The next morning, I woke up with a faceful of sunshine in the back seat of Trahearne’s convertible, sodden with dew, dogspit, and recriminations of high degree. When I sat up to look around, it looked like California, then a passing paperboy told me it was Cupertino, but that didn’t tell me anything at all. Two houses up the street, a curly-headed guy was standing in his driveway, sucking on the remains of a half-pint as he tried to dodge a barrage of kitchen utensils that flew from an unseen hand inside the house and glittering out into the morning light. He ducked a large spoon and a heavy ladle, chortled and dancing, but a potato masher caught him on the lower lip with a sudden burst of bright blood. As he started weeping, a blond woman in a housecoat rushed outside and led him back inside.
I shook my head, shared the last cold beer with Fireball, then let him out to water somebody’s lawn. As soon as he was finished, I leaned on Trahearne’s horn until he stumbled out of the house across the street, his shirt in one hand, his shoes in the other, his tail tucked between his legs.
“Damned crazy woman,” he complained as I drove away. “How was I supposed to know she wanted to wear all that goddamned junk jewelry to bed. Jesus Christ, it was like fucking in a car wreck.”
“Beats sleeping in the car,” I muttered.
“Wasn’t my fault,” he grunted as he tied his shoe. “You refused to come in the house.”
“At least you could have put the top up.”
“I did,” he said. “Twice. But you insisted on having it down, and you gave the world a forty-minute speech about sleeping under the stars to clean out your system, so I left you alone.”
“Good idea,” I said.
“You’re a surly drunk, Sughrue.”
“Surly sober, too.”
“What happened to the woman?” he asked. “What woman?” “The one with you.”
“Whatever happened,” I said, “I’m sure I enjoyed it. What did she look like?”
“Soft and furry,” he said. “She’s not dead in the trunk or something awful, is she?”
“I don’t have any idea,” I said, “and I’m not about to look before I have a drink.”
“Let’s not even act like we’re going to have breakfast,” he said, grinning. “Let’s just find the nearest
bar.”
“Then it’s off to Bakersfield,” I said. “Oh my god,” Trahearne groaned.
8••••
BETWEEN DRUNKS AND HANGOVERS, IT TOOK TRAHEARNE and me two days to drive to Bakersfield, but as we drove from the motel to Betty Sue’s father’s place, we were both sober and not in any great pain, which was good because his place looked like the sort of dance hall and bar where a man wanted his wits about him when he went inside. The marquee promised dancing nightly to the strains of Jimmy Joe Flowers and the Pickers, and the bar, a cinder-block square building in the middle of a parking lot, promised all the trouble you could handle. Since it was early, though, we went inside with the lunch rush—two welders and a traveling salesman who wanted beers and Slim Jims. The daytime bartender told me that Mr. Flowers usually came in about one-thirty, and sure enough at two o’clock sharp, his ostrich-skin boots thumped through the doorway. Ostrich skin makes a lovely boot leather—if you like leather that looks as if the animal had died of terminal acne—and it went well with Flowers’ wine Western-cut double-knit leisure suit, just as his suit matched the woman who followed him.
Flowers was all happy handshakes and smiles until I showed him my license and told him what I wanted. Then he frowned and led his secretary into the closet he called his office. When I didn’t follow on his heels, he stepped back out and waved me hastily inside. He said he had something he wanted to say to me. At some length.
“Ungrateful little bitch,” he said, then slapped his flimsy desk. “I never thought a child of mine would turn out to be a hippie, you know, never thought it for a minute. I mean, what the hell, I like to see kids have a good time, but they got to work for it, and you know, I lost a boy over there in Vietnam, and might have lost the other one, but he had a bum knee, and here I tum around and find this damned hippie for a daughter. I mean, you know, first I hear she’s run off without finishing school—and you know how important an education is nowadays—and here I am her own loving father, you know, and I don’t hear a single solitary word from her for four, maybe five years, then one night she calls, collect, mind you, and wakes me out of a dead sleep.” He paused to look up at his secretary. “You remember that, don’t you, honey?” he said to her, and she reached down to pat his freshly shaven and powdered cheek as if the effort of waking up had been just more than he could bear.
