Jesus, Dieter, a guy can’t blow into town the way you have and then just leave, you know. What’s the matter with you anyway?
17
You sure you’re up for this, buddy?
Clutching his 3-wood like a cane, Colt twisted his torso in both directions. A twitch of pain in the damaged ribs but nothing he couldn’t handle. What about all the old codgers who gimped around golf courses like this three or four days a week? How much pain were they in? Good to go, Boss.
Shaking his head in grudging admiration, Teddy Mink considered the first hole, a straightforward par four: trees on the right, a nest of bunkers guarding the green, and a shallow fork of Hopkins Creek snaking across the fairway a hundred yards in front of the tees. Visualizing his shot, Teddy addressed the ball, flexed his knees, and proceeded to swing his driver as hard as he possibly could, in direct defiance of everything his new golf instructor had been trying, to no avail, to teach him about tempo. Along with Colt, who suppressed his glee by cupping a hand over his mouth, he watched the ball, after a brief, unimpressive flight, land thirty yards left of the fairway in a thicket of wiry grass.
No worries about the old ribcage, Colt mused. I could beat this fucker with a blindfold on.
By the fifth hole Colt was up four even though Teddy had already improved his lie three times and taken a mulligan on the second hole when he duck-hooked his tee shot into the estuary that drained Hopkins Creek. On the other hand, this wasn’t really about golf. There were ulterior motives at work here.
The vista from the seventh tee was certainly one of the more scenic on the course, a par three over a picturesque pond swept by the loose arms of a weeping willow, the postage-stamp green nestled between a pair of pot bunkers that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Wales. As Colt was admiring the layout, Teddy sidled up next to him and the mule knew that this was the moment his lord and master had been targeting all along. Here it comes, he thought; whatever it is, here it comes.
I talked to Jimmy Santiago today.
Oh yeah? How’s he doin’?
Better. Teddy squinted at the far green. Pretty much healed, in fact. Kinda like you.
Colt winced. Pretty much healed? Kinda like me? Easy for you to say, he thought bitterly. The truth of the matter was that he would never completely heal, and that the scars on his face would serve as a constant reminder of that awful night out on Pheasant Hill Road. At first, the disfigurement had caused him a great deal of remorse. Hours in front of a mirror contemplating those untidy rows of sutures camouflaging the tears in his skin from Raul’s lightning jabs while worrying about the wound the broken beer bottle had ripped open on his left cheek, the one he still hadn’t seen. And yet when the last bandage was finally removed, it wasn’t as bad as he had expected, the gash already closed over and stapled shut, leaving a crooked but not necessarily repulsive two-inch scar on the side of his face. Nicky Meyers, who had accompanied him to the clinic, didn’t even flinch, and their acrobatic lovemaking that very same evening gave him further incentive to accept his changed appearance. Thoroughly sated, Nicky had traced a lazy figure eight on Colt’s bare chest. Chicks dig scars, she groaned. They get off on stuff like that.
Colt wasn’t sure what Nicky meant by this and doubted whether she did either. He had begun to notice that the stripper had an annoying habit of spouting off the wall comments that drew, at best, a puzzled response. Then again, no one really expected strippers to be deep thinkers, and the way Colt figured it, if Nicky was a bit of an airhead she more than made up for it in bed, and afterwards too, like last night when she suggested to her new paramour that Maggie Paterson must have been crazy to let a guy like him go. Drowsily content (among other positive developments, his doctor had just refilled his prescription of Percodan), Colt had gazed up at the silent, spinning paddles of the ceiling fan in Nicky’s bedroom and muttered, Damn right she is. Woman’s crazy.
He stabbed his tee into the ground and stepped back, sensing that Teddy’s little performance wasn’t over quite yet.
So I asked Jimmy how he felt now, you know, about the troubles.
Yeah? Colt nodded, attempting nonchalance. And?
And he said as far as he was concerned the troubles were over.
With a swing so rhythmic Maggie once said it was like watching a man having sex, Colt clipped his Top Flite with a deadly seven-iron and held on to his pose until the ball sailed over the willowy pond and rolled to a stop ten feet below the pin. Bingo!
