The Right Madness

  Mac was sitting on a tall stool at the corner of the bar beneath the chalkboard that displayed the beer and wine list. He wore olive khakis and a dark cashmere sport coat over a white knit shirt. I felt like a bindle stiff in my jeans, Slumgullion’s T-shirt, and Old Goat’s windbreaker. As I worked the rest of the way through the crowd, Mac tapped the kid beside him on the shoulder. The kid gave up his stool happily and moved back into a clot of standing players. I knew that Mac had bought the kid and his friends a round of drinks to save me a stool. The two pudgy young blond girls from the pool were billing and cooing on the stools beside me.

  “I saved you a place, darling,” Mac said as he slapped my cheek when I sat down. The kids nearby gave us a look, then shook their heads and laughed. “You want a drink?” He had an almost untouched martini in front of him, a drink I usually avoided like sin, but it looked clean and cold and perfect for the moment.

  “I’ll have one of those,” I said.

  “Todd,” Mac said in a normal voice. But the bartender heard him and looked up alertly. I was fairly good company in bars, but Mac made himself a neighborhood within minutes after climbing on a bar stool. “A Bombay Sapphire martini for my friend, please.”

  While the bartender made the drink, I looked around the bar. As had happened too often recently, all the women looked very young, impossibly pretty, and sharper than the popper on a blacksnake whip. But I was with Mac, a member of the neighborhood, so my openly admiring stares were met with smiles instead of frowns.

  When my martini came, I raised it to Mac. We clicked glasses. “Victory,” I said.

  “Unless it’s victory over death, my friend,” he said, “it’s as empty as an old man’s condom.” He stared at the clear drink, his face deadly serious.

  “Excuse me,” I said, trying not to think about the piece of Lorna’s swimsuit in the inner pocket of my windbreaker. Or her bare breasts. Or her legs. “Jesus, I thought this was supposed to be a celebration.”

  “I need you to go to work for me again,” he said abruptly, his voice almost inaudible beneath the crowd noise.

  “No,” I answered without hesitation. “I don’t think so.”

  “You won’t even think about it?”

  “The last gig almost killed me, partner,” I said. “I didn’t shit right or sleep through the night for months after all that time on the road. And you know how I feel about working for friends.”

  “You’d be working for Ron Musselwhite,” he said as he pulled out a cigar and snipped off the tip.

  “Can’t smoke that in here, dude,” said a passing blond waitress with massive energy and a dangerous edge to her laughter, who quickly lost the edge, then slipped into a happy voice that defined her personality. We were the entertainment in her world.

  “Can I at least chew on it?” Mac suggested.

  “Anytime, dude. Anytime,” she said, then swept on past with a tray full of drinks.

  “Look,” he said, leaning toward me. “You won’t have to leave town, and I promise it will be an easy job. I’ll pay twice your usual rate.”

  “What the hell?” I said. “We live in the same town, man. We even live in the same neighborhood. We have drinks at the Scapegoat at least twice a week, right? So why did we have to drive all the way to Missoula, play two softball games in the same goddamned day, and come down to this madhouse so you can offer me a job?”

  “You always had a great perspective on the obvious,” he said. “The timing seemed right. Whitney’s on her way back to the Twin Cities—”

  “Thanks for reminding me.”

  “Sughrue, I need your help. A professional and personal favor.”

  “Jesus fucking wept,” I said, then sighed, and gunned my martini, then waved my glass at the bartender. Of course, he ignored me. Mac raised his finger and Todd was there in a microsecond.

  “Another?”

  “For him, please,” Mac said, then turned to me again. “Look, this is worse than the malpractice suit. Far worse.”

  “It’s always about you, isn’t it?” I said as I picked up my second martini. Gin had always made me silly. “It’s never about me,” I said, probably louder than I meant. Now the kids shifted gently away. We were almost alone in the crowd.

  “If I worked for you,” Mac said, perfectly calm, “it’d all be about you. But when you work for me, by definition, it is about me, my friend.”

  I didn’t say anything, just looked at my empty martini glass and wondered how it had gotten empty. “Goddamn,” I said to no one in particular, “I fucking miss drugs.”

