"Don't worry about it," I said. "From the delighted look on Jennifer's face when you put her down on the saddle in front of you, I'm sure she thinks the ride was worth it."
We drove to the Joshua Tree Motel, four blocks from downtown Wickenburg proper. Shorty let me out and drove away, reaching under the seat for the no longer cool Coors. Even though beer isn't my drink of choice, it was still thoughtful of him to wait until I was out of the truck before he opened it.
The Joshua Tree Motel turned out to be a barely habitable relic from another era. I found myself standing in front of a run-down office where a faded but hand-lettered cardboard vacancy sign still leaned against the glass in one corner of a bug-speckled window.
The place consisted of a series of crumbling stucco edifices, cabins I suppose, that must have dated from the earliest days of motels. Or before. The AAA rating, if one ever existed, had fallen by the wayside years ago. Tiny arched carports, far too narrow for many contemporary vehicles and ideally suited to Model Ts, were attached to every free-standing unit. Inside the office all available flat surfaces were covered with price-tagged, church-holiday-bazaar-type bric-a-brac and handicrafts.
At the counter, a pillow-faced, cigarette-smoking manager pushed a leaky pen and registration form in my direction while announcing that the Joshua Tree didn't take American Express-only Mastercard, Visa, or cash. I paid cash, twenty bucks, and considered myself lucky.
As I finished filling out the form, the office door opened again to admit a harried young father trailed by three obnoxious little kids. The father eagerly snatched up the Joshua Tree's only remaining room. It was, he told me with obvious relief as he began filling out his own registration form, the last available room in town. While the three children raced around the office, screeching with joy at being let out of the car and manhandling the handicrafts, I retreated to the welcome safety and solitude of my own threadbare room.
Clearly most of the furnishings, interior design, and plumbing were still the original equipment. The room reeked of years of cigarette smoke, mold, and benign-to-active neglect. Dingy wallpaper peeled away from the walls and ceiling. The fitfully meager spray of lukewarm water from the shower head hit me somewhere well below the shoulder blades, but even the short, tepid shower with a tiny sliver of nondescript soap was better than no shower at all.
Putting the same clothes back on, I tried the phone, an ancient black model with no dial, but was told by the manager that the phones in Wickenburg were all out of order. That wasn't exactly news.
Unable to reach Ames, I sat there being frustrated for several minutes before I realized that part of what was wrong with me was hunger. My afternoon of unaccustomed physical labor hadn't been followed by dinner. I had walked out on my plate of roast beef and mashed potatoes. That was a problem with an accessible solution, so I left my room and walked the four blocks back down to Wickenburg's main drag, where the entire three-block area between the stoplight and the bridge was full of parked cars and milling people.
If a town is small enough, I guess any excuse for a party will suffice. This sociable group, made up equally of stalled travelers and curious locals, laughed and talked and carried on like a spirited crowd eagerly anticipating a dazzling Fourth-of-July fireworks display. There's nothing like the possibility of a collapsing bridge to bring out the local thrill-seekers.
Center Street, Wickenburg's main thoroughfare, was lined with several restaurants, all of which were doing land-office business. Every visible table was fully occupied, and each restaurant doorway held a queue of people waiting to be seated. I chose a place at random, the Silver Spur, and managed to work my way across the threshold and into a crowded vestibule.
Before reaching the hostess, however, I found myself standing in line directly behind the young couple from the motel with their three screaming banshees. Life is too short. Stumbling over the man behind me, I managed to elbow my way back outside. A few feet farther up the street was another door, still part of the Silver Spur, but this entrance opened into the bar. Saloon, the sign said. It was noisy inside, noisy and crowded, but it was my kind of place. There were no kids within hearing distance. Not a one.
Counselors at Ironwood Ranch had issued all kinds of dire warnings and predictions about what would happen to clients foolhardy enough to attempt returning to the bar scene. Bars were, to quote Burton Joe, "bad medicine," and those who went back were "tempting fate." If drunks wanted to recover, if they wanted to lead lives of upstanding sobriety, they needed to change their ways, their habits, and their friends in order to find other things to do with their time besides drink.
But I was no longer a client at Ironwood Ranch. Calvin Crenshaw had thrown me out. Tempting fate or not, I wanted a place where I could eat in peace without some hyperactive kid spilling a glass of Coke down the back of my neck or dropping a ketchup-laden French fry on my sleeve. The hell with Burton Joe. I pushed open the swinging door and went inside.
At first the place seemed almost as full as the restaurant had been, but then two people got up and left. I set off through the crush, aiming at one of the two empty stools at the far end of the polished mahogany bar. I jostled my way through the crowd of happy imbibers and reached one of the two stools just as a middle-aged man in a natty three-piece suit claimed the other.
"This seat taken?" I asked.
"No. Help yourself."
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.