Sideways (22 page)

“Yeah, now, maybe, in retrospect, but at the time, I thought the fucker was shooting at us. Lead us out, some dark road, blow us away, steal our money, that’s what I was thinking.”

“I wasn’t thinking shit. I was pretty loaded.”

“You were a little twisted, Homes.” Jack chuckled. “I’ll grant you that.”

“But I held it together.”

“You made the call.”

“I stared him down, that little motherfucker.”

“I did the dirty work,” Jack boasted. “As usual.”

I laughed. “Yeah, we make a pretty good team.”

“Think he’ll make the bell Friday?”

“If he doesn’t come back tonight with more artillery and blow us away,” I said.

“Why’d you say that? You really think that?” Jack asked.

“No. He was just goofing us like he said.”

“With a fucking rifle. I mean, some of those shots were close.”

“Yeah, well. He’s got a twisted sense of humor.”

The heater hummed as we fell silent. It felt weird all of a sudden to be lying in the dark in the same room with another man. Except for eight years of marriage, I’d lived alone all my adult life.

“When he was shooting at us, you know what I was thinking about?” Jack suddenly asked. “Aside from dying, that is?”

I waited.

“I thought about Babs.”

“It took a near-death experience to bring her and the wedding back into focus, huh?”

“Don’t make fun, Homes. I’m getting personal here. You undercut me every time I get serious.”

“Can’t be that often then,” I said, shifting uncomfortably in bed.

There was a pause as Jack gathered his thoughts. “So, I’m thinking about this woman, Terra, and how I don’t really

“I know what I’m here for,” I said, making light of his confession.

“Yeah, but you made that decision a long time ago. Don’t tell me you don’t have regrets about all the shit that happened with Victoria?”

“Look,” I cut him off. “I’m the wrong guy on this subject, Jackson. I’ve come to the inescapable conclusion that individuals like me are unfit for cohabitation. I recognize this flaw—if, indeed, it is a flaw—and I operate accordingly. Others are different.”

“But this is what I’ve been struggling with,” Jack said sincerely.

“I understand. But you’re not going to find your answer up here in Buellton. That’s just what’s so ridiculous about the whole thing.”

His voice sharpened. “I know that.”

“In a way, we’ve both got the wrong personalities in the wrong aesthetics.”

“What the fuck are you talking about, Homes?”

“Well, I wish I had your gift to meet women. That way I could leapfrog unhappily from one to the next without fear of long lonely gaps in between. You, on the other hand, could use some of my introspection, my capacity for aloneness, so that you wouldn’t feel the need to go traipsing from one woman to the next. Especially now that you’re getting married.”

“You don’t really believe that, do you, about leapfrogging from one woman to the next?”

“For now it seems to be the only thing that works.”

“So, you’re saying because I’m outgoing I’m always at risk?”

“Exactly,” I replied. “You comprise the ten percent that ninety percent of the single women date and ultimately hate. You give the rest of us a bad name.”

Jack laughed. “And if I were a dark little misanthropic fucker like you, I’d be better suited to cohabitation?”

“Contradiction in terms, I guess.”

Another silence fell. I could tell Jack wasn’t asleep, and neither was I. The cricket song competed with our breathing. After a long few minutes, as if he had been cogitating on something all the time, Jack said out of the blue: “Do you believe in love? Love with one person until your dying days?”

I didn’t answer right away. My eyes had adjusted to the room now, and I could make out Jack’s hulking shape in my peripheral vision.

After a minute or so he rotated his large head toward my queen and said, “Huh?”

I started to snicker.

“I guess that’s a no,” Jack said, unamused.

The floodgates opened and I disintegrated into uncontrollable laughter.

Then, unable to restrain himself, Jack, too, burst into laughter. We laughed together until we couldn’t have spoken if we’d wanted to. Then, suddenly, as if the gears had been thrown into reverse, he started yelping in pain. “Ow, ow, shit. Shit!”

“What?”

“Fuck.” He switched on the end-table light, sat up in bed, and examined his rib cage. He fingered a sensitive area and winced. “Ow. Shit. I think I broke something out there, Homes. Jesus.”

I sat up on my elbows and looked over at him. He was genuinely grimacing in pain. The upward light of the lamp caricatured his anguish. “Go see a doctor tomorrow,” I suggested.

