Saguaro Riptide

TWO

The baseball cap said OLD FART. Wearing it, Jack looked like he’d dropped fifty IQ points.

He stared at his reflection in the motel room mirror and removed the cap. Without it, his IQ rating plummeted another twenty points, easy.

His ears looked especially big. That was because the barber with the hairy forearms had razor-cut the hair on the sides of his head, leaving him looking like a white sidewall tire with stubble.

At least the butcher had left some long hair up on top. In the front, anyway. And in the back, where a magnificent cowlick sprouted. But between those two points Jack’s hairline resembled a particularly short crew cut. If his head had been a highway, a road crew would have been forced to install a DIP sign up on top.

Baddalach held his head under the tap until his hair was good and wet. He toweled off and tried combing the patch of longer hair up front over the dip to disguise the damage, but he didn’t have enough hair to pull it off.

Suddenly, Jack found himself contemplating some of those camouflage hairdos favored by politicians and TV anchors. He wondered how those guys did it. Maybe he could phone ABC News, ask Sam Donaldson for some tips.

Probably a long shot. If he was going to waste time, he might as well call Florida, see if he could borrow one of Burt Reynolds’s toupees.

But there was no use being unrealistic. He turned his attention to the cowlick. Plastered it with water again and again, but it popped up every time. BOINK! Jesus. That kid from The Little Rascals had nothing on him.

And on top of everything else he was out nearly twenty-five bucks. First, he’d paid seven for the haircut, for no other reason than to spare himself another run-in with Wyetta Earp. Then he’d stopped off at a drugstore where he bought a pair of scissors and the OLD FART cap (a winner by default-his other choices were OLD FART'S WIFE and the ever-popular WHO FARTED?) There went eighteen and change. And the real hell of it was that he’d been so rattled about the bad haircut that he’d forgotten to use Woodrow Saad Muhammad’s stolen credit card or his own corporate plastic.

Jack gazed at his reflection and decided that there was only one thing left to do.

With one hand he grabbed a fistful of long hair.

With the other he picked up the scissors.

Woody was swimming laps, stroking back and forth across the motel pool. On the whole, he had to admit that he felt damn good. Not one bit tired anymore.

He paused, treading water in the deep end, holding the sharpened toothbrush in one hand. No one was around. Not the boxer or the motel lady, not even the bitch in the black bikini.

Nice to have the pool to himself, though. Just the gentle slosh of the water as he paddled around. Real peaceful.

Then a funny feeling scrabbled over his spine, a feeling that told him he wasn’t alone.

Someone was watching. He was sure of it.

He looked around but didn’t see a soul.

And then he glanced down. It seemed kind of crazy doing that, but it didn’t seem so crazy when he spotted the man at the bottom of the deep end.

Woody didn’t recognize the man. He couldn’t see him all that well-sunlight glinted off the rippling water, and Woody himself was kicking up little waves as he tried to stay afloat, and the man was doing the opposite, stroking with his arms, trying to stay underwater.

Still, Woody didn’t like the idea of the man being down there. He swam for the side.

Just as Woody’s hand touched the pool ladder, a torrent of bubbles boiled up from the man’s mouth. He pushed off from the bottom of the pool and came at Woody like a torpedo, and at the last instant Woody recognized the monk and the monk grabbed Woody’s legs, pulled him away from the ladder, dragged him under before Woody could get a breath and he gulped water, tasted chlorine and his head was throbbing, throbbing, and the monk had hold of him like the Creature from the Black Lagoon in that old movie and he pulled Woody through the rippling water, beneath bright waves of light and-

A door slammed. Woody jerked awake.

Automatically, his right hand made a tight fist around the sharpened toothbrush. He couldn’t believe he’d fallen asleep.

He didn’t know what time it was. Didn’t even have a motherfuckin’ watch. If the door hadn’t slammed-

Shit! Maybe Jack Baddalach was back.

Woody jumped up and opened the door.

Just in time to see the Range Rover backing out.

A white guy with a fucked-up haircut was behind the wheel.

Jack Baddalach.

Woody tossed the sharpened toothbrush across the room.

Shit!

The motel office was actually part of Sandy’s house. The door on the back wall connected to her living room, and that was where she actually spent most of her time.

Actually, it was a pretty nice room. Sandy’s old surfing pictures on the wall, along with posters from Dale’s concerts. And a sliding glass door on one wall that afforded a spectacular view of the low mountains to the west.

It wasn’t what you’d call an unobstructed view, however.

The junkyard was in the way.

When Sandy and Dale designed the house, they hadn’t planned for a junkyard to be part of the view. The living room was supposed to overlook a miniature Pacific complete with a wave machine and palm trees and acres of soft sand, but things hadn’t worked out that way.

Sandy popped a beer and looked to the low mountains, jagged shards of cinnamon beyond a forest of tangled metal. Even the junkyard could be beautiful at times, when the desert light was right.

But tonight Sandy didn’t want to look at the junkyard. She didn’t want to look at the mountains, either.

Tonight she wanted to look at the sky. It reminded her of nothing so much as a cool watercolor brushstroke, darker at the bottom, like the angry Pacific during a hurricane, lightening as the brush moved across the horizon and the bristles grew dry, until all that remained was the clear liquid blue of a gentle wave washing Poipu Beach on the island of Kauai.

