Sideways (28 page)

“Maybe she gave me the money because you told her I was broke and needed it.”

“Fuck, Homes, why would I say that, huh?”

“Well, you told her I hadn’t been laid since my divorce. Which isn’t true, by the way.”

Jack hung his head guiltily. He brooded for a moment, then reached for his beer and took a healthy swig.

I checked my yardage book out of habit, but I wasn’t really thinking about the distance to the green. “I mean, why would you say such a thing to a woman you barely know? That pisses me off more than your giving her a grand to open a couple of great bottles and seduce me.”

Jack remained frozen in silence.

“Because you wanted her to feel sorry for me, right? Isn’t that it?”

“Hit your shot,” Jack barked.

“So, she gave me a mercy pop, but her conscience got the better of her. How would you feel, apprised of such a thing? Huh?”

“She likes you, man,” Jack said halfheartedly. “
That’s
why she returned the money. She realized it was going to come out eventually, so she gave the money up because it didn’t feel right.”

“Why wouldn’t she just give it back to you and keep the whole thing quiet? If she genuinely cared about me, she might have spared my feelings.” Jack didn’t respond. Of course he wasn’t privy to the true source of Maya’s wrath. “And you wonder why your nose is broken!”

Suddenly, a ball thudded against the grass directly behind us, kangarooed forward, landed inside the cart, and ricocheted around inside it, making several sharp reports like gunshots.

“What the fuck?” Jack said, leaping out of the cart.

I whirled around. Back on the tee box, a foursome of two couples could be made out. One of the men in the foursome was waving his driver over his head and shouting in our direction: “Get the lead out, would you?”

“Fucker hit into us,” I said to Jack in disbelief.

Jack cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled, “Hey, asshole, that wasn’t cool!”

“Throw me his ball,” I said to Jack.

Jack retrieved the trespasser’s ball and tossed it over the cart to where I was standing. I pushed it around with the head of my club until it was teed up nicely on a tuft of grass. Then, without a practice swing, I took a beastly cut at it with my 3-wood, aiming straight in their direction. I flushed it, and the ball took off low and stayed low with the flat deadly trajectory of a cruse missile.

“Great shot, Homes!” Jack exclaimed, applauding.

The foursome, hearing the
thwock
of metal on Surlyn, took cover behind their carts as the ball whistled over their heads. Jack slapped his knee and laughed. The two men, irate, jumped into one of the carts and sped in our direction to exact revenge.

Jack, quickly rising to the challenge, jerked an iron from his bag and started slashing the air with it like a swashbuckler. “Oh, this is going to be fun,” he sang. “This is going to be fun.”

The cart slowed some fifty yards from us. Jack started to advance on it, brandishing the iron with the fury of a bouncer wielding a baseball bat on a bad night. After getting

Jack sprinted after the retreating cart in a crazy zigzag course, shaking the iron at them like an enraged shepherd with his crook. “Hit into us again, motherfucker, and I’ll rape your wife!”

Jack returned to our cart. He was feeling good about his success in chasing the two guys off. Neither one of us could stop laughing. Maybe we’d be able to move beyond the whole Maya and Terra mess after all, I thought.

Jack got into the beers on the back nine. I wasn’t playing particularly well, but I didn’t really care. Jack seemed to have completely forgiven me for punching him that morning. I think he had reached the conclusion that he had more or less deserved it, even if, as he pointed out, a more prudent target would have been his jaw.

“I wasn’t aiming for your nose,” I said, as we putted up the fifteenth fairway, the sun lowering in a churning fog bank ahead of us. “It was just one of those wild punches born of anger and lack of sleep.”

“I understand,” he said, his speech slightly garbled by the ales. “I’m not blaming you. In fact, I think it’s brought us closer together in some strange fucked-up way.”

Although I tended to laugh at his beer-blurred observations, I reined myself in for once. Underneath his words some honest emotion resonated. So, when he held up his hand and said, “Give me five, brother,” I clasped it in mine and let him grip it tightly, pull me toward him, and shake our hands close to our faces as if he were forging a blood pact. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“You deserved it,” I said, pointing at his broken nose.

“I know,” he said mournfully. “I fucked up.”

“Forget about it.”

He smiled and let go of my hand.

