Sideways

by Rex Pickett

  Jack went up to the snack bar at the turn to get some beers while I waited on the tenth tee box. The sun had advanced high in the sky and the wind was gusting through the valley with increased velocity, rattling dead leaves in the gnarled branches of the stately oaks. Hawks glided effortlessly on the thermals, their raptor heads angled downward, surveying the barrancas for rodents.

  Jack came back from the snack bar with four Firestone Ales and a pair of turkey sandwiches. “You want a beer?” he asked, holding one out to me.

  I shook my head. “Don’t drink when I’m playing. Interferes with my swing thoughts.”

  “Fuck your swing thoughts. Have a beer. Lighten up.”

  “All right.”

  He handed me a beer and I popped it open. It was cold and refreshing.

  The beer seemed to take the edge off and I finally started to find my swing. Jack, however, played even better when he was drinking and was matching me par for par. It was beginning to look like I was going to lose this Nassau all the way around.

  On the fourteenth hole—a very tight, tricky par four—Jack blocked a driver into the canyon on the right. He turned to me and said gloomily, “Is that gone?”

  “Yep, I’m afraid so. Want to know your options under the rules?”

  He shook his head petulantly. “I know my options. Throw me another fucking ball, will you?”

  I squeezed another Titleist out of the ball holder and underhanded it to him. He teed it up and, with another beer-scorched swing, sliced it even deeper into the same canyon. Jack stared at its disappearing arc in disbelief, ragingly pissed. He held out his arm without looking at me. “Throw me another.”

  I tossed him a third ball. He stubbornly deposited that one into the canyon. A turkey buzzard, frightened by the errant projectile, shrieked madly and rose out of the undergrowth on anxiously flapping wings.

  “Jesus, Jack, you’re a fucking biohazard.”

  “Shut the fuck up and throw me another.”

  I tossed him a fourth and, astonishingly, he managed to compose himself and hit it into the fairway.

  We carted out to where our balls lay and climbed out to survey our approach shots.

  “So, what do I lie?” Jack asked.

  “Seven,” I said.

  “Seven? How do you figure that?”

  “Four swings, three penalty strokes for the three that didn’t make the short grass. That’s seven.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ!” he yelled, his voice echoing in the low of the canyon. He plucked out an iron and set up to his ball.

  “However,” I said, interrupting him, “that canyon is a lateral water hazard. You should have gone to the point of entry after your first one and taken a drop. You’d only be lying three.”

  Jack turned slowly to me. “Why the fuck didn’t you tell me?”

  “You said you knew your options.”

  “Fuck that. I’m lying three.”

  “No, you’re not. You’re lying seven. You stupidly elected to take your stroke-and-distance option and paid dearly.”

  Jack could tell I wasn’t kidding, and he turned away. He was so infuriated he laid the sod over his 8-iron and chunked it into the front bunker. When the carnage was over he had carded a thirteen to my four.

  When I was finished holing out I noticed that Jack had ditched me and taken the cart up to the next tee, which was out of view. I walked through the trees up to the fifteenth hole and found the cart, but no Jack. His bag was still strapped onto the back. I called out his name. There was no answer, so I hit my tee shot, then drove out into the fairway. He still was nowhere to be found and I assumed he had walked in.

  After two more shots, I arrived at the green. When I circled around it, I found Jack reclining on his towel in the rear sand trap, his back propped up against the steep face.

  I unhooked the golf towel from my bag and climbed down into the hazard with him. Jack didn’t say anything. He just mechanically poured a second glass of wine and handed it to me. I leaned my back up against the face of the bunker and lazed there with him, the trap serving as an oversized chaise longue. The fifteenth hole was at the easternmost edge, and highest vantage point, of La Purisima, elevated so that we had an untrammeled view of the entire course. In the distance, a fog bank was lowering on the horizon, slowly swallowing the mid-afternoon sun.

  After a moment, Jack began laughing. Then I started laughing. We must have laughed together, in spiralingly convulsive waves, for five minutes until we actually had tears streaming down our sunburned cheeks.

  “Homes, you crack me up,” Jack said, his laughter subsiding.

