After the drizzle at the end of their round had given way to a night of thundery downpours and flashes of lightning, the clear sky over Bandon Dunes the following morning, itself burnt orange and red by the dawn sun, betrayed a scorcher of a day was in store for anyone lucky enough to be heading out onto the links. With over a hundred holes of golf under their belts and goodness knows how many extra miles on the clock after the previous week, however, Ray couldn’t help but feel a warm sense of relief that as he was walking across the parking lot, the large duffel bag with his and Mustang’s luggage inside slung over his shoulder, the only activity he had ahead of him was the 40-hour-long drive back to Louisiana in Travis’ Mustang – or ‘Maisie’ as he, himself, had begun to call her.
Reaching the rear of the Mustang, Ray fished the keys out of his pocket, unlocked the trunk, and popped it open. After wincing at the creaking hinges – as he did every time he heard that groan of metal grinding on metal – Ray slipped the duffel bag down off his shoulder and tossed it into the carpet-lined trunk. Once he’d done a little maneuvering and rearranging to make sure the duffel bag was tucked in nice and flush with the sidewall of the trunk, Ray turned around and looked back across the parking lot. Having left him chatting at reception to Marcus Stilwell, the 21-year old college senior from Georgia Tech he’d dispatched 3&2 in the quarter-finals, Mustang was now walking towards Maisie with his shoes and golf bag in tow.
He’d been pretty quiet the previous night, which, given he’d just experienced being beaten for the first time ever, Ray had wholly understood. The USGA and Bandon Dunes had put on a ‘Champion’s Banquet’ to round out the week’s festivities for those players who’d made it to the round of 16, a plush affair with expensive food and one-too-many speeches, and whilst he had politely taken part in the necessary small-talk Beau had warned them such an occasion would demand, Ray could tell Mustang hadn’t been quite right in himself. So, when he’d asked him not long after the tables had been cleared after dessert could they just head up to their room, Ray had been more than willing to get him out of there. Of course, he’d tried lightening the mood once they got back, asked him if he wanted to watch a movie or some TV, but Mustang had shown no interest; said he was tired and just wanted to go to bed. So, that’s what they’d done.
What Ray was eager to see now, though, was how Mustang was feeling about losing to Fletcher after sleeping on it. He’d considered trying to get a read on how he was doing when they were getting up and grabbing some breakfast, but given all of that had been happening at the break of dawn, not even Ray, himself, had been much in the mood for conversation, so he’d decided to give Mustang a pass for not saying much either. Between the refreshingly cold morning air now filling his lungs and the flood of caffeine racing through his system courtesy of the triple espresso he’d had at breakfast, however, Ray was now feeling sufficiently awake to give it another go.
“So, what did Stilwell want?” he asked, once Mustang got comfortably within earshot of Maisie.
“Not much,” replied Mustang, unenthusiastically. “Just more of the same stuff from last night.”
“Ah, so tryna’ recruit you to Georgia Tech, then?”
“Pretty much.”
Mustang landed next to Maisie and stood his golf bag down onto the ground alongside Ray.
“Well, I guess we might as well start gettin’ used to that,” said Ray, grabbing the golf bag by the hard, plastic top handle and placing it inside the trunk.
“You mean colleges trying to get me to go play golf with them?” asked Mustang, looking to make sure they were on the same page.
“Oh yeah,” Ray answered, sliding the bag up into the space where he’d let down the backseats. “After makin’ it to the final of the U.S. Amateur? At your age? I’d be surprised if there weren’t already packages wingin’ their way to the Creek from all the top schools as we speak.” Ray leaned back out from the trunk and reached out his hand to take Mustang’s golf shoes. “And given we’re runnin’ dangerously low on pens, baseball caps, and fridge magnets?” he grinned mischievously. “This past week really couldn’t have come at a better time.”
Mustang smiled weakly as he handed over his golf shoes to Ray.
“Speakin’ of the final, though …” continued Ray, spying an opportunity to steer the conversation in the direction he wanted as he neatly tucked Mustang’s shoes right in by the lip of the trunk so that they wouldn’t be sliding around once they started driving. “How ya feelin’ ‘bout it?”
“Uh … I dunno,” replied Mustang, sounding a little thrown by the question. “Alright, I guess?”
