The Last Good Kiss

  Dinner was ready when I got back to the house, but Trahearne was too hammered to eat. He sat in his sutdy, looking at his desk, which was covered with scraps of yellow paper off a legal pad, idly twirling an old .45 service automatic while Melinda tried to hold the steaks at medium rare.

  “Now you know,” he mumbled as I stepped into the study with a drink for the two of us.

  “I know dinner’s ready,” I said.

  “You’ve met the crone and the dragon lady and seen the hall of lost dreams,” he said, “so what else is there to know?”

  “Let’s eat,” I suggested.

  “Eat, eat,” he said, then broke into his poetic 130

  brogue. “Matched with an aged wife, I mete and dole unequal laws unto a savage race who eat and sleep and breed and know not me—”

  “It little profits that an idle king,” I added, moving back a line, “fucks up the dinner.”

  “How the hell do you know that line?” he asked, drunken puzzlement twisting his face.

  “When I was a domestic spy at the University of Colorado for the United States Army,” I said, “I took an M.A. in English Literature.”

  “You’re shittin’ me,” he said, rearing back in his chair.

  “Not at all.”

  “By god, boy, let’s have a drink,” he said, “an’ you can tell all ‘bout your life as a spy.” “Over dinner,” I suggested.

  “All right, goddammit,” he grunted as he heaved his hulk out of the chair. “All right, you bastards and your goddamned dinner,” he complained, but he followed me to the table.

  If I had known how he was going to act, I would have left him in his study quoting bad Tennyson. His steak was overdone, his baked potato cold, his salad too vinegary—or so he claimed in a loud, drunken voice. He ate a few bites, moved his food about his plate as if he were playing some sort of victual chess, then he slumped in his captain’s chair at the head of the table, sleeping, thankfully, with only a few light snores. Melinda smiled at me and shook her head. But not in reproach.

  “Poor dear,” she whispered. “His work never goes well when he first gets home. If you don’t mind, we’ll just let him sleep there while we eat.”

  “I don’t mind,” I said. “I’m so hungry I could even eat with him awake.”

  “Don’t be mean,” she said lightly, then smiled again and brushed her hand through her short hair, the clay dust in it fluffing out in a soft cloud. She went back to her steak, eating like a farm hand at the end of the harvest season. When she finished it, she sliced off a portion of Trahearne’s, then ate that too with equal relish. When she finished that, she suggested coffee on the deck, and we left the big man sleeping in his chair.

  It was past eight o’clock but the northern sun still settled slowly toward the low mountains in the west. The grass of the pasture grew darkly lush in the limpid air, and the forested hills shifted from green to a darkness as black as dead coals. Over the flats, nighthawks flitted with throbbing cries through the willows, and small trout leapt into the floating haze above the creek. In the near . distance, the lights of Cauldron Springs flickered like signal fires.

  “It’s a shame,” Melinda said softly, “that he can’t write … about this place. My work has never gone better, his never worse, and yet he says it isn’t my fault. Sometimes I wonder, though … ” She paused to sip her coffee and stare at me over the cup.

  I had had all the confidences I could stand for one day, so I turned to idle conversation.

  “Were you raised around here?”

  “What?” she said. The fading light was kind to her features, and I thought that if she worked at it—maybe fixed her face and let her hair grow and wore something besides baggy clothes—she might be an attractive woman. As I studied her, she blushed, and I wondered what she felt when she saw the polished beauty of Catherine, wondered what her fingers felt as she molded the lovely profiles on her clay.

  “Were you raised in Montana?” I asked.

  “Oh no,” she answered quickly, almost as if she felt guilty because she hadn’t been. “Marin County,” she said, “across the Bay from San Francisco, and Sun Valley, and the south of France.” It sounded like a line she had said so many times it had begun to bore her. She noticed it too. “I’m sorry,” she added, “I love this part of the country, and I’m afraid that I sounded a bit supercilious. Poor little rich girl, you know, and all that. I wish I had been raised on a little ranch just like this, but my parents were both well-off—not wealthy, mind you, but well-off—incomes from estates and trusts—and they dabbled at things, you see, the cello and violin, abstract painting, scuba diving, and skiing. The worst sort of dilettantes, I’m afraid,” she said with a gentle laugh, “but very good and kind people.”

