Sideways (8 page)

“Fuck, man, who said anything about moving?”

I sighed. I didn’t want to go down this road with Jack and fan his flames. The bar was crowding up and I just wanted to melt into the scene, relax, and lose myself in wine and idle chatter. But Jack wouldn’t give up.

“Given the opportunity,” Jack said restlessly, “you wouldn’t take a ride on that?”

“Why do you always couch everything in sexual terminology?

“
Ibex
?” He frowned, hating it when I used a word he didn’t know.

“Wild goat. Man beast. Satyr. Priapus. Take your pick.”

When I looked up, Jack was gawking at me. Then, his eyes crinkled and he started laughing. “Miles, you crack me up.”

Maya returned from the dining room to her station for another round of drinks. Jack was staring at her as if she were a moving monument to womanhood. Which, in fact, she was.

“She’s a sweet girl, in a crumbling marriage, marooned in a small town she didn’t grow up in, and I don’t think she’d like it if she knew you were talking about her like this,” I said.

“Oh, bullshit. I’m having a hormone meltdown just looking at her. Jesus. She’s jammin’. And you
know
her?” He turned and regarded me in amazement. “Take advantage of the gift.”

Just then Maya locked eyes with me and smiled warmly. Jack glanced excitedly back and forth at the two of us as if his head were mounted on ball bearings. Charlie set four glasses of wine on her tray. Maya kept looking at me the entire time, and for a moment I felt vaguely desired. She said something to Charlie, then, just before she turned to go, she winked at me. Jack caught the gesture and pounced on it.

“She fucking winked at you!” he said, rising up off his stool.

“She does that to everyone.”

“Bullshit. There are winks and then there are
winks
,”

“What’re you getting all worked up about?”

“What am I getting all worked up about?” he echoed snidely. “Oh, I don’t know. She might have a friend. Two girls, two guys, small town, wine country …” Jack knocked back his Pinot and motioned to Charlie to refresh our glasses.

“There’s no way that woman is interested in me. No way.”

Charlie heaved over with a full open bottle, poured us each a glass, and placed it on the bar between the two of us. “It’s on Maya.”

Jack turned to me and slapped a hand over his mouth in mock astonishment. “Oh, my God, she must hate your guts.”

I sheepishly tossed Maya a schoolboy’s wave. She smiled
You’re welcome
back, and all Jack could do was slowly shake his head.

We ordered off the menu—Jack: filet mignon; me: duck breast; both ideal complements with the Pinot, which we drank with relish. I kept trying to coax the Bien Nacido out, but it never really opened up the way I had hoped, remaining budded and hidden from its full expression. Maya came and went, stoking Jack’s libido with every appearance.

Jack wanted to hang around the bar after we had finished dinner, drink more wine, and wait until Maya got off her shift, but the congested room was already beginning to feel suffocating, and, more important, I feared a long intoxicated evening with a woman I barely knew and an

Outside, the night chill freshened our flushed faces and invigorated us for the half-mile-long walk back to the Windmill. It was a commercial district and many of the businesses had closed for the night. As we walked along the shoulder of 246, vehicles of all sizes hurtled by in both directions, the 18-wheelers buffeting us with the velocity of their passing. In between the roar of revving engines, the highway grew still for brief moments and we could hear the gentle hum of insects fill the void. We were a little tipsy from the two bottles of wine, but the universe was still comparatively in order.

Jack bumped my shoulder and I bumped him back. “I could take you,” I said unconvincingly.

“Oh, right,” Jack said, looming over me with hands on hips.

I adopted a boxer’s pose. Jack did likewise, and we shadowboxed against the side of the road, feigning left jabs and right crosses, ducking and feinting, until both of us were laughing so hard tears sprang to our eyes. To passing motorists, we must have looked like some bad vaudeville duo who had been unceremoniously drummed out of town.

It was still relatively early and going back to the motel wasn’t really in the cards for Jack. He kept trying to persuade me to go back to the Hitching Post, but I wasn’t in the mood.

“So, what do you want to do?” he said. “’Cause I ain’t ready to call it a night.”

“What about a movie?”

“A movie?” He smirked. “You mean like with a big box

“Okay, bad suggestion.”