With his shoes secured in place, Ray turned and zeroed in on Mustang a little more. “Alright?” he said, repeating Mustang’s answer as he placed his hand on the trunk lid and rested it there. “That it?”
“Yeah …” answered Mustang, unsure as to what exactly Ray was looking for from him. “I mean, would I have preferred to win? Sure. Does it suck that I lost? Definitely. But it’s over. There’s nothing I can do about it now, so, really, I’m just trying not to think about it – which, by the way, this?” He gestured sarcastically back and forth between himself and Ray. “Is helping massively with.”
Ray smiled. “So, just to be clear then, you’re not … I dunno … super bummed out or anythin’ like that? Cause after seein’ how quiet you were last night … I gotta be honest, kid, I was a little worried.”
Mustang let out a contemplative sigh as he looked off to the side and fell silent. After three and a bit months of living with one another, though, Ray had come to pick up on what Mustang’s tells were. And right now? He knew there was something on his mind.
“Ok, out with it,” said Ray, bluntly cutting to the chase, a tactic he’d found to be the most useful for dealing with him when he clammed up.
Mustang let out another sigh. He’d been through this process enough times in the preceding months to know ‘him talking’ was now the only possible outcome, as once Ray figured he was keeping something from him? He was like a bloodhound chasing an escaped convict once he’d picked up their scent – which is to say, ‘relentless’.
“Well, the reason why I was a little … ‘off’ yesterday,” he began, the weight already beginning to feel as though it were lifting from his chest. “Was partly because of losing to Fletcher …”
“But mainly?” probed Ray, eager to keep Mustang speaking.
“Well … once the trophy presentation was over and I went into the locker room to get changed … before I grabbed a shower, I checked my phone, right?”
“Ok …” said Ray, after getting the sense Mustang had wanted some form of affirmation from him.
“Well, anyway … I saw that I was after getting a message from Kiko, and …” Mustang trailed off. And going on where his gaze went, he’d either suddenly developed a profound interest in the perfectly smooth asphalt covering the parking lot, or the prospect of actually finishing his sentence was proving to be more difficult than he’d anticipated.
“Yeah, kid?” Ray said, encouraging him to keep going.
Mustang let out another sigh before looking back up at Ray, his eyes heavy with disappointment. “She’s after getting a boyfriend, man.”
*
“So, wait, am I missing something?” asked Jeanie, her face screwing up in confusion. “Were Mustang and Kiko, like … dating?”
After two long days of driving back from Oregon, a journey that had included the pair of them spending the night in a dirt-cheap motel just outside Las Vegas, Ray and Mustang had arrived back in Marais des Voleurs just after 2 a.m. the previous night. Despite the fact he felt as though he needed to sleep for a week straight, however, after not seeing each other in well over a week, when Jeanie had suggested she could come over to their place to catch up on everything that had happened in Bandon before she went to work that morning, an eager Ray had peeled himself out of bed after only a few hours sleep and put on a pot of coffee.
“Well, I dunno if you’d call it ‘datin’ as we know it?” he answered, trying to keep his voice down as he topped off his cup and placed the carafe back down onto the counter. “But from the way the kid explained it, they’d been textin’ and, you know, Facetimin’ or whatever since after the Memorial; and, I dunno, I guess he was under the impression that maybe they were kinda datin’?” Ray picked up the two cups he’d just filled, being careful not to spill any of the precious coffee sitting inside them, and began to walk slowly over towards the kitchen table. “So, to then see that Kiko’s only gone and started goin’ out with somebody else? Well, you can’t blame the kid for takin’ it a little hard.”
“No, of course – the poor guy,” agreed Jeanie sympathetically, wrapping her hands around the cup of coffee Ray had just placed down on the table in front of her, the navy blue porcelain warm to the touch. “And to find out the way he did? Like, right after losing his match? If that had happened to me when I was his age, I’d have been a wreck for a mon-…” Cutting herself off mid-sentence, Jeanie’s eyes grew wide as she looked off towards the door leading into the kitchen.
Knowing already what to expect, Ray turned around in his chair and, dressed in his usual sleepwear of an old t-shirt and shorts, saw a groggy-looking Mustang standing in the doorway.
“So you told her about Kiko then?” said Mustang, dryly, after a few seconds of semi-awkward silence.