  “Are they still traveling about?” I said, still making conversation with the poor little well-off girl to whom Traheame, for all his faults, must have seemed as real and exciting as a storm in the North Atlantic.

  “My parents?” “Yes.”

  “No, I’m afraid they’re dead.” “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “My mother died in a skiing accident in the Alps,” she said, “and my father died of grief. Or so I told myself. He ran his Alfa off a curve on the Costa

  Brava.”

  “I’m sorry,” I repeated.

  “Thank you, but there’s no need,” she said. “It seems so long ago now, so far away.” Then she sat up and brightened. “I’m certainly glad that you two weren’t hurt in the accident.”

  “Just a fender bender,” I said, wondering what Traheame had told her.

  “Oh, it must have been more than that,” she said, “for Trahearne to be in the hospital for three days.”

  “Observation,” I said, glad that I had my wits about me. If Trahearne didn’t want his young wife to know that he had been shot, then I certainly wasn’t going to tell her.

  “He must have taken quite a spill when he was thrown out,” she said. “Those scars on his ham look as if it might have been serious.”

  “Minor stuff,” I said.

  “How did it happen?” she asked, but I didn’t have the impression that she was pumping me.

  “Frankly, I was too drunk to know exactly what happened,” I said.

  “Well, thank you for taking care of him,” she said.

  “We had a pretty good time,” I said, “and I’m not sure who was taking care of whom.”

  “It sounds like … sounds like a wild trip.” She paused. “You know, we got to know each other on just the same sort of trip. I was teaching in a summer workshop in Sun Valley and having a drink with some of my students in the lodge, and Traheame came in off the terrace, this huge, beautiful, alive man, and he sat down at the bar beside me, bought me a drink, then another, and somehow we ran away with each other. I didn’t realize who he was until we had driven all the way to Mexico—we wouldn’t tell each other our names, it was like that, you know—and then I heard him spell his name for the Mexican border people, for that form—visitor’s card, you know—and I just couldn’t believe it. Here he was, the most alive man I had ever met, and he turned out to be Abraham Traheame. Life is so strange. Who would have thought all this could come of a simple thing like buying me a drink.”

  “Speaking of the great man,” I said, trying not to be ironic, “would you like me to help you get him to

  bed?”

  “Not at all,” she said. “He’ll wake up in a couple of hours shouting for whiskey and wild, wild women.” The grin on her face suggested that she could handle the wild woman part perfectly well. For an instant I believed her, then she turned her face, and I thought that if she was wild, she kept it well hidden behind plain. “I’ve bored you, haven’t I, with my little love story?”

  “It’s not that,” I said. “I thought I’d hook it up and leave while I’m still sober.”

  “Trahearne will be so disappointed,” she said as if she meant it.

  “Yeah, but I’ve got this other case I’m working on,” I said
, “and I need to be in Oregon yesterday.” “Tomorrow’s never soon enough, is it?” “No.”

  “And that’s such an exciting phrase.” “What’s that?”

  ” ‘Working on a case,’ ” she said. “It suggests dark intrigue, tangled mysteries, the sort of romance denied to mere mortals.”

  “I’m afraid the reality is usually repossessing cars and combing bars for runaway husbands,” I said.

  “Or runaway children.”

  “Sometimes.”

  “That should be exciting,” she said. “A prince stolen by gypsies or something like that.”

  “I don’t know any gypsies or princes,” I confessed.

  “That’s no reason to quit looking,” she said, a plaintive note creeping into her voice, soft like the cry of a lost and dying animal. “I do wish you wouldn’t leave.”

  “I have to go,” I said.

