Sideways

by Rex Pickett

  “Fuck if I know.”

  “I’ll pay for it, Homes.”

  “I’ve got to drive this fucking thing!”

  “I’ll get you a rental when we get to Paso Robles. We’ll get your car fixed up there. I’ll drive it back to L.A. after the wedding.”

  I shook my head in disgust. “You’re fucking nuts. God, I can’t wait until you get married and get out of my fucking life!”

  Jack did a double take, but didn’t say a word.

  We rode the rest of the way in a pin-dropping silence. In Los Olivos, Jack nosed into a parking space in front of Skorpios, a quaint Greek café. I climbed out wearily and circled around to the front of my car to assess the damage. The hood and grille were crumpled in like a gigantic wad of tin foil. The left headlight had sprung and drooped forward on a tangled mess of twisted metal and wires. And the front fender was bent inward into a V and dangled comically from its mounts.

  “That’s going to be a couple of grand at least,” I estimated dismally as Jack came around from the driver’s side for a look.

  “Fuck it, I don’t care,” Jack said cavalierly. He placed a mollifying hand on my shoulder and nudged me toward the café. “Come on, I’ll buy you a bottle of anything you want.”

  We went into the café. It was a dark, casual open-air restaurant with a Greek-costumed staff. It wasn’t crowded and we easily found stools at the long, wood-planked bar. I scanned the wine list with revenge in mind and, after some internal debate, decided on the ’97 Silver Oak Napa Cab, $175 a bottle. Jack didn’t flinch. I wanted to hold off on Pinots and save my palate for the upcoming festival. Cabs can be rich and powerful and exalting, but they usually seem prosaic to me for some reason. But the Silver Oak was satiny and full-throttle, almost geological. Mm. Mm mm, I exulted, drinking not just to experience the pleasures of the wine but to cushion the image of my damaged 4Runner.

  As the evening wore on, I started to forgive and forget the deliberate destruction of my car. And Jack, in high spirits, his hearty laugh back in full force, was somewhat shockingly making progress with the porcine-featured bartender.

  Returning from the bathroom, I almost couldn’t believe what I heard—Jack leaning across the bar, callously forgetful of me, closing the deal to meet her back at her apartment in Solvang. How had flirtatious banter and a profligate waste of high denominations so quickly spiraled into the makings of a one-night stand? I wondered.

  When Zaftig trundled off to take care of some of the customers she had been ignoring, he turned to me and whispered, “You’re going to take me into Solvang and drop me off. Pick me up in the morning.”

  “You’re joking?”

  “Homes, I just sprang for a bottle of Silver Oak Cab.”

  “She’s a fucking porker. Bottom of the barrel for you, Jackson. You slip out of the saddle and I’m warning you, you’re going to end up with your cock in a cast.”

  “The girl’s a load of laughs. And right now I need some giggles, Homes.” There was something sad about the way he said it and I turned away, almost feeling sorry for him.

  Too tired to protest—not that it would have done any

  We located her place easily enough. As we waited for her to arrive, I turned to Jack and asked, “Are you sure you want to do this? She doesn’t seem your type.”

  “Look,” Jack started, slurry from all the drinks, “I know you think I’m going for Miss Last Call. And I know you disapprove. That’s cool. But I’ve got something to get out of my system. I’m not sure you understand. You understand wine and literature and movies, but you don’t understand my plight.”

  “Okay. I guess I’m at a loss in that department.”

  The headlights of a beat-up Ford Escort rounded the corner into view, interrupting our conversation. Zaftig tooted her horn when she spotted my idling car, then she shoehorned her compact into a parking space on the street, killed her headlights, and bounded out, waving excitedly as though she hadn’t seen a naked man in ages.

  “She doesn’t look too bad,” Jack said. “Besides, I like ’em a little Rubenesque,” he rationalized, flashing me a leer.

  “Are you going to make the Pinot festival tomorrow?”

  “Absolutely. Wouldn’t miss Brad chauffeuring us around for anything.” He reached for the door handle. “Even a girl.”

  “Have fun,” I said dully. “Got your banana peels?”

  “Got my banana peels.” He slapped his wallet in his shirt pocket.

  “Don’t want to give Babs herpes.”

  “I hear you, brother, I hear you.”

