Honeymooners A Cautionary Tale (44 page)

You, my boy, are a cracked
record, Lindsay said, and laughed. —But I’m happy you feel you can
talk with me. I’m afraid I’m out of practice. The practice of
opening up.

Opening up, Ralph said, and
patted Lindsay’s cheek. —That’s something we can practice on
together.

Oh, Ralph, Ralph, Lindsay
said, and slowly stood up to hug him. —You can be such a dear old
dog, she said, and kissed Ralph on the cheek.

Gosh, Ralph said. —Thanks a
million. I’m a lucky old dog is what I am. Really. I needed that.
What did I do right, anyhow? Tell me what I did right so I can do
it again. I mean, that really hit the old spot, that kiss did.
Well, it almost hit the old spot.

Almost, Ralph?

Well, you sort of missed my
mouth.

Oh, not by a
mile.

Hey, I’m not complaining,
you understand. A kiss from you is a kiss from you, and I was a
lucky old dog to get it. I’ll take any kind of kiss from you I can
get. Hey, hold the horses. Let me ask you something. Is the reason
you missed my mouth on account of this little cold sore I
have?

Cold sore? Lindsay said, and
laughed. —I hadn’t noticed any cold sore, Ralph.

Right here, Ralph said, and
touched a red spot on the left corner of his mouth. —This little
devil. I know it looks bad. You’re just being kind, as usual. I
didn’t get enough milk or green veggies as a kid. That’s how a doc
explained why I’m always getting these godawful sores. It’s just
another carryover from what passed as my childhood. My childhood is
always rearing its miserable, hoary head. Such as now. Deprived of
an innocent kiss on the mouth from a dear, dear friend because
Momma raised me mostly on lard and sugar sandwiches. Well, I don’t
blame you one little bit. I wouldn’t want to kiss me on the mouth
either. Even if I did know, which I do, that this little devil
isn’t in the least bit contagious. This little baby has about run
its course.

Oh, Ralph, you nut, Lindsay
said. She put her hands on Ralph’s chest. —You make me laugh. I
miss laughing.

I wish I knew some jokes. I
can never remember jokes.

Neither can 1.1 always
forget the punch lines.

Me too. Hey, here’s one I
remember. Have you heard the one about, .. Ralph said, and stopped
when Lindsay reached up and kissed him on the mouth. When Ralph
opened his mouth, so did Lindsay. They kissed for a full
minute.

When did you say Jim would
get back? Ralph said.

I didn’t say. But my best
guess is that it will be a while. Long enough, anyway.

Long enough?

Let’s go downstairs,
Ralph.

Downstairs? You mean, you
think we should go downstairs?

I don’t want to think about
it, Ralph. I want us to just go downstairs while we can.

Well, yes. Yes. Let’s do
that. Go downstairs. And you’re sure Jim won’t be back anytime
soon?

God, yes, Ralph. I’m sure
about that, anyway, Lindsay said and took Ralph by the hand and led
him across the deck to the stairs.

Lost Highways

1

The house was dark when
Kathy returned from rounding the bars. She fixed herself a nightcap
in the kitchen and then walked upstairs to what would have been the
baby’s room. She sat in the rocking chair she had bought when she
was six months pregnant. In the slant of light from the street the
little lambs on the wallpaper were luminous. All around the room
bits of light reflected from the bead eyes of stuffed animals.
Kathy rocked while she smoked a cigarette in the dark.

Kathy turned the light on in
Bill’s bedroom to see if perchance he was already home passed out.
As soon as she entered her own room she heard the faint sounds of
muffled hiccups coming from inside her closet, and the clink of ice
against glass. The sliding closet doors were cracked. Kathy
undressed slowly. When her six-foot-plus body was naked she carried
her phone over to her dresser, where she sat down facing the mirror
and began brushing her long blond hair. After a time Kathy picked
up the phone and, holding the button down, pretended to
dial.

