He crouched next to me, balancing lightly on his heels, and squinted at my face. “You look terrible.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Walking around,” he said. “Wearing a hat and carrying water. Which is more than I can say for some people.”
“Don’t start.”
“Water is the key to life here in the arid Southwest.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Without it we’d all perish.”
“I said I know,” I said. “Can I have some more?”
I felt nauseous and stupid and annoyed. Every time I looked for Wylie, I wound up with this character instead. He took a folded handkerchief out of his pocket, dampened it with water, and gently wiped my forehead and cheeks. “Can you walk? Otherwise I’ll carry you.”
“Don’t even think about it.” I stood up and immediately sat down again. My calves were knotted and cramped, and some floating squares of color — red, blue, green, purple— hovered weirdly in my field of vision. When I pressed a hand to my face, one was hot and the other ice cold, but for a second I couldn’t tell which was which.
“Let me help you,” he said.
It took twice as long to get back down the trail as it did to climb up. I leaned heavily against his shoulder and stopped often to drink water, and by the time we got to the trailhead I was feeling almost normal. The sun was lower now, drooping densely in the flat sky, and hikers with dogs and children spilled from their cars in the parking lot. I could see far below us the sparkle of traffic on the highway. I had no idea how long I’d been on the trail. Without saying anything Angus steered me to the Caprice, took the keys I offered, opened the door, and sat me down in the driver’s seat. Then he leaned against the door and asked if I was all right to drive. Suddenly his smell hit me: the stinky pheronomic nastiness of male sweat, plus that chemical odor I’d noticed before, and, on top of that, a general odor that was strangely but recognizably clean. It was impossible, but he smelled like water.
“I think so,” I said. “Where’s your car?”
“I walked.”
“From Wylie’s apartment?”
“As modes of transportation go, it’s both safe and reliable,” he said. “Listen, would you care for a drink?”
“What time is it?”
“It’s five o’clock somewhere,” he said, and smiled. Under the brim of his hat, sweat was gathering in drops and preparing to trickle down his face.
“So you want to get a drink,” I said slowly. “Right now.”
He reached into the car and placed his hand flat against my forehead.
“You’re sure you’re all right to drive?”
I glared at him, and he grinned widely, his teeth gleaming against his dusty skin, and then sprang away from the door with a light, quick step. A millisecond later, it seemed, he was sitting on the passenger side.
The streets were crowded with traffic, and I rolled down the windows and sighed, asking myself what the hell I was doing. Angus gave me occasional directions and fiddled constantly with the radio, listening to ten seconds or less of every single song, ten words or less of talk. It was basically the most annoying thing ever. I kept glaring at him, which only made him laugh. This went on for fifteen minutes as mothers in minivans cut me off, truckers barreled down on top of me, and packs of teenage girls stared at us and giggled for no reason that I could see. I was sweating a lot and hating it. Finally Angus reached behind him into the backseat of the car, leaning far over to rummage around on the floor, his sweatpanted butt perilously close to my shoulder.
“What the hell are you doing?”
He turned around clutching a fistful of cassette tapes in his hands and sorted through them quickly before sticking one in.
I heard strings.
“The sweet sounds of Frank Sinatra,” Angus said. “They’ve always been a favorite of mine.”
“Is that right?”
“It is. Take this left on Indian School, please.”
The sweet sounds seemed to calm him down, and he sat looking out the window and mouthing the words. Two crooned songs later I pulled up at a motor lodge on a deserted strip of road. On the sepia-colored sign was a neon martini glass and the word “Cocktails” in a flowing script.
Angus leapt out of the car and opened the door to the cocktail lounge. Inside, through the gloomy dark, I could just make out booths with cracked red vinyl and tables made of dark pressed wood that was supposed to resemble mahogany. It looked like the set of a canceled TV show.
The waitress, a woman in her forties with a devastated face, sat smoking a cigarette on a stool at the bar. She wore a black miniskirt and beige panty hose with no shoes, and she was the only person there. We slid into a booth so small that my knees were touching Angus’s. I shifted around and crossed my legs. Angus leaned back and ran his hands approvingly over the vinyl. “I think I’m going to have a martini,” he said. “Would you like a martini?”
“Okay.”
“Jeanine,” he called to the waitress, who had not gotten up. “We’d like two martinis here.”
“Vodka or gin,” said Jeanine, stubbing out her cigarette with what appeared to be total exhaustion. She reached down past the ashtray to where her shoes — black flats — were sitting on the bar, then pulled them on with a grimace.
“Gin, of course,” Angus said. “And a big glass of water for my friend here,” he added, smiling at me. “You know, gin is the canonical martini. If I wanted a vodka martini I’d say a vodka martini. To distinguish it from the standard version, right?”
“Olives or a twist,” said Jeanine.
“Olives!” he said. “Olives, definitely.”
“Me too,” I said.
Jeanine nodded and set to work behind the bar.
Angus Beam would not stop smiling. He leaned forward, putting both his freckled hands palms down on the table. His fingernails were ragged and chapped around the edges.
“What’s so funny?” I said.
“Nothing.”
“You’re smiling like there’s something funny.”
“I’m smiling,” he said, “because I’m happy.”
To this I had nothing to say. Jeanine brought the drinks in small plastic glasses, two tiny dark olives, shriveled as raisins, speared on each toothpick.
“I didn’t think you’d do this kind of thing,” I said.
“What, go on a date? I just had the impulse. I’m an impulsive person.”
“This is a date?”
“Well. Never mind, if that’s not what you meant. Go on.”
“I meant going to a cocktail lounge. Drinking martinis.”
“Why would you think that?”
“I picture you and your friends in some kind of outdoor hut, drinking naturally refined alcohol that comes from, like, hemp or something.”
His eyes widened. “They can do that?”
“Not as far as I know, but I’m not the expert here.”
He winked and mouthed both olives off the toothpick at once. “Listen,” he said, chewing, “I think our world is an ungodly mess. That we live in a society overwhelmed by its own poisonous excesses. That people who don’t see the truth of this are blind or stupid or both. But a world in which a man can drink a martini with a beautiful woman on a sunny afternoon — well, that’s a world with some redeeming qualities.”
I rolled my eyes. “I guess I’ll drink to that,” I said. We clinked glasses and I raised mine to my lips. As I tipped it back the toothpick fell forward and I splashed gin down my chin and the front of my shirt. I flushed deeply and dabbed myself with a napkin. Angus noticed, but pretended not to, and I liked him for it.
When I finally got some gin down it filled me with a kind of gorgeous, beneficial warmth, as if I’d been cold without knowing it for days. The room dimmed then, and yellow light flickered in some plastic sconces on the wall. From some crevice of the lounge, music began to play, another crooning torch song, this time by a woman whose voice I didn’t recognize. It turned out to be Jeanine, sitting on her stool by the bar, her lips against a microphone connected to a karaoke machine. She stared at our booth and sang in a tuneless, gravelly voice: