"I wrote the kazoo solo." Dwight put one beer down on top of the Rock-Ola, reverently, as if setting a trophy on a mantel. "Terry Pohl joined the Navy two days before we went in to record, and we needed something in the middle there, so I went down to the Ben Franklin and bought a kazoo for thirty-nine cents. Best thirty-nine cents I ever spent. People still come up to me at weddings." He shook his head. "Not Augie, though. He's never forgiven me. Or himself, I guess. You know he bought 'em all back?"
Frankie's hand stopped on the can of contact cleaner. "Bought what back?"
"The records! Nineteen-eighty. After that punk magazine thing. He went around to every store in the Cities that ever had a copy. Went to the plant in Shakopee and bought the overruns. Went to my dad's garage and took the two boxes Uncle Gus had left, didn't even ask. Paid my dad twenty bucks for 'em. He even went around to a couple of the aunts." Dwight laughed and took a pull of the beer. "Two hundred and twelve copies. Loaded 'em in the back of his Pinto and drove out past the Kmart in Roseville, and that's the last anybody saw. Burned 'em in a barrel, he told me. Every last one. That's Augie. All or nothing."
The bowling alley went on around her: the thunder of the balls, the crash of the pins, a league team in matching purple shirts screaming about a seven-ten split. The Rock-Ola hummed in front of her with its guts open.
Nineteen eighty.
She had started looking for that record in 1980. She'd gone into a little shop on Snelling, she remembered it exactly, and the man behind the counter had said, Funny, I had a copy of that, some kid came in and bought it last week. She had thought about that kid, occasionally, over the years. Some kid. Some collector. Some lucky so-and-so.
"Anyway," Dwight was saying, "good for him, with Chicago. About time he got out of that basement."
Frankie looked up. "Chicago?"
Dwight's face did a slow, comic, horrible thing—the expression of a man who has just stepped onto a frozen lake and heard it crack.
"Oh," he said. "Oh, geez. He didn't—oh, geez Louise."
---
She finished the Rock-Ola first. She was a professional. She cleaned the contacts and replaced the worn needle and tested it with three songs and wrote up the service ticket and got Bev's signature, and her hands didn't shake once, because her hands never shook when she was working. Then she sat in the Econoline in the parking lot with the engine running and the heater blowing cold air, and she let herself have it: the hot, embarrassing, prickly rush of it, all the way up her neck.
Six years. Six years she had looked, and he'd had them in the back of a Pinto.
And for six weeks he had sat across from her at the Embers and on the milk crate in the booth and on the floor of room 214, and let her play a tape that was coming apart.
She could have driven home. She could have taken the phone off the hook and let it howl. She knew women who would have, and she had been one of them, once, at nineteen, with a boy named Gary who'd lied about a girl in Mankato. She'd been so busy being right about Gary that she had never actually found out what happened.