  Jack climbed out of the car and skipped across the street to greet Zaftig. They came together in a rush like long-separated lovers in a sappy romance. Jack wrapped her up

  I watched as they disappeared arm and arm into her apartment complex. Then I rolled up my window, put Hope Sandoval in the CD player, and cranked the volume. I made a U-turn and headed back toward Buellton, Hope’s smoky music-to-slit-your-wrists-by the perfect accompaniment to the depressing end to my night.

  FRIDAY: COME HELL OR HIGH ALTAR

  Sometime early in the morning I was awakened from a vivid dream to the din of pounding on the door. I sat bolt upright in bed, thinking for a moment that our friends the sheriffs had returned for a second look at the room. As my brain struggled to consciousness, I heard a familiar voice.

  “Open the door,” a frantic Jack called out. “It’s me, Homes. Wake up. Open the door.”

  “Just a sec,” I said groggily.

  “Hurry up.”

  I slipped out of bed, crossed the room, and unlocked the door. I found Jack, looming shadowed against a penumbra of raw dawnlight, wearing only his boxer shorts, his arms crossed against his naked torso, shivering. Droplets of sweat pockmarked his forehead and he was breathing heavily, his exhalations visible in the cold morning air. “Jesus fucking Christ. Let me in, it’s freezing.” He pushed past me into the room.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, closing the door, still half asleep. I wiped a hand across my eyes to get the sleep out, hoping the image would change. It didn’t; on a second look, it was even more disconcerting. “What are you doing in boxers, man?”

  Jack pulled on a coat, slumped on the edge of the bed, and tented his forehead shamefacedly. He looked up at me after a long moment. “Fucking chick’s married.”

  “What?” I said, closing the door, starting to come into consciousness.

  “Her husband pulls a night shift or something and he comes in at like six and I’m sprawled out on the floor eating his wife’s pussy.”

  “Jesus, Jack! Jesus.”

  “I just bolted. Had no choice.”

  “In your underwear?”

  “I was lucky to get those!” He shuddered, attempting to shake off the memory of his narrow escape.

  “And you ran all the way from Solvang?”

  “Damn tootin’.”

  “That’s five klicks, Jackson.”

  “Fucking A it’s five klicks. And without shoes!”

  “You’re lucky someone didn’t see you. Jesus.”

  “Yeah,” Jack said. “Like Mr. Rodent Sheriff, for instance.”

  “You’d be in a fucking loony bin.”

  “I hear you, Homes. Trust me, it was not a fun trek. I cut through an ostrich farm and one of those fucking pterodactyls chased me. Fucking mean son of a bitch. I thought he was going to bite my dick off!”

  “Might have done you a world of good.”

  Jack laughed caustically. “I felt like Cornell Wilde in The Naked Prey.”

  “Well, you made it back in one piece,” I said. “I hope you at least got out of there with your wallet.”

  Jack shook his head.

  “Oh, fuck man. What’re you going to do?”

  He raised his large, unshaven, scratched, and bruised face and glued his purple-and-black ringed eyes on mine. “We’ve got to go back.”

  “No. No. Nuts is nuts, but I ain’t going Planters.” I stalked to the other side of the room.<
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  “It’s got all my credit cards, the thousand bucks, fucking ID, everything,” Jack appealed.

  I spun around angrily. “How do you propose we’re going to retrieve it?”

  Jack reached under the bed and rooted out Brad’s Remington and held it up at an angle across his chest. “They’re probably in there arguing or something. We’ll just go up, knock on the door, stick this in his face, and tell him I want my wallet back.”

  “That’s lunacy! Just blow it off. You lost your wallet. Pretend you left it at some fucking bar.” I subsided into the room’s only chair to punctuate my point.

  A silence fell. “Homes,” Jack began appeasingly after a while. “The fucking wedding bands are in my wallet.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “Buy some new ones. Who fucking cares about some lousy wedding bands?”

  “Babs picked ’em out. They’ve got this special little design on them with our names engraved and shit. We’ve got to go back. She’ll fucking crucify me if I don’t show up with them.”

  A bad feeling suffused me. “Oh, fuck, you have got to be kidding me.”

  “I am not shitting you, man.”

