The Last Good Kiss

  Even after high school, through the first years of college at the University of Washington, when he still lived at home, he saw the woman. And even later, after he had moved closer to the campus, he came back to the neighborhood on rainy days to once again stride the bricks of that littered alley, red bricks glistening in the rain. Only when he graduated and could find no work in Seattle, after he moved to Idaho to work in the woods setting chokers, only then did he stop haunting the alley behind her house, watching, waiting.

  There were girls, of course, during those days, but it was never the same in cheap tourist cabins or upon starlit blankets beneath the pines. There was one, almost, once. A plump Indian girl who went skinny-dipping with him at dawn in a lake, which had flooded an old marshy forest and filled with tiny dark particles of wood fiber held in pelucid suspension, the naked girl near but distant too, like a skater twirling in a paperweight snowstorm. One, once, almost.

  Then the war came. Trahearne enlisted in January of 1942, in the Marines, and after officer’s training, his gold bars brightly gleaming, he took his leave in San Francisco instead of going back to Seattle to see his mother before he shipped out to the Pacific war. In the center of the Golden Gate Bridge, he met a young widow, still in her teens, whose husband had been an ensign on the Arizona at Pearl Harbor. At first, seeing her black dress and pale young face ruined with tears, he thought she might be preparing to jump, but when he spoke to her he found out she wasn’t. She had only come there to throw her wedding ring into the bay. One thing, as he said ruefully, led to many others, and they fell in love, the young lieutenant anxious to be away to the war, to glory, the teenaged widow who had already lost one man to the war with a sudden violence that was as shocking as that first blot of blood that had marked the end of her girlhood only a few years before. Their love, he said, was sweet with the stink of death from the beginning, and each time they coupled, it was as if it were the last time for both of them.

  On his final day of leave, they went back out on the bridge, and there on a blustery spring afternoon, the wind full of sunlight, booming through the girders like the echoes of distant artillery, cold off the green sea, fragrant as a jungle, there he told his new love about the naked woman and the rain. Beforehe could finish, though, she began to unbutton her blouse, and oblivious to the people around them, she bared her small breasts to the afternoon sunlight, then nestled his face between them, sending him off to die.

  “Of course,” he said to me, “it was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me. And maybe still is. I don’t know.” Then he paused, and in his rumbling voice, added, “I’d never been so touched. Such a lovely gesture.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “Always with the questions, huh,” he said, and gave me a long, hard stare. “What happened to everybody then? The war happened, that’s what. But I don’t suppose you remember much about that.”

  “I remember my daddy went away, then he came back, and went away for good,” I said.

  “Killed?”

  “No,” I said. “After seeing North Africa, Italy, and Southern France, he said South Texas didn’t look like much. He came out West, and my mother and I stayed home. She said the war just gave him an excuse to be as worthless and shiftless as he always wanted to be.”

  “Women are like that, boy,” he philosophized.

  “They don’t understand moving on. Give them a warm cave and a steady supply of antelope tripe, and they’re home for good.”

  “Maybe so, maybe not,” I said. “But what happened to the woman?”

  “What woman?” he asked, seeming confused and

  angry.

  “The one with the tits.”

  “For a man with at least a touch of imagination, my young friend, you have a callous soul and a smart mouth.”

  “I told you I was a nosy son of a bitch.”

  “I’ll buy that,” he said. “What’s the C.W. stand

  for?”

  “Nothing,” I lied. “What happened to the woman?”

  “Hell, boy, I don’t know,” he grumbled. “She

  married a 4-F or a dollar-a-year man or another officer with a longer leave than mine. What difference does it make? It’s the story that counts.”

  “Not until I know how it ends,” I said.

  “Stories are like snapshots, son, pictures snatched out of time,” he said, “with clean, hard edges. But this was life, and life always begins and ends in a bloody muddle, womb to tomb, just one big mess, a can of worms left to rot in the sun.”

  “Right.”

  “And speaking of messes,” he said, smiling, “what are you going to do now?”

  “Take you home, I guess.”

  “What about Rosie’s missing daughter?”

