“Okay.”
“I almost believe you,” he said.
“You mail me a receipt for a thousand-dollar contribution to the humane society,” I said, “and I’ll mail you copies.”
“You got it, man,” he said. “I’m sorry about the dogs. Hyland, he hated dogs and when this bulldog bit him on the ankle, he went crazy. I tried to stop him, really, but he—”
“Just shut up,” I said as I leveled the shotgun at his nose. “You got it?” He nodded. “Now let’s go get the Browning.” I herded him outside, took the automatic from Stacy, then prodded him back into the kitchen. “Unload it,” I told him, “and wipe it clean, then reload it.” He did it quickly and professionally. I didn’t even have to tell him to take each round out of the clip. When he finished, he found a large plastic bag and dropped the piece in it. “Now let’s go down the hall and pick up those five pieces of brass,” I said.
“You’re a careful son of a bitch,” he said as he handed me the plastic bag.
“That’s what I’m doing here,” I said, “practicing my careful act, scumbag.”
“You don’t have to insult me,” he said as I followed him down the hall.
“I wouldn’t know where to begin,” I said, then stepped back as he opened the door and switched on the light. The five shell casings were clustered behind the door, and he picked them up and gave them to me. “Now get me the magnum out from under the couch,” I said.
“Come on, man, that’s my favorite piece,” he complained. “Besides, it’s registered to me.”
“That’s even better,” I said, and he knelt down to reach under the couch. “Nothing personal,” I said as he pulled the revolver to the edge of the couch and I clubbed him wjth the shotgun butt behind the ear. His face slammed into the floor, his back arched, and his feet tattooed across the rug. “Nothing personal at all.” I picked up the .357 and stuck it in my belt, then drew my boot back to kick Torres in the face, but I knew it wouldn’t help. I put my foot down. I had gotten Melinda out, but it hadn’t provided any satisfaction at all.
When I got to the car I motioned Stacy behind the wheel, then climbed into the passenger seat and dumped my load of arms on the floorboard along with the ledgers.
“What took you so goddamned long?” Trahearne asked as Stacy drove us away. “We must have been sitting in the car for a goddamned hour.”
“Honey,” Melinda chided him in a whisper, “honey, hush. He got me out.”
“Yeah, well, I’m paying him good money for it,” he said.
Stacy slammed on the brakes, skidding across the gravel of the driveway, and turned around and shouted at Traheame, “You old fat bastard, you shut up! No—you say thank you and then you shut up! You haven’t done a thing tonight but piss and moan and fuck up, and if it wasn’t for him, Melinda would be doing it under the lights with that good-looking blond dude, so you say thank you and then you shut the fuck up!”
“It’s okay,” I said.
“Stop making excuses for him!” she shouted at me.
“I don’t have to thank the hired help,” Traheame huffed. That made Stacy so mad that she flounced back under the wheel and stuffed the accelerator to the floorboard. The car shot down the drive and fishtailed onto the highway.
Nobody said anything for a long time as we headed back toward Denver, the silence only broken by the whisper of tires, the gurgle and plop of Traheame’s bottle, and Melinda’s sobs.
I had a long drink of water out of a canteen, then wet a towel to scrub away the camouflage paint on my face. When I finished and leaned back in the seat, Stacy reached over to pat my thigh.
“Thank you,” Melinda said softly, “thank you so very much.”
“Yeah,” Trahearne grunted as nicely as he was able. “You want a drink?” He reached the pint of vodka over the seat back.
“Is that your answer to everything!” Stacy shouted, wheeling in the seat and nearly running the car off the freeway.
“Don’t make him mad,” I said as I grabbed the steering wheel, “or he won’t give me one.”
“Oh,” she muttered, then settled back to driving. When I offered her a hit off Traheame’s pint, she cursed, but took a long swallow. “I don’t know why you drink that terrible stuff,” she said, spitting and coughing.
“It’s the only way to get drunk,” I said, and everybody laughed as if I had said something funny.
“I’m sorry,” Trahearne said, and that sent up gales of laughter.