“Fuck,” he said, sucking in his breath against the hurt. “This is all I need.”

“Nothing you can do about it tonight. Unless you want me to take you to the emergency room.”

“No.” Jack snapped the light off and eased back down onto the mattress. “Oh, man, this hurts all of a sudden.”

“There was this pro golfer who was out for six months because he cracked a couple of ribs. Know how he did it?”

“No, why would I?”

“Laughing.”

“You think I just
now
cracked it?”

“Might have. Might have been weakened by that tackle.”

Jack started to laugh again, but his laughter quickly broke up into grunts of discomfort.

In a bad imitation of a woman’s voice I said, “Honey, how’d you crack your rib? Oh, tackling a boar hunter,” I finished in a huskier man’s voice.

Jack slapped a hand over his mouth and tried to stifle his laughter. In a muffled voice, he pleaded, “Stop it.”

T
he next morning I drove a somber-faced Jack to the emergency room at Lompoc Hospital, a sprawling, single-story, ranch-style complex at the southern end of town. Inside the ER, a young, bespectacled intern with an owlish face asked him to remove his shirt and climb up onto a paper-covered table in a curtained cubicle. I waited off to the side as he performed a cursory examination. After Jack flinched in pain in response to his exploratory touches, the intern ordered an X-ray.

As Jack was led into the bowels of the hospital to the radiology department, I retreated to the waiting room and flipped absently through a stack of dog-eared magazines. In a women’s rag I scanned a Q&A on how to determine if your man is cheating on you: “Does he make excuses for withholding sex?” “Is his routine different from when you first started living together?” “Does he exhibit frequent mood swings, alternating from euphoria to depression?” What women don’t understand, I sassed the magazine, is that for most men adultery is the best sex they’re ever going

Bored, I folded the magazine shut and looked up. Two toddlers clung to their mother’s legs, the three of them presenting a silent and grim-faced tableau. I wondered if Dad wasn’t at that moment under the knife in some grim fluorescent-lit room having his heart resuscitated. To their left, a man with long, stringy hair was jackknifed forward, drumming a hand rhythmically on his knee as if warding off some appalling image that kept replaying itself in his imagination. From time to time he combed a grease-stained hand through his hair. I returned to my magazine and found another questionnaire, this one measuring self-esteem. After honestly answering all the questions, I tallied up my score, compared it to a chart, and found myself in

The Formica chair was pinching my ass and the rubbish in the magazines was aggravating my mood. I spotted a pay phone across the waiting room, got up, and dialed home for messages to brighten my outlook on life. A woman I had dated briefly months ago called to tell me her younger brother had just written a novel and she wondered if … fast-forward. Message number two was an unrecognizable voice speaking in an escalatingly threatening tone about one of my unusable credit cards (God! what an occupation!) … erase. Message three was a still-worried Victoria. This time she barraged me with apologies—her not having informed me that she’d remarried (“didn’t want to set you off”), how she wished things had worked out between us—uh-huh—and a host of other mollifying assessments. Number four I didn’t really pay attention to, mostly because Victoria’s lengthy one was still reverberating in my head, but it was a friend whom I hadn’t heard from in a while wondering if I was still alive. The last one was the creditor making a second, angrier, attempt to reach me, reciting an 800 number complete with name and extension. That was it. Nothing from my agent. Obviously, things were proceeding slowly at Conundrum, if at all. I slowly paced the linoleum back to my plastic seat, slumped down, and kept on waiting, the result of my self-esteem examination reaffirmed.

Jack emerged at last, clutching a sheaf of green-colored documents, his head bowed. He signed some forms at the

“What is it?” I asked, rising to my feet.

He started walking toward the sunlit exit and I trailed. “Hairline fracture in one of the ribs,” he said in a grim monotone over his shoulder.

“No golf today, I guess,” I said, catching up with him.

“It’s your fault, Homes.”

“
My
fault?”

“You should be the one with the rib fracture,” he said peevishly. “Not me.”

“You’re the one with health insurance,” I reminded him.

“Maybe Hell does have a god,” he said, loosening up a little.

I chuckled. “What’d they do for it?”

Jack came to a halt just outside the entrance to the ER, spun around and faced me. He unbuttoned his shirt and held it open, revealing a white body bandage swathed tightly around his torso.