  Feeling magnanimous, I said, “Forget the bet. It’s cool.”

  “Fuck it,” he said. “I’ll pay you. You won fair and square. Besides, you need the fucking money worse than me.”

  I didn’t argue with him. We were silent for a moment, drinking in the fading warmth of the sun—and the Pinot.

  “Tastes good right here, right now, doesn’t it?” Jack observed. He held his glass up to the sun and watched the light dance around inside it.

  “Excellent,” I agreed. “Perfect. Golf course all to ourselves.

  “So, you didn’t get your nut?” Jack asked, sincerely disappointed.

  “I was too out of it, to tell you the truth.”

  “But you like her?” he persisted.

  “Yeah. She’s got a lot of feeling. Brought me coffee and croissants this morning.”

  Jack tipped his cigar at me and flicked off a meaningful ash. “I’m telling you. That woman digs you.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe?” he said, astonished. “You almost do a face-plant and she shows in the morning with coffee and pastries. She digs you, man.”

  I didn’t say anything. He had a point.

  “I’m thinking we should all go out again tonight.” Jack refilled his glass. I automatically held out mine and he topped if off.

  “Let’s give it a rest. Back-to-back night games, especially on the road, are debilitating.”

  “You’re always crapping out on me,” Jack whined.

  “No, I’m not. I just don’t want to reprise last evening.”

  I looked at Jack for a reaction. His face had a dark, faraway expression knitted into a focal point on the horizon that was really some debauched place in his mind. “I think I have to see her again,” he said a little fearfully.

  “What?” I said, that sick feeling in my stomach returning.

  “It was wild last night,” Jack confided. “I mean way more than just sex. We burrowed into each other like a couple of corn weevils.”

  “I’m sure it was wild, but let’s not leap into the quagmire, shall we?”

  “What quagmire?”

  “Fuck, man, you know what I’m talking about.” I was getting angry now.

  He tried to reason with me. “Fuck, man, do you know how long it’s been since I’ve had my tongue on a woman’s clit?”

  “I don’t want to know,” I said. And I didn’t.

  “God, it was pink and sweet as bubble gum.” He turned to me. “Babs doesn’t dig that kind of shit,” he confessed.

  I looked away and sighed, audible enough I hoped to discourage him.

  But Jack wanted to spill his guts. “That girl last night had me throttled like I was back in college.”

  “So, re-enroll!” I said, in rising exasperation. “Teach acting and fuck all the sophomores you want.”

  “I might!” he threatened.

  “Is that going to buy you happiness?”

  “I don’t know. I’m fucking confused.” He quaffed a big gulp of Pinot in an effort to disentangle the knot of emotions warring inside him.

  “You’re going to the altar in six days with a beautiful, caring woman who loves you—God knows why!—and you don’t need to have your gonads tweaked and be thrown into the maelstrom, Jackson. You got your mercy pop, my lips are sealed, time to move on.”

  “I’m not sure I’m cut out for marriage,” Jack said a litt
le wildly, ignoring my rebuke.

  “A little late for that, isn’t it?”

  “It’s never too late.”

  “Love is love and sex is sex and I hope to God you know the difference.”

  “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

  I scrambled to my feet and exploded. “Fuck, man, take the gift and forget about it.”

  Jack kept shaking his head to himself, fixated on Terra’s pussy and how wonderful his cock must have felt in its cavernous newness. “I went deep last night, brother. I mean, deep.”

  “And you’re going to take her, and Babs, and me, down with you?”

  “I guess he doesn’t approve,” Jack spoke sarcastically over his shoulder to a make-believe friend sitting on his other side in the trap.

  “You got that right,” I snapped to Jack and his imaginary ally. I didn’t wait for a response. Men with fresh pussy experience are unreasonable and irrational creatures. I scrambled out of the bunker and walked back to the cart, unstrapped my golf bag, slung it over my shoulder, irons rattling, and stalked over to the sixteenth tee. The wine had robbed the starch from my legs, and I hit a snipe hook that bounced along the ground on a zigzag course. I was so angry—Jack, my golf game, hangover—that I tomahawked my driver a hundred yards down the fairway. Some minutes later, trudging toward the green, I finally caught sight of Jack approaching in the cart, moving through long shadows cast by tall trees that lined the fairway. He was hanging out one side, waving a white towel and flashing a smile. His disarming approach left me no choice but to forgive him.

