Late in the Standoff

Cotton Flat Road

Bren and I were last-minute shopping at the Westgate Mall, looking for bath towels to give to our mother for Christmas, when a slender, professional-looking woman in a light blue pantsuit approached Bren, tugged her sleeve, and declared, “Land’s sakes, sugar! How long has it been? You’re looking good!”

Bren and I are white, middle class, in our early forties now, children of a petroleum geologist and a stay-at-home mom. This woman was black and, beyond first appearances, not so professional-looking, after all. Three missing teeth, a drooping right eye, a touch of red dye in her hair.

Bren blushed, a dappled rust color. “Hi,” she said.

“What is it — four, five years? What you hear from Bobby?”

“Nothing,” Bren said, backing away a little beneath a sequined BATH NEEDS sign.

I hovered near a shower curtain display, ready to slip away or step up to meet the lady, however Bren wanted to play it.

“He never was one to stay put. I tried to warn you, didn’t I?”

“Yes.”

“Well, happy holidays, sugar. Good to see you.”

“You, too.”

The woman sway-hipped down the aisle.

“An old acquaintance,” Bren told me. “I couldn’t remember her name, or I would have introduced you.” Her fingers shook.

“Feeling a dip?” I asked. About five years ago she’d been diagnosed with diabetes and wasn’t, as far as I could tell, taking care of herself.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Let’s grab these towels and get out of here, okay?”

“Sure. You’ll find me some armor back home?” Her three-year-old, Tommy, liked to wrestle. “He inherited your competitive streak,” Bren had warned me, last week, on the phone. Since I’d arrived he had already given me two shin bruises. My mother was always black and blue. She babysat Tommy every day while Bren’s husband, Chip, a financial adviser, called on his clients and Bren did — what? I gathered she stayed in bed much of the time, curtains drawn, suffering back pains, migraines, fatigue. Our trip to the mall — and meeting the woman — had done her in.

The towels’ peach color summoned the red in my sister’s hair, which was mostly brown now. As a cashier rang up the sale, I was struck by Bren’s beauty. Until this minute, I’d only seen her exhaustion. With our shopping done, she looked relaxed — carefree, even, the way she had as a teenager.

I drifted across the aisle into Home Entertainment — EVERYTHING 25 % OFF! From beside a pre-viewed video rack — Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Empire Strikes Back, The Rocky Horror Picture Show — I watched Bren. Twenty-five years ago she had been a rabid Rocky Horror fan. She was one of those kids who frequented midnight screenings each week, who mouthed the actors’ lines in the theater. One Christmas I came home from college (she was a high school junior then), and she dragged me to a twelve o’clock show. In the projector’s dazzling blue strobe she sang and danced in the aisle. She wore fishnet stockings and platform shoes.

After the movie she offered me a joint and hinted that she could scare me up me some acid if I wanted it. I understood she was trying to impress me. I knew, too, that she wanted my approval, but I was the mature college boy, newly steeped in foreign films, and I dismissed the dope, the drag scene, the horror show. Bren’s antics plagued my parents — they disagreed on whether to ground her or wait until she outgrew what Dad called “her crazy hippie phase,” and they bickered all the time. I was pissed at her for making my homecomings tense. I told her Rocky Horror was the stupidest thing I’d ever seen. She cried, her mascara as runny as cheap green salsa.

Many times over the years I’d wished I could take back my words, had told her how much it pleased me to watch her dancing with her friends. I’d wished I’d seen how much trouble she was in.

Now, I thought of buying the video for her but she’d probably think I was mocking her. At Christmas I was always dropping back into town, judging her. I know that’s how she felt, and Mom didn’t help.

Bren turned, clutching the sack with the towels. I’d replaced the video on the rack. She didn’t see it. Her skin was no longer flushed. She was as snowy as our mother’s bathroom carpet: a faintly faltering, well-to-do woman who knew her way around the mall. Did any touches remain of the lively, rebellious teenager? She had fought Mom all her life, but now she lived down the block from my folks, ate with them every evening while her husband worked late, counted on Mom for babysitting. Was that the rebellion now — staying in bed all day, leaving her kid with Grandma? Or had she given up the fight?