“That I did,” Ray answered casually, not in the slightest bit bothered or embarrassed.
“I’m sorry, Oscar,” added Jeanie, sounding genuinely apologetic. “I hope you don’t mind.”
Mustang had gotten along with Jeanie right from the very first night Ray had brought him to ‘Renée’s’ a few months previously. And since she and Ray had started dating not long after the Memorial, their friendship had grown all the stronger right alongside her and Ray’s budding romance. What that all meant when situations like this arose, however, was that Mustang was now all the more powerless to be even the slightest bit annoyed with her.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said, waving off the need for an apology as he began to walk towards the old refrigerator they’d gotten off Bill, his bare feet quiet on the dated-looking linoleum floor Ray had deemed ‘too good’ to get rid of when they were renovating the house. “It’s not like it was a secret or anything.”
Mustang pulled open the heavy door of the refrigerator and gazed inside as a refreshing blast of frigid air gave him a temporary reprieve from the heat that, despite the fact it had only just gone 7:30 in the morning, was already oppressively humid. With Mustang busy trying to decide what he wanted, Jeanie reached her hand across the table and hit Ray with a short, sharp slap into the arm to get his attention. After quietly mouthing his displeasure at such an unprecedented assault, Ray whispered, “What?!”
“Say something,” Jeanie mouthed, gesturing subtly off at Mustang, who had just pulled a carton of orange juice out from the shelf on the door.
Though not knowing what exactly she meant by ‘something’, Ray scrambled and blurted out the first thing that came to mind. “Yeah, well … it’s probably for the best, kid. With you here and her in Japan? I mean, it was hardly gonna work out, now was it?”
Eager to see if that had classed as the kind of ‘something’ she was talking about, Ray looked back at Jeanie. When all he saw was her shaking her head in exasperation, though, he quickly realised he’d missed the mark.
“No, I guess not,” replied Mustang, a hair quietly, as he poured some of the orange juice into a glass he’d fished out of one of the cupboards.
“But, hey, even still,” said Jeanie, stepping in quickly to pick up the slack from where Ray had left off. “It’s ok to be disappointed that things didn’t work out the way you were hoping they might – you know that, right?”
With his glass half-filled, Mustang screwed the top back onto the orange juice and placed it down onto the counter. “Yeah, I know,” he said. “But, uh … do you mind if we just talk about something else?”
“Yeah, no, of course,” answered Jeanie, quickly hitting Ray with another stinger of a slap into the arm to get him to say something else.
“So, uh …” he began, the words stumbling clumsily out of his mouth as he racked his brain for a suitable change of subject. “What has you up so early?”
“My phone woke me,” replied Mustang, pausing for a moment in-between taking a drink from his glass to answer.
“Did you forget to turn your alarm off?” asked Ray, speaking with the knowing tone of someone who’d, clearly, had plenty of experience of such a thing happening to him.
“Oh, I hate when that happens,” said Jeanie, her face, too, tinged with the same semi-haunted expression colouring Ray’s. “When you’re looking to sleep in?”
“It’s the worst, ain’t it?!” said Ray, energetically, as he turned in his chair so that he was looking more directly at Jeanie.
Having gotten used to this particular trend since they’d started going out, one in which even the most mundane of topics could see them delve off into deep conversation like a pair of lovesick teenagers, Mustang moved quickly to restore Ray’s and Jeanie’s focus on the topic at hand. “So, anyway …” he said, raising his voice just enough to snap them out of their trance. “No, it wasn’t my alarm – it was a phone call.”
“A phone call?” repeated a confused-sounding Ray, looking back over his shoulder so that he could see Mustang walking towards the refrigerator with the juice carton in hand. “From who?”
Mustang pulled open the door of the refrigerator once again and dropped the carton back down into the shelf alongside a carton of milk that had definitely been in there since before they went to Oregon. “Dunno …” he answered, pulling the suspect milk out from the shelf and opening the top of it with all the care and precision of a bomb disposal technician. “Didn’t recognize the number, so I didn’t answer it.”
“Well, that’s weird,” mused Ray. “You have your phone on ya?”