  Back at the Windmill Inn, Jack hit the phones while I meandered over to the Jacuzzi to soak my aching muscles. Slouched in the bubbling, foamy water, that reeked of chlorine, I gazed upward. The twilit sky was starting to break out with little pinpricks of starry light. I closed my eyes and grew lost in it for a drowsy moment. All I could hear was the peaceful hum of air-conditioning units droning away from the surrounding rooms.

  I finally dragged myself out of the Jacuzzi and barefooted it back to the room. Jack was nowhere to be found. I switched on the TV out of habit and went into the bathroom for a shower to rinse off the chlorine smell. Taped to the mirror was a note handwritten in large block letters:

  WE’RE AT THE HITCHING POST. HOPE TO SEE YOUR FACE IN THE PLACE.

  Fanned out on the Formica vanity were six fifty-dollar bills: payment on the golf debt. I ripped the note off the mirror angrily, crumpled it into a ball, and flushed it down the toilet.

  Under the needle shower, weariness overcame me. I fantasized about heading back to L.A., leaving Jack a note of my own saying I didn’t want any more to do with his newfound affair. He’d cheated on Babs many times before. One that almost wrecked their relationship had to be worked out over a stormy, tequila-soaked weekend in Acapulco—a contrite Jack no doubt on his knees blubbering I love yous—but if she found out this time there would be no reconciliation. I was paranoid that maybe Jack wanted her to find out and blow the whole wedding, a wedding that had been in the planning stages for months. He was that reckless.

  In the main room, I lay on the bed and shuttled through the TV channels—all twelve of them—uncertain what to do. The news had the eerie familiarity of a déja vu: a philandering politician, a weather catastrophe that destroyed half an island country, heinous murders and global terrorism and medical marvels and something uplifting involving domesticated animals.

  Unsettled, and wanting to avoid the Hitching Post at all costs, I drove to the local multiplex and took in a movie. The theater was crowded and stank of perspiration and cheap cologne. The seats were cramped and the soles of my shoes stuck to the soda-pop-coated floor. The movie was one of those cripplingly boring summer action flicks starring a smirking overpaid actor who seemed to be mouthing, amidst all the special effects, that we in the audience were all a bunch of idiots while he was laughing all the way to the bank. Walking up the aisle before the end credits, I felt like I’d been sucked off by a toothless hooker.

  I loitered outside the theater, my ears still ringing from the aural assault, thinking about what to do next. Driving around seemed silly and returning to the motel depressing. Jack always had a plan, was never at a loss for the next stage in the evening’s revelry, and I felt idiotically incomplete without him. I wasn’t sure if I was seething because he was cheating on his fiancée or because he had abandoned me.

  Stubbornly, I drove past the Hitching Post without stopping. I had a vivid image of Jack and Terra and Maya drinking Pinot and laughing and having a grand time. It took all my fortitude to keep from turning around and pulling in.

  I headed in the direction of Solvang. Yellow streetlights illuminated Highway 246 on either side of me in a limpid light. Cruising past one of the many ostrich farms that had sprung up in the area, I could make out the surreal silhouettes of the tall birds standing motionless in the moonlight.

  Passing slowly through sleepy Solvang, I glimpsed a woman hunched in the doorway of a shop, smoking a cigarette, her elbows chickenwinged into her stomach, warding off the cold night air. I projected my own loneliness onto her, picturing her closing up, then making the thirty-mile hump

  I shook off the image and hung a left on Alamo Pintado Road, heading aimlessly north. The streetlights disappeared, darkening the terrain. The sky’s ceiling was now brightly speckled with stars. A flare went off in my memory banks and I braked the car to a stop on the gravel shoulder and climbed out. I suddenly remembered that the night before, Maya had stopped on a similar dark stretch of road and coaxed me out of the car to look at the sky. According to her, a comet was streaking madly across the empyrean, leaving a static phosphorescent tail in its wake, even though it was hurtling through the cosmos at millions of miles per hour. I searched the sky until I found it, feeling a certain elation in my success. I wondered absurdly if my own dying would be that visually dramatic, if I, too, would cross the galaxy in a flaming instant and burn out in glory.