  “It’s a waste of time,” I said. “If I had a year with nothing else to do, I might be able to find her, or find out what happened to her. But not in a couple of days. I’ll just tell Rosie that you got out of the hospital sooner than I expected.” But that wasn’t what I wanted to say.

  “Listen, boy, I don’t have a damned thing to do at home,” he said as I poured the last of the champagne into our glasses, “and I feel that I’ve earned a few days of entertainment—what the hell, I’ve been shot again and survived—so why don’t you give it a couple more

  days.”

  “Well, sure, if you don’t mind …” “Mind, boy? Hell, I insist,” he said grandly.

  “Great.”

  “But I’ve got one little favor to ask,” he said ashe sat up gingerly on the side of the bed.

  “What?”

  “Take me along,” he said shyly, mumbling and scuffing his feet on the carpet.

  “What?”

  “Let me go with you,” he said. I laughed, and he jerked his head up. “I won’t get in your way. I promise.”

  “Promise to stay relatively sober,” I said, “and you’re welcome to come along for the ride.”

  “How sober?”

  “At least as sober as me.”

  “That’s no problem,” he crowed. “You sure you don’t mind?”

  “It’s your ass, old man,” I said.

  “Please don’t remind me,” he muttered, grinning as he stood up stiffly. “It’s a lovely day, boy. Let’s stop by and pick up my barge, let the top down, and have some fresh air and sunshine, let the four winds blow the hospital stench and the, ah, ineffable odor of lust out of our noses. By god, I’ll even buy the gas and the whiskey.”

  “What will I do for expenses?” I asked as he hobbled toward the bathroom, but he waved his hand at me as if to say The devil take the expenses.

  While I replaced the rotor and moved our gear into his convertible, Trahearne tried to lure Fireball, dour with a hangover, out of the back seat, but the bulldog obviously intended to defend his position to the death. Or at least until Trahearne poured a cold beer into a rusty Hudson hubcap. Muzzle-deep in his morning beer, Fireball ignored us as we climbed in and lowered the top, but when we drove away, he glanced at the locked doors of Rosie’s, then followed us down the road with a damned and determined trotting waddle, as if he knew we had the only cold Sunday-morning hangover beers in Northern California, as if he intended to fetch the Caddy by a rear tire and shake them loose. I slowed down to keep an eye on him.

  “Dumb bastard’s bound to quit,” Trahearne said after we had driven nearly half a mile.

  Maybe that’s the definition of dumb bastards: they never quit. After another two hundred yards, I stopped the car to wait for the dog. He showed up petulant and thirsty. Trahearne opened his door, let him in, and gave him a beer. Fireball turned up his nose at it and scrambled into the back seat, where he sat with a great deal of dignity, waiting like a stuffy millionaire for the help to drive on. I did. His jowls quivered in the slipstream, and he seemed to enjoy the sunlight and the Sunday drive.

  “All he needs is a cigar,” Trahearne grumbled. I handed him the ones I had lifted from poor Albert, but he kept them for himself. ?
??What a lark!” he shouted as he fired up a fog and settled back to enjoy the ride. “What a fucking lark!”

  Outside of San Rafael, I had to brake hard to avoid a gaudy van as it cut across three lanes of traffic toward an exit. Trahearne flinched, then propped his haunch higher on the pillow we had stolen from the motel.

  “By god,” he said, “if I were a younger man—or hell if I were just whole—we’d run those punks down and see if they couldn’t learn some manners.”

  “You sure this is what you want to do, old man?” I asked.

  “Son, this is all I’ve ever wanted to do,” he said, still grinning through his pain. “Hit the road, right? Move it on. And here I am wandering around America with an alcoholic bulldog, a seedy private dick, and a working quart of Wild Turkey.” He reached into the glove box, took a nip, and passed the quart to me. “But don’t call me old man. That’s all I ask.”

  “Don’t call me a seedy dick.”

  “It’s too lovely a day to be crude,” he said. “And if you’ll pass the painkiller instead of holding it, I’ll see about easing the pain.” He hit the bottle hard when I handed it to him.