  “Don’t we all,” Mac said. “How did you get here?”

  “My dad was pretty fucking crazy when he came back from WWII,” I said, “and my mom was an Avon Lady who loved gossip.”

  “The Depot, man,” Mac said. “How did you get to the bar?”

  “I walked,” I said. “I knew you’d stay sober and give me a ride back to the motel.”

  “I’m glad I’m dependable, CW,” he said.

  “I’m dependable, too,” I said, “in my own way.” I pushed the third martini aside, ordered a rack of ribs and a glass of water, then bummed a cigarette and a light from the young woman on the stool beside me. She didn’t seem to mind so I assumed that she belonged to the clot of kids drinking on Mac’s tab. She gave me an almost empty pack of Dunhills and a box of Swan matches. “Just keep them.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Just one more I don’t have to smoke,” she said. The young woman had a thin, pleasant face and fair, almost creamy, skin. And the same accent as an old friend of mine, a Chicano dog trainer whose mixture of Mexican and Southern accents gave him one of the best storytelling voices I’d ever heard.

  “Thanks,” I said again. “Where are you from?”

  “Billings,” she said. That’s what her jacket said.

  “You didn’t get that accent in Billings,” I laughed, but she turned away. Old guys get used to it. So I turned to Mac. “So what the hell’s up?”

  Then he told me. Unfortunately.

  Most of Mac’s patients dealt with their problems with drugs or group therapy, but he still had seven patients in old-fashioned long-term analysis. Like all his records, the notes and tapes of these sessions were tightly controlled. But shortly after the conversion from tapes to minidisks, his secretary had discovered that somebody had broken into either the office or the files and copied the stack of minidisks. There was no evidence of a breakin, and the secretary only caught on to the fact that the minidisks had been copied when she was checking the computer logs for something else entirely.

  For reasons that weren’t quite clear to me but seemed obvious to Mac, he was convinced that the theft had been accomplished or engineered by one of his seven patients in analysis. He claimed he couldn’t expand on his reasoning without violating his doctor-patient confidentiality.

  “These patients are the only ones who have ever been in the back office where the computer is,” he said as Todd set the plate of baby back ribs in front of me. “Patients in analysis are always curious about each other,” he added as he set an envelope beside my drink. “That’s why I have two waiting rooms and a secluded exit from the back office.”

  “Blackmail, you think?”

  He paused, then said, “Lord knows I’ve been fooled before, but I am almost certain, my friend, that none of these patients are being blackmailed. Yet.”

  “Almost?” I said, then stubbed out the cigarette, had a sip of my last martini, and a slug of water. I picked up a rib but left the envelope where it set. “How ‘almost’?”

  Mac leaned closer as if we were under a cone of silence. And perhaps we were in our quiet island in the confusing froth of late-night bar conversations, a tangle of voices as opaque as the smoke floating above our heads. “My patients are your average band of unhappy neurotics whose lives would probably improve if they could just get out of their personal situations,” he said. “Look over there.” Mac pointed across the barroom toward the fake f
ireplace in the corner.

  Our first baseman, Charlie Marshall, a lanky accountant with a narrow, long-suffering acne-scarred face, leaned on the couch next to his tiny wife, Ellen, who was talking to him as if she were lecturing a child. I knew she was seeing one of the other shrinks in town, a lady doctor known for her quick moves with a prescription pad, so Ellen lived on a half-dozen psychotropic drugs. Behind his glasses, Charlie’s eyes were deeply unfocused, and his grin was so painful his feet might have been on fire. Another couple—our third baseman, George Paul, and his bony wife, whose name I couldn’t remember—sat on the opposite couch. I didn’t know what George had to be unhappy about; he owned a successful Internet company that provided business advice, information, and accounting services to small hospitals and clinics all over the country. The catcher, Ken Forbes, an ex-college baseball player, now a business lawyer with a wife who never left the house, sat alone on the hearth.

  “Charlie and George and Ken are patients?” I said. When Mac didn’t answer, I suggested, “Their wives?”