“They’ve got you mummified, Jackson!”

“Don’t piss me off, Homes.”

“How long do you have to wear that?”

“Six weeks,” he said dispiritedly. “Maybe longer.” He rebuttoned his shirt and quickly covered himself up.

“
Six
weeks?”

He nodded and started walking toward the car.

“Can you have sex?”

He wheeled and crooked a finger at me. “Don’t piss me off, Homes.”

“What’re you going to do on your honeymoon?”

“I’m not happy about this,” Jack warbled in a warning tone.

“Maybe this’ll be the oral sex icebreaker with Babs,” I called out from behind him.

“That’s it! That’s
it!
” He stormed off.

I let him walk away so he could blow off some steam. The hot sun was beating down on me, so I got back in the 4Runner, turned on some music, and waited.

A good half hour later, I saw Jack angling toward the car. He went around to the passenger side and painfully hoisted himself in. Without a word, he slammed the door shut and stared miserably through the windshield, his face a block of granite. After a moment he barked, “Let’s go.”

“Where?”

“I don’t care. Just move it.”

I turned the engine over and let it idle. “Hearst Castle?” I ventured.

He turned slowly and glowered at me. “Are you kidding?” I shrugged. “You really want to see the Hearst Castle?”

“I’m tangentially interested in opulence, yeah. In the unlikely event my book becomes a bestseller.”

“Doesn’t it have to get published first?”

“Well, according to half the population of the Santa Ynez Valley, that’s already a done deal.”

Jack cracked a smile for the first time that morning, resigned, it seemed, to his injury. “All right,” he said gruffly, “go call ’em.”

“Let me use your cell.”

“No. I’ve got to make some calls.”

“All right,” I said, opening the door, “I’ll be back in a few.”

On the emergency room pay phone that had insulted me earlier, I called information and got the Hearst Castle main

When I returned to the car, Jack was concluding a call, cradling his cell phone as if he didn’t want to be overheard. He looked as though he was thinking about something important.

“Babs?”

He nodded.

“Tell her about the … mishap?”

He scrunched up his face and shook his head. “I don’t want to worry her.”

“How is she?”

“Weirdly distant.”

“Are you worried that maybe
she’s
having second thoughts?”

Jack pushed out his lips, then he faced me with a furrowed brow. “You didn’t answer the phone and talk to her and not remember because you were looped, did you?”

“No,” I said, aghast at the idea.

“And you don’t remember what you said to Victoria?” he continued.

“I didn’t say anything that would compromise you. When I’m drunk I say things that embarrass me, but I rarely, if ever, spread malicious gossip, especially when it’s factual.”

Jack turned slowly back to the window, captured by something in his mind. “Okay, let’s go,” he said, sounding unsatisfied with my explanation and still dismayed about whatever Babs had said.

We drove north on Highway 1 in the direction of Morro

In Morro Bay—a coastal retirement town pockmarked with cheap motels and bric-a-brac shops—we had an hour to kill, so we stopped for lunch in a marine-themed restaurant perched at the water’s edge. Inside, the wall facing the ocean was broken by large, lightly tinted picture windows. It was the off-season and the restaurant was empty so we were led to a window table. Through a scrim of decorative fish nets sagging under the weight of old cork floats and rusted lures, we had a clear view of the famous Morro Rock, a gray skyscraper-sized, long-extinct volcano sitting in shallow waters, jutting up an impressive 576 feet.

“Should we get a bottle of wine?” I suggested casually, glancing at my menu, checking to see if Jack remembered our morning’s vow of abstinence for the day.

“No,” Jack barked.

“Just kidding,” I said.

“No, you weren’t. You were testing me.”

“How’s the rib?” I asked with affected concern.

“What do you mean, ‘
How’s the rib?
’”

“How’s the rib?”

“The rib is the same as it was an hour ago,” he answered, glaring at me over his menu.

“Does it hurt when you breathe?”

“No. It only hurts when I look at you.”

I dropped my menu and met his gaze. “Look. I may be the reason we followed the boar hunter and you ended up hitting the deck in a valiant effort I’ll never forget and will anecdotalize for years to come, but you’re the reason I was pissed off enough to even get in that position in the first place. Just to set the record straight.”