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the Desert Inn and Sambos and Happy Steak,
     flashing the manager a killer smile when he’d screw up, showing up late or not at all, moving on when the smile stopped working.
     He was moody and shiftless, prone to smacking things or people around when he felt trapped or threatened or had been drinking
     too much. Although he was gone more than not and had, on more than one occasion, questioned whether my sisters and I were
     his at all, I remember his hank of red-gold hair and freckles and too-wide ultrawatt smile, the starburst of crinkles around
     his blue-gray eyes. I remember too the hop-shuffle in his walk as he crossed the parking lot of Sunset Liquor, as if he was
     listening to music that we couldn’t hear, something with drums.
    We always stopped at Sunset Liquor on the way to the drive-in, where we went pretty much every Saturday night when our dad
     was in town; we stopped and waited for him to shuffle in for his six-pack of Coors, his bourbon in brown paper. The lot was
     full of old-gum and spilled-soda-pop smells, broken glass in spirograph patterns. Moths pinged against the pink-and-yellow
     marquee, sizzled and stuck. My sisters and I sat in the backseat, already in our pajamas, while up front our mother was scooched
     all the way down with her feet on the dash. She was headless this way, but we could see part of her arm out the window — a
     hand, a thumb pressed to the filter of her cigarette as if she was saving a place for her mouth to go later.
    Dad came out of the store, careful of his shiny black lace-ups. He was a little overdressed for the drive-in, wearing a starched
     open-collared shirt and creased slacks, overdressed in the same way Roger was when he came visiting, hair slicked darkly in
     place, piney aftershave preceding him by a good ten feet. They were both dapper, both tall and thin. Roger didn’t have Dad’s
     wild hair, though, and didn’t have the odd mix of nerve and goofiness that was in evidence as Dad eased the Galaxy out of
     the liquor-store parking lot and gunned it, less for the speed than for the shriek he got from the backseat and the way our
     mother sat up then, grinning, and put her hand on his thigh.
    The last movie we saw all together was
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
From the speaker resting on my dad’s half-open window came a strummy ukulele song about raindrops on your head; my sisters
     fought silently about who would shuttle the next beer from the ice chest up to the front; over by the snack bar a group of
     kids played on the swings, their feet throwing giant shadows over the hoods and hardtops like tentacles, like the Blob. Everything
     was monsters and stars in the Morse-code light.
    “Look,” I said, and poked Teresa. I pointed to our dad’s head and showed her how to squint so that the red tips of his hair
     with more red flickering through looked like Mars on fire.
    When I woke up, my foot was asleep, the pins coming on when I shifted. My sisters weren’t moving, and the front seat was quiet.
     “Hey,” I heard either Butch or Sundance say, “who are those guys?” I took Penny’s pillow, put it under mine and dragged part
     of the blanket over to see stone buildings with arches, the Bolivian sky. Butch and Sundance were lying on a floor looking
     bitten and bloody and terrible, and still Butch was talking about the next good thing, Australia this time, the vaults in
     the banks falling right open. When they made their big break, running out into the courtyard with cocked pistols, they didn’t
     know that everyone but God was out there, waiting with rifles and enough ammunition to put a whole army down. There were rounds
     of gunfire, but Butch and Sundance didn’t fall. Nothing fell because the screen was frozen.
    “I don’t believe it,” said my dad. “They can’t be dead. They were too lucky.”
    “Face it,” Mom said. “They’re Swiss cheese. Still, I won’t be surprised if Hollywood finds a way to bring them back from the