He shook his head. “I don't know her. Probably a faculty wife, they come in all different shapes and packages. I don't know hardly any of the people here, they're mostly from the university, friends of mom and dad.” He passed a hand over his eyes. “I can't believe she's gone. It's like any minute she'll come waltzing in and grab a canapé, you know?”
Callie nodded. “I know.”
Walt came over to them. “How're you two holding up?” he asked.
“We're okay, dad,” Clancy said. “What about you?”
His father gave him a dispirited nod. He handed his empty glass to Callie. “Could you get me another? It's hot in here, isn't it? I don't want to dehydrate and fall down and look stupid.”
“Sure,” she answered. She moved off toward the bar.
“Who's that woman?” Clancy asked.
“Which one?”
“The woman in the black silk dress you were talking to a minute ago.”
Walt turned and looked around. “A friend of your mother's, I guess.” He rubbed his eyes. “Everything's a blur right now.”
Clancy put his arm around his father's shoulders in support. “It's okay, dad. Hang in there.”
“I'm trying, son.”
Callie returned with a glass of water for Walt. He took it from her and drank deeply. “Thanks,” he muttered. “I'm going outside for a minute. I need some air.”
“Do you want me to go with you?” Clancy asked, concerned.
Walt shook his head. “I need a minute alone.”
“Sure, dad.”
Walt walked across the room and out onto the patio.
“Man, is he in a world of pain,” Clancy said to Callie.
She nodded. “Aren't we all.”
The last of the stragglers had departed, the leftovers had been wrapped. Some of the excess food went into the refrigerator; the caterers would take the rest to a homeless shelter.
Walt and the boys and Callie sat in the living room, sprawled out on the couches and chairs. Walt was nursing a weak vodka tonic. The others were drinking beer from the bottle.
It was evening. Outside the west-facing windows the sun hung low in the sky, ready to drop.
“You should go to bed early, dad,” Tom said to Walt. “It's been a long day.”
“For all of us,” Will added.
Walt shrugged. “Yeah, I guess.” He looked off for a moment, lost in space. “It was all so stupid,” he said, his voice rising in sudden anger. “So horribly unnecessary.”
“Don't rile yourself up, dad,” Tom said, moving over and sitting next to Walt.
“I was in charge, and I screwed up,” Walt said insistently. “It was my fault, what happened down there.”
“That's bullshit!” Clancy moved over and sat on the other side of his father. “You weren't at fault about anything!”
Walt shook his head stubbornly. “You weren't there. You don't know what happened.” He took a hit from his drink. “I'm going to tell you.”
“No, dad,” Will said in alarm. “Now isn't the time.”
Walt shook his head stubbornly. His face was as gray as ash. “There may not be a time later. We're all here now, together. I have to do this.”
Slowly, in a halting voice, Walt told them everything that had happened, from the moment they discovered the sabotaged alternator that morning at La Chimenea until the ambush started. They sat in stunned silence, sinking lower and lower in their chairs. It was dark, but no one turned on any lights. They sat in the darkness, listening.
He got to the part where he realized one of the bandidos was going to shoot at them, that some of them might be killed. “ ‘Get the hell off the road!’ I screamed. ‘Run!’ I hollered.”
His sons and Callie flinched as his voice rose with the memory.
He hesitated, remembering; then he continued on, lowering his voice to a softer tone. “No one waited, not for an instant. They all scattered into the jungle. The rifle went off like a cannon, and an instant later I thought I heard the bandido leader yelling, ’Why did you shoot? I told you not to fire your rifles unless I fired first!’ He was angry and upset, I could hear it in his voice. But I didn't give a damn about their motives or what he was saying then, I was ducking for cover like everyone else.
“Our captors took off, disappearing into the jungle. Whatever they hadn't put on their packhorses was still on the ground where they had dumped it. I was lying on my stomach, covered with mud, listening to them ride away. They had the trunk with my stuff and the artifacts from La Chimenea, but at that point none of it mattered, because we had all survived.