“And you know what she wants?” he asked me suddenly. He didn’t give me time to answer. “Money, by god, she wants money so she can leave that damned dirty commune where’s she been shacked up like some animal.” He paused to shake his head. “And you know what I told her?” I didn’t make a move. “I told her that I hadn’t sent her a single thin dime to get herself into trouble, and I wasn’t going to send a damned cent to get her out. Not by a damned sight I wasn’t, you know what I mean.”
Even if he knew anything else, Betty Sue’s father wasn’t going to tell me, so I didn’t have to be nice for effect. “You mean those dirty hippies were probably stuffing drugs up their noses, too,” I said.
“You got a smart mouth, fella,” he said, his eyes as flat as yesterday’s beer. Then he smiled with just his mouth. “But that’s okay, because you must have a smart head on your shoulders to come into town and tell me that.”
“Peggy Bain told me,” I said, not wanting him to think I was too smart.
Flowers sighed heavily, as if the conversation had been the hardest work he had done in years. His secretary patted his shoulder again. “Remember your heart, honey,” she murmured. She had dressed for the occasion too, but her idea of a sex kitten looked like something the cat had dragged in.
“Most drugs make you stupid,” he lectured me, “but cocaine is a smart man’s high. You have to be smart to enjoy it and rich to afford it.”
“A man in my business needs his wits,” I said, “so I don’t know anything about drugs.”
“I can see that,” he said scornfully. “How much is Rosie paying you for this wild goose chase?”
“Not nearly enough,” I said, meaning to insult him.
“She was always tight with a dollar bill,” he said ignoring my tone. “Goddamned old woman.”
“Well, her place isn’t doing as well as yours,” I said. “You must have done well in the aluminum cookware business.”
“How would you like that smart mouth on the other side of your head, fella?” he said quietly. “Or maybe one of your legs busted at the kneecap.”
“You’d need help,” I said stupidly.
“All I have to do is snap my fingers,” he said as he held up his hand. “You know what I mean?”.
“You have the right connections, right?”
“You could say that.”
“What’s a good ol’ boy like you doing with connections like that?” I asked pleasantly. “Making a living,” he said.
“Okay,” I said, “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t let the door hit you in the butt on the way out,” he said.
“Give my best to the family,” I said, then left. He could have been bluffing, but I didn’t want to find out. I made a quick exit, which made Traheame happy.
“This place gives me the creeps,” he said as we left.
“Me too,” I said, and on the way to the car I told him why.
Since I needed some time to think about Betty Sue Flowers, and since Trahearne demanded a few days of luxurious recuperation, we drove straight through to San Francisco, and he checked us into a suite at the St. Francis.
Some time for reflection and recuperation. Cigarettes and whiskey and wild, wild women. One commercial type spent the whole time babbling in my ear about her shrink, so I faked an orgasm for her and hid in the shower until she went about her business. Then th
ere was a lady poet, an old friend ofTrahearne’s, who was so mean that she scared me into hurrying. Hiding in the shower didn’t help a bit. She came in and gave me an endless lecture on my responsibility to women in general and herself in particular. Somewhere in the drunken blur, Trahearne walked oft the balcony bar in the lobby and fell headfirst into a rubber tree, much to the consternation of the management. Somehow, I drove his convertible into the rear of a cable car. Nobody was hurt, but I had to endure a monsoon of abuse about trying to destroy a national monument. The conductor and his passengers acted as if I had run over a nun. The worst thing that happened, though, was that Fireball took to wearing a rhinestone collar and drinking Japanese beer.
One afternoon, it finally came to an end. Fireball was drinking water out of the toilet bowl, a naked blond woman wearing red boots slept on the couch in an extremely revealing position, and the suite smelled like a Tenderloin flophouse.
“This is no way for a grown man to live,” Trahearne announced as he woke me up. “Let’s go home,” he said.
“Home’s where you hang your hangover,” I said.
“Let’s have more movement, jack, and less piss-ant redneck homilies,” he grumbled, holding his head very carefully.
When he decided he wanted to go home, Trahearne wasn’t about to wait for anything. Not even to wake up the blond lady. He griped about the length of time it took me to pack, then he whined all the way to Sonoma as I detoured by Rosie’s to drop off her dog and pick up a tow bar and my El Camino. But there was a strange woman behind the bar. She told me Rosie was asleep in her trailer house, and not to bother her, but I had to.