  “No thanks,” I said when he offered it to me again. “Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?”

  “We’re in this together, aren’t we?”

  “What were you doing on the road?” I asked. “Looking for your runaway wife?”

  “She hadn’t run away,” he said. “Like most artists, Melinda needs a change of scene occasionally—fresh vistas and all that—a chance to be alone, to be anonymous, to see the world with an eye uncluttered by companionship. My god, I understand. If I can’t understand that, who can? I need the same things myself. Luckily, in this marriage there’s plenty of room for that sort of freedom, in this marriage, unlike my first, my wife and I aren’t completely dependent upon each other..” Then he paused. “Goddamned Catherine. I divorced her, but I can’t seem to get her off my back. I think she had some insane idea that Melinda had run away, which I’m sure delighted her no end, and that I was searching for her with murder on my mind. Or something equally melodramatic. She thought she could save me by sending you to find me. Or something like that. I don’t know. Damn it, I was married to the woman—saddled by the woman—for more than twenty years, and I still don’t have any idea what goes on in her mind. I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that she had hired you to have me shot in the ass.”

  “Pretty slick, the way I handled it, right?”

  “Don’t make jokes about Catherine,” he said, grinning, “she’s great at arranging things. She arranged my life for years.” He was telling me something more than I had asked, but I had no idea what. “You’re not married, are you?”

  “Never have been.”

  “I thought not,” he said. “You’re not complex enough to survive it.”

  “That’s what I always said.”

  After a long pause as. he watched the frail monuments of apartment complexes soar past the moving freeway, he asked, “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”

  “Nope.”

  “Where the hell are we going?” he asked, then laughed wildly.

  When he stopped, I told him what I had found out about Betty Sue Flowers, what I planned to do, and where I meant to look, shouting above the road noise until we kicked off into the windy, blue space of the Golden Gate. As I talked, Traheame drank, and as we crossed the bridge, he stopped listening, thinking, I suppose, of the young widow. He stared at the bottle, clutched in his hand like a grenade,- then frowned, the feathers on his lark already saddly ruffled.

  In the back seat, the bulldog hunkered like a heathen idol, some magical toad with a ruby as large as a clenched fist in his head, glowing through his stoic eyes, an inscrutable snicker mystic upon his face.

  7••••

  THEY SAY THE GODS WATCH OVER FOOLS AND DRUNKS— surely Trahearne and I qualified—and whoever they are, they’re right too often for comfort.

  Once we were downtown, we stopped at a quiet bar, and I called every dope dealer, police officer, and old girl friend I knew. They gave me some names and numbers, all of them absolutely useless. How was I supposed to know that every porno kingpin and czar in the city spent Sunday afternoons in religious retreats, consciousness-raising sessions, or est seminars? Out of boredom and hoping to stay sober, I hit the bars and theatres around Broadway and found a bored college student taking tickets. He knew a sociology professor who knew more about pornographic movies than either the Legion of Decency or the Mafia.

  The professor was home on Sunday afternoon like any good citizen, watching an old silent porno flick about a young fellow who is fooled by two young girls at the beach into fucking a goat through a knothole in a fence. Several months later, the girls con him out of his walking-around money when one of them slips a pillow under her old-fashioned bathing suit and accuses him of having fathered it.

  “I’ll be damned,” Trahearne whispered as he wriggled on the hard metal folding chair. “That’s almost funny.”

  “Almost?” Professor Richter said, glancing down his sharp nose. “Almost?” he repeated with the proprietary air of someone who had written, directed, and starred in the movie. He did resemble the young protagonist. “It’s hilarious!” he screeched. “And that is the major problem of modern pornography: it’s too serious. With minor exceptions, of course. Usually, when it attempts humor the modern pornographic film tries for the lowest level, and when it succeeds, however slightly, as in the case of Deep Throat, they have a national hit on their hands,” he said gravely. “It’s the same in all the arts: as technology advances, humor declines. The limits and definitions of art disappear, then the art is forced to satirize itself too earnestly, and the visual arts become literary, and that, my friends, is the very first sign of cultural degeneracy.” Then he slapped his slender, dusty hands together lightly, lifted the corners of his mouth, and added, “Don’t you agree?”