“I waited a few minutes until it was obvious that they weren't returning, then I gathered all my people in the road again and started taking a head count, because I wanted to make sure everyone was accounted for. No one was missing, and miraculously, no one had been shot. We started gathering our stuff they hadn't taken and throwing it back into the vans. Then Manuel said to me, ‘Señora Gaines, I don't see her.’
“I wasn't worried about your mom, I knew she could lake care of herself. To be honest, I thought she was right there next to me. But he was right. She wasn't there. And then we heard a low moan. Mom was lying on the ground at the edge of the jungle, a few feet off the road, just deep enough in that we hadn't seen her. She'd been shot in the stomach. I could see the blood oozing out from her, her hands were covering her belly but they were red with her blood. I remembered the second rifle shot and realized that bullet must have hit her.
“Her color was good and her pulse seemed strong. I pulled her dress up and checked where she'd been shot. It didn't look that bad, the blood wasn't gushing out, just oozing slowly. I thought, we can be at a hospital in an hour. She's going to be okay.
“We threw everything into the vans and took off and drove like crazy, I had her in the lead van with me, Manuel was driving like Mario Andretti, I was holding her, telling her she was going to be all right, she was telling me she thought it wasn't that bad. We were pushing as hard as we could.”
He stopped talking for a moment and buried his head in his hands. Then he looked up again.
“Five minutes before we got to the hospital, she stopped breathing.”
Walt was exhausted, both from the ordeal he'd been through, and from the remembering and recounting of it. Around him, everyone was devastated.
“Five minutes,” Walt repeated. “Ten at the most. That's how close we came to saving her.” His voice sounded hollow, distant, like it was coming from the bottom of a deep well.
“And how far.”
PART THREE
CHICAGO
Last call!” Clancy sang out in a weary voice.
The Pabst Blue Ribbon clock hanging over the backbar, a relic from whoever owned the bar before World War II, read a quarter to one. Weekdays were generally slow after midnight; only half a dozen stragglers, hard-core regulars from the neighborhood, were still hanging on. They ordered up with languid “yos” and fined taps on their glasses.
This bar, Finnegan's, on the near North Side, was Clancy's second business, the one that paid the bills. From six in the morning until five in the afternoon he was absorbed in his sports-kinesiology practice, his real vocation. That business had grown so quickly that four months ago he had formed a partnership with a couple of other physical therapists and opened a bigger place, the Evanston Sports Rehabilitation Center, a large, airy facility just over the city line. The partners had taken out a sizable loan with the bank—the equipment required to set up a facility like that ran well into six figures—but they were breaking even financially, with the prospect of making seriously good money not too long down the road, and most important, he was doing work that he loved.
He drew the last beers of the night, poured the final round of drinks. For the past half-hour he'd been methodically going through his shutdown, so that at one on the dot, as soon as he shooed everybody out and turned the neon sign in the window from OPEN to CLOSED, he'd be able to finish his cleanup in less than ten minutes, stash the cash
box in the safe, set the alarm, lock the door behind him, pull down the security grate, lock it, and go home to Callie.
They had been married for eight months now. The ceremony had taken place between Christmas and New Year's, four months after his mother's death. Her accidental murder had been a brutal blow to everyone, but Clancy and Callie had decided, after much soul-searching, to go on with their wedding, which they had already planned. Life can be shorter than you think it's going to be, that was the harsh lesson they had learned.
The most compelling reason they'd thought about postponing their wedding was Walt. He hadn't handled Jocelyn's death well at all; this was the first time in their lives that his sons had known him to not be in control. But when the question had been broached to him—very delicately—he had insisted that the wedding go forward as planned. Life is for the living, he'd told Clancy and Callie. Jocelyn would want you to push ahead, full speed.
So they tied their knot. It was a sweet wedding. Not too big, their families and close friends, fifty guests in all. After the minister performed the ceremony, which included a special prayer for Jocelyn's memory, so that her spirit was included in the ceremony, the full wedding party caravanned in limousines to Clancy's bar (which he had closed for the day), whereupon one and all pigged out on the massive buffet, danced to a rocking local blues band, and drank.