“You should be,” Stacy said, giggling. “I can’t believe I missed that son of a bitch,” she added, then giggled louder.
“You couldn’t’ve stopped that big bastard any quicker if you had blown his head off,” Trahearne said, and they chuckled.
“Meaner’n a Marine,” Stacy squealed.
“That’s not saying much,” Trahearne said. “My mother’s meaner than any Marine that ever lived.”
“No kidding,” Melinda offered in a soft, shy voice. “She wouldn’t have missed,” she added, and they all laughed again, so happy to be alive that they would have laughed at a stop sign.
Back at the motel, we moved all the gear out of the car into the room, then I left them there while I unloaded Jackson from the trunk to the front seat. Stacy’s driving had left him some the worse for wear. He wasn’t bleeding too badly, but he looked like a man who had just survived a terrible auto accident. I drove him to the emergency-room entrance at Denver General and left him on the curb, a shoe in one pocket, a half-empty pint of bourbon in the other, assuming that he would work it out after I explained that Hyland was dead and nobody was looking for him. He nodded briskly, then hobbled toward the hospital, hopping quickly off his right heel.
“I’m sorry!” I shouted out the car window, but he waved his hand without turning around, as if to say it was all in a day’s work.
When I got back to the motel again, it wasn’t even midnight yet, and I found the troops sitting down to
delivered pizza and room-service beer, and we ate and drank furiously until a flurry of fatigue swept over us like a tropical rainstorm, dropping us like sodden flies. Trahearne fell asleep with a piece of pizza in his hand moving toward his mouth, and as she helped him to the bed, Melinda tumbled down beside him with a quick, sudden snort like a woman clubbed in the back of the head. Within seconds Trahearne, flopped on his back, began to snore as only he could.
“Jesus Christ,” Stacy whispered, “how can she sleep through that?”
I yawned. “She must love him.”
“She must.”
“I guess I have to sleep in your room,” I said.
“Of course,” she answered sweetly, then took me by the hand and led me through the connecting doors. Stacy was asleep on her feet, and as I collapsed toward the bed with her, I went under too.
But it was, as I knew it would be, a quick, uneasy sleep, dreamless, but broken by fits and starts of waking out of darkness into the unfamiliar room—like the first few nights back from the bush in the base camp at An Khe—a treacherous sleep. And the second time I woke up, around three A.M., I didn’t want to go back into it. I untangled myself from Stacy’s arms as gently as I could, but she woke up too.
“Every time I close my eyes, I see that room with the mirror exploding like knives,” she murmured dreamily, “and I don’t understand why I don’t feel bad.”
“The good guys won,” I said, loosening her grip on my neck.
“Where’re you going?”
“The john,” I said.
“Come back,” she whispered. “I don’t feel bad but come back, okay? I don’t understand why I don’t feel
bad.”
“I’ll be back,” I said, climbed up and closed the 231
connecting doors, then went to the john. When I came out, she had taken off her clothes and lay naked above the covers, her hands holding her small breasts as if they were as painful as wounds.
“It’s not like hers,” she said quietly—she didn’t have to explain who her w
as—“but it’s all I’m ever going to
have.”
“You’re lovely,” I said.
“I know you want hers,” she said, trying to smile and cry all together, “but make love to me.”
I lay down and held her as the sobs rippled “like convulsions through her slim body, held her until she cried herself to sleep. I covered her up and went to the bathroom to make a drink, meaning to drink until I could sleep again, but I heard a tapping at the connecting doors. When I opened them, I wasn’t surprised to see Melinda waiting there.
“I guess we should talk,” she whispered, then held her index finger up to her pale lips. Sometime during the night, she had scrubbed the make-up from her face, but even wrapped in a sheet and wearing a wan face, the beauty I hadn’t been able to see at first was as clear as the troubled look darkening her eyes.
“I guess we should talk,” I echoed her, then led her into the bathroom and closed the door. She sat on the floor, cross-legged, her elegant feet rosy in the harsh light. I sat down on the toilet seat in my classic thinker’s pose. “I seem to be having a lot of conversations in johns tonight.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, asifshe could reach back and change it all now. “I’m so sorry.”