  He had the glittering eyes and pained smile of a fanatic, the long face unmarked by emotion, so Trahearne and I nodded quickly. His face wasn’t unpleasant, just blandly, hysterically objective. Maybe a steady diet of porno flicks had softened his features, but I couldn’t begin to guess what had happened to his clothes. Perhaps he had slept in his shiny black suit. Several times. Badly. Certainly he had dined in it. Or off it. A blossom of tomato sauce with a dried mushroom bud served as a boutonniere, and his thin black tie, tugged into a knot the size of an English pea, as a napkin.

  “What can I do for you gentlemen?” he asked as it became apparent that we hadn’t come to discuss the state of the art.

  I showed him my license and explained my business.

  Before I could finish, he scampered to a 5x8 file, rifled it, and came up with both hands full of cards, waving them at the walls of his small apartment, which were banked with file cabinets and shelves and stacks of film cans.

  “Animal Passion,” he said, holding out his right hand. “Animal Lust,” he added with his left. “Take your choice, gentlemen. Not a particularly imaginative title, either of them, but damned popular.” He simpered at his own joke.

  “Low, low budget,” I said, “with a group grope for a finale.”

  “Aren’t they all,” he said with his frail laugh. “Could you give me an approximate date?” “Late sixties maybe.” “Major actress blonde or brunette?” “Blonde.”

  “Right,” he said, then replaced the cards into their file, shuffled them again. “Perhaps this is it,” he said as he read a card, his narrow bloodless lips mouthing a long number. He dashed over to a stack of film cans and jerked one out of the middle so quickly that the ones above it fell down with a neat solid thunk. “If I remember this one correctly, it’s simply trash,” he said, “without a single redeeming feature. Would you like to

  see it?”

  “You mind?” I asked Trahearne. “Why should I mind?” he said, looking very confused.

  “Your romantic illusions,” I said, then laughed.

&nb
sp; “Oh,” he said, “oh yeah. Those.” His confusion seemed to clear itself up. For him, though, not for me. “Roll it,” he said crisply, and Richter threaded the film.

  It was basic, all right, perhaps even pitiful. It was Betty Sue Flowers, too. No matter how often I looked away, when I looked back she was there. She had

  gained enough weight to make her figure more than Reubenesque, and if she hadn’t been able to move it with some grace, she would have seemed grotesque and comic as a chubby young housewife clad only in a frilly apron, her thick blond hair gathered into two unbraid-ed pigtails that framed her fat face.

  At least the plot was thin. First, a little minor-league action with a pair of bewildered toy poodles, then some major-league work with the neighborhood help: a postman, a milkman, two meter readers, and a grocery boy with pancake over his wrinkles. Among the five men, they had enough beer guts, knobby knees, blurred tattoos, dirty feet, and crooked dicks to outfit a freak show. In the finale, as they gathered in a carefully arranged pile about the kitchen table, they looked even more distraught than the poodles had, and their faces contorted with pain as they all tried to come at once as Betty Sue worked at all of them together. Everybody was stoned blind, and the crew kept stumbling on camera or into the lights or jerking the camera in and out of focus. You could almost hear the sigh of relief when they ran out of film. The whole thing seemed about as exciting as jerking off into an old dirty sock.

  But Betty Sue, in spite of the fat and her eyes, which were as blank as two wet stones, had something that had nothing to do with the way she looked. She seemed to step into the degradation freely, without joy but with a stolid determination to do a good job. In spite of myself, I was excited by her, which made the whiskey curdle in my stomach. I worked on righteous anger but only came up with quiet sadness and a sick sexual excitement. I saw why Gleeson hadn’t wanted to talk about the film; I didn’t either. No more than I wanted to look at a large, ugly scar that split the center of her pudgy abdomen.

  “That wasn’t funny at all,” Trahearne growled as the film unthreaded itself and flapped like a broken shade.