“I’m on vacation. I’m getting married a week from tomorrow. I want to party.” He swept an arm grandiloquently across a desolate expanse of car dealerships, minimarts, and supermarkets. “Where’s the action around here on a Saturday night?”

“All right,” I said, “I’ll take you to the happening place.” We headed back to the Windmill Inn and rolled into the Clubhouse, the motel bar. It was a spacious, tacky joint, with tiled mirrors serving as one wall behind a horseshoe-shaped bar that showcased a raft of available stools. In the center of the place, Naugahyde club chairs circled laminated wood tables that were grouped in front of a carsized parquet dance floor. This was flanked by a barely elevated stage on which stood some kind of amplifier console and microphone stand.

Jack was underwhelmed. “This is it?”

“It’ll pick up.”

Jack looked skeptical. I pivoted onto a stool. Jack placed a hand on my shoulder and said, “Order me something, I’ve got to make a phone call.” He unfolded his cell and strode outside, seeking privacy.

I surveyed the scene. The Clubhouse’s customers were a mixed crew of locals, the early crowd made up of construction and service workers and other minimum wagers, shooting pool and quenching their thirst with pitchers of beer. The men wore jeans and T-shirts and grease-stained baseball caps, and the women were in tight jeans and halter tops. It had the feel of a place that could get downright rowdy given the right amount of excessive drinking.

The bartender came over to take my order. He was a quiet man with thinning red hair and a cadaverous face, courtesy of too many bartending jobs breathing other people’s cigarettes, bending a tin ear to the incessant palaver of wrecked lives, and enduring countless soul-withering 2:00 A.M. close-ups.

“What’s up tonight?” I said, nodding toward the dance floor.

“Karaoke,” he replied.

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah. What can I get you?”

“Any Pinot?”

“What?”

“Pinot Noir. Red wine.”

“No.”

“Any red wine at all?”

“Cabernet and Merlot. That’s it.”

“Pour me two glasses of the Cab.”

“Coming right up.” He turned and crossed to the back of the bar, uncorked a bottle of already-opened Firestone—a mediocre local winery that valued quantity over quality—filled two generic wineglasses inappropriate for Cabernet, and put them down in front of me. I laid a hundred-dollar bill on the bar and he plucked it away, rang the order up on his register, then returned and fanned the change out on the bar as if I were going to contest the transaction. A nasty scar dividing one side of his face caused me to imagine that he once had to defend himself over just such a misunderstanding. He turned his attention back to a TV bolted into the wall, not interested in conversation.

I sipped the overly oaked Cab, puckering at its harshness and total absence of forward fruit. It was the kind of

A shrill noise interrupted my reverie. I swiveled around on my stool for a view of the dance floor. A young woman, with long, ropy black hair tumbling over a Pea Soup Andersen’s uniform, had mounted the stage and was turning on the karaoke apparatus, creating a few seconds of ear-splitting amplifier feedback. Her cronies, who were dawdling around the pool table, whistled and hooted as she selected a song, wrapped a hand around the microphone, and waited for the music to kick in. A Fleetwood Mac song—“Landslide,” for Christ’s sake!—started and the girl came to life, imitating Stevie Nicks’s familiar voice and stage movements, singing so ingloriously out of tune that I wondered why she would actually want to
pay
for the privilege of publicly humiliating herself.

As her performance droned on and her tone-deaf voice blared away in ever bolder flourishes, her contingent of supporters broke into wild howls of execration, shaking their fists and beating their cue sticks against the floor. It was as if her intent wasn’t to prove whether she could sing, but to be the self-appointed object of her friends’ derision. I reached the twin conclusions that she
did
have a purpose in life, and that Jack and I weren’t exactly at the “in” spot.

Jack materialized out of the crowd and claimed a bar stool next to me. He reached for his glass and took an ample mouthful of wine in a show of anger.

“Local swill, sorry.” I raised my chin toward the karaoke stage where “Stevie Nicks” was winding down her act.

“I heard.” Jack shook his head. “Jesus. That’s frightening.”

I turned to him. He had a sour look on his face. I assumed the phone call had upset him. “Call Babs?”

“Yeah,” he said unhappily.

“How is she?”

“Fine.”

“How she holding up?”

“Okay, I guess.”

“What’s happening?”

He plunked his glass of wine down and it clinked loudly on the bar. “She’s on my case,” he said, his face hardening.

“What’s her problem?”

