Sticks (9 page)

“To your first lesson.”

We’re moving down Flax Street in the Peterbilt, sitting high.

The steering wheel is made of wood. Two little cowboy boots hang down from the rearview mirror. The seats are covered in dark leather.

Everything is better in a truck.

We roll by St. Xavier’s—the dark old stone makes it look like a castle. We head past the police station with those big steel doors that look like you’re walking into a refrigerator. The Peterbilt moves on, churning up a cloud of dust near the cars locked behind the chain-link fence at Zeke’s Towing.

I can see the flat roof of Grover Cleveland Elementary. “That’s where I go to school,” I say.

Joseph Alvarez slows down and gives it a good look.

“The clock in the front’s always ten minutes slow no matter what the principal does to fix it.”

“You like school?”

“It’s okay. I don’t like oral reports or grammar.”

“Not hot for those myself.”

He turns down Botts Street and smiles at the new stores going up. Gillette’s Movie Palace is getting a coat of bright yellow paint, which should do Camille a load of good.

“This was all junk when I was around last,” Joseph Alvarez says. “Old machine shops, a dumpy liquor store, rats in the alley. Folks work hard here to make things better.”

People look as we roll by. A lady lifts her baby up to wave at us. We wave back; it’s like being in a parade. I’d sure like to see Buck right now.

I say I think I’m riding in the best truck in America.

“I’m glad you think so, son. Some drivers beat a truck to death and wonder why it’s not performing for them—you’ve got to treat it nice and it’ll take care of you. I try and let my truck tell people who I am.”

Joseph Alvarez pulls into the parking lot of GameLand, which is where Arlen had his tenth birthday party. It’s got miniature golf, shooting, archery, and all kinds of games inside, except pool. We have to park near the street, there’s so many cars.

“Out,” he says.

“What are we doing here?”

“Only way I know how to teach pool is how your dad taught me.”

Joseph Alvarez takes off his hat and starts up the
walk, which is painted with big red footprints. I run to catch up. We stop at the little white booth.

“Full game package or a la carte?” asks the woman chewing gum behind the cash register.

“The works,” Joseph Alvarez says, taking out his wallet.

I take his arm. “They don’t have any pool tables here . . . .”

“That’s right.”

We walk through the main door, which makes a laughing sound when anyone comes through it. Kids are screaming, bells are going off. We stand there looking at the red, white, and blue rooms jutting out like boxes in a maze. A little boy starts wailing when his father says he’s out of tokens. A tired mother is counting the little girls around her.

“She’s going to lose it,” Joseph Alvarez says to me. “On three. One . . .”

The woman throws down her purse.

“Two . . .”

The woman throws back her head.

“Bingo.”

She starts shouting that no one is moving
anywhere
at this birthday party until she finds
Ashley
!

We laugh good and walk through the arcade of blinking video games into a smaller room with Ping-Pong tables. Joseph Alvarez picks up two paddles.

“Your serve,” he says, tossing the little white ball to me.

I miss the catch. “I’m not good at Ping-Pong.”

“Serve.”

I serve bad. Joseph Alvarez returns the ball, bouncing it right on the line; it sails past me.

“Zero–one on the serve,” he says as I run to get the ball. “Serve again.”

I do and it’s worse. He nails it past me like I’m blind.

“Why,” I ask, “are we doing this?”

“Focus on the ball, son. Zero–two.”

We play to zero–eleven. It doesn’t take long. Joseph Alvarez writes our names on a scorecard and under his he puts a 1 for winner, which sure seems like rubbing it in.

“Know why you lost?” he asks.

“Because I’m ten.”

“Nope.”

“Because you’re better.”

“Because I make those spin shots you haven’t figured out how to hit yet.”

Like I said.

Joseph Alvarez beats me seven to zip and each time he wins he puts a little mark under his name. I say shouldn’t we be getting back to the pool hall for practicing and he looks at me hard and says, “You can’t learn to win, Mickey, until you learn how to lose.”

The words hang over the fat red nose of the painted clown poster.

We walk through the arcade to the snack bar. The man behind the counter has a T-shirt with a hot dog on it. Joseph Alvarez buys two Mountain Dews and says, “How are you at archery?”

“Awful.”

He nods, steers me to the archery section, and hands me a bow and arrow. “Shoot,” he says.

Well, I’m standing there like a ding-dong trying
to put the arrow in and hold it up; the arrow keeps falling out of the bow and every kid there for a birthday party is laughing at me. Joseph Alvarez stands next to me, stretches his bow back, and hits a perfect bull’s-eye. He says to hold the bow steady, and I say I think I got a bad bow. I’m sweating now because people are waiting in line for their turn and I’m sure everyone thinks I’m stupid. I try to shoot and the arrow makes a little leap toward the ground.

“Focus,” he says to me. “Concentrate on the arrow, the bull’s-eye, making it happen.”

I can’t
!

“C’mon. You can do it.”

I throw my bow down and storm off past the shuffleboard court, the miniature-car raceway. My head’s pounding and my brain’s melting. Joseph Alvarez comes alongside me and hands me a golf club.

“Miniature golf,” he says. “I’ll spot you ten strokes.”

“I want to go home.”

“Why?”

I glared at him. “I’m sick of losing, okay?”

“You lost today, Mickey, but what did you learn?”

“Nothing.”

“Really? You didn’t figure out how to beat me?”

I haven’t figured out anything except that I’ve probably never lost so much in my whole life as I have in this stupid day. He steers me to the golf course. I’m pretty good at miniature golf; most pool players are.

