“How are you feeling?” she crooned. “You should have let me come to the hospital, you know.”
“I’m fine.” Traheame sighed heavily as she fussed over him. “Just fine. A little tired, though. Maybe I’ll take a little nap.”
“Is that nap? Or nip?” I asked as I climbed out. Trahearne gave me a sad, tired smile as he shook his head, but Catherine looked at me with such intense anger that it nearly sobered me. Nothing like a little naked hatred to get a drunk’s attention. “Sleep tight,” I added stupidly as she eased Trahearne up the stairs.
When they disappeared through the front door, I went around to help Fireball out. He nosed across the lawn slowly, looking for a bush. Not to pee on, though—to hide behind. Having to squat like a mere puppy embarrassed him no end. Finally, he found a bit of ragged evergreen shrubbery and he lowered himself behind it.
“What the hell are we doing here, dog?” I asked. But he didn’t know either. He finished his business, then came back to curl up in the shade beside my feet. I leaned against my fender and went on with my beer.
Catherine came out of the house and walked down toward me, the short pleated skirt of her tennis dress fluffing as she bounced hurriedly down the stairs.
“You’re looking particularly lovely today,” I offered.
She was, too. The summer weeks of tennis had darkened her tan without drying her skin, and deep red highlights glowed in her cheeks. She smelled of perfume and lady-sweat, of coconut oil and sunshine.
“Damn fine,” I added, hefting my beer can in toast as a warm flicker of old desire kindled inside my belly.
She stopped in front of me and slapped the beer can out of my hand. It clattered against the gravel driveway and spewed a froth of foam across the road.
“What the hell do you think you’re trying to do?” she asked, breathless with anger.
“He’s had all the tender loving care he can stand,” I said as I tried to swallow my own anger.
“What the hell do you know about it?” she demanded.
“Almost everything there is to know about it,” I said. “He hired me to keep him dry, and I just wanted to see if he’s got the guts.”
“Alcoholism is a disease!” she screamed at me. “It has nothing to do with guts.”
“Well, he hired me, not you,” I said.
“You’re not even doing it for him,” she said, “you’re doing it for her.” I didn’t bother to deny it. “Oh, the goddamned bitch,” she hissed. Rage flattened her lips and stretched the skin tightly across the bones of her face until they seemed to glow like a mummy’s skull through parchment. Fine white lines glimmered hotly at the corners of her eyes, her temples, and along her jawline. She hissed a silent curse, stomped her foot, thenran over to her Porsche and roared away in a cloud of gravel and dust.
I went around and got another beer and watched her leave. She made the tum onto the highway with a very nicely executed four-wheel drift. Halfway back to town, her brake lights flared as she locked the wheels and skidded to a stop in the middle of the highway, where she sat for several minutes. Then, slowly and deliberately, she turned around and drove back toward the house.
“Please accept my apology,” she said as she stopped the car beside me. “I’m truly sorry.”
“Don’t apologize,” I said as she stepped out, “it’s a sign of weakness.”
Her anger came back in a single swift rush, but she gulped it down, and sweetly asked, “What?”
“That’s what John Wayne says,” I said. “I can’t remember which movie but I know he said it.”
“He’s your hero, is he?” she said.
“Only fools have heroes,” I said.
“I see,” she said, smiling slowly. “I always make the mistake of underestimating you, don’t I?”
“That’s better than overestimating me, isn’t it?”
“I’m not certain of that,” she said, “but I’m certainly sorry.”
“Forget it,” I said. “It’s a fool’s errand, and I’m 151
probably doing it foolishly. It’s the only way I know. Pride and guts—that’s the only thing that will work for Trahearne.”
“When the going gets tough, the tough get going?” she asked slyly.
“Make fun if you want to, but that’s what character is all about.”
“I’m sorry.” She laughed and touched my arm. “I just couldn’t resist teasing you. You were so serious, you know.”
“Drunks are always serious at the wrong times,” I said.
“Do you think you can keep Trahearne dry for a while?”.
“If he really means it, I can help, I guess,” I said. “It’s worth a try.”
“Perhaps I should come over later to prepare dinner •for the two of you.”
“Thanks,” I said, “but we’ll manage.”
“I’m being, as they say, invited out?” “Something like that,” I admitted. “Perhaps you’re right,” she said. “Come over for a drink after dinner.”
“I’ll see,” I said.
“Of course.” She reached up to kiss the corner of my mouth. “Take care of him for me.”
“I’ll do my best,” I said, and she nodded as if she knew I would. She went back to her car and drove slowly around to Trahearne’s mother’s house. Once again I loaded up with our baggage and toted it up the stairs to the house.
Instead of napping, though, Trahearne was sitting in his shorts and T-shirt at his desk, idly working the slide of the .45 Colt automatic. A freshly poured glass of neat whiskey sat at his elbow.