Rosie came to the door after Fireball and I had spent several minutes standing on the steps. She was hastily wrapped in a faded purple chenille bathrobe, her hair tangled with sleep and sweat. Fireball elbowed past me and trotted toward the rear of the trailer, where the sounds of masculine snoring rumbled.
“What the hell’s that thing around his neck?” she asked, not sounding all that happy to see me. “You shoulda called, gimme a chance to clean up,” she added.
“Sorry,” I said, “but I didn’t know we were coming until a few minutes ago.” “Been on a toot, huh?”
“Had about as much fun as a man can stand,” I said.
“You find my baby girl?” she asked.
I shook my head and looked down. Rosie tried to hide her long, crooked yellow toenails, first with one foot, then the other. I looked back up.
“You come up with any leads?” she asked. “One rumor,” I said, “that she was living up in Oregon six or seven years ago.” “Where’d you hear that?” Rosie looked puzzled. “From her daddy.”
“You talk to that worthless bastard?” she asked. “Just about as long as I could,” I said.
“How’s he doing?”
“Got his own band,” I said, “and a place to play it in.”
“Somebody must be running it for him,” she said.
“He’s got himself a secretary,” I said.
“Naw, it wouldn’t be that,” Rosie said. “Jimmy Joe’s scared sideways by a smart woman. He might’ve loved Betty Sue if she hadn’t been so smart.”
“Maybe so,” I said. “Listen, since I didn’t come up with anything definite, why don’t you take your money back?” I tried to hand her a sheaf of folded bills.
“Get away with that,” she said.
“Take it.”
“You earned it.”
“Okay,” I said, ”I’ll stop in Oregon on the way through and ask around some more.” Which was exactly what I didn’t want to do. I didn’t want to look anymore, didn’t want to find any more scraps of Betty Sue Flowers. “If I find anything, I’ll give you a call.”
“I’d appreciate that,” she said, “but you’ve already done more work than I paid for.” Down the hallway behind the living room, the squeak of springs and a series of muffled curses filled the close air. Fireball had joined the gentleman in bed, and the gentleman hadn’t enjoyed it. Rosie looked embarrassed and turned to quiet the man. When she did, she exposed a life-sized poster of Johnny Cash on the wall behind her. Then she glanced back at me. “You did more work than I paid
for, didn’t you?”
“I told you it was wasted money,” I said.
“It’s mine to waste,” she said, “and I thank you for
trying. Give me a call, collect, you hear, whatever you find in Oregon, and if you’re ever down this way, you got a place to drink where your money’s no good.”
“Sounds like heaven,” I said, and Rosie smiled.
“You taking the big fella’s car home?” She nodded over my shoulder. I had already hooked Trahearne’s Caddy to the tow bar and my El Camino.
“The big fella too,” I said.
“What’s the matter? Can’t he drive?”
“He can’t even walk yet,” I said.
“Must be nice,” Rosie murmured.
“What’s that?”
“To have enough money to hire somebody to tow you around,” she said.
“I don’t know,” I admitted, then as Rosie and I exchanged goodbyes, a bald, hairy man, his beer belly drooping over his sagging boxer shorts, wandered into the picture, demanding cold beer, scrambled eggs, and true love. Rosie asked me in for lunch, her eyes pleading for me to leave, so I did. I had to drive Trahearne home anyway.
Trahearne had made his literary reputation with six highly praised volumes of poetry, two of which had been nominated for national prizes, but he had made his fortune with three novels, the first published in 1950, the second in 1959, and the third in 1971. I had read all three, and although they were set in different places with different characters, I couldn’t keep them separate in my mind. The first one, The Last Patrol, had been set on a nameless island in the Pacific during the final week of World War II. A Marine squad had been sent on a mission behind Japanese lines to blow up a crucial bridge. Before they can make the march, though, they receive a radio signal telling them that the war is over, but the young lieutenant who is leading the patrol keeps the information to himself. At the bridge, the Japanese soldiers, sick and hungry, rush out to surrender, and the Marines slaughter them. During the one-sided fire-fight, the young lieutenant takes a round through the chest, and as he is dying, he tells his men the truth, and he laughs, happy that he is dying before the fighting ends. The war is over, he says, and the peace is going to be hell.