  In the pale light of dawn I drove east on 246 in the wreckage of my 4Runner, feeling like Rommel rumbling across the Sahara in his final campaign. Jack sat shotgun with Brad’s Remington sticking up in between his legs like a giant steel erection. He stared grim-faced but determined through the filthy windshield.

  “She tell you she was married?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Jack said sheepishly.

  “What the fuck were you thinking? I would have gotten out of there as soon as she told me.”

  “She claimed he wouldn’t be back until nine. Fucker rolls in at six.”

  “Cutting it a little close, weren’t you, Romeo?”

  Jack ignored my criticism. “I just want to get my fucking wallet back.”

  “How was she?” I said, out of habit.

  “Horny as shit. Flopping around like a landed trout. Said her husband hadn’t fucked her in years.”

  “Great! A guy getting off a night shift who hasn’t been laid in years finds his wife in flagrante with some hamburger-faced guy who hightails it out the front door in his underwear. We’re walking into a hornet’s nest, Jackson.”

  Jack clutched the rifle and raised it at an angle with the ramrod air of a new recruit. “That’s why we’re going in prepared.”

  “Fuck, man, let’s reconsider this.”

  “I’m getting those bands!” he shrieked. “They’re irreplaceable.”

  “So’re our lives.” I slammed my foot on the brakes, jerked the car over to the shoulder, and skidded to a stop. “I’m going back to the motel and checking out. I’m not

  Jack turned to me. I couldn’t have been more shocked to find his ravaged face in tears. “I’ve got to get those rings, Miles. I’ve got to make it to this wedding.” He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. I couldn’t tell if it was an act, but if it was, it was Academy Award–worthy. “I fucked up, okay?” He wept. He touched my shoulder. “I need your help. I can’t do this alone. I’ve got to get my wallet. Please.” His hands were trembling. “Please. This one last thing.”

  Wordlessly, I shifted into drive and merged back onto 246, disgust locked in combat with understanding, and losing. We rumbled on.

  Since we were approaching Solvang from Buellton instead of from Los Olivos, I had to intuit my way to where Zaftig was bunkered with her cuckolded husband. After a few false turns I managed to orient myself, find her apartment complex, and slip into a parking space across the street. In the daylight, the neighborhood came into focus. Clusters of two- and three-story, candy-colored stucco apartment complexes stood in shadow framed by a cold, cobalt sky. It was the perfect setting for a phalanx of squad cars with SWAT teams, and a circling flock of TV news copters.

  “We’re not going in with the Remington,” I said, summoning our last collective scrap of sanity.

  “We have to,” Jack argued. “The fucker’s big.”

  “That’s a B&E, Jackson, with an armed weapon. We could do serious time for that.” I looked him straight in the eye. “I’m not going over there with you carrying that thing.”

  “I’ve got to get my wallet,” he said, whining like a child.

  “Okay, stop your bellyaching, will you?” I reproached him.

  A flare went off in his head, and his face brightened. “Why don’t you go?”

  “Me?”

  “He won’t recognize you. Explain the situation.”

  “Uh, excuse me, sir, my friend was balling your wife a couple of hours ago and he accidentally left his wallet here, and I was hoping …” I cut my little speech short.

  “Yeah. Sounds good.”

  “Oh, so I can get a broken nose like yours? Fuck that, Jackson. I did not get us into this mess.”

  “I’m giving you ten grand, man. I mean, can’t you just go up there and try to reason with the guy?”

  “Oh, now the ten grand’s got conditions! Fuck your ten grand. I’d rather be destitute.”

  Jack angrily slammed his hand down on the door handle and started to awkwardly climb out with the rifle.

  I grabbed him by the shirt and hauled him back. “Where’re you going, Rambo?”

  “I’ll get it myself, fucking pussy.”

  “Wait a minute. Wait a minute.”

  Jack got back into his seat and turned away from me.

  I reached across his chest and pulled the door closed. “You go charging in there with a rifle looking the way you do and the only vows you’re going to be taking this Sunday will be behind bars with a felon twice your size for a roommate.”

  “I have to get my wallet back.”

  “Fucking stop whining about your goddamned wallet! Jesus Christ!” I drew a deep breath and leaned back in my seat. A minute or so crawled by as I considered the repercussions. “What building is it?” I asked, resigned to my part in the scheme.