In the parking lot, cars milled around the bottlenecked exits. Santa, wearing limp brown cowboy boots and chewing a plastic straw, rattled a tinny bell in front of JCPenney. He aggravated my headache. Not only was I jet-lagged and jangled by the crowds, I was no longer used to West Texas sunlight. Even in late afternoon it turned the sky into white-hot flame. I had lived in the Pacific Northwest for eighteen years now. The mild days there had made me soft. My temples pounded, and I squinted against the three o’clock dazzle. As Bren maneuvered around shoppers, I lowered my gaze to focus on the snapshot of Tommy she had taped to the dash. It had curled in the heat, next to the chipped Chevy logo. Tommy wore a Shell Oil cap and appeared to be asking a question.

Bren braked hard, narrowly missing the pickup in front of us.

“You okay?” I asked.

“A bit shaken.”

To my right, a blue pantsuit pushed a shopping cart full of cat food. Bren noticed the woman, too. It wasn’t the lady who’d stopped us before, but Bren had gone pale. “Tell you what,” I said. “Why don’t we wait till this rush clears? You want to step into TGI Fridays?” I pointed to the mall’s north end. “Have a drink, relax a little. We’ve still got a couple of hours until dinner.” Mom was baking a turkey at home while looking after Tommy.

Bren wheeled us, groaning with the effort, into a parking slot. We locked the bath stuff in the trunk. At Fridays, she ordered a margarita with plenty of salt and a big basket of fries. She caught me looking at her. “My blood sugar’s fine,” she said. “Don’t worry.”

I ordered a salad and a glass of red wine.

When the food came she ran a fry through a catsup pond on her plate. “It’s funny, this place. The night I decided to answer that personals ad — Chip’s, you know? — I was sitting right here.”

“I never figured you as a ‘personals’ gal. I’m still amazed by that.”

“Hey, it’s worked out.”

“Yes yes, I’m happy for you both.” We toasted. She licked the salt from her glass.

“So …” I let a few seconds pass. “How are things?”

“What did Mom tell you?”

“Nothing.”

“She told you I wasn’t carrying my weight, didn’t she? I sleep all day. Right?”

“Bren, I was only asking — ”

“It’s just that, ever since Tommy was born, I’ve had these awful back pains, and I’m so damn tired. No one takes me seriously, not even my doctor, because the oh-so-lovely thrill of motherhood is supposed to blow away my ‘minor’ complaints. Tell you the truth.” She gulped half her drink. “I’m not thrilled to be a mother. Tommy wasn’t exactly planned. You knew that, didn’t you?”

“I’ve always wondered, given your age … and your health.” I watched her face. Could we go down this road? We ought to be able to speak frankly with each other, I thought. We’re adults. But for years my every shot at candor with Bren had veered into acrimony. In the past, I’d resented her for putting me in the position of chastising her, advising more caution, lecturing her to straighten out her life. My criticism had become habitual, and now she’d stopped confiding in me. Of her last five years I knew only the broad outlines: lost jobs, diabetes, the personals. I was buried, working fourteenhour days in a film lab in Portland, and surprisingly, she seemed to have found equilibrium with Chip, though he was not the type of guy I would have picked for her.

She played with her fries. “I’m too old to be chasing a kid around the house, I’ll tell you that.”

“He’s wonderful.”

“Yes. He deserves a better mom.”

“You’re fine with him, Bren.”

“I swear, though, it takes everything — ”

“I think that’s the job. So what are you telling me, you’re not happy?” I tried a charmer’s smile.

“Do I seem happy?”

“You look run-down, to be honest.”

“Yeah, well …”

“That woman. In the store,” I said. “Who was she? Who’s Bobby?”

She ordered a second margarita. “With more salt this time — shower that sucker.” She tapped her fingers on the table. Beatle-y muzak dribbled from a speaker above a potted fern. Someone had stuffed a chili-soaked napkin into the fern’s fat leaves.

