Written by Stephen F. Moloney
The tyres on Ray’s truck screeched as he brought it to a shuddering halt on the polished concrete driveway. He quickly switched off the engine, threw open his door, and exploded out into the stiflingly humid Florida air, eyes trained like a laser beam on Trenton, who was standing in the driveway next to his blacked-out Lamborghini.
“Thanks for coming, man…” whimpered Trenton, sounding as panicked as he had on the phone. “I didn’t know who else to call. He won’t answer any of my calls, he’s been straight blanking me on socials -…”
“And have you tried actually goin’ into the house?!” barked Ray, accusingly, as he made a beeline for the large front door of Mustang’s mansion.
“Obviously!” snapped Trenton, now taking to hammering his smartphone nervously against the palm of his hand. “But if he’s in there, he won’t come to the door either.”
Having been trying in vain to peer through the pane of frosted glass that stretched the entire height of the oversized door, Ray turned around and glared at Trenton.
“So you’re sayin’ you don’t even know if he’s actually in here?!” he asked, the words firing sharply from his mouth as he moved hurriedly back towards where Trenton was standing.
“Well … no, not exactly …” replied Trenton, wilting, as usual, under the pressure.
“What do you mean ‘not exactly’?!” growled Ray, trying desperately hard to swallow the immense frustration he was feeling for the sake of the situation.
“I mean, I called him yesterday to see if he wanted to head out for a few drinks – you know, just to blow off some steam ahead of flying out today cause he’d seemed a little tense about the whole thing,” replied Trenton, gesturing loosely off in the direction of Palm Beach, the place where he would have been planning on having Mustang pay for their night out. “But he said no – said he was just going to crash at home for the night.”
“And did it ever occur to you why he may have seemed a bit tense?!” said Ray, his frustration building dangerously close to where he’d cease to be able to control it. “This week of all weeks?!”
Recognizing that there was obviously something he was missing, Trenton immediately began to rack his brain in an effort to think what Ray could be referring to. When that yielded nothing, however, Trenton – like he did when faced with any problem – immediately turned to his smartphone. He punched in his passcode and set to furiously scrolling and swiping through it in search of answers. From the way his face dropped a few seconds into his search, though, it was clear Trenton had finally found the answer he was looking for – and it wasn’t good.
“Oh no …” he said quietly.
“Yeah, ‘Oh no’ …” repeated Ray, scornfully. “And the fact you had to go into your phone to figure that out just shows how little a damn you actually give about him.”
“Hey, are you forgetting who called you?!” replied Trenton, now getting defensive. “Cause I’m pretty sure it was me! Would I have done that if I didn’t care about him?!”
That was it for Ray. The tipping point. And the red mist descended as a result. Before he knew what was happening, Ray’s body was covering the short distance between the front door and Trenton’s car like a rampaging bull until he was directly in front of him. He grabbed him up by the no doubt hideously expensive shirt he was wearing and slammed him into the side of his Lamborghini.
“Owwww!!!” cried Trenton, wincing in pain as the roof of his car dug sharply into his lower back. “What the he-”
“IF YOU’D CARED ABOUT HIM YOU WOULDN’T HAVE LEFT HIM ALONE!!” roared Ray, two years worth of pent-up frustration finally erupting out of him – yet it didn’t feel as good as he thought it would. Instead, as he saw Trenton semi-cowering before him, genuine fear in his eyes, Ray realized that as much he didn’t like him this wasn’t his fault. And, ultimately, that’s why this whole situation was so frustrating – because there was no one to blame. No big, bad wolf to single out and say, ‘You. You’re the reason for all of this.’
It was just fate.
Cruel, uncompromising fate.
*
“I thought you might be missing this …”
Having not heard her approach on account of the grass on the range dulling her footsteps, Ray was suddenly pulled from his memories by the sound of Maggie’s voice. He turned around from where he was leaning against the 100-yard marker and saw her standing behind him, arm outstretched and holding his baseball cap – in his rush to get out of the cabin he’d completely forgotten to grab it.
“Thanks,” said Ray, reaching out and taking his cap. “And uh … sorry.”