Joseph Alvarez steps up to the first hole with the little hill and almost makes a hole in one.

“C’mon, Mickey. Shoot.”

I can’t beat him, even with the ten-stroke spot. My ball keeps getting stuck in Aladdin’s mouth on the fifth hole and I overshoot the eighth hole because the windmill messes me up. We play three rounds of eighteen holes and each time my score gets a little higher until all of a sudden on the ninth hole I realize how the greens roll—all of a sudden, I can’t miss. I beat him bad on the last round with a hole in one on the seventeenth, right across the little bridge that’s guarded by the ugly troll, and totally miss the water. Joseph Alvarez’s ball hits the troll’s stomach three times in three games and plops in the water. But I see the roll and I’m ready. I tell him to forget the ten-stroke spot, I can win on my own. I nail my ball right through the grizzly bear’s mouth on the eighteenth.

“Good game,” he says, shaking my hand. We walk up to the snack bar and get double cheeseburgers with chocolate shakes. I’m eating mine, feeling tough.

Joseph Alvarez looks at me and smiles. “Charlie Vernon’s rule number one in playing pool and anything else—if you can figure out why you’re losing, you can figure out how to win.”

*   *   *

We leave GameLand after two more Ping-Pong matches that I still lose, but my backhand shots are definitely getting better. I figure out that Joseph Alvarez likes to play the corners and he’s expecting
me to do it too, so every so often I blip one just over the net and he has to reach like mad to return it. His face gets all stern and I know I have him. I also figure out that if I just keep watching the Ping-Pong ball, not anything else, I can usually hit it. Joseph Alvarez says I’m a natural-born all-around athlete, which no one has ever said to me since becoming the world champion of nine ball has been taking up most of my time.

I say Ping-Pong isn’t so bad.

“Great way to clear your mind and work on focusing,” he says. “Winning, losing, focusing, sportsmanship, patience, determination—it’s all there, son, played out on that table.”

We’re heading toward Vernon’s in the Peterbilt, moving past the abandoned Chrysler dealership on Krenshaw Street. The afternoon shadows make it look haunted. I’m looking in the windows where the new cars used to shine through, trying to picture where that drug pusher has his business.

Joseph Alvarez stops at a red light. “You know what I found in Alaska?”

“No . . .”

“In Alaska I found
ganas
!”

“Huh?”

“It’s a Spanish word for desire—the thing that makes you want something so bad you go after it with everything you’ve got.”

“
Ganas
,” I say.

“That’s it. Nothing important works without it.”

“You’ve got to find the
ganas
to get better, to push yourself. See, I always loved trucks—everything about them. I’d climb into one and feel this
energy pumping through me. But I didn’t have the money to get a truck, to start my business. I had to make it happen. So my brother and I got good-paying jobs in Alaska. We worked overtime for two years, saving, living cheap. I had the desire. It was in my blood.” He pats the dashboard. “I bought this rig. I don’t imagine any cowboy loved his horse more.”

“Are you a cowboy?” I ask.

Joseph Alvarez tilts back his hat and smiles. “My great-great-grandfather was a
vaquero
—that’s cowboy in Spanish. He rode horses from Mexico up through Texas and into California. A
vaquero
sat on a horse for three days straight not talking to anybody except his animal, which isn’t sprightly conversation. He and I, we’ve got the same spirit for the open road. Lots of truckers do.”

“That’s why you wear the cowboy stuff?”

“That’s why I wear it. To remind myself of the spirit inside. Now that’s what we’ve got to find in you—and that will make way for the natural pattern for your game.”

He pulls out a pack of Wrigley’s Spearmint and gives me a stick. “It’ll come,” he says. “I’m sorry about those nine years, son. I feel real bad I didn’t come by sooner.”

I’m looking out the window, watching a bus pick up an old man with a cane. “How come you didn’t?”

“Your dad dying just laid me out. I drove away from it—as far as I could go.”

Joseph Alvarez steers the Peterbilt onto Mariah
Boulevard, heading for Vernon’s. “Your mom’s got a right to not be happy to see me.”

I look at him. His arms get stiff holding the wheel. His face looks so sad.

I want to tell him it’ll all work out.

But I don’t know that it will.

It’s Sunday. At church I prayed that Mom would get happy about seeing Joseph Alvarez and that Buck would go to military school. After lunch I went to the hall to play nine ball with Marcus Denny, who’s thirteen years old and makes big-time stupid mistakes. I’m beating him, too. Joseph Alvarez said he wanted to just watch me play. Part of me wishes he wasn’t watching.

This isn’t my best game.

I’ve missed two bank shots and I almost blew an easy tip in the corner. My hands are sweaty and I keep glancing over at Buck, who’s looking like a tank. The red shirt’s hanging in the window right by the Knights of Columbus dinner dance poster; the dance was last week. Poppy’s slow in taking things down.

I want it so bad.

I take a big breath, wipe my hands on my jeans,
and bank the eight ball at a forty-five-degree angle; it just makes it into the side pocket. I look up at Joseph Alvarez, who’s sitting on the bench against the wall, stroking his beard, not frowning, not smiling. I shoot the nine ball at the side pocket and miss, but Marcus misses too. I tap it in the corner.

Yes! That’s a win.

“Good game,” I say to Marcus, and shake his hand, looking up at Joseph Alvarez, who stands up and leans against the table with his hands in his pockets. Marcus walks off.

Joseph Alvarez says, “You could have played that cleaner.”

“I won . . . .”

“You did,” he agrees, “but you almost didn’t.”