“Come on, Bren. Do you have a secret life, or what?”

“Yes.”

“Yes?”

“I did.” She flattened her palms on the table. “Though it wasn’t secret for long. Mom and Dad didn’t tell you this?”

“What? The drugs and stuff?”

“Oh, that was eons ago.” In the early eighties, she’d spent half a semester in Austin, then come home to Midland after dropping too much acid. Since then, the jobs: waitressing, temping, clerking for oil companies. What else? She seemed to have quit the hard stuff, though I guessed she still smoked now and then. She clung to Mom and Dad, dumping her laundry there, dropping in for meals.

Me, I’d been saved by foreign films, or that’s what I told myself. College in the big city — Fort Worth, home of some of the country’s biggest stockyards (I never knew there were so many animals on the planet), skyscrapers, freeways. I got a glimpse of the world beyond Midland and never looked back.

I lived off campus near a second-run theater that sponsored Kurosawa Weekends, Fellini Fests, Bergman Marathons. I got hooked — an even bigger world, beyond the Lone Star State — and sophomore year declared myself a cinema studies major. A classmate told me the Northwest was one the country’s most “progressive film regions.” As soon as I graduated, I headed for the Cascade Mountains and drifted into lab work, a boring but well-paid routine. I developed safety films for state highway commissions, medical documentaries, trailers for zoos (it turns out, animal life is pretty damn narrow, after all).

Over the years, whenever I phoned home, Bren was usually at my parents’ house, even after she’d married.

“Didn’t you ever wonder how Chip and I got together so quickly?” she asked me now. “Why I’d even look in the personals — you’re right, I’m not the type.”

“I assumed, when your health crashed, you wanted — ”

“That was part of it, sure. But believe me, I was running from a whole lot of crap.”

“I’m listening, Bren.”

“Okay,” she said. “All right.”

I ordered another glass of merlot and polished off her fries. As she talked, I watched the restaurant crowd — families, mostly. Everyone seemed at ease. Straightforward. Simple.

I wasn’t prepared for what she had to tell me. When she finished, I asked, hushed, “So. Are you saying you don’t love Chip? It was a rebound thing?”

“I was on the rebound. But no. I do love him. I really do. I’m lucky he’s so patient with me.” I was relieved, but disappointed too. Chip was a far-right Republican, a gun nut, an abortion foe, a Bush family supporter — not the sort of guy Bren would have put up with a few years ago and not the type I could tolerate now, though he was sweet to her and appeared to be a good father. “And I love Tommy, too,” she said. “I’m just wiped out all the time. My back and the migraines really do knock me on my ass. I couldn’t manage without Mom, though I know what’s on her mind whenever I drop him off …”

“Oh, she loves being Grandma.”

“Sure. If I didn’t bring him over, she’d throw a fit. But now she gets the satisfaction of seeing him and thinking of me, ‘I knew you were going to screw things up. Didn’t I tell you? Why couldn’t you have been more like your brother?’”

“Bren — ”

“Anyway. I miss my old life sometimes.”

I didn’t know what to say. We settled the bill and walked back to the car. Bren pulled her blood sugar kit from her purse, pricked a finger with a needle, and tested the blood. “Little high. You’re probably right. I should have watched what I ordered. You know, there’s sugar in French fries. They put sugar in everything. It’s killing us.”

The parking lot was a little less jammed than before. Bren squeezed into the traffic stream. “Have you seen W.’s childhood home?” she said. “It’s near where we used to live.”

“Probably. I don’t remember it.”

“Chip’s on the board for restoring it — they want to turn it into a presidential center or something, with papers and computers and things. A historic plaque. You want to see it?”

“No, that’s okay.”

“I’ll swing you by.”

“Mom’s waiting.”

“It’ll only take a minute.”

Stalling so she won’t have to deal with her son. No no, I’m being too hard on her, I thought. We’re finally spending a pleasant day together, talking openly for the first time in years. I’m happy to prolong the afternoon and she is too.

