The ringing was back. He opened all the windows in the car hoping to make it go away. When he reached ninety most of it did. He sat at the It’ll Do bar and ordered a double Jack on the rocks. He swiveled around to the softly-lighted dance floor, much larger and louder than the one at Ticcio’s, and watched over-heated lovers who might be having their first dance together melt into unity as Patsy Cline delivered I Fall to Pieces. He tilted his glass to the juke box. “Know what you mean,” he mumbled.
Something surged through him when Toni walked up and rested her arm on his shoulder. “Out in the wilderness for awhile, huh Cam?”
Her question would’ve been painful except for the Jack. “Hi, Toni.”
“Hey, I like the beard on you,” she said, tugging at it. “Weight’s not bad either. I like a man with some meat on his bones.”
Toni’s eyelids gently waved up and down like the wings of a July butterfly. The lovers on the dance floor caught Warfield’s eye. “Workin’ tonight?” he asked.
“Depends on who wants to know?” She smiled.
“Forgot. You own the place now.”
“Thought it was about time you’d be back. Didn’t wanna miss you.”
“Dance?” he asked, as Celine Dion began to sing My Heart Will Go On.
She lowered her huge eyes for a moment as if she was thinking it over and then looked at him again. “Not here,” she whispered. “My place.”
A few hours after General Antonov and Captain Nosenko met in the Moscow theater, Fleming arrived at Hardscrabble to hear her phone ringing. It was Macc Macclenny returning her call. “How’s my favorite shrink?”
“Macc, you bum! How’s life on the Colorado?”
“Rough out here! Really rough! Thank that Senator what’s-his-name for closing Lone Elm. Hope you’re calling to tell me you and Warfield are headed my way.”
She wished that, too. But she’d called Macc for another reason. Now she had to tell Warfield’s best and oldest friend he’d stumbled.
Warfield had a constitution of steel, the stainless kind that came with a warranty. The internal fires, the passion, the grit that made him what he was couldn’t be bought or created or turned on inside someone who didn’t have them. You couldn’t simply will yourself to be that kind of man: You either were or you were not. Macc would find it hard to understand that these hallmarks of Warfield had failed him.
He sobered after hearing her explanation. “The guy’s never been depressed a day in his life, Fleming. If it wasn’t coming from you I wouldn’t believe it.”
“Strong men like Warfield aren’t immune.”
“What’s he doing?”
“You mean what’s he not doing. He’s a recluse. I’ve tried to rescue him to the point of badgering. He never initiates contact. God only knows what else is falling through the cracks.”
“You mean you haven’t seen him?”
“Hardly at all since you left. Couple nights ago he called from Ticcio’s, left me a message to meet him there but I didn’t get it until the next day. Tried to call him but his voice-mailbox was full and wouldn’t accept any more messages. My e-mails go unanswered. The times I’ve gone by his condo all the blinds are closed. I don’t know if he’s there or not. I let myself in once and couldn’t believe the condition it was in.”
Macc groaned.
“Funny thing was,” Fleming continued, “I was at Ticcio’s that night when he called. My brother was here from Germany and I took him there for dinner. I’d have seen the War Man if he’d been there.”
“How long does this stuff last? This depression.”
“Varies case to case. Not easy to deal with. Sometimes it’s a life sentence. I don’t think that applies to Cam.”
“Hell no, not for Warfield, it’s not. I’ll keep calling ’til I reach him and then I’ll get him down here on the river and work his ass off. He won’t have time to be depressed. He’ll get over it in no time, Fleming; you wait and see.”
Macc ran his hand across his pate as the twin-prop De Havilland 8 came to a stop and cut its engines at the Flagstaff-Pulliam Airport. His hairline had moved further and further back year by year and he’d begun shaving his head a few months before he left Lone Elm. The stubble reminded him he had neglected to use the razor on it this morning.
He wondered what his old boss would be like. Fleming had described him in a way Macc could not envision, but when he called him to invite him to Arizona he had a better understanding.
The Cameron Warfield he had known since that day at Fort Huachuca so many years ago was a guy who didn’t even have bad days, not to mention bad months. It hadn’t been easy to get him to make the trip, but to Macc a few days inside the Grand Canyon was better than any medicine a doctor could prescribe. The Grand Canyon and Colorado River had their own way of healing a man’s mind and body and soul.
Macc was stunned when he saw Warfield. Long shaggy hair. Extra weight. Black eyes. Worst of all, the vacant look. Macc wasn’t sure how he’d greet this stranger but when they were close enough Macc threw his arms around him in a bear hug and was surprised Warfield held on to him so long. It was a good start, Macc thought, but as they made their way out of the terminal little was said beyond Warfield’s comment on his flight. He’d had to change planes in Denver and Phoenix.
The north rim of the Canyon, minutes south of the Utah state line, was a three-hour drive up U.S. 89 from Flagstaff and Macc knew it’d be a long, quiet trip the way things were going. Talk between them was stilted like a first date of teenagers, not like the two buddies they were. An hour north of Flagstaff, Macc pulled off the highway at an old wood frame structure with a stained metal roof. The building had been painted sky blue by someone who by now would be too old to work, and the paint was peeling. The thick layer of dust paste on the pickups in the parking lot told how long it’d been since it rained. Even the lone cactus standing at the right end of the building looked bedraggled. The faded sign out front said this was the Blue Penny Saloon.
Macc knew alcohol wasn’t quite the prescription for depression, but he wasn’t going to coddle Warfield, and besides that they wouldn’t be at the Blue Penny long enough for a lot of drinking.
“It’s about the only place between here and Utah,” he said.
A blast of heat clipped them as they stepped out of Macc’s white pickup, and Warfield muttered something about Saudi Arabia.
“One-eighteen today, twenty-percent humidity,” Macc said. As they entered the dark roadhouse, four or five cowboys with leather faces and big hats sitting at a long bar turned to see who it was. The jukebox was loud. A layer of sawdust covered the plank floor and a pool table in need of new felt stood idle on the other side of a dance floor. The cool breeze from the swamp cooler provided a welcome hint of moisture in the air.
“Help you boys?” The barmaid wore tight shorts and a tank top. She smiled tan teeth but Macc figured it didn’t matter. The tank top probably kept most eyes to the south.
“Draft.” Warfield said, looking around the place. Dusty beams sitting on wood columns provided the support for the roof. The Budweiser mirror behind the bar had lost much of its silvering and now yielded gray, rippled images. A lone woman who looked like she belonged to the place sat at a table next to the dance floor. Three cowboys smoking at a nearby table appeared to be interested, but she didn’t.
“Like the ol’ days, Cam. Bar full of horny men, one or two wimmen. Numbers never did seem to work in our favor.”
“We always beat the odds,” Warfield said with a brief smile. It was the first one Macc had seen. A start.
After a couple of beers, Macc glanced at the lone woman. She probably wasn’t bad in her prime but the Arizona sun and dry air had claimed some of their due. “I reckon she’d like to dance with me,” he told Warfield. “No use in makin’ her wait any longer.”