The next day, after sobering up, everyone scattered. Walt drove himself back to Madison, Tom and Will went to their respective homes in Ann Arbor and Minneapolis, Callie's parents flew back to South Dakota. Clancy and Callie honeymooned in Paris and Florence for two weeks. Then they came home and settled back into their everyday lives.
Callie Jorgensen was Nordic-blond, blue-eyed, a shade over six feet, a few years out of college when she and Clancy met. She had been a volleyball player, an All-American at UCLA, then two years on the pro circuit.
It had been a great life—how many twenty-four-year-olds are making six figures a year to hang out on beautiful beaches in California, Florida, and Hawaii, wear great-looking two-piece swimsuits, slug a volleyball over a net, and smile at the camera for the Gatorade and Nike commercials? Not to mention hanging out with Derek Jeter, I Pete Sampras, and Vince Carter. The answer is, damned few.
When she blew out the anterior cruciate ligament in her right knee it was like the end of the world. Women's volleyball wasn't that big a sport that she could survive the operations and recovery time she'd need to get back in her peak and be a force again, not only as a player, which was questionable, given the severity of her injury, but more important, as a commercial entity. If you can't jump, you can't play. If you can't play, you have no market value.
Callie Jorgensen was twenty-four years old and she had already been through, and completed, an entire career. She was miserable, dejected, and lost.
And then along came Clancy Gaines.
Clancy was Callie's physical therapist. He was completing his master's degree in physical therapy and anatomy at the University of South Dakota, and was working at a local rehab clinic to make money and get practical, hands-on training. He had never worked with a professional athlete before. Having that opportunity was exciting to him—you don't normally find a professional athlete rehabilitating a serious injury in Vermillion, South Dakota. Callie was there because her parents lived nearby, in Sioux Falls, and she had gone home to lick her wounds and have a stable support system, far from the glitz of the world she'd been living in.
Callie was the hardest-working client Clancy had ever worked on. Regardless of when he'd show up for their morning appointment, six o'clock or whatever ungodly hour they'd scheduled, she would be there, waiting impatiently. He would put her through her routine, really punish her, and she would finish it and want to do more. No matter how bone-tired she was, no matter how much her leg hurt, she wanted to keep pushing. She wanted to get better faster, and she wanted her leg to be as strong as it had been before her accident.
After months of grueling exercise, pain, and mental effort, the knee recovered nicely, but not like it had been. There had been too much damage. Callie could do anything on the reconstructed joint she had done before— ski, play volleyball, basketball, run, ride a bike—but she couldn't perform at the rarefied level that's required of a pro athlete. Her operation and rehabilitation, by any regular standards, was a success. But in this case, the patient—her career—unfortunately died.
When Callie finally accepted that she could never again compete professionally, she went through a period of heavy denial. She had never been drunk in her life, but there were occasions those first few months when she woke up puke-stained from having gotten shit-faced the night before. Drugs, too—when she was rehabbing she was taking cortisone and other muscle enhancers, under her doctor's supervision; after she was finished, she kept taking them, under the table. She felt like she was making up for the time she'd lost when she had denied herself the forbidden pleasures that her nonathletic friends had taken for granted while at college.
She was lost, and she was angry.
But she was lucky. Early on, her relationship with Clancy had gone beyond one of therapist and patient to deep friendship. But not romantic, because if her rehab was successful enough for her to return to the high-powered world of pro volleyball there would be no place for him, unless he was willing to be a passive supporter, accompanying her from tournament to tournament, hanging in the background, giving up a life of his own. Which he wasn't going to do—he had a life, he liked it, it was productive.
If Callie had been able to go back to her sport, that would have been the end of them. But she wasn't, and he was there for her. Steady, supportive, caring. Gradually, she came to honor and appreciate that, and as she accepted the changes in her life the bitterness faded away; and as it did, they stopped denying the obvious—they had fallen in love.