After taking a tentative sniff of the milk in the interim, Mustang, who was still recoiling from the sour stench which had assaulted his nostrils, reached into the pocket on his shorts, pulled out his phone and tossed it to Ray as he moved briskly across the kitchen towards the sink – making sure, all the while, to keep the carton held as far away from his nose as the length of his arm would allow. After a quick few taps on his phone saw him gain access to Mustang’s missed calls, however, Ray’s face immediately screwed up in confusion.
Because he recognized the phone number that had called Mustang.
“It was Beau …” he said, trying to work out what was going on as he was saying the words. “He’s the one who called you.”
“Seriously?” replied Mustang, so taken aback by Ray’s revelation that he couldn’t even be grossed out by the thick, curdled slop now dropping out of the milk carton and down into the sink. “I didn’t even know he had my number.”
A still firmly perplexed Ray placed Mustang’s phone down onto the table alongside his cup. “Neither did I …” he said, his tired mind struggling to put up with the level of computing he was now pushing it to do at such an early hour. “Let me go check my phone; maybe he called me too.”
After watching Ray get up from the table and disappear out of the kitchen to go run to his bedroom, Jeanie looked over at Mustang, who had now taken to rinsing out the carton under a steady stream of water pouring from the tap. “So, Ray was saying that the two of you are planning on going to New Malo after lunch?” she said, bringing her cup up towards her mouth to take a sip of the now sufficiently cooled coffee.
“Yeah,” sighed Mustang, sounding less-than-enthusiastic about their afternoon excursion as he turned off the tap and placed the carton down onto the water-stained draining board. “School shopping.” After grabbing a towel from off the counter to dry his hands with, a suddenly indignant-looking Mustang turned and looked across the kitchen at Jeanie. “Speaking of which, did you know they make you wear uniforms here?!” he scoffed, the outrage he was feeling abundantly clear.
Jeanie smiled knowingly as she gently placed her cup back down onto the table. “Yep. And while I’d like to tell you that they aren’t that bad? Well … you’ll see when you get to the store. Which one is Ray bringing you to?”
“I’m not sure yet,” answered Mustang, tossing the towel back onto the counter as he imagined what horror of a uniform awaited him in New Malo. “He said we’d figure it out once we got there: a policy I think he’s using for pretty much everything we have to get on the list, so … it’s probably gonna be a long afternoon.”
“Yeah, that sounds about right,” laughed Jeanie, despairing ever-so-slightly at the idea of Ray dragging Mustang from store to store in pursuit of school supplies. “Well, look, I’m only working until lunchtime today so I could come with you and help you guys run through that list if you want?”
“That would be great, yeah,” said Mustang, enthusiastically. “You sure you want to give up your afternoon to go school shopping, though?”
“I’d nothing else planned, so, if anything, it’ll give me something to do,” reassured Jeanie. “Plus, I’m not gonna lie, there’s this new ice-cream shop after opening up there that’s supposed to be crazy good and I’ve been dying to try it – so, this’ll give me the perfect excuse.”
“Well, in that case then, you can definitely come! Thanks!” smiled Mustang appreciatively.
Before Jeanie could voice the ‘You’re welcome’ she’d already loaded onto her tongue, the sound of Ray’s voice echoing down the hall leading to the kitchen beat her to the punch. “WE GOTTA MOVE, KID!” he shouted, his voice an energetic mix of urgent and excited.
“What? Why? What’s going on?” asked Mustang, understandably taken aback as Ray barreled back in through the doorway of the kitchen with his own phone in hand.
“Did Beau call you too or something?” surmised Jeanie.
“Yup,” confirmed Ray, now positively buzzing as he came to a stop next to the kitchen table. “And, as it turns out, there’s someone at the Creek right now who wants to meet the kid.”
“At this time of the morning?” questioned Jeanie, her confusion growing stronger. “Who?”
“Dallas Rugger,” said Ray, the name falling from his mouth as if it should carry significant weight for anyone who heard it.
After exchanging a silent glance with Jeanie to see if she had even the slightest inkling who, exactly, ‘Dallas Rugger’ was, a smiling Mustang looked across the kitchen at Ray. “And that’s a big deal because …?” he asked.
“Because, kid, Dallas Rugger?” said Ray, now grinning like a Cheshire cat. “Just so happens to be the captain of this year’s U.S. Walker Cup team.”
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