“For what?” scoffed Maggie, moving up alongside Ray. “Having a perfectly normal reaction to recalling an extremely painful memory? Actually, you know what? You should be sorry!”
Ray couldn’t help but laugh at Maggie’s sarcastic tone of voice – and seeing him laugh, made her laugh as well.
“Uhhhhh …” sighed Ray tiredly, lifting one of his hands up to his face and wearily rubbing his eyes. “I didn’t think it would still hit me as hard, you know? Thinkin’ back on that day?”
“I’d be surprised if it didn’t, to be honest with you – may I?”
As requested, Ray shuffled towards the opposite end of the marker to make room for Maggie, “What makes you think that?”
“Well …” she began, taking up her newly created spot against the marker. “Because it’s a reminder of the moment your life entered this … limbo that you’ve been in ever since. I mean, for the last decade you’ve had no idea what happened to Mustang. Like, he was this huge piece of your life for so long … and then he just vanished. You don’t know if he’s alive. If he’s … well, you know …”.
Ray did know what Maggie meant. And the thought made him wince – something not lost on Maggie.
“And as a result …” she continued, eager to keep things moving. “You’ve never had any closure; no way to move on and finally close that chapter of your life.”
Ray just nodded quietly to himself as he busied his hands with gently bending the already well-curved peak of his cap as he digested Maggie’s words. He knew she was correct, of course. From the moment he found that note and the ball from his first encounter with Byron sitting on the island in the huge expanse of white marble and stainless steel that was his kitchen, Ray knew things were never going to be the same again. It was as if in that second his old life, the one he’d been living all the way up until that point, ceased to exist and was instead replaced with one, single mission: find Mustang.
And for the next year that’s all Ray had tried to do. When he wasn’t making appeals on television for anyone with information to come forward or dealing with po-faced news anchors asking him, ‘And if Mustang were listening right now, what would you say to him?’ in the hopes they might get a few tears out of him on-camera, Ray was out searching. Every single day. Rain or shine. From dawn until dusk. He was out scouring far and wide for Mustang. He barely slept. He barely ate. In truth, he became a shadow of his former self. A man possessed.
But when that year eventually came to an end, after the media had long since moved on from the story of the ‘golfer who vanished into thin air’, and there hadn’t been sight nor sound of Mustang – or his boat, which had also gone missing from the dock at the rear of his mansion – Ray realized it was time to face facts. If Mustang was still, indeed, out there … he clearly didn’t want to be found. So, despite part of him screaming the contrary, he stopped trying to find him. He stopped clocking up thousands of miles driving between places he thought Mustang might have gone. He stopped going out on his boat and combing the horizon for signs of Mustang’s boat until there was nothing around him but ocean and sky. And he retreated. Back to Marais des Voleurs. Back to Crescent Creek. Back to where everything had started.
“It’s the hope that gets you,” said Ray quietly, keeping his attention focused on his cap. “You try to ignore it most days – and most of the time you do. But then other days?”. He lifted his head and looked out towards the far end of the range. “You just can’t help thinkin’ what if today’s the day, you know? Like, what if today’s the day I look out there … and just see him walkin’ across the range?”
“Have you ever wondered what you’d do?” asked Maggie, looking sideways at Ray and squinting slightly because of the sun. “You know … if that did actually happen?”
“Is that just a way of askin’ would I be mad at him without actually askin’ me?” smiled Ray, looking out the corner of his eye at Maggie.
“So you caught onto that, huh?”
“Just a tad.”
“Well, would you be mad?” asked Maggie, deciding to take the blunt approach given the jig was obviously up. “I mean, I don’t think anyone would blame you if you were.”
Ray took a deep breath as he pondered his answer.
“I think if you’d asked me that a few years ago,” he said, crafting each individual word carefully before giving it a voice. “I’d have probably said yes. I’d have been mad that, after everythin’ we’d been through, he just upped and left leavin’ nothin’ but a two-word note sayin’ he was sorry. I’d have been mad for all the worryin’ and sleepless nights he’d cursed me to …” Ray trailed off into silence. He took another deep breath, except this time exhaled it out as a weary sounding sigh.