About the time Callie was coming out of her funk, they took a weekend trip to Chicago. Clancy had gone to Northwestern as an undergrad, and had close friends living in the area. One Saturday night, after a hearty Italian meal, they repaired to Finnegan's Bar on the Chicago-Evanston divide, a bustling place that was popular with the college crowd—Loyola, Northwestern, DePaul. Clancy and his friends had been regulars there, and he had fond memories of it.
“This is a cool place,” Callie observed, as the group worked on their second pitcher of Pete's Wicked Ale.
“No kidding.” Clancy looked around the bar, which was jammed beyond legal capacity. “I used to want to own a bar, like this one. Not a restaurant—they're a hassle. Just a nice, simple bar with a cash register that goes ka-ching, ka-ching, all night long. No one loses money owning a bar, not in Chicago, anyway.”
“I guess everybody's had that fantasy,” she'd said.
“My father's generation's was a nymphomaniac who owned a liquor store.”
“Nymphomaniac? God, that dates him. Anyway, I don't think your father ever had to worry about getting women.”
“I doubt it, yeah. His wild-oat days were behind him by the time I came along, though.”
“With a woman like your mother, I would think so.”
Callie liked Clancy's mom and dad. They were the neatest parents she knew. There was nothing old about them, except chronologically—they were younger in spirit than the parents of her other friends. Much younger that way than her own parents.
Jimmy Finnegan, the owner, a retired Chicago fireman who had been a fixture in the neighborhood for years, came over and joined their table.
“Hey, big guy, where you been hiding?” he joshed Clancy, punching him hard in the biceps.
Clancy punched him back, and explained that he didn't live around here anymore. He ran down his recent history for Jimmy, and introduced Callie. Jimmy was pushing seventy, but he still had an eye for the ladies.
“You're a keeper,” he complimented her in a jovial, heavy-handed manner.
“You're so subtle,” she answered in kind.
“She's a keeper,” Jimmy told Clancy.
> They all laughed. Jimmy ordered them another pitcher, on the house.
The friends drifted off, but Clancy and Callie stayed until last call. Not drinking a lot, just grooving on the place. Only a few diehards were left, which was fine—it was nice sitting at the dark oak table, with the light low and the Coors aid Budweiser fluorescents glimmering blue and pink over the backbar. A Domino's kid came in with a couple of boxes, courtesy of Jimmy, and they all grabbed a slice, Jimmy closed up the cash register and joined them again.
“You doing good?” he asked Clancy, glancing at Callie. There were no rings on her fingers, he didn't know the lay of the land.
“Doing great” Clancy grabbed another slice of pepperoni. “Thanks for the pizza, too.”
“Gotta keep your strength up.”
“You know, limmy,” Clancy said, washing the pie down with some beer, “this isn't a bad life here, what you've got. As long as the colleges stay open, you're always going to have a captive clientele.” He looked at Callie, and winked. “I wouldn't mind owning a business like this, someday.”
Jimmy sat back, put his stein on the table. “You think?”
Clancy laughed. “Hell, yes. Who wouldn't? You've got to be the richest ex-fireman in Chicago by now, man.
Not to mention all the cute little girlies who traipse through here. Keeps a man young, I'll bet.”
Callie gave him a kick under the table.
Jimmy smiled and nodded. “Young as a fresh stallion.”
“The miracle of Viagra,” Callie threw in, to razz him.
“Whatever it takes,” Jimmy told her unselfconsciously. “I've always been a results-oriented guy. How a fireman's mind works—results.” He looked at Clancy again, the smile off his face now. “You serious about what you were saying? Owning a joint?”
The three of them had breakfast the next morning. Jimmy was ready to sell the place and retire, move to Florida. He would always root for the Cubbies, but the harsh Chicago winters had worn him down. If Clancy was earnest about buying the place, Jimmy would make him a sweet deal.
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