“Me too,” I said, “but it’s too late to do anything about it. Way too late.”
“How do you know when it’s too late to change things?” she asked with a sad smile. But she didn’t want an answer. Not to that question. “What did take you so long after Trahearne and I left the house?”
“I had to clean up the mess,” I said, “talk to Torres and Hyland about the details.” It didn’t seem necessary for her to know that Stacy had killed Hyland. I didn’t want anybody else to know.
“What details?” she asked casually.
“Like what to do with your body if you don’t come up with the forty thousand,” I said, and she dropped her face into her hands. “You can’t steal from those people,” I added. “Didn’t you know that?”
“I didn’t have any choice.” She raised her head to stare at me. For the first time since I had known her, I could see Rosie’s influence on her features. She had the same patient eyes, the same cocky defiance in the tilt of her chin. “I just couldn’t make another movie,” she said. “I couldn’t … couldn’t do it … Hell, I can’t even say it anymore … I couldn’t fuck any more strangers. When I first started it seemed like a lark. I mean, it seemed like fun, you know, I was stoned all the time and fucking everybody anyway, so getting paid for it seemed like a great bonus. What I did with my body didn’t matter. Only the mind and the spirit mattered, I thought. But I was wrong. Everything you do matters. Every action causes complications, repercussions. I learned that in jail.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“Nothing all that dramatic,” she said. “I went in thinking that I was Betty Sue Flowers—a little fucked up, right, and thirty pounds overweight, but still ‘smarter and prettier than any of that trash in jail. I was wrong. I met a woman who was brighter and better-looking than I could ever hope to be, more talented, more promising in school. She was also the meanest, toughest person I had ever met. She beat me senseless the first night, and humiliated me every day and night after that, but the worst thing she did was tell me that in ten years I would be just like her. She was dead right, of course, so when I got out, I knew I had to change my
life. The money gave me that chance, and I had no other choice, so I took it.”
“What did you do with it?”
“When I left Selma’s, I went to stay with a friend of hers in St. Louis, and she got me admitted to Washington University as a special student—.”
“The great American dream,” I interrupted, “finance an education with mob money.”
“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” she said quietly. “So I went to college until I discovered ceramic sculpture. Once my pieces started to sell, I came back out West. Everything was fine until … until all this happened.”
“I don’t know if all this was Trahearne’s fault or mine,” I said, “but I’ll apologize anyway.”
“That’s not necessary,” she said. “If it’s anybody’s fault, it’s mine.” She sighed. “What’s going to happen
now?”
“You have any of the money left?” I asked.
“I have about thirty-five hundred in the bank,” she said, “and I can raise some more—maybe another three or four thousand—if I sell all my finished pieces. That isn’t forty thousand, is it?” She chuckled. “Maybe they’ll let me pay them back on the installment plan.”
“Us,” I said. “Us?”
“I’m on the hook now too,” I said. “I’ve bought a little time, but I don’t have a big enough edge to keep them off our backs forever. They’re really touchy about their money. They’ll spend a hundred grand just to get the forty back, and then they’ll cut off our hands.”
“What can we do?” she asked tiredly.
“Borrow it from Trahearne,” I suggested.
“He’s so broke, I have to buy groceries on his BankAmericard,” she said.
“How about Selma?”
“She’s done too much already,” she said. 234
“Ask Trahearne to borrow it from his mother,” I said.
“I’d let them cut off my hands first,” she said, then held them out in offering. The long, darkly red fake nails had been clumsily pasted over her own. As she looked at her trembling fingers, tears of anger gushed from her eyes, and she started tearing at the fake nails, scraping and biting, ripping nail and cuticle and flesh until the ends of her fingers were covered with blood, then she jammed her hands into the folds of sheet bunched at her lap. She stared at the stains and whispered, “I’ve made such a mess of things, and people I don’t even know have to come to my rescue again and again … Maybe I should call Hyland and tell him I’ll come back to work.”
