When the bartender came by, I ordered a hamburger and a glass of tonic with a twist. I might have returned my backside to the familiar world of barstools, but, Burton Joe aside, that didn't mean I had fallen off the wagon.
I sat there fingering my drink, looking around the bar, and feeling a little out of place. It was as though I had been away from bars and drinking for a long time, although in actual fact it had only been just shy of a month. I glanced at the man next to me. Sitting there among Wickenburg's casually dressed tourists and cowboy-type locals, he looked ill at ease in his citified gray suit and dandified paisley tie. Meanwhile, I felt as though the indelible aura of Ironwood Ranch still clung to my body. I couldn't help wondering if it showed, like some kind of religious stigmata.
'Where are you from?' I asked, turning to the man seated next to me and thinking that a little friendly conversation might make both of us feel less uncomfortable.
'California,' he answered, spinning a newly filled beer glass around and around between the palms of his hands while he stared deep into its depths. I recognized the gesture as a drinking man's version of examining tea leaves.
'Get stuck by the flood?'
He shook his head and smiled ruefully. 'If you can believe it, right here in Wickenburg is where I wanted to be. It really does seem like the end of the earth. I drove over from the coast this afternoon, planning to surprise my wife and kids, but they're not in their rooms, so I guess the joke's on me. I left a note saying that I'd wait here until they got back.'
There was a hint of marital disharmony in his answer, and I was happy he spared me the gory details. Friendly conversation I could handle. Shoulder crying, no way.
My hamburger came. I doctored it with liberal doses of mustard and ketchup and ordered another tonic with another twist. The noise level in the room went up a notch as still another group of revelers-locals or stranded tourists, I couldn't tell which-crowded into the already packed bar.
'Do you have floods like this often?' the guy in the suit asked, erroneously assuming I was on my home turf.
I started to tell him that I wasn't from Wickenburg any more than he was, but that would have necessitated explaining where I was from and what I was doing there.
'They're calling it a hundred-year flood,' I answered, quoting my local fountain of knowledge, Shorty Rojas. 'Personally, I've never seen one like it,' I added with what I thought was artful candor.
The hamburger was all right, if you don't mind fried lettuce, and the French fries were soggy with grease, but food is food if you're hungry enough. I downed the main course and ordered a dish of vanilla ice cream for dessert. It was the first time in years I had ordered ice cream in public. Watching me curiously, the man next to me ordered another Bud.
'What do you do for a living?' I asked. By asking questions first, I thought I could at least direct the flow of conversation.
'I'm an accountant. You?'
But that's the problem with casual conversations. Every answer evolves into another question, tit for tat.
'I'm a cop,' I answered.
'Oh,' the guy grunted. Not, What kind? Not, Where? Just, Oh, and since he didn't ask for any more specifics, I didn't offer them. An old loose-jawed guy one seat over asked Gray Suit for a light, which he didn't have, but the two of them struck up another conversation, leaving me out of it. With the life- and property-threatening flood surging past outside, everyone in the room found it easy to talk to strangers. While Gray Suit was preoccupied, I asked the bartender for a pay phone. He directed me to one in the grungy yellow hallway between the dining room and the bar, but when I picked up the handset, the phone was dead.
'Phone's out of order,' a dishwasher said unnecessarily as he trudged past me lugging a huge plastic tub laden with dirty dishes.
'I noticed,' I said, and made my way back into the bar, where a third glass of tonic had reserved my place. I had just hunkered onto the stool and was in the process of raising the glass to my lips when someone spoke directly behind me.
'If this isn't cozy. What are you two doing, sitting around comparing notes?'
I recognized the icy voice. Instantly. It was Karen, my ex-wife Karen, on a rampage. Stunned, I turned to look at her, almost spilling the full drink down my front. What the hell was she doing here?
Carefully I set my drink back down on the bar. When in doubt, attack, so I took the initiative. 'I thought you were going to the meeting.'
There was such blazing fury in her eyes that I almost would have preferred tangling with the rattlesnake in Dolores Rojas' glass jar.
'Meeting? You're damned right I've been to a meeting, but I'm here to tell you you've suckered me for the last time, Jonas Piedmont Beaumont.'
'Karen,' I said reasonably, 'it's not what you think.'
'It isn't? I'll tell you what I think. The kids and I took a full week out of our lives. We came all the way over here and squandered our time willingly, on the assumption that we were doing you a favor, helping you get well. That's what all the counselors told us on the phone when they were begging us to come. Just now we've spent a good hour and a half attending a goddamned Al-Anon meeting, while you're already back in the bars and drinking again.'
'Karen, I…'
But before I could say anything more, the man in the gray suit, who seemed almost as surprised as I was, managed to find his voice.
'Honey,' he said, standing up, 'I think I can explain everything.'
She glared at him, her face awash in tearful anger. 'You'd better get started then, David, unless you prefer his company to mine.'
With that, karen Moffit Beaumont Livingston turned on her heel and swept regally out of the Silver Spur Saloon, with gray-suited David, her second husband, trailing miserably behind. Somehow sensing incipient danger, people in the crowd parted, stepping aside to let them pass.
The bartender came by and collected David Livingston's abandoned glass. 'Who was that?' he asked, pausing for a moment to polish the top of the bar in front of me.
'My ex,' I replied grimly. 'And her second husband.'
I couldn't exactly call David Livingston Karen's new husband. After all, he had been around for some time now, ten years in fact, although I personally had never before laid eyes on the man. From the way he handled his glass, from the way he stowed away the Bud, I wondered if Karen had screwed up and reeled in a second drinker. It happens; at least that's what the counselors say.
'Did you know who he was?' the bartender asked, staring at me curiously.
'I do now,' I said.
The bartender grinned and shook his head. 'You look like you could use something stronger.' He set a glass of amber-colored liquid on the counter in front of me. 'On the house,' he added.
I sat there looking at it for several moments, debating whether or not I should pick it up, when somebody tapped insistently on my shoulder. I turned around expecting to find Dave Livingston standing there ready to punch my lights out. Instead, Shorty Rojas peered up at me.
He motioned his head toward the door. 'Come on,' he said. 'I got somebody who wants to talk to you.'
Call it fate, call it superstition, but I had the uncanny feeling that somebody was looking over my shoulder, watching out for me, making sure I didn't take that first drink. That Somebody had nothing to do with Shorty Rojas.
I waved my thanks to the bartender with an apologetic shake of my head. 'Some other time,' I said, and followed Shorty out into the street. His truck was nowhere in sight.
'Who is it?' I asked, figuring that Calvin Crenshaw had changed his mind and was ready to call the sheriff's department.
'Joey Rothman's mother,' Shorty said. 'She wants to talk to you.'
'Marsha? What does she want with me?'