Nice shot, buddy. Teddy raised his hand for a high-five because he thought that’s what golf studs like Colt expected him to do. Then, frowning in concentration, he stepped up to the tee and took yet another mighty swat at his ball only this time, somehow, he caught it clean, square to the target. With his mouth hanging open in disbelief, Teddy tracked the flight of the ball as it arced high over the water before landing, with a distant thump, inches from the pin.
Holy shit, Boss, you stiffed it!
Yowzah!
After Colt lipped out his putt, Teddy tapped in for a two and started back toward the cart, pretending the birdie was no big deal. As long, he said, as Colt agrees.
What’s that?
Teddy speared the putter into his bag. What Jimmy said; as long as Colt agrees.
No shit. He said that?
His very words. Verbatim. Colt climbed into the cart. He wasn’t sure what verbatim meant but the rest of it sounded pretty good. An eye for an eye? Why not? At this stage of the battle, his spat with Santiago was no longer significant. All that mattered was for Teddy to assume that his kingdom was intact.
Well, feel free to tell Jimmy that Colt certainly does agree, Boss.
Before disengaging the cart’s handbrake, Teddy glanced over at his mule, unquestionably pleased. Now, see that? That is exactly what I told Jimmy you’d say. Of course Colt will agree! Why wouldn’t he?
Playing out the string, Colt curled his fingers for a fist bump, knowing how much stock Teddy put in such meaningless macho gestures.
Thanks, Teddy, I appreciate this.
Forget about it!
No, I mean it. The way you handle these things, sometimes I don’t know how you do it.
Graciously accepting the praise he so richly, in his mind, deserved, Teddy shed the persona of casual weekend golfer so he could assume the more endearing role of Godfather, one of his favorites. He stopped the cart to gaze out over the glistening fairways, as if waiting—in this, the movie of his life—for the violins to swell.
Let me tell you somethin’, buddy. Over the course of a lifetime, a man’s lucky if he has three or four real friends. True friends, genuine brothers. You know what I’m sayin’ here?
I think I do, Boss.
What I’m sayin’ is, a man never wants to lose those guys. Suddenly Teddy reached over and grabbed Colt’s wrist and for a moment the mule was afraid that his lord and master had somehow read his mind, had somehow ferreted out the act of vengeance he had so meticulously planned. But he was mistaken. Blood, Teddy breathed, in a mime of passion. You and Jimmy. To me that’s what you boys are, blood.
Resisting an urge to laugh out loud at Teddy’s blatant histrionics—Blood? Did he really say blood?—Colt hung his head in feigned reverence and lowered his voice until it was appropriately small; husky with emotion, but small. You too, Boss, you too.
Later, sipping a gin and tonic in the air-conditioned clubhouse, Teddy got down to business, detailing the plans for the next run south, and the one after that, the pickups, the routes, the name of Colt’s contact in the Keys. When he was finished he leaned back and clasped his hands behind his head, feeling expansive again.
Water under the bridge, old buddy. What I told Jimmy this morning; water under the proverbial fucking bridge.
Colt raised his glass in agreement, his own happiness mirroring Teddy’s, and for better reasons. He polished off the rest of the scotch, basking in
the glow of his deception. Because everything was falling into place, just as he had planned. Soon the score would be even. Soon, revenge would be his.
18
Maggie lingered in the stacks, dreaming. She let her hand trail across a shelf of spines the way she let her hand trail through a school of parrotfish the first time she snorkeled the Florida reef with Mom and Dad. The same flora and fauna she discovered underwater reproduced here in a coffee-table volume of dazzling photos and poetic text. Lavender plumes waving their slender fingers, stingrays skimming the floors of the canyons, sea whips. In a picture taken from a helicopter hovering over Montego Bay, the water assumed a color nature would be hard put to replicate, the cobalt blue she had seen in the paintings of Vermeer. Pigment so intense it brought back the skies of childhood and the ocean, that first time, from the windows of a plane.
