one of the women objected. Seth’s impromptu wailings sounded like the epithets construction workers hurl at passing women in New York. Seth could’ve simply told them they were mistaken, that his yells of jubilation weren’t directed at anyone but the universe.
This was Seth.
“Those bow-wows?” he asked. “You ought to put a muzzle on them.”
That was all it took for one of the men to shove Seth into the ball retrieval. He came back swinging.
As I sprang up to play peacemaker, I could see BJ lumbering out from behind the bar. It appeared he had a Louisville Slugger in his hand. This had all the makings of an ugly incident-a banner headline across tomorrow’s Littleton Journal.
“Hey fellas,” I said. “This is a bowling alley.”
“Thanks, asshole,” the bigger one muttered without actually looking at me. “I thought it was the public library.”
Seth had awkwardly swung his ball in the direction of the bigger man’s head and badly missed. His momentum had carried him sideways into the scoring table. It occurred to me that five or six beers had probably taken their toll on Seth’s general equilibrium. Bowling ball or no bowling ball, he was a sitting duck.
The man smashed Seth in the side of the face. Seth went down hard. A woman screamed from somewhere in the alley-probably not one of the women who’d sent these two idiots out to defend her honor.
I managed to grab the closer one’s arm-he might’ve been physically less imposing than his friend, but I still felt a generous amount of muscle beneath his bowling shirt.
He jerked around to confront me, his right hand back and balled into a fist. I felt a crackling jolt of adrenaline, similar to the effect I used to get from the stepped-on coke I’d begun inhaling during my last excruciating days in New York. I ducked as his fist skittered over my left ear. Everyone seemed to be surging to our alley, mostly just to gawk, but some of them looking as if they had an old-fashioned barroom brawl in mind.
Crack!
BJ’s baseball bat slammed down on the scoring table, sending one and a half Miller High Lifes flying into the air.
A generous amount landed on the seriously pissed-off man I was holding on to for dear life.
Some of it got in his eyes; he cursed, squinted, then covered his face with his free hand. I used his momentary blindness to trap him in a semblance of a bear hug-more Yogi Bear than grizzly.
Seth had made it back to an upright position, frozen in a boxing stance of dubious merit. Everyone seemed to be waiting for something.
Maybe for the man holding the baseball bat over his head.
“You don’t want to be doing that here,” BJ said in a remarkably calm voice.
No one ventured a counter-opinion, including the man I was hugging like a long-lost friend.
I smelled a mixture of sweat and aftershave. I slowly let go. Aside from stepping back and flashing me a halfway murderous look, he made no effort to resume hostilities.
Seth was still bobbing and weaving.
“He was woofing at my girl,” Seth’s attacker said, obviously feeling a need to explain. It might’ve been his appearance-Jerry Springer miscreant, “Why I Can’t Stop Beating People Up”-a mostly shaven head with a Judas Priest tattoo garishly displayed on his right forearm.