  “I understand,” she said. “I’m sure that Traheame would want me to tell you that you’re always welcome in our house. I feel the same way. Please come ba$k whenever the mood suits you.”

  “Sure,” I said, “thanks.” But I couldn’t think of any moods that would bring me back to this crazy place. We said our goodbyes, and as I drove away, in contract, my search for Betty Sue Flowers seemed alnXSt sane.

  Driving hard, I made it to Grants Pass in one straight shot, nineteen calm hours behind the wheel, then checked into a motel and slept like a child until ten the next morning.

  At the Josephine County Sheriff’s Department, when I stopped by to let them know I was in the county and I wasn’t planning to break any laws, they seemed bored by the prospect but they told me where to go. They didn’t tell me what to look for, though, and a couple of hours later I was driving up into the Sis-kiyous, following a washboard gravel road along a smaU creek that ran into the Applegate River. About ten miles up the road, the land opened up into a nice little valley, and I understood the smile on the deputy’s face.

  A prefab A-frame cabin sat beside the road surrounded by multicolored plastic flags flying from loose guy wires. A large sign in front announded SUNDOWN SUMMER ESTATES. When I parked, a tail young man bounded out of the cabin, his hiking boots rattling the cheap pine porch.

  “Yes, sir,” he said brightly, “what can we do for you

  today?”

  “I think I’m looking for a place to retire,” I said, and it sounded suddenly true. A quiet place where I could settle back and think about all the wild goose chases of my life.

  “I’ve got just the place for you,” he said quickly, “a ten-acre plot with creek frontage, a spring, and a great building site. Unimproved, of course, but cheap.”

  “Actually, I was looking for a hippie commune,” I said.

  “You’re in the wrong place,” he said, his spiel over, his voice hard now. “This place belong to you?” “That’s right,” he said.

  “No hippies, huh?”

  “Not now.”

  “Where did they go?” I asked.

  “Wherever hippies go when they find out that living on the land in the old way is hard work.”

  “How did you get the place?” I asked.

  “If it’s any of your business, I inherited it from my grandmother,” he said, then looked away and shuffled his feet. “You’re some kind of law, right?”

  “Private,” I said, then showed him my license.

  “Wouldn’t you know,” he grumbled. “I’ve had three prospective buyers today—a Fresno chicken farmer, two kids driving a brand-new Continental, and a rent-a-cop.”

  “Didn’t mean to raise your hopes,” I said.

  “That’s what they’re for, aren’t they?” he said sadly.

  “It was your commune, right?”

  “Everybody makes mistakes.” He grinned. “What the hell, man, I turned twenty-one in Nam and came into this place and a little bread, and when I came back, all I could think of was peace and dope and hairy-legged hippie chicks. Sounded like heaven on earth.”

  “What happened?”

  “Times changed,” he said simply, “and my money ran out. I thought we could make a living up here, but nobody wanted to be on the duty roster. The lazy bastards wouldn’t work, so I got a little freaked on acid and conducted a search and destroy mission of my own, burned their hooches and relocated the fuckers. Man, you should’ve seen them run.”

  “So now you’re selling out?”

  “Everything but the back quarter section,” he said. “It’s either that or another six months up on the pipeline, and Alaska is great, man, if you don’t have to work out in the cold—but it’s always cold.”

  “How long ago did everybody leave?”

  “Four or five years ago,” he said. “Who’re you

  looking for?”

  “Betty Sue Flowers,” I said, then showed him the picture.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” he said as he looked at

  it.

  “No, I’m really looking for her.”

  “Not that, man, I mean you got to be kidding that this is her,” he said. “When she was here, man, she was a cow. A sweet fuck but as big as a barn.”

  “You remember her, huh?”

  “Nobody ever forgets a fuck like that,” he said, then sighed darkly, as if he remembered too many other things, too. “Say, you wouldn’t have another one of those beers, would you?” I nodded and got two fresh ones out of the cooler. We strolled over to sit on the steps of the A-frame porch. “She was wild, man, too much. How come you’re looking for her, anyway?”