“I don’t think that would work,” I said.
“Why not?”
“He told me he never wanted to see you again,” I
lied.
“And I’ve probably made a mess of your life now, too,” she said.
“It’s always been a mess,” I said lightly.
“You’ve done so much,” she said, “and I don’t even know why.”
I didn’t either but I reached for my wallet and took out her high school picture and handed it to her.
“I killed that girl a long time ago,” she said quietly, “you’ve been looking for a ghost.” She touched her face in the picture, smearing it with blood. She didn’t sob, but tears coursed unbidden down her cheeks. “That cameo was my grandmother’s, you know, the only thing she had left when they got to California— that cameo and seven kids and a husband with a cancer behind his eye,” she said. “She raised them all, made them all finish high school. She ruined her feet and legs slinging hash in a truck stop in Fresno, and when she got too old to work she went to the county home. She wouldn’t live with her kids, wouldn’t trouble them that way. When I was. a little-bitty girl, my mother would take me to visit her, you know, and I hated that dry stink of the old folks. They were so crazy with loneliness, they always came out of their rooms to touch me and fuss over me, and I hated it, just hated it.
“While she talked to Granny, my . momma would kneel down in front of her chair and rest her legs on her shoulders and rub the varicose veins in Granny’s legs, rub them until her hands began to cramp. Then she’d ask me to rub Granny’s legs for a minute while she rested, and I wouldn’t do it, wouldn’t touch those veins like big ugly worms under her stockings. I couldn’t make myself touch them, those legs she had ruined so her children would finish high school.
“Jesus God, why didn’t I understand?” she moaned. “I didn’t go to her funeral because I was playing at being tragic in Antigone . .. Playacting, my god, what a foolish child I was … a foolish child I have been.” Then she stopped and stared at me, tears and blood smudged on her cheeks, like some ancient mask
of grief. “Why?” she asked simply.
“I don’t know,” I said, and she tucked her legs under her, let her head fall into my lap.
“I haven’t dreamed in ten years,” she said, her voice muffled against my thigh, her breath hot against my skin even through the fatigue pants. “They say I dream and don’t remember but I know I don’t dream at all. My hands dream for me,” she said as she rocked back on her knees and held her hands out again, offering them to some angry god. I reached for the hands, but she grabbed my face between them, clutched my cheeks and pulled me toward her, kissing me through the tears, whispering against my mouth, “Lie down with me, make me forget, please, please …”
With the last Strength of my hands, I took her wrists and pushed her away. As she rocked back on her knees, the sheet unwound from her shoulders like a shroud, and her naked breasts stood between us.
“You don’t want me,” she said, “and I can’t blame you, not after all you know.”
“It’s Trahearne,” I said.
“He doesn’t want me anymore,” she said. “He wants me gone, out of his life. I’ve know that for a long time but I chose to ignore it.”
“He went to a lot of trouble for a man who doesn’t want you,” I said.
“He thinks I’m a slut,” she whispered, “and he just wanted to make sure. That’s all. That’s not the same thing as wanting me. A woman knows. You want me, I can tell. I don’t know why you won’t lie down with
me.”
“I’m afraid,” I said.
“Of me?” she asked, then twisted easily out of my
grip.
“Of myself,” I said, and she stared at me again, long and hard. “You love Trahearne,” I added as I put my hands on her bare shoulders. She waited, as still as an animal resigned to a trap, waited for me to pull her toward me or push her away.
“You’re right,” she said, tilting her head so her cheek rested on the back of my left hand. “I’m sorry.” She rose and wound the sheet around her body. “You think you’re in love with me, don’t you?” she said with her hand on the doorknob. I nodded slowly. “You don’t even know me,” she said, and I had to nod again. “It’s very kind of you to care, but you don’t even know me at all.” Then she left, walking out of the sterile light of the bathroom and into the darkness. To my blurred eyes, the white sheet seemed to leave a drifting afterimage that glowed like swamp-fire.
The Last Good Kiss Page 22