Hello, honey, Kathy said
into the phone. —Yes, I’m home now. Just got in. I wanted to hear
your voice again before I tucked in. What, honey? No, I have no
idea where he is, and I don't give a goddamn. Out romancing some
barroom rosy, I guess. No, hon, you don’t even have to think about
something like that. Don’t even think it. Old Billy hasn’t brought
a boner home in years. What, baby? Me too, baby. It was. Really,
baby. I’ve never before in my life like that. God, hon. I hope the
walls were thick enough. I’ve never screamed out like that. What,
baby? Nothing on, as a matter of fact. That’s right. I’m stark.
Bare ass, baby. Yes, I was going to step into the shower. I mean,
God, you can smell sex all over me. What, hon? Oh yes, baby. Yes.
I’ll do it right now. My right nipple. Now my left, baby, I’m doing
it. I’m pinching them. You’re pinching them. You’re sucking on
them hard now. You’re biting now, baby. Bite harder, baby, harder.
What, baby? Honey, I only have one free hand. What, sweetie? Honey,
my tongue’s no way long enough to do that, unlike your own. What?
Honey, I don’t see anything around I could use for that. I’m at my
dresser, precious. Wait a minute. I’ve got a bright idea. There are
some enormous cucumbers downstairs in the fridge. Could you hang on
a sec, sweetie? Oh, me too, baby. God, yes, yes. Yes, I love you,
too, honey. I love your huge cock. I just live to have your big
black cock in my mouth, Rufus.

You bitch! You bitch! Bill
bellowed as he took down the closet door in a single
lurch.

Why, Bill, you’re home,
Kathy said, and hung up the phone.

2

When Bill awoke early the
next morning he discovered that he must have dozed off in his car
in the driveway with the engine running. But there he was, sure
enough, his forehead against the top of the steering wheel, a
little lake of drool on the floor mat between his boots. He also
discovered that he was in a great amount of discomfort, mostly in
and about his head. When Bill looked in the rearview mirror he made
even further unhappy discoveries. Both his eyes were black, for
one thing, and his nose was bloody, for another. A great knot had
risen on the back of his head, which he touched tenderly with his
fingertips. It also appeared that many of his worldly
possessions—his clothes, for instance, his favorite books, a couple
of boxes of his own manuscripts, his fishing gear, several guns,
his old high-school football helmet, the framed picture of his mom,
all this and more were strewn about the car, in both the front seat
and the back. Oh, that’s right, Bill recalled, he had been in the
process of leaving this place and its attendant woman forever. He
had been in the process of running away from home. Well, okay,
then, why not simply do that very thing?

But where was he going, and
why exactly? Bill pondered as he rinsed his mouth and gargled with
a swig from that half-full bottle of vodka he had happily
discovered between his legs and swallowed. Well, he was going to
go there. But where exactly was that? Looking for what? Call it
desire and pursuit of that dim aura glowing over the horizon we
call possibility, or excitement. Hadn’t Henry James once said there
are two mental states, excitement and lack of excitement, and that
unfortunately excitement was more interesting than the lack of? Who
was Bill to argue with Henry James? Or call that chasing away from
home the pursuit of that whole we call love. Why shouldn’t he,
Bill, have some of it, too, love, like that evil betrayer,
butt-kicking woman in that house he didn’t care if he ever set eyes
on again in his lifetime.

Bill headed out of Missoula,
Montana, upstream along the Blackfoot River, the asphalt weaving
and dipping and the morning light lime-colored through the leaves
on the aspen. He put a tape of fine, thin, fragile music on the
tape deck, a Vivaldi cello concerto, music as clean as the air
across the mountain pastures, music that didn’t encourage Bill to
think. Later, he knew, there would be plenty of thinking. But all
Bill needed at that point was the purity of that music and the
motion of going, the very notion of it, that going, and somehow
ending up as far away as he could get from that illusory sheltering
semblance of coherency he had once called home. But with some
restraint, sure, Bill thought as he passed a cluster of those
little white crosses you see everywhere along the roads of Montana,
marking those places where other travelers have died, many of them
drunk, sure, and most of them

searching, too, and unable
to name what it was they were missing at home.