Sometimes just looking at the sky made Sandy want to go back to the Islands. Some days she really missed that life.

But she could never figure out how to get started. She never knew what she should take with her and what she should leave behind.

She’d take Dale, of course, but even that was a problem. If you took a dog to Hawaii, the authorities insisted on quarantining the animal for a period of months. Being locked up would drive Dale crazy. And Sandy couldn’t stand to be separated from him, anyway.

That wasn’t the only problem. Other stuff was just as hard. Like she had never been good at getting rid of anything. She still had all Dale’s stuff. His clothes, his guitars, even his records.

And she should have trashed the records, because they were all messed up. Most of them were warped. She couldn’t play them even if she strapped a boulder to the turntable’s tonearm.

Sandy never told anyone about the warped records, though. Not a soul. Because she knew it was the records that had killed her husband.

“Saguaro Riptide” was the one that had done it. Not the version from the Pipeline '64 album that Kate Benteen remembered-this was Dale’s very first record, an early version of the song recorded as a 45 for an independent label long before he hit it big. And it was rare-if you could find a copy, it would set you back a hundred bucks.

Dale didn’t play it very often. He hardly ever played any of his own records because he didn’t want to wear them out or take the chance of scratching them. He’d paid some kid to transfer his entire vinyl collection to tape when they lived in LA, and that was the stuff he listened to. He kept all his Dale Dayton and the Daytonas records in a special cabinet that stood on the same wall as the sliding glass door that overlooked the junkyard.

The sun hit that wall every day. Heating it up. And at night the moon came up, and things cooled down. Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot.

And the records did the same, pressed against the other side of that wall, day in and day out.

Heating up, cooling down. Time and time again.

Sandy never thought about it. Neither did Dale.

Until the day Dale tried to play “Saguaro Riptide.”

Sandy wasn’t home. She’d gone to town for groceries. Dale was all alone. She knew he was depressed. They’d just opened the junkyard, and in many ways that was the final straw-like giving up on the dream, like finally admitting that the miniature Pacific and the sandy beach with the palm trees was never going to happen.

She should have never left Dale alone on a day like that. A day didn’t go by without her wishing she hadn’t done it.

But she had done it. She’d gone to buy hamburger and milk and bread and mustard, and her husband had killed himself because she wasn’t there to put her arms around him when he took that warped 45 off the turntable.

The junkyard had only been open a week. A single car sat in the huge lot surrounded by gleaming chain-link fence-a battered lemon-colored VW Bug.

That was where Sandy found Dale late that afternoon- leaning against that battered lemon Bug, the hole in his head the same color as the blistering lava sunset.

Still gripping a pistol in his right hand, the warped 45 in his left.

Sandy sipped her beer. She knew that the VW Bug had been crushed many years ago, but she was always afraid she was going to see it when she looked through the sliding glass door.

But the VW wasn’t there this evening. Sandy wished for the millionth time that she had only dreamed it, the same way she’d once dreamed of watching soft waves brush a golden beach in the Arizona desert.

Sandy opened the door. A gust of wind ruffled her dark hair. In the junkyard, twisted Detroit steel floated in pools of twilight. Broken windshields gleamed, as if charged with the last whisper of sunshine. A slight wind rose, bringing with it a golden haze, and the golden haze whistled through tailpipes fluted with rust, dying in dead engines heavy with oil that could smother any sound.

And then shadows were everywhere. They came on the wind, from the cinnamon mountains. And the wind was rising, howling-

Sandy laughed, because the wind wasn’t howling at all.

“Goddamn dog,” she said, and she snatched a can of Alpo from the kitchen and shoved the can opener in her back pocket and stepped through the doorway that afforded a view of the junkyard and the mountains beyond.

Dale yipped in delight, stubby legs pumping like mad as he charged along the chain-link fence.

Sandy smiled.

“Hold on, boy,” she said. “I’m comin’.”

Woody stepped onto the landing. The Range Rover hadn’t returned, and now the Dodge Dakota was gone, too, meaning that the bitch in the black bikini had also hit the trail.

Shit. Wasn’t nobody around but him and that damn dog barking in the junkyard.

Mutt was driving him seriously crazy, too.

He wished he had the monk’s pistol.

But he didn’t. Didn’t have a gun. Didn’t have a car. Didn’t have a motherfuckin’ dime in his pocket.

Shit.

The dog shut up. Only one reason why-the motel lady was over by the chain-link fence, feeding the mutt some dinner.

She was wearing a pair of cutoff jeans that rode up her ass like a second skin as she knelt to dish up that dog food.

Had nice legs for an older bitch, too.

She turned and headed for the house. Not bad tits on her, either.

Woody wished she’d dish something up for him.

She looked up just then and saw him.

She waved, gave him a smile.

Just the way she’d smiled when she spotted those goddamn roses.

Smile and wave at the faggot, that was what she was thinking.

Woody smiled, waved back.

This was some sorry shit, and he was seriously tired of it. He went inside and grabbed the sharpened toothbrush. He’d teach this bitch to smile at him.

He’d teach her a thing or two. .