“She thinks I’m up to no good.”

An abrupt laugh shot from my mouth. “Well, at least we know you’re marrying a smart, intuitive girl.”

He looked at me mirthlessly. “It’s not funny.” He drained his drink, hefted himself off his stool, and said, “I’ve got to call her back and work this out.”

“Why?”

“Because I hung up on her,” he admitted.

“Hey, I have a radical idea.”

“What?” he said, frozen midstride.

“Why don’t you say something sweet to her so she can sleep peacefully tonight?”

Jack glared at me, then took off and threaded back through the jeering crowd as the Fleetwood Mac song broke off. The girl in the Pea Soup Andersen’s uniform

“Do you believe that?” I heard a voice saying. I turned to find a young man with short, straw-colored hair crowning a doughy face stippled with bright red pimples. He was clad in the uniform of the place: white T-shirt, faded Levi’s jacket, and matching jeans. On the bar in front of him rested a half-empty pitcher of beer that he guarded jealously, his face hanging expressionlessly over it.

“Pretty frightening,” I agreed.

He nursed his beer slowly but continually, his arm moving back and forth from his mouth to the bar with the mechanical monotony of an oil derrick. “What do you do?” he asked, shifting his eyes toward me without moving his head.

“Me?” I said. “I’m a writer.”

“No shit?” he asked, perking up.

“It’s no big deal. I’m not famous or anything.” Not that he would know.

“What do you write?”

“Books. Movies. Whatever pays the rent.”

“Oh, yeah? Any I might have seen?”

“I once wrote a book that was made into a movie, but the book was never published, and then when the movie came out they hired some hack to do a novelization of it. Do you fucking believe that?”

My words had outraced his beer-fogged brain and he turned to me slowly as if allowing himself time to catch

I cleared my throat, not sure if he gleaned the full import of one of my past professional demoralizations.

“What was it called?” he asked.

“
Circling the Drain
.”

“Was it about plumbers?”

I laughed out loud and shook my head no.

“Then I probably didn’t see it.” He crossed his right arm over his left and extended his hand, palm downward, for a shake. “Name’s Brad.”

I took his hand and shook it. It was sticky from beer and bar pretzels and God knows what else.

“Miles,” I said.

“What’s your full name? In case you write another book.”

“Miles Raymond. It’s a nom de guerre,” I quipped.

He did a double take, then threw me a look to let me know he knew I was fucking with him. “Funny,” he said. He released my hand and took another guzzle of beer, sudsed it in his mouth and said, “How’d you like to go wild boar hunting with me?”

I straightened, caught off guard by the proposition. “What?”

“Wild boar hunting.” He lowered his beer mug and forearmed foam off his upper lip.

“You’re joking.”

“Nope.”

“You’re a boar hunter?”

“In season,” he replied.

“Hunt ’em at night?” I asked, puzzled but intrigued.

“Yep. That’s when they like to come out. They sleep during the day.”

“Why would you think I would want to go wild boar hunting?”

“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “You’re a writer. Might be an idea for your next book. I’d read it.”

“That’s encouraging. Where do you hunt ’em?” I asked, pretending to be interested.

“On the cliffs over at Jalama Beach.”

“And you’d like me to accompany you?”

“I don’t like hunting alone,” he confided.

“I don’t know, Brad. Tonight’s not good. I’m with a friend here …”

“Have him come,” he cut in.

“I’ll take a rain check. But thanks for asking.”

“That’s cool,” he said, disappointed. “Some other time, dude.” He emptied the pitcher into his mug and drained it in one sustained quaff. Then he steadied himself with a hand planted on the bar and climbed down off his stool. “Later.” He belched as he staggered past me and hauled his short, stocky frame out of the Clubhouse. I followed his unsteady retreat to the parking lot, picturing him hunkered down in a gully steadying a high-powered rifle as a hulking, snorting swine from hell charged at him. What madness!

A moment later an entirely different kind of madness manifested itself as Jack returned. A sinewy, snarly-looking guy in a blue work shirt hanging out over filthy jeans had stepped up to the karaoke stage and was belting out the Stones’ “Jumping Jack Flash.” He was gyrating around like some monstrous mechanized marionette, trying to imitate the Jagger strut and shouting instead of singing. It was so awful it was almost entertaining. Almost.