  A truck hurtled past and broke my reverie. I got back in my car, drove a few more miles, and parked in front of the Café Chardonnay, situated on the first floor of the quaint Ballard Bed & Breakfast, a two-story Victorian house in the tiny, nondescript town of Ballard. Eight years ago, Victoria and I had honeymooned here. It was a good week, marked by lust and intense conversations about our glorious future together. I didn’t really know what had gone wrong, and the thought of trying to analyze our relationship while eating by myself only intensified my feelings of emptiness and remorse. The thought of dinner by myself was too depressing, so I left without going in.

  The roads were almost deserted when I drove back to the Windmill Inn. I poked my head out the window several times hunting for the comet. I found it finally, but was hard-pressed to tell if it had budged at all. Maybe a million miles per hour in a faraway galaxy is only an inch through

  Evidently not, because Jack, as expected, wasn’t at the motel when I got back. The message light on the phone was flashing obnoxiously, pulsing red onto the walls. I rummaged through the boxes stacked by the door and rooted out a bottle of the Byron Sierra Madre—to hell with Jack!—and meandered my way over to the lobby.

  A balding man with a gray moustache and dark eyes hidden behind dark-framed glasses was manning the office when I came in, bottle and corkscrew in tow. Closer up, the harsh overhead lights revealed his alligator-dimpled complexion. I asked him about Cheryl—thinking I would share the bottle with her—but he said she was off for the night and went back to his crossword puzzle, buzzing switchboard, and forlorn graveyard shift.

  Disappointed, I took the bottle back to the room, feeling fidgety, not wanting to drink it alone.

  Restless, I left the room and crossed the parking lot to the Clubhouse. It had closed early and I was starting to feel like it was a conspiracy. I took a walk to clear my head. The night offered nothing but stillness and emptiness and I needed something else, but I didn’t know what exactly.

  Back in the motel room I wanted the red light on the phone
to go away, so I called the desk for messages. There were six: Babs for Jack (twice), Jack for me, Babs for me (shit!), Jack for me (urgent!), and … Maya for me (phone number included).

  The first call I returned was Maya’s. A sleepy voice answered on the other end, “Hello.”

  “Hi, this is Miles,” I said. “Karaoke specialist. You called?”

  She chuckled hoarsely, then cleared her throat. “Yeah. We missed you tonight.”

  “I was a little under the weather, as you can well imagine.”

  “Oh,” she said with a tinge of disappointment. “I was hoping we could continue that argument on whether true love is still feasible after divorce.”

  I had a fractured memory of the discussion. “It had nothing to do with you. I just needed to chill out tonight.”

  “I’m glad,” she replied. Then, she lobbed a grenade: “I think Terra has it bad for your friend.”

  An imaginary spider skittered up my spine. “Apparently,” I said, trying to disguise my disgust. “I haven’t seen him since this afternoon. Must be quite a romance.”

  “You don’t approve?” Maya asked, picking up on the edge in my voice.

  I didn’t say anything. We fell into silence. I had decided not to spill the beans and bring Jack’s wrath down on me. What he did was his business, even if I disapproved. And, I was still confident that it would all end with the suddenness of a Midwest thunderstorm, just as abruptly as it had begun. If Terra got her heart broken, c’est la vie. At least she would learn in the future to give a wide berth to the Jacks of the world. “Oh, I don’t know, Maya,” I finally answered.

  “Do you want some company?” she asked.

  I did, desperately, which is why I had gone looking for Cheryl and visited old honeymoon haunts and gazed up at comets in an effort to summon up some sense of belonging to a world that wasn’t solely stitched out of fading memories. But, as much as I liked talking to Maya, I didn’t want to encourage Jack’s fantasy of an orgiastic, wine-swilling