  “Not a psychotic among the group, and they all have plenty of money,” he said, ignoring my questions. “Sometimes I think that the people around them are the fucking crazy ones,” he added. “If you’ll excuse my French.”

  “I’ll excuse your French, my friend,” I said, “if you’ll excuse my reluctance to do this personal favor for you.”

  Mac nodded slowly. We sat silently as I finished the ribs, then thanked the young woman with the cigarettes again. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” I said as I slipped the envelope into the inner pocket of the windbreaker, next to the scrap of cloth, then picked up my martini.

  “It’s on me, buddy,” Mac said.

  “No shit,” I said.

  Mac settled the check while I finished a cigarette and half of my drink. Then I followed him out the back door and into the soft luxury of his new Range Rover, both of us still silent. We drove back to the motel without a word. Mac parked in his space beside the bridal suite, turned off the engine, then lit his cigar.

  “You picked up the envelope, CW,” he said.

  “I was drunk,” I said. “What the hell did I pick up?”

  “A twenty-thousand-dollar retainer from Ron Musselwhite,” he said. “And the names and address of the seven patients. Some you’ll know, others you won’t. And for pity’s sake, don’t lose it. It’s the only copy. I’m on very shaky ground here, friend.”

  “I suspect you’re not alone,” I said.

  “Just follow them around randomly, now and again; watch them from a distance,” he said. “But not to or from my office, okay? You’ve got a blank check for expenses. Rent or buy whatever you need. But don’t hire any other PIs, and don’t listen to any private conversations. Whatever you overhear in public, that’s okay. You can report that, along with movements and impressions. But just to me. And nothing on paper or tape, audio or video. You can’t tell anybody what you’re doing. Not even Whit.”

  “How long do you want me to work on this?”

  “Until I know which one has the copies,” he said.

  “How the hell are you going to know?”

  “I just will,” he said.

  “You know this job is even crazier than the last one?”

  “I told you. I’ll double your hourly rates.”

  “I’d have to be out of my mind to get involved in something like this, Mac,” I said. But I had to admit that the notion of being paid like a lawyer without bothering about law school had its attractions. “This is not my kind of job, man,” I said. “I find people who want to be lost—skip traces and bounty hunts, runaways and lost spouses—that’s what I do. I don’t do surveillance. It’s too fucking boring,” I added. I could hear the acceptance slipping into my voice.

  “But you’ll do it, right?” he said, holding out his hand. “Thank you, Sughrue. I truly thank you.”

  “You’re less than welcome,” I said.

  We shook hands warmly, smiling ruefully at each other.

  Making friends had always been hard for me after we moved to Vado, Texas, at the end of WWII when I was a kid. I was always the new kid in town, the one who wore feed-sack shirts and no shoes. The one with the crazy and often missing father. Nothing like being an outsider in a small Texas town to make an old boy cranky and adept with his fists. As far as I knew, the first group of men I’d really cared about were the guys in my squad in Vietnam. So in late middle age making friends was problematic at best.

  Women usually make friends talking, by exchanging confidences, and men, traditionally, by working together. But the only work Mac and I had ever shared was the occasional firewood foray on nice fall weekend afternoons. Unless playing softball together was work.

  Sports often revealed the cracks in a man’s character, the frayed edges of his personality. Maybe friendship between men was as inexplicable as love. Whatever, Mac and I were friends. Good friends, who depended on that friendship more than either of us admitted. We both dealt in the secrets of damaged lives, but we could never talk about them. Our bonds were silent but stronger, perhaps, for the silence.

  “When we stop holding hands,” Mac said, “I’ve got a bottle of twenty-one-year-old Springbank single malt. Let’s have a nightcap?”

  “Sounds good to me,” I said. I had hoped he would ask me in for a drink when we came back from downtown.

  I followed him into the inner entrance of the bridal suite, which opened into a short hall between a toilet and a closet, then into the sitting room. Except for the glow from the master bath, the bedroom was dark beyond the partially closed door, but Mac went to the wet bar without even looking in on Lorna. Once he had told me that she slept like a cat: deeply, quickly, often, and anywhere. He put ice cubes in a couple of glasses and drenched them with four fingers of peaty Scotch, then we settled with our drinks into armchairs across the coffee table from each other. Mac offered me a cigar, but I declined. I wanted another cigarette. So badly I couldn’t remember why I had quit. We sipped our Scotch and chatted aimlessly in low voices until we had almost finished our drinks.