She drove us into the old neighborhoods south of Midland High. When I was six or seven, Dad had bought us a house here. I used to stand in the front yard in the evenings, squishing my toes into just-watered grass, watching fireflies, searching for the first stars or tracing meteors, listening, from a few blocks away, as the high school band practiced: silly pop tunes set to ragged marches. The Jacksons, next door, owned a trampoline. Next to them, the Elams kept a billiard table in their basement. They’d converted the small space into a family room. If it rained and the trampoline was off limits, Bren and I would challenge the Elam kids to eight-ball, and we got pretty good at it.

The Wilco, back then the only tall building in town, rose high above flat desert streets. Dust-colored, it cut a rectangle out of the sky. KCRS’s broadcasting towers gleamed in the west. Around our neighborhood, new car lots opened with spotlights and helium balloons to celebrate their fall and winter sales. Stores on every corner sold golf clubs, tennis rackets, riding boots. Oil production had made Midland one of the richest towns in America, but all the money in the country couldn’t hide its ugliness. I liked escaping to my neighbors’ windowless basement, hunching over a cue stick.

On Ohio Street, a nondescript, tree-shaded avenue, a sign in front of a modest one-story house proclaimed, CHILDHOOD HOME OF GEORGE W. BUSH, FORTY-THIRD PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. Like our father, George Sr. had come to Midland in the early fifties to drill for oil and gas — though our dad had worked for men like Bush. W. was a few years older than Bren and I, but for a while he’d gone to the same public schools we did.

She parked across the street from the house. “Doesn’t look like much,” I said. A white, rectangular chimney, small windows.

“In the old days, I guess it was quite the place. Chip tells me the Bushes bought it for about nine thousand dollars in ’51. It’s going to take over seven mill to restore it and turn it into — ”

“Disneyland.”

“When W. was campaigning, he’d tell the press there were no racial or class divides in Midland when he was a kid. ‘Racial or class divides.’ I laughed my ass off. Oil was his bathwater. Privilege his soap. What the hell did he know about race and class?”

“I want to see it, Bren.”

Others slowed their cars to view the house. “You’re seeing it,” she said.

“I mean your part of town,” I said. “The places you hung out.”

On the radio, a three-chord country waltz. Love gone terribly wrong.

“My secret life?” she said.

“Will you show me?”

She sat still. Then she put the car in drive and took us south, past tumbleweed lots, empty, burned bodegas, bailbondsmen, tattered billboards — KRBC, YOUR COUNTRY CONNECTION — rows of Arco oil tanks. They looked like a fleet of flying saucers. Across the interstate and the railroad tracks, a drive-in movie screen leaned toward scrubby weeds. “When’s the last time you saw Rocky Horror?” I ventured.

“God knows. Terminator II was pretty cool. You catch that one? Chip really liked it.”

“Missed it. My favorite film this year was the David Hockney one. About the master painters, their use of camera lucidas and optics.”

“Hm.”

We were quiet after that. We crossed the tracks onto Cotton Flat Road, past a Popeyes chicken. It was draped with a sagging line of Christmas lights, red and white, only half of which worked.

1997. She’d quit the Blue Star Inn, Exxon, the Stall Brothers A-Plus Auto Parts, Lodle Oil and Gas. At the Stall Brothers, she’d met Earlene, the only good thing ever to come from a job for her. Earlene was short and squatty, loud and fun. Her parents, from Oaxaca, had crossed the Rio Grande one night when Earlene was a baby. “Screw money,” she told Bren. “There’s always another shit job. Don’t sweat it. Let’s have a ball!”

And they did, night after night, crossing the tracks to the places Earlene knew: La Loca Vida, Jimmy’s, the Dog House Pub. Beer, weed. Darts and pool. Bren couldn’t keep up with her friend. She’d drag home at dawn, barely conscious. Had she wrecked her damn chromosomes, dropping all that acid in college?

But then, no one could keep up with Earlene. The boys kidded her — she could drain Jimmy’s fish tank, a twenty-gallon monster, in less than two minutes. “You fill that fucker with Coors, I’ll suck it in one!” The bartender should have taken the bet. The mollies had long since died.