Still daydreaming, she rounded the corner of the aisle and caught the roving eye of Jackie Banks, who was ostensibly flipping through a Rolodex, but in truth scoping out the stacks for boys of indeterminate age, as well as a few grown men. They liked to cruise here in their horn-rim glasses and black wingtips, shuffling down the Astronomy aisle only to emerge moments later at 18th Century Russian Lit. Coy, playful, fabulous, the ones Jackie hadn’t already slept with averting their eyes when he looked up at them with his world-weary smile. For Jackie Banks was a towering figure to the furtive gay denizens of this backwater southern town, a flamboyant and unapologetic swordsman who didn’t give a damn who knew what his sexual inclinations were, or how often he engaged in them.
Sometimes Maggie saw the other ones in the library too, the edgy young Lotharios women swooned over even if there wasn’t a chance, the bad boys with slick black hair swept back in the style of a decade ago, sporting T-shirts and blue jeans that left nothing to the imagination except what boys like that might actually do with such equipment. Projecting a defiant toughness and some of them not faking it either, like their hero Jackie Banks, who decided one day that he was sick and tired of being bullied by Crooked River’s homophobes and signed up for Taekwondo.
Even sitting down at his desk, he was a man who projected ease in his own body, confidence in the once bulky frame now trimmed of its last ounce of fat.
Well if it isn’t little Maggie Paterson. Right here in the living flesh.
Grinning, Maggie set her books down on Jackie’s desk and leaned over to receive the usual peck on the cheek. Without attempting to hide her amusement, she fingered the bright paisley collar of his latest outrageous shirt.
Look at you.
Jackie puffed out his chest, lifted up his chin. So what, he wanted to know, did Maggie think?
She studied the shirt’s intricate pattern, all those colorful, exuberant squiggles. I think, she whispered, it’s you.
Why of course it is!
They had been friends since high school, where Jackie graduated one class ahead of her before leaving town to study library science at Florida State. Upon his return they had struck up their friendship anew, Maggie and the town’s most notorious sexual outlaw flaunting their freedom from the old strictures by cruising the bars and beaches for likely prey. Downing shots of Southern Comfort with the boy toys who blew into town on their way to somewhere else, would-be studs who didn’t know what to make of the brazen young man on the arm of the sexy redhead, of his cackle of a laugh and unabashed flirtatiousness. Not that Jackie particularly cared. Even as far back as high school he had never been bashful, much less ashamed, of his sexual orientation, flaunting his right to sleep with anyone he chose even as he suffered the taunts of his schoolmates, the shoves in the hallway, the yanked hair, the beatings out behind the bleachers. He suffered the taunts of intolerance right up until the night two toughs confronted him in the center of the town plaza, in the stern shadow of General Lee. Fresh from that evening’s class in Taekwondo, Jackie had finally snapped. The two bullies still laughing, still razzing the town’s most outrageous homosexual even as his hands and feet, befitting a future black belt, lashed out in half a dozen different directions at once, connecting each and every time until the two bullies lay prone and pummeled on the sidewalk, begging him to stop. Naturally the story spread like an oil spill and the following morning the legend of Jackie Banks, Crooked River’s first militant gay, was born.
With a flush of pride, Maggie recalled strolling down Main Street on Jackie’s sinewy arm when he returned home from college, fully aware that there were those who refused to be amused by her friend’s fey demeanor, Colt among them. Because her ex was an unrepentant redneck—there was just no way of getting around that fact—the kind of narrow-minded bigot small southern towns bred like flies. Not that Colt’s homophobia mattered any longer, because he was out of the picture now for good. Moreover, she was traveling light on her feet today, still high from her encounter with Dieter the other day in the town square. An arrow from Cupid’s bow had pricked her skin, and if anyone could understand what that arrow felt like, it was Jackie Banks. She smoothed his collar back down, giving his shoulder a motherly squeeze.
After work today? You’re coming with me.
I am, huh? Jackie leaned back in his chair, eyeing Maggie with his usual glint of mischief. And what, pray tell, did you have in mind?
Excessive drinking?
Ooo.
General debauchery?
Now we’re talkin’.
Seriously, big boy, how about a cocktail after work.