“Don’t worry,” he said as I set the bags down in the living room, “I’m not about to blow my brains out. I prefer the slow suicide of drink.” Then he lifted the glass of whiskey. “And don’t worry about this, either,” he said as he put it back down. “Its presence comforts me somehow.” He picked up the .45 again and spun his chair to face me. The large automatic was almost dwarfed by his huge hand. He let it dangle from his fingers as if it were a broken wing. “You took that house down in Colorado like a good soldier,” he said.
“Were you?”
“It seemed like the only choice at the time,” I said, “the best way to stay alive.”
“That’s the big difference,” he said quietly, “between your war and mine. You kids knew that if you survived the tour of duty, you’d survive the war. We all knew we were going to be killed. That’s the only way we could go on—we accepted out deaths in advance just so we could go on. But that’s not the point, is it?”
“What’s the point?” I asked as I sat down.
“What’s the worst thing you did in the war?” he asked suddenly.
It wasn’t a casual question, and I didn’t have a casual answer.
“We were fighting through a village south of An Khe, a hole in the road called Plei Bao Three,” I said, “and I grenaded a hooch and killed three generations of a Vietnamese family. Both grandparents, their daughter, and her three children.”
“Were you a good soldier before that?” Traheame asked.
“I guess so.”
“And afterwards?”
“There wasn’t any afterwards,” I said. “I was in the stockade afterwards. A Canadian television news team was covering the attack, and I made the evening news the next day, so they had to lock me up.”
“That’s politics,” Traheame said, waving his empty hand at me, “not combat.” After dismissing the central trauma of my adult life with a flip of his hand, Trahearne went on. “I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anybody.”
“Great,” I said, but he didn’t notice.
“When we landed at Guadalcanal, I wasn’t much of a Marine,” he said. “I mean, I walked and talked and fought like a Marine but it was all an act. I guess I thought I was supposed to survive the damned war or something—I don’t know—but I was just going through the motions, trying to look good. Then we were dug in up on the Tenaru River, and the Japs pulled a night banzai charge. We held, we held and kicked the shit
out of them, and I got some idea of what I was doing wrong. After it was over, though, I worked it all out in my mind.
“We were checking the bodies, the Jap bodies, and I found this Jap enlisted man floating face up in the shallows. There was just enough starlight to see that he was alive, enough for him to see me. I leaned over and shot him between the eyes with this .45.
“I guess I don’t have to tell you what it looks like up close, I guess you know, but I made myself watch, made myself not flinch, and then I knew what the war was about. It wasn’t about politics or survival or any of that shit, it was about killing without flinching, about living without flinching.” Then he paused and tossed the pistol onto a pile of loose papers. “That’s how I’ve lived ever since that night, and that’s what’s wrong. If you can’t flinch, you might as well be dead.”
“That was a long time ago,” I said. “Maybe it’s time to stop blaming yourself.”
“Have you stopped blaming yourself for all those dead civilians?” he asked quickly.
“Some.”
“You’re lucky, then,” he said sadly. “I can’t stop. So I’m going to give in to it. Listen, I know what sort of sentimental nonsense my poetry is, and I know what sort of macho dreck my fiction is—I’m as phony as my goddamned crazy mother—but I’ve learned something out of these past few insane months, and I’m through with all that other crap. And it’s all your fault.”
“It’s always my fault,” I said lightly.
“In the beginning, I wanted you to find out about Melinda so I would know—if Rosie hadn’t hired you, I would have “found some way to do it—but I watched you go after her for a smile and eighty-seven dollars, and you never judged her, not once, you forgave her without asking anything in return. When I was in the hospital, I thought about it all the time, and I finally understood it. All this time, all these years since the war, I worried about how tough you had to be to live, how I had to live without flinching, but when it came down to it, when it had to do with living instead of dying, I didn’t have the guts to forgive the woman I loved. I couldn’t cut it, son, not a bit.” He paused long enough to pick up the .45 and shove the stack of pages off his desk. “So now I’m through with all that. I’m going to write a novel about love and forgiveness. Even if it kills me. And that’s why I’m not about to blow my brains out with this.” He tossed the pistol back on his desk. “It’s nothing but a paperweight now.”
“Good.”
“I’ve pulled my last trigger, boy,” he said, grinning. “Hell, I didn’t even pull the trigger on the shotgun that night—I just jacked a round into the chamber and I was so drunk that I had the trigger back when I did it, and the son of a bitch went off. Nobody there was more surprised than me.”
“Some of us were pretty surprised,” I said, grinning back at him.
“Nobody more than me,” he said, then he chuckled and handed me the glass of whiskey. “Now get out of here, boy, I’ve got work to do.”
“Right,” I said. As I stood up and watched him gather his sharpened pencils and a fresh legal pad, I discovered an odd knot in my throat and a burning in my eyes, but I went off to do my chores before the old man noticed.
Trahearne worked until dinner, then he ate scrambled eggs and sausage at his desk, waving me away when I offered him more. Since he seemed locked in, I decided to wander outside to check on the bulldog. Fireball had eaten most of the baby food in his dish and had fallen asleep with his nose still touching the bowl. I left him alone and drifted over toward the creek. Catherine met me at the bridge. She was wearing a long knit gown that rippled across her body in the twilight.
“Were you coming for a drink?” she asked as she locked her arms around my neck and socketed her groin against mine.
“Something like that,” I said as I slipped my arms around her firm waist.
As she kissed me, she murmured against my mouth, “We’ve no place to go, lover.” It didn’t seem to matter, though. She moved her hands down and quickly unfastened my Levis, then lifted the long folds of her skirt and gathered them about her hips so I could hold her naked buttocks in my good hand as I bent my knees.
When we were finished, I glanced over her shoulder toward Trahearne’s mother’s house. A curtain at an upstairs window wavered as if someone had just stepped away from it.
“I think the old woman was watching us,” I said.
“To hell with her,” Catherine said as she smoothed her skirt down finely muscled legs.
“Did it ever occur to you that we shouldn’t be doing this?” I asked.
“It never occurs to me until afterward,” she answered, then laughed prettily. “Tomorrow evening,” she added, “same time, same place.” Then she walked away from me into the fading dusk, walked away before I could say no.
But the next evening when I showed up at the bridge after dinner, Edna Trahearne was waiting for me. She was dressed, as usual, in her retired fishing clothes, to which she had added a knit Irish hat against the evening chill. As I walked out on the bridge, she snorted as if I were late for a fly-casting lesson.
“Try to contain your disappointment,” she growled at me. “Catherine is still clearing the dinner table. She’ll be along shortly.”
“It’s nice to see you again, Miz Trahearne,” I said as I leaned against the rail beside her. “Fish bitin’?”
“Aren’t you the polite one?” she sneered. “How did you get mixed up with all these mortal folk?”
“How did you?”
“A moment of foolish passion, boy,” she answered, then broke out in a cackle, a rash, fevered laugh that split the evening like a loon’s call. “What’s your excuse?”
“I guess I don’t have one, ma’am.”
“You’d best find one, boy,” she advised cheerfully. “You’ve stepped into a nest of vipers, and if you’re here without a good reason, you got no business being
here.”
“A day’s work for a day’s pay,” I said, and she laughed again. “You’re in a good mood tonight,” I added.
“Every time that little slut is gone it improves my mood considerably,” she said, then smiled as she waited for me to rise to the bait. When she was convinced that I wasn’t going to bite, she snorted again, then asked, “What happened to your hand, boy?”
“I hit your baby boy in the chops,” I admitted.
“A fella in your line of work ought to know better than to hit a man that size with your fist.”
“I knew better,” I said, “but I did it anyway. Just for the pure pleasure of it.”
“You’re polite, boy,” she said with a smile as twisted as her fingers, “but you’re not nice. Not a bit.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I answered, and the old woman turned away to hobble toward her house, pausing for a moment to speak to Catherine, who was walking toward the bridge. I couldn’t hear what Edna was saying, but Catherine glanced over her shoulder to smile at me, the sort of smile my mother used to call a snake’s grin. When they . finished talking, the old woman went on toward the house, and Catherine strolled toward me slowly. She wore the same long soft green gown and carried a tall glass in her hand.
“I understand that you aren’t always respectful toward your elders,” she said as she stepped onto the bridge, the smile still sly on her face.
“I’m always nice to you,” I said.
“You find it amusing to remind me of my age?” she asked, the smile suddenly wiped from her face.
“Just a little joke,” I said by way of apology.
“I am not amused,” she said as she swirled her drink furiously.
“I’m sorry.”
“Why don’t you go back and play nursemaid?” “You got it, lady,” I said, then walked away from her.
“C.W.,” she said softly, but I kept on walking.
17••••
FOR NEARLY TWO WEEKS EVERYTHING WORKED SMOOTHLY, and Trahearne and I lived together as pleasantly as two old impotent bachelors, much as we had during his long visit up
on the North Fork. It was like a vacation for me. In the mornings I ran, then sat in the sun and read my way through a large portion of his library. After lunch, I moved my chair into the shade and picked up whatever book I had just put down. Trahearne worked all day, though, writing in his furious scrawl and muttering to himself. About five every afternoon, he would stroll out of the house, stretch and growl, “Scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr. Gibbon?” then chuckle as he walked down the stairs for his daily exercise, whistling for Fireball.
The big man and the bulldog walked toward town every afternoon while I followed in the Caddy like a trainer watching my fighters do their roadwork. When Trahearne tired, I would pick them up and drive on to the hotel pool, where Trahearne lolled about like an old walrus until his head began to nod. Then I drove the two invalids home and fed them. After dinner they both went to sleep, and I went downstairs to drink beer and watch television until I, too, found refuge in sleep.
Every morning, while I was away from the house 259
running, Catherine brought Traheame a sheaf of typed manuscript and picked up his pages from the day before to transcribe them. Once, though, she was late, and I was sitting on the porch, back from my run and breathing hard as she came up the steps. She nodded at me, then went on into the house. When she came out, though, she stopped.
“I suppose you find this odd?” she said, rattling the long yellow sheets at me.
“Nobody else in the whole world can read his handwriting,” I said.
The Last Good Kiss Page 24