When we were kids, Bren had never mixed with Chicanos or blacks. At Midland High, plenty of kids were bused from Cotton Flat Road, but they kept to themselves, the Mexicans in one niche of the sour cafeteria, blacks in another, rags on their heads, all badass and cool.

At supper one night, Bren’s sophomore year, Dad told her, “I guess I’m a racist. I think your education is being ruined by all this busing.” It was one of the few times he dropped his happy mask. “The school’s lowering its standards to accommodate these kids, and the smart ones like you will suffer.”

“I’m not smarter than they are, Daddy.”

“Sure you are.”

“I’m not! The schools they come from, over in that part of town, you know … they aren’t as up-to-date as Sam Houston or San Jacinto. They still don’t have money for soccer balls or overhead projectors and stuff — ”

“Doesn’t matter. The blacks can’t keep up with you, Brenda, and you shouldn’t be forced to share with them.”

Hopeless. He was racist, she thought. But she didn’t feel easy with colored kids, either. They were sneering, vulgar, always grabbing their crotches whenever a white chick walked by. The foods they brought from home — peppery chicken, whipped eggs — were greasy and rank, like something you’d find in the alley behind Bi-Mart. Bren kept her distance, but she imagined Mom and Dad’s reaction if she brought home a black boy. Wouldn’t that chap their rears? They were always on her for staying out late, doing the Time-Warp with her pals. Pathetic. Dad feared confrontations and never would scold her. Instead, he’d make bad jokes — “Your skirts get any shorter, I’ll have to sell my stock in the cotton industry”—trying to shame her. With Mom, it was always, “Your brother …”

“You were easier on him,” Bren said.

“He got his homework done, respected his curfews …”

“You let him stay out late!”

“Honey, you’re a girl.”

“It’s not fair!”

“Life is more complicated for — ”

“Bullshit!”

“Don’t talk to me that way! Don’t you dare!”

Whatever. Mom had never trusted her. Why? Because she wouldn’t stay home scraping dishes or baking perky little muffins and shit? “If it’s so great being a happy homemaker, why do you look like crap all the time?” Bren screamed at her one night. Dad poked his head into the kitchen. “Hey, big-mouths. I’m trying to watch the wrestling match. Keep it down, will you? Or maybe there’s more action in here.” Then they both got pissed at him.

And the saintly brother? Where was he? Off at college, hiding in musty movie houses. Hell. Bren knew the score. He’d hated it here. Midland was an oily, gaseous pit, no matter how sleek they made the buildings. Big brother had rebelled by withdrawing, keeping quiet, never calling attention to himself so no one would bother him. That’s how he always got ahead, plotting his moves under the radar. At the first chance he split, never to return. Oh, he’d visit, sure, but he was always aloof. Tucked inside himself. Long gone. There’s your loving son, Mom. He loathes the life you gave him, the life you lead.

Bren felt liberated only when dancing with her friends, singing along with Frankenfurter. One night, as the final credits rolled, she scanned the theater. Her girlfriends gossiped in the aisles; boys in leather coats hung at the back, leering, hoping to get lucky. She didn’t know what it was tonight, why she saw things clearly for a change. Maybe she wasn’t as stoned as usual — she’d been carried away by the dancing. Whatever it was, she saw the girls working hard to make something happen — fun, laughter, conversation. And the boys … the boys just slouched, the way Dad did at home, the way her brother used to do. They were drunk or fucked up, though that wasn’t the problem. They didn’t know what to do, or if they did, they didn’t have the balls to do it. It was who they were, the way they’d been raised, as if, relentless, the West Texas sun had paralyzed them, stunned them into waiting, staring, wandering out of one lousy situation into another. Now she pictured Mom in the kitchen, cooking for Dad, and she began to cry. Mascara stung her eyes. “Bren, what is it?” her friends asked. “What’s the matter?” “My mother,” she sobbed. “She thinks I hate her, but I don’t, I don’t. Do you understand? I don’t hate her at all!”