In the second novel, Seadrift, the survivors of a yachting accident, cast adrift on a small raft, work hard to elude their rescuers. One of the survivors, a Hollywood screenwriter, convinces the others that surviving on their own in more important than living. By the end of the novel, I expected them to be eaten by a whale, but only the screenwriter dies, leaping into the jaws of a shark, his sole regret that he doesn’t have time for a dying speech.
In the third one, Up the River, an alcoholic playwright and his pacifist son team up to wreak a terrible vengeance on a party of elk hunters who have accidentally killed the wife and mother. Even as the last of the hunters dies in a bear trap, the father and son still don’t know which hunter actually did the shooting, and they don’t even care, trapped as they are by their love of this wild justice. The son joins the Army to go to Vietnam and the father sobers up to write a great play about love.
All three novels were best sellers, all made into successful movies, and perhaps because of his reputation as a poet, well reviewed. But as far as I could tell, the books were fair hack work cluttered with literary allusions and symbols. Fancy dreck, one unimpressed reviewer called them. The male characters, even the villians and cowards, cling to a macho code so blatant that even an illiterate punk in an east L.A. pachuco gang could understand it immediately. The female characters serve as stage props, scenery, and victims. And the stories were always incredible. But Traheame had found his niche and mined it as if it were the mother lode instead of a side vein, and he made a great deal of money, back in the days when money was still real.
B
ut maybe that was the only choice he had. When he came back from the war, he found that his mother had become a rich and successful writer with two novels about the tender, touching, and comic adventures of a young widow with an infant son as she makes her way in the world as a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse in western Montana. As Trahearne said, she made a million dollars, then never wrote another word, and she made it up out of whole cloth, since she only taught one year in Cauldron Springs before she became pregnant and lost her job. And he told me also that she didn’t bother to write the best novel of all, she lived it. When the money came flooding in, she left Seattle and moved back to Cauldron Springs, where she bought the hot springs and the hotel and most of the town, and she kept the town running through the lean years when hot baths were no longer in vogue, when the cattle market fluctuations ruined the ranchers. She never said an unkind word to a soul, never mentioned the fact that the small town had run her off, she just lived in her house on the hill and looked down, smiling kindly, watching the town look up.
With his first money, Traheame had built a house across the creek from hers, and except for occasional trips to Europe and a few visiting-writer jobs at colleges, he had never lived anyplace else, but had never written a poem set within fifty miles of Cauldron Springs. He wrote about the things he saw on his binges, about the road, about small towns whose future had become hostage to freeways, about truck-stop waitresses whose best hope is moving to Omaha or Cheyenne, about pasts that hung around like unwelcome ghosts, about bars where the odd survivors of some misunderstood disaster gathered to stare at dusty brown photographs of themselves, to stare at their drinks sepia in their glasses. But he never wrote about home. As I drove him there, I had too much time to think about all the runaways.
My El Camino was a bastard rig—half sedan, half pickup, a half-crazy idea out of Detroit for lazy drugstore cowboys who want to drive a pickup without driving a pickup—and I loved it. The Indian kid up in Ronan who had ordered it out had it set up so he could hit the rodeo circuit as a calf-roper, which means plenty of high-speed travel towing a heavy load. The kid got tired of the circuit and bored with making payments, and when I repossessed it, I bought it from the dealer cheap. It was a beauty, fire-engine red with a black vinyl roof and a fancy topper for the pickup bed, all chrome and conception, but it had a heavy-duty racing suspension, a four-speed box, and a tricked up 454-cubic-inch engine stuffed under the hood. It was a real beast, it could dust a Corvette on the straight, outcor-ner a Porsche Carrera, and I carried an honest ticket from a South Dakota radar trap for 137 mph. Of course it got six miles to the gallon, if I was lucky, and not even Lloyd’s of London would sell me insurance, but with a CB radio, a radar detector, and a stack of 15-grain Desoxyn speed tabs, even a child could make time towing Traheame’s barge, and I burned up the highway.
The Last Good Kiss Page 10