We finished out the round, loaded up our clubs, and headed back to Buellton. The sun now had been swallowed by the fog bank and the highway was cloaked in a fine gray mist. We debated the night’s plan. Terra and Maya were obviously out, the movies seemed like a boring compromise, so we decided, at Jack’s suggestion, to spend a quiet evening at a new, pricey restaurant in Santa Ynez and uncork the ’82 Latour: Jack’s idea of burying the hatchet.

“Are you sure you want to pop it?” I asked. “You don’t have to.”

“Absolutely. Fuck it. It’s the last chance I’m going to have to drink it with you for a while and you’re the one who said it was … what?”

“On the declivity.”

“Right. Losing its fruit,” he mocked.

“It is my duty as someone semi-knowledgeable about wine to inform you that you can probably get over a grand for that bottle.”

Jack swiped the air with his hand. “I don’t give a shit. Besides, I like Cabs better than Pinots.” I turned and he met my look. “We’re not the same,” he said.

“Amen.”

We were laughing about the crazy bachelor week when I arced into the parking lot at the Windmill Inn. As we rounded the corner leading to the rear of the motel, Jack suddenly tensed. He bent forward and stared out the window, horrified. “Oh, fuck!” he said. “Go. Just go.”

“What?”

“Go! Just fucking go!” he said in a frantic voice, both

I pushed my foot down hard on the accelerator. Jack kept his gaze fixed on our room as we sped past it. I steered around to the opposite side of the motel, found a parking spot in front of the Clubhouse, and killed the engine. Jack was breathing heavily; he looked almost frantic. “What’s up? What was that all about?”

He turned slowly toward me, his eyes filled with foreboding. “That’s Terra’s fucking red Cherokee parked in front of our room.”

“What?”

“She’s in the fucking room, man!”

“So? Maybe she’s lying naked in bed, waiting for you.” Jack weighed this possibility for a brief moment. “Did you say anything to Maya last night?”

“No,” I lied again.

“What’s she doing in the fucking room, then?”

“How do you know it’s her car?”

“It’s her car. Who else has a ‘Got Wine?’ bumper sticker?”

“Oh.” I pretended to consider for a moment. “Remember the first night we got up here, we told Charlie at the Hitching Post that you were getting married? Maybe
he
blew your cover.”

“That’s right,” Jack recalled. “Fuck.” He turned to me for advice. “What’re we going to do?”

“Just go over there,” I suggested as though it were no big deal.

“That’s easy for you to say.”

“In that case, I’ll say it again: Just go over there. Take your medicine like a man.”

Jack pointed angrily at his nose bandage. “I’ve been

“You probably gave her a key, Jason.”

He jerked his head and glared. “No, I didn’t.” He pointed a finger at me. “And don’t start calling me Jason or I’m going to use that Latour for fucking mouthwash.”

“It’d be easy to get into the room,” I reasoned. “Everybody knows everybody around here.”

Jack drew a deep breath and heaved a sigh. “Fuck, man.” He drummed his hands nervously on his thighs.

“Fuck.”

“I need a shower,” I grumbled to push him along.

“I’m thinking. I’m thinking.” He flipped down the visor and regarded himself in the mirror. It was obvious he didn’t like what stared back at him. “Fuck, man, I can’t let her see me like this.” With one swift move, he stripped off the bandage, screaming, “Ow.
Jesus
. Shit.
Shit
.” He examined himself again. His nose and the area surrounding it had turned a hideous yellowish purple.

“Do you want me to tag along, or do you want to handle this solo?” I asked.

“No, come with me.”

“All right, let’s get this over with.”

We climbed out of the 4Runner and walked toward our room. Jack was moving haltingly, and I kept bumping into him from behind.

“She misses you, man,” I teased, as we approached the stairs.

“Yeah, right,” Jack said. “Something is definitely weird.”

We mounted the stairs and started cautiously upward, not particularly eager to reach our destination. “You probably

Jack threw me a dismissive backward glance. “I don’t think so, Homes. This isn’t funny, so cut the play-by-play already.”

We ascended the stairs and then skulked down the outdoor corridor toward our room bent at the waist like two grade-school boys trying to elude the teacher. One room away from ours, I stopped. Jack turned and looked at me and I gave him a little wave to signal that I had gone far enough. He nodded understandingly, then moved grimly ahead to meet his fate.