Now, weirdly enough, in La Loca Vida, it was Mom she thought of again as she and Earlene watched black men lean across pool tables, wriggling their butts, or slip their hands up ladies’ skirts, not in the lewd way of high school kids, but naturally, tenderly, no big deal. If Mom had had a chance to do this scene, who might she have been? Would she have married Dad?

Earlene started dancing on a chair. A walnut-colored man walked up to Bren, bouncing a yellow cue stick and gripping a can of Mad Dog. “Name’s Bobby,” he said. “How you doing, sugar?”

“So the woman we met in the mall,” I said. We bumped down a narrow dirt lane. “Who’s she?”

“Shirley.” Bren drove us past an electrical switching station. Wires hummed above us, a raspy, sore-throat sound.

“She was Bobby’s old girlfriend?”

“Just a pal. After I met Bobby that night, she was great, including me in parties, get-togethers. It was like … I don’t know, I’d been unfrozen or something. I was able to stretch, kick, move around inside a brand new world.”

“You and Bobby …”

“I don’t know how to put this … I mean, Jesus, you’re my brother, I can’t talk about … all I can say is, Bobby was more patient with me in bed than any man I’ve ever been with. There was something … it’s like he wasn’t there for himself. It was all about me, what I needed, what I wanted.”

How does Chip feel about this? I wondered. Does he know?

Earlene met a roughneck and moved to Oklahoma. Bren was on her own, then, across the tracks. She and Bobby dated for six months. “Shirley tried to tell me he was seeing other girls, but I. I couldn’t hear it.” It wasn’t just his cheating that screwed things up. “One Saturday night I went into insulin shock. I hadn’t been eating all day — I’d been waiting for Bobby to call, and didn’t know where he was. I got myself to the emergency room. They checked me into the hospital. Mom and Dad came and later went to my apartment to gather clothes, makeup and stuff. I’d forgotten I’d left a bunch of Polaroids on my coffee table — pictures of me and Bobby in bed. We’d been goofing around one day, holding the camera above our heads and taking silly shots of ourselves, you know? Well, when Dad saw them he nearly had a stroke. He never said a word to me about any of this. I learned it all from Mom. You know how he is, always joking. But he was so upset, he agreed to see a shrink for a while. Took sedatives to sleep at night.”

She turned onto another dirt road, past a pony-shaped oil pump with a Christmas wreath on its neck.

“Long story short, this gave Bobby the excuse he needed,” Bren said. “Instead of being straight about not wanting to settle down with me, he could point to Dad and tell me, ‘Your old man’s a bigot. No way I can be part of your family.’ And that was it. About three months later, I answered Chip’s ad in the paper.”

On the radio, turned low, Willie Nelson cried in the rain. Whatever I say, I thought, she’ll take it wrong. If I say nothing, she’ll figure I’m judging her. “I’m sorry, Bren,” I murmured.

“My life in this part of town … the ‘racial and class divide’…” She laughed. “Didn’t turn out so well.”

So she’d scurried back to Mom. Too hard, too hard. Everything I felt about her was much too hard. I stared out the window at tiny box homes — a far cry from the Bush abode or the house Bren and I knew as kids.

“Scene of the crime,” Bren said, braking. “Where Bobby first knocked boots with me.” She pointed to a square wooden building bathed in red lights. Painted on the wall above the door, LA LOCA VIDA — CLOSED SUNDAYS. She pulled the car over next to a vacant lot throbbing with cicadas, and we sat looking at the bar. “It was only six months,” she said. “But it’s like those songs you hear. He was the one. I knew it.”

“Was it just the sex?” I asked. Our new openness.

“Not just. But it didn’t hurt. What about you? Ever felt that way?”

“You know me.” I laughed. “I drive all my girlfriends away. Too judgmental. Too damn competitive.”

This got no rise from her. But it flipped my mood around. I’d never said such a thing, and I was dismayed at how true it was. Behind the bar, light bulbs lined the scaffolding of a sewage treatment plant. The bulbs glared back at the sun. It was low in the sky. Bren, looking paler than usual, checked her watch. “What the hell,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what the hell. We’ve got time.”