Bill was well aware that
lonesome traveling could get tricky. It was a delicate passage,
lonesome traveling. Aloneness could lead to loneliness, and
self-pity, and paranoia, and things like that. Such a trip could
break down into dark questing after dubious companionship. But the
advantage of going it alone lay, of course, in spontaneity and
freedom. You don’t have to consult anything but your inclinations.
You are in your old white Buick convertible and you are rolling,
you are riding away and long gone. Shit fire, Bill thought, they
don’t need me, not today. Or tomorrow. Maybe never. I’m sick. This
is sick leave. You know it’s true, Bill told himself. You’ve been
sick and now you are going to cure yourself elsewhere far away from
that evil butt-kicking betrayer woman and old broken-down way of
life.

It had always seemed like a
good idea to Bill when driving up along the Blackfoot to stop at
Trixie’s Antler Inn just as the doors were being unlocked. One
single quick drink for the road and some dirty banter with the
pretty hippie chick tending bar. But wrong. After that first
hesitation Bill found himself stopping at other establishments, all
enjoyable, one after the other. The Stockman’s in Arlee, the
Buffalo Park in Ravalli. He moved on to the 44 Bar north of St.
Ignatius, then made the Charo turn to Tiny’s Blind Pig. Then the
Wheel Inn on the near outskirts of Lincoln, the Bowman’s Corner
over south of Augusta, with the front of the Rockies rearing on the
western skyline like hope and possibility personified.

Soon that fine blue bowl of
heaven and Bill’s exquisite freedom were forgotten, and he found
himself lying to strangers and himself about his role in life. No
more Vivaldi. By noon of the second day Bill was playing Hank
Williams tapes and singing along, wondering if he could have made
it in the country-music business. By then Bill knew he was a long
and dangerous way from that ticking stillness he recalled as home,
and he was somewhat disoriented. The bartenders had begun to study
him like a potential serious problem. Bill had drifted into another
mythology called lost highways, an emotional rat’s nest of
rootlessness, a country music worn-out drifter syncopation that
could be a theatrical but finally real thin way of life.

Bill began to stop at
historical markers, and then mull over the ironies of destiny as he
drove on. This was maybe the third day and Bill was listening to
bluegrass, in fact a tape from a Seldom Seen concert. Bill was
experiencing no despair at that point. He thought of elk in the
draws, buffalo on the plains, the complex precision of
predator-prey relationships. Bill was becoming a philosopher. And
he was willing to learn from his past mistakes. For instance, Bill
reflected, as he touched his still-sore, swollen nose, never again
would he fuck with a six-foot-plus humorless woman. Bill was
finding himself interesting, and enjoying his own company mightily.
There was no need to get drunk and kill somebody on the road, not
to mention himself. At twilight Bill stopped in some little town
and checked into one of the two motels along some river. He
showered, shaved, changed shirts, and then ambled on over to that
tavern across the road, where he intended to make some new best
friends and share his pretty new vision of life.

Which was about the last
clear memory Bill would have, strolling relatively sober through
the sweet Montana twilight toward the sweet blinking blue lights of
that tavern, humming his favorite Willie Nelson tune, “You Were
Always on My Mind,” his heart full of a sort of sweet and gentle
melancholy and all the best intentions in the world, until he more
or less came to, driving across the Bay Bridge into San Francisco
at night God-only- knows how many days later, rock-and-roll blaring
ungodly from the radio, his gas tank on real-near-dangerous empty,
a very young and lovely woman with long, dark hair and a sleeping
child on her lap sitting in the seat right beside him, her hand on
his knee.

The Queen of
California

1

I’m here to make you all
stars, Bill said, wagging his huge, shaggy head, when Lindsay
finally arrived at the bottom of the stairs to answer the
door.

Good God, Billy! Lindsay
said. —Where in the world did you come from?