You got it, babe. Jackie glanced up at the wall clock. Gimme twenty minutes. I’ll meet you there. He reached over to check out her books, lingering over each selection. Let’s see now. Monet at Giverny? Check. Pauline Kael’s film criticism? Check. Ansel Adams? Very good! But no novel today? Not even that new Ripley?
Ach, I forgot. And it’s almost closing time! As Maggie spun back toward the stacks Jackie reached out and grabbed her wrist. Hey, I’ve got an idea. How about one by a local scribe?
One what?
A novel, by a local. Someone residing right here in our bucolic, little burgh.
Maggie pondered this. A novelist in Crooked River?
Who writes, Jackie promised, like an angel. Sex and drugs, steamy evenings on a Yucatan beach, blotter acid split two ways. How’s that grab you?
Maggie batted her eyes in mock innocence. Did you say steamy, sir?
I said steamy.
Well I don’t know, Mr. Banks, sounds rather risqué.
Don’t worry, dear, he said drolly, I think you can handle it. He handed over her library card. Now go. I’ll be there soon, and I’ll bring the book with me. And hey, don’t forget.
Maggie turned around. Forget what?
To order me a daiquiri. Queers like drinks like that.
They do, huh.
You bet. With lots of fruit. And one of those little umbrellas!
You are such a queen.
Why thank you, my dear.
They sat along a wall of windows overlooking the pool at the Holiday Inn, the water empty today except for a family of four, the kids and their mother splashing away while the father, hidden behind black shades, relaxed in a lounge chair with a copy of the local newspaper and a cooler filled with beer. Seemingly oblivious to his frolicking family, the father scanned the sports page while Maggie gave him the usual once-over, expecting Jackie to do the same. But when she looked across the table her friend was staring not at the hunk in the lounge chair but at her.
Talk to me, hon. Tell Jackie all about it.
So she did. The night in the emergency room, the tortuous last days at the cabin with Colt hobbling restlessly around the dark rooms while Maggie anguished over her decision; and finally the denouement, the ultimatum she gave Colt followed by a quiet conversation with Hunter, who burst into tears as his father’s car sped down the driveway spraying gravel.
Jackie waited for Maggie to finish, impressed by his friend’s resolve. She
didn’t falter once, didn’t pout, didn’t shed a single tear. Classic Maggie Paterson, he thought, a born survivor. Shake off the dust, kiss that sorry phase of your life goodbye, and get on with it. Running out of breath, she held up her glass for a refill. More, please.
Yes ma’am.
As Jackie sauntered up to the bar, Maggie checked out the pool again, the kids flopping around like seals in the sparkling water, the father immersed in his newspaper, the mother looking a little exhausted but hanging in there all the same, tossing a beach ball to her youngest. Watching the mother, Maggie hurt. Because that could have been me, she thought. That should have been me. If only I hadn’t made such lousy choices.
Then again, she reasoned, I’m only twenty nine, hardly too old for another shot at happiness. A picture of Dieter in the town plaza flashed through her mind, raising gooseflesh. She upended her empty glass and let the dregs drip onto her tongue—lime pulp, and a little sweet juice—and thought about Dieter again, wondering what it would feel like to kiss him, to hold him, to coax him into her bed.
Hey, I almost forgot. Jackie set their daiquiris down on the table and reached into his leather satchel and withdrew the book he had brought for her. Your novel.
Maggie glanced down at the cover, an impressionistic rendition of a harvest moon perched over a stretch of tropical beach. She registered the title—Jaguar Moon—then flipped the book over to scan the blurbs. A favorable comment from Norman Mailer; a snippet of a rave review from the Washington Post, which named it one of the best books of the year; and then the capper, no less an authority than John Updike proclaiming the novel “This generation’s The Sun Also Rises”. Maggie was impressed.
You’ve read this?
I have.
And?
And it’s as good as they say, Jackie replied.
She flipped the book over again. Jaguar Moon. Then her gaze locked on to the author’s name and she felt the air in the room shift. No, it couldn’t be. There was just no way. Her hands felt numb as she opened the back cover. And there it was, the author’s photograph. As she closed the book Maggie’s eyes lost focus and the room began to sway.
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