“For what?”

“You said you wanted to see my part of town. Here we are. I never thought I’d be back.”

“But — ”

She had already opened her door, moving faster than I’d seen her since her son was born. “Bren!” She was on the doorstep. I wished I could freeze her with a glance, but she was beyond me now.

Inside, La Loca Vida was murky and blue. Stale-smelling. A television on a shelf above a cigarette machine played a Bruce Lee video. Shirley’s bright hair lit the wall. She grinned at Bren as though she had expected her to walk in the door. “Well well,” she said. “Coming home to roost?”

“This is my brother,” Bren said, nodding my way, but she didn’t go on. I couldn’t picture Shirley in the mall anymore, though I’d seen her there just a couple of hours ago.

Four or five guys in camo jackets slumped in a booth in a corner. Two men in overalls and dusty Texaco caps circled a pool table. The tallest one spat tobacco into a Dixie cup and mumbled, as though he’d only run into her this morning, “Bren-da! What’s up?”

Bren cocked her hip against the table. Relaxed into a smile. Color flooded her cheeks. I stood by a flashing jukebox. It was beating out a hip-hop tune: white cops in coffins. I guessed Dad felt this way when he’d found the photos. Disoriented. Slapped in the head. I imagined him in a psychiatrist’s office — a pale, sterile place — his jaw trembling, his skin slack, an old man all of a sudden …

I gathered from Bren’s banter with the guys that they had been pals of Bobby’s. “Ain’t hardly seen him in a while,” the tall one said. “Last I heard, he’s wildcatting down near McCamey … or Houston …” He turned to me. “Name’s Pete. How you doing, man?”

“Hi, Pete.”

“Brenda’s bro?”

“That’s right.”

“You shoot stick?” His buddy had wandered off to the bar.

“Used to.”

“I’ll rack ‘em up.”

“Well …” Bren appeared to be settling in. “All right.”

She laughed and went to get a Lone Star.

“Where you from?” Pete said. He arranged the balls. Behind him, painted on a mirror on the wall, a red-headed woman in hot pants rode a jumbo beer bottle as if it were a bull. Next to her, a sign-up sheet for a Gulf War veterans support group, a Time magazine shot of W. pinned to a dart board.

“Oregon. I work in a film lab there.”

Pete whistled. “Got to go to college for that?”

“Not necessarily. But I did.”

He picked a bottle of Johnson & Johnson’s baby powder off the edge of the table. He sprinkled his hands. “Okay, College. Show me what you got.”

My palms were sweaty. I tried the powder, but it didn’t help much. I hadn’t held a cue stick in years. It slipped and my break was bad. Three or four balls rolled from the pack but most of them stayed where they were. Shirley giggled into her whiskey. Bren sat next to her on a cotton-spitting red leather stool. Pete ran three stripes off the table. “Watch it, College, watch it now! Or-ee-gone, eh? What’s it like there? I hear it’s the Pastures of Plenty. Pair-o’-diice.” He sank another.

“It’s nice,” I said. “Cloudy. I miss watching meteors.”

“Meteors? You a fireball, College? Ha!” The twelve ball banked off a side cushion, just past the pocket. “Shit, Fireball, here’s your chance! Don’t say I never gave you nothing!”

Rushing, I blew a simple corner. Bren and Shirley joined in Pete’s laughter. My sister’s smile looked malicious. She downed her beer and ordered another. On the jukebox Shirley punched up “Play That Funky Music, White Boy,” and she and Bren danced. Pete strutted back and forth in front of the mirror. “Gonna put you away now, College!” How many beers had he snarfed? His hot-dogging cost him an easy bank shot.

The floor felt uneven under my feet. Warped boards, gritty, sticky. I chalked the tip of my stick and remembered the Elams’ basement, the warm, dim lights, the swamp cooler rustling in the corner, the paneled walls blocking out the flatness all around us. Jack Elam, four years my junior, was overweight. The son of a jeweler. He was the only kid I ever knew who wore a silver Rolex. His watches kept getting stolen at school, but his father would just replace them. Perhaps because of the teasing Jack took — his belly, his family’s ostentatiousness — he was always bitter, quick to anger when things didn’t go his way.