He continued down the corridor, stepping cautiously, as if it were booby-trapped. When he finally reached the door to our room, Jack knocked instead of using his key and just going in, which I thought was a little odd—maybe
he
knew something
I
didn’t.

“Hello? Terra? It’s me, Jack. Are you in there?” he called out. There was no answer from inside. Jack turned and shrugged at me.

I made a little pushing motion with my right hand as though it held an imaginary electronic card and gestured with my head toward the inside, pressuring him to go in.

Jack dug a hand into his back pocket and found his card. He inserted it into the lock, pulled it out, then pushed down on the handle. He cracked the door open circumspectly and barely poked his head in. “Terra? Are you in there?” he said.

The initial absence of a response made me optimistic, and I closed the distance to take a position behind Jack as he pushed the door open wider and risked a step inside.

It all happened with lightning speed. I got a quick glimpse of a fully-dressed Terra leaping up from the bed.

Jack was glued to my tail as we spun around with a flurry of
Oh shit! Oh shit!
and hauled ass back down the corridor. When we reached the top of the stairs we skidded to a stop to reconnoiter what we were up against. What we saw terrified us down to our scrotums. Terra was standing out in the corridor in front of our room, which she had commandeered, aiming Brad’s Remington directly at our cowering, cowardly selves. Her blond hair was in a tangle and her eyes were wild with rage.

“You fucking bastard,” Terra screamed. “Liar! Motherfucker! Liar!”

“Terra,” Jack said, lifting his hands up slowly in apparent surrender. “Put the gun down. Someone could get killed.”

“You better fucking believe it, Loverboy.” She angled the rifle just above our heads and discharged another round into the twilight sky. The firearm bucked against her tiny frame and she staggered in place briefly before recovering her balance.

From my inadequate cover, I started to back away, but Jack brazenly began inching slowly toward her, a step at a time. “Come on, Terra,” he pleaded, putting a brave face on. “Put the gun down. Please.”

“Why didn’t you tell me you were getting married?” Terra shrieked, becoming more enraged the closer he got to her.

“I’m sorry,” Jack said lamely, continuing to advance one tentative step at a time. “I’m really sorry.”

“So, it’s true? You
are
getting married this Sunday?”

Jack, now less then ten paces from her, stopped and hung his head in ostensible shame, instinctively adopting the protective posture of a sympathetic character and ventriloquizing through him. “I’m sorry,” Jack repeated, attempting to soft-soap her. “I’m really sorry.”

Terra jutted her head forward. “You’re
sorry?
What was all that shit you said to me? You fucking bastard.” Her voice became a frenzied scream. “You motherfucking liar!”

“Okay, okay,” Jack tried to calm her. “I lied to you. I apologize. Now, put the gun down. Please, Terra, don’t do something stupid.”

Terra slowly leveled Brad’s boar annihilator at Jack and sighted down the barrel, a modern-day Annie Oakley. A couple of curious motel guests peeked around the curtains of their nearby rooms to see what all the commotion was about, their expressions suggesting they were too petrified to come out for a better view. I suspected the cops weren’t too far away.

For a protracted moment I truly feared for Jack’s life. Then, with the two of us frozen in place, waiting for Terra’s next move, tears suddenly sprang to her eyes and flooded her cheeks. Her arms collapsed to her sides and the gun clattered to the cement. Terra’s hands rushed to her face and she wept openly.

Jack, seizing the opportunity, moved toward her cautiously, much as one might approach a wounded animal. “Come on, Terra, it’s all right.” He closed the gap between them, moving stealthily. Still wary, he sidled even closer, all the while extending a tentative hand like an insect’s antenna. When he reached her, he quickly clutched her by the forearms and attempted to pull her hands away

“No,” she wailed in a new adrenalin-rush of fury. “You’re a liar! A motherfucking dirtbag liar!”

With difficulty, Jack managed to pry her hands from her eyes. They were puffy with raw emotion and smeared mascara. “Listen to me,” Jack beseeched, not making headway, but merely holding the situation in check.

“No!” she screamed. She tore her hands out of Jack’s grasp. Then, in a blazing moment of ferocity, she wind-milled her right hand and slashed at Jack’s face like a frantic animal.

Jack brought a hand to his face and cried out in pain. “Ow! Jesus!” His knees buckled a little and he quailed to protect himself from further blows.