“And, most of all, I’d have been mad …” he continued, reboarding his train of thought. “That he didn’t just come to me and say he wasn’t copin’ – cause at least then I could’ve helped him.”
“But now?” prompted Maggie, figuring that Ray now felt differently.
“Now?” he repeated, before turning back to look at Maggie. “I’d just give him a hug. Tell him I don’t care why he left or where he’d been all this time. And just …”. Ray let his words drift off on the warm air once more as he looked back off towards the treeline at the other end of the range. He hadn’t vocalized what he was thinking of saying next to anyone since Mustang went missing.
“And just tell him I love him,” he said, biting the bullet. “But … what can ya do, huh?”.
Maggie didn’t know what to say. In all the years she’d spent studying journalism in college there was nothing she’d ever read in a book or heard in a lecture hall that could prepare her for how best to navigate this moment. This was beyond anything she’d ever experienced in an interview before. She knew reliving his time with Mustang was always going to be difficult for Ray. It had been the elephant in the room from the moment he’d agreed to talk to her about it. But listening to him speak now and hearing how blatantly raw everything still was for him, Maggie found herself quickly coming to the conclusion that there wasn’t anything she could say. No magic words to make Ray not feel the way that he did. So she said nothing. Instead, she just lifted up her hand and gently placed it on his shoulder.
“Thanks,” said Ray, smiling weakly at Maggie’s gesture. “But I’m good – really.”
Returning Ray’s smile with one of her own, Maggie removed her hand from his shoulder and brought it back down to rest on the edge of the yardage marker.
Having returned to the trees surrounding the range in order to get a break from the smothering heat of the midday sun, the sound of birds singing and chirping at one another filled the silence as both Maggie and Ray, unbeknownst to one another, tried to figure out how best to proceed after things getting as deep as they had done. Luckily for the pair of them, however, the sound of an alarm going off on Ray’s smartphone provided the perfect ice-breaker.
“Is it that time already?” said Ray, disbelieving, as he reached his hand into the pocket on his jeans and pulled out probably the oldest and most beat up smartphone Maggie had ever laid eyes on.
“That’s your phone?!” she exclaimed, unable to mask her shock.
“Yeah, what’s wrong with it?” said Ray, as he silenced the alarm.
“What’s wrong with it?!” said Maggie, repeating Ray’s question as if the answer should be obvious. “It’s an ancient relic that should be behind glass in a museum somewhere! That’s what’s wrong with it! I mean, look at the screen, it’s all cracked! And what does it even run on?! 8G?!”
“Alright well, first of all, the smashed up screen adds character,” said Ray, dryly. “And, secondly, I don’t need this runnin’ on … I dunno … XG or whatever it is those satellites are bouncin’ around nowadays. Ok, as long as it makes phone calls, streams to my T.V., and has an alarm? I’m happy.”
“Alright, alright …” replied Maggie, conceding defeat as she watched Ray slide his phone back into his pocket and lean away from the yardage marker. “So what was the alarm for?”
“That …” began Ray, before momentarily trailing off in order to gently stretch his lower back. “Was tellin’ me that it’s time to go feed Lola – you wanna come?”
“Well, tell me this, does ‘feeding Lola’ entail tossing whole chickens to a twenty-foot alligator from a flimsy, wooden row-boat?”
“Nah, that’s Darlene,” joked Ray. “And she ain’t due another feedin’ till next week, so …”.
“Oh, well in that case,” said Maggie with a wry smile as she, too, leaned away from the yardage marker. “Lead the way!”
“Good!” chirped Ray enthusiastically, glad that things hadn’t become awkward between the pair of them. “And, hey, on the way I can tell ya what happened in the aftermath of Mustang makin’ that putt.”
“Will I need to get my recorder?” probed Maggie, looking daringly across at Ray as the pair of them rounded the yardage marker and began to walk back through the grass in the direction of the cabin.
Ray pondered over his answer for a moment before meeting Maggie’s gaze with his own.
“Oh yeah …” he said confidently, as he slipped his cap onto his head. “You won’t want to miss a second of this.”