I stepped around Pete and sank the yellow one ball.

Jack clung to me as his one friend, though I always beat him at eight-ball. I’d beat Bren, too, or whip them both when she and Jack ganged up to take me on together. The joy of winning, of letting the two of them gain a little confidence, then going purposefully about my business, always raised the heat in my face. I understood that Jack and Bren were jealous of each other, competing for my attention. My tolerance of him, and his closeness to me, kept Bren on her toes.

The two and the three. Pete squinted his concern. Bren stared at me over the rim of her glass.

After school, if Jack had been bullied, and he was sullen, I’d sit with him in the basement and tell him to freeze! “Now lift your hands,” I’d say. “Otherwise, don’t move. Hold them in their frozen position. See how weird they are?” Fingers oddly curled, thumbs splayed. Hands weren’t supposed to look like this. I don’t remember how this game got started, but it delighted Jack. Years later, thinking about it, I concluded it must have given him a rare sense of control over his body. As I paced around the table, telling Pete, “Excuse me,” “Sorry to take so long,” I recalled Jack’s laughter. Right after I moved to Oregon, I heard he’d died of a heart attack while fixing a wristwatch for a customer in his daddy’s store.

I buried another ball and left myself a beautiful approach to the five. More powder. More chalk. My cheeks burned. I knew, right then, I should stop. Bren had quit dancing and was slumped on the stool. With her beer bottle she made wet, wide circles on the bar. Give her some pleasure, I thought. Just once. You can afford to let this go.

But the shot was too good to miss. You’d have to fake it to muff a shot like that, and everyone would know.

Afterward, I called the eight in the side and put the sucker to bed.

“Damn, College,” Pete said. He shoved his stick in the rack and walked outside. I headed for the men’s room, clapping powder from my hands. I didn’t look at Bren. “You got any holiday specials?” Shirley yelled at the barman. “We need some Christmas cheer ‘round here.”

No toilet paper, soap, or towels. No hot water. I wiped the rest of the powder on my pants. Taped to the wall, to cover a hole in the wood, was a National Geographic shot of a bear, like the frames I developed for zoos to use in their television ads. My face in the mirror was red.

Back in the bar, Bren’s hands shook wildly. She’d spilled Shirley’s whiskey on her dress. “I need to eat,” she told me. “We’d better get home.”

“You want some Fritos or something?” Shirley asked her.

“I’m good. Dinner’ll be waiting.”

“Good old Mom,” Shirley said.

“Right.”

“Don’t be a stranger, sugar, okey-dokey?”

Bren nodded. “Hi to Bobby if you see him.”

Dust fogged the parking lot. Bren popped her trunk and reached for our mother’s bath towels. She swabbed her dress with one and tossed me another. “For your pants,” she said. “Shit, Mom’ll know exactly where we’ve been.” She threw me the keys. “You’d better drive.”

“Will you — ”

“Fine, I’ll be fine.”

As I stepped into the car I watched the lot, wondering where Pete had gone, expecting him to come at me out of the shadows. The sewage plant spat green steam shaped like a head of broccoli. The sun was lost behind the blinking red lights of the broadcasting towers.

Bren and I didn’t talk. On the radio John Lennon told us to imagine there’s no heaven. I rolled down my window, hoping to draw the heat from my face. A Southern Pacific freight train caught us at Cotton Flat Road. Bells rang, lights flashed. Bren folded her arms. Her hands twitched.

“Bren — ,” I said.

“Forget it,” she said. It would be five minutes or more before we could cross the tracks. “Merry Christmas, okay? Merry fucking Christmas.”

“Stop it,” I told her. “Just stop it.”

“And a Happy — ”

“I’m sorry, all right?” I reached over and took one of her hands. She tried to pull away. The train shook the car. I kept her still until she quit fighting me. For a long time, once the tracks were clear, we didn’t move. We sat there holding hands.