  “She hasn’t been in touch with her family for a long time, and they’d like to find her, see her again.”

  “Probably not.”

  “Why?”

  “Man, I’ve known some crazy ladies—in Nam and up on the pipeline^—and I’ve done some numbers I don’t like to remember during the daylight hours, but this one, she was something else.”

  “Was she your lady?”

  “Everybody was everybody’s,” he said. “You know, trying to destroy the concept of private property and personal ownership. What the hell, man, you do enough drugs, it sounds okay.”

  “At least you hung on to the land.”

  “Just barely,” he said. “They were pushing me to put the title in all our names, you know, telling me that I was on some sort of power trip because I owned the land, and that’s when I finally freaked.”

  “Was that when she left?”

  “No, she was gone by then,” he said. “She didn’t stay around too long before she split with this older dude. She may have even come with him, you know, but I just can’t remember.” “Remember his name?”

  “Jack. Something like that. We weren’t too heavy on last names, you know, shedding another vestige of the middle-class fascist life or some such crap.”

  “Randall Jackson.”

  “Sounds good to me, man, but I don’t remember.” “Potbellied, bandylegged, balding?” “That’s the creep,” he said.

  “Creep?”

  “He wanted me to finance a skin flick dressed up as a sociological study of sexual freedom in the communes. He said he had all sorts of distribution connections and claimed we’d make a bundle. You know him?”

  “We haven’t exactly met,” I said, “but I know him.”

  “Whatever happened to him?”

  “I heard a rumor that he was in Denver dealing dirty books,” I said.

  “Figures,” he said, then we sat for a bit listening to the flutter of the plastic flags. “Looks like a fucking used car lot, doesn’t it?” I nodded. “I guess when I decided to sell out, I wanted it to look as sleazy as possible,” he said. “Hey, if you’ve got another beer, maybe I’ll trade you a lot for it.”

  “You can have a beer,” I said, “but I’ve already got five acres up in Montana on the North Fork of the Flathead. Sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” he said as he came back with two fresh beers.

  “How are the plots selling?”

  “Like cold hot cake
s,” he said. ‘Two five-acre plots in the last month, and I had to carry the paper on those, Money’s too tight. But I’ve got a standing offer from a land syndicate—you know, one of those outfits that sell acre lots on television and in the Sunday supplements. Only thing is, they want the whole place, you know, they say that if I keep my quarter-section, it ruins the development potential or some such shit, but if I don’t sell some more plots soon, I’ll have to take their offer.”

  “Better than nothing, I guess.”

  “Just like nothing,” he said, “just money, and damn it my great-grandfather was born on the Oregon Trail in Applegate’s second train, and my grandmother was born in a log cabin that is still standing five miles up the creek, so here I am sitting under a raft of plastic flags.”

  “Like you said, times change.”

  “Yeah,” he murmured, “but you know what I hate

  most of all?” “What’s that?”

  “One of these nights, man, I’m gonna be sitting down in Santa Cruz stoned out of my mind watching the late movie, and some washed-up TV cowboy is gonna come on the tube offering my land in piss-ant lots, and man that’s gonna be a bummer.”

  “Maybe you could run a few cattle or something.”

  “Hell, have you seen the market quotations lately?” he said. “You’ve got to have a wad of capital just to get into the cattle-raising business and lose your ass,” he said. “Besides, I’ve been lazy too long to quit now,” he said, then paused. “Say, man, you look like you might have been high once or twice, and I’ve got this dynamite number in my pocket. If you’ve got a couple more beers, we can sit here and get high and wait for the customers who ain’t about to come here anyway.”

  We smoked his dope and drank my beer, watched the sun ride the wide open spaces of high blue sky, talked about wagon trains and trails, about what it might have been like, talked about the motorcycle shop he might open down in Santa Cruz, but we didn’t talk about Betty Sue Flowers and we didn’t get very high.

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