  “I thought I smelled your cigar, honey,” Lorna said from the darkened doorway, a depleted ice bag dangling from one hand, a tattered, barely recognizable stuffed elephant from the other. She held two condoms in green silver foil against the stuffed animal’s chest. Whitney had suggested that Lorna was so afraid of getting pregnant that she was on the pill, still used a diaphragm, and probably made Mac wear two rubbers. But until I saw them in her hand I thought Whitney had been joking.

  “Oh hi, CW,” she added. She seemed to have gone to bed wearing full makeup, but standing in the shadows her face was half dark. Unlike some women’s green eyes, Lorna’s never glittered metallically. They were always softly smudged, sleepy, dissipated like the smoke drifting from a green flare. Except for the blister on her thigh—fingerwide and perhaps four inches long—Lorna’s elegant legs were very white and very long beneath the short jade silk nightgown she wore. “You boys havin’ fun?” she said. Although she had never been any closer to the South than South Dakota, she had an almost unaffected Southern accent.

  “We always have fun,” Mac said. “That’s why they call us boys.” Then he rose and walked over to his wife to kiss her on the corner of the mouth. Even barefoot, she stood a few inches taller than Mac. And she almost always wore heels. “Let me fill this up,” he said as he took the ice bag from her.

  Lorna lifted a slim hand in a languid farewell, then floated into the darkness behind her. Mac stepped over to the bar, dumped the water, and began to load ice cubes into the bag. I excused myself and went into the toilet off the sitting room. I took the swimsuit top out and dropped it on the floor, only partially hidden behind the toilet.

  As far as I knew, Lorna had never fooled around, but she had that air of availability about her, and she had always been a bit casual about exposing her body in ways that made me uncomfortable. One of her large and lovely breasts seemed always about to slip its mooring int
o public view. And she seemed unable to cross her legs without offering a glimpse of her dark red and neatly trimmed muff through transparent thongs.

  Unfortunately, I knew what I was talking about. Once when the four of us were on a float trip down the Smith River, camped at Sunset Cliffs, after an evening of wine and whiskey, elk steaks, and mota shared with the guides, Whit and I had curled into our bags to sleep as calmly as rounded stones under the soft murmur of the river. But sometime during the middle of the night, I’d woken with an aching bladder. When I climbed out of our tent, but before I could trek up to the outdoor toilet, I noticed Lorna standing naked in the moonlight on the sandbar at the edge of the river.

  We had camped at the mouth of the canyon where the cliff’s shadow covered the campsite like a widow’s shawl, but down by the river the moonlight glistened off Lorna’s body as if she were a pillar of rock salt. She stood so still, I walked down the slope to see if she was all right. When she heard me, she turned, a joint in one hand, a wine bottle in the other, and looked at me. She raised the bottle as if to offer me a drink but quickly lowered it to her side. The look in her eyes and the slight smile on her face signaled neither invitation nor anticipation but acceptance. Of what, though, I didn’t know. Whatever it was, it unnerved me. I retreated, pissed on a tree, then crawled back into my sleeping bag for a night of red-wine marijuana dreams.

  The visible portion of the swimsuit-top micro-fabric sparkled vividly against the pale tiles of the floor beside the toilet. I’d done what I could. I flushed, then washed my hands and face. When I looked in the mirror over the sink, I was, as usual, shocked. I’d never regained the weight I’d lost after I’d been shot. The dark blond ponytail, which I couldn’t seem to give up, was shorter, but the beard had fallen by the wayside. The mustache fit into the decently earned wrinkles, and somewhere behind that blue-eyed dusky face, I hoped, a younger version of myself might still live, maybe an aging surfer or a retired dot-com millionaire. Then I laughed at my foolishness. Just another piece of footloose border trash staring back at me, a redneck with a corazón mejicano, a Mexican heart.