  Jack pointed over at the most prominent one: a pink-and-white stucco monstrosity with the ironic name EDEN GARDENS hung in verdigris metal lettering across the facade.

  “What’s the apartment number?”

  “Thirteen.”

  “Thirteen? You’re joking? There’s not supposed to be a thirteen.”

  “No, I know, that’s why I remember it.”

  “Fuck. Fuck me. Fuck you. I don’t believe I’m in this situation.” I banged both hands on the steering wheel so many times that they hurt. “All right. If I’m not back here in ten minutes, fuck, I don’t know, call my agent and tell her to rewrite my bio. ‘Was stomped to death by irate husband while retrieving worthless wedding bands for psychotic friend before he could see publication of his first novel.’” I looked at him angrily. “And leave that fucking gun in here, whatever you do!”

  I leapt out of my car and strode across the street. Fury at Jack—and the raw nerves that came with it—propelled me forward. What’s the worst that could happen? I asked myself as I mounted the narrow concrete walkway that led into the complex. And what right did I have to the wallet? Surely, contributing unknowingly to adultery wasn’t a crime, I reasoned, as if working out an argument. In truth, I was scared out of my fucking mind.

  Apartment 13 was on the first level tucked away in a corner. Over a weed-fissured concrete deck, I skirted a pathetic, algae-discolored swimming pool that looked as if it hadn’t been used in years.

  Instead of walking straight up to the door, I approached it from the side, skulking, my whole body tensed for impending violence. Thinking of the single punch I’d

  At the front porch, I pressed my ear to the door, but didn’t hear anything. A few feet down the corridor I noticed a sliding glass door, partially opened. That must have been Jack’s escape route, I realized. I tiptoed over and cocked my ear toward the interior, listening. Nothing. I carefully pulled back one parcel of the curtains with the back of my hand and peered inside. The living
room was a riot of strewn clothes, overturned furniture, and broken dishes. Draped over a puke-yellow bean bag I spotted what were probably Jack’s faded Levi’s. I started for it, then froze when I thought I heard something. It sounded faintly like someone was crying, but I couldn’t be certain. No, on second thought, as I listened more closely, it sounded like someone was crying and another voice was moaning. The moans were rhythmical, as if sound effects for some form of bizarre sex.

  I felt sick to my stomach as I slipped through the curtains into the living room, pushing the sliding glass door all the way open for an easy retreat. The bizarre sounds seemed to be coming from a bedroom at the end of a short hallway. I determined that the crying was definitely female while the moaning was male. An odious image leapt into my mind, unbidden but fully formed. I shook it off and crossed the room to claim Jack’s Levi’s. I rapidly rooted around in all the pockets, but the wallet wasn’t anywhere to be found. Shit!

  As the moaning and crying rose both in force and volume, I frantically foraged through the mess in the living room in search of the wallet, but I couldn’t come up with coup de grâce for Babs to call off the wedding, I clambered down on all fours and began crawling along the carpeted hall toward the back bedroom like an infantryman in a DMZ. My heart thudded in my chest.

  I bellied past a trail of discarded shoes and clothes, moving with the twisting motion of a sidewinder, carpet-burning my elbows. The apparel appeared in the traditional order one might expect of people disrobing for sex: shirts, pants, and finally undergarments. I recognized Jack’s leather jacket, and I felt around in it as the twin moans of sexual activity and crying grew louder and closer, more heated and more strange. No wallet. Goddamn it. For a brief moment I wondered what my literary agent would think if she could see me now.

  As I neared the bedroom, I began hearing not just moaning but voices to accompany it. Cuckold was berating Zaftig, haranguing her, “You don’t think I fuck you, bitch? I’ll fuck you.”

  When I reached the open door, I got my first appalling eyeful of what was underway. There’s something violent about witnessing other people making love, no matter who they are and what the circumstances. Cuckold, a beer-bellied, barrel-chested, balding man with a disturbingly hairy ass, was on top of Zaftig, slamming away with a lobster-faced urgency, a jackhammer run amok. Zaftig was splayed out underneath, her hands tethered with scarves to the faux brass headboard. She was swinging her head back and forth as if swooning to some Baptist snake ritual as Cuckold slapped her face hard on both cheeks.