The Last Good Kiss (2 page)

time, another place. The dust bowl '30's and a rattletrap, homemade Model T truck heading into the setting sun. As I sat down, they glanced at me with the narrow

eyes of country people, looking me over carefully as if I

were an abandoned wreck they planned to cannibalize

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for spare parts. I nodded blithely to let them know that

I might be a wreck but I hadn't been totaled yet. They

returned my silent greeting with blank eyes and

thoughtful nods that seemed to suggest that accidents

could be arranged.

Already whipped by too many miles on the wrong

roads, I let them think whatever they might. As I

ordered a beer from the middle-aged barmaid, she

slipped out of her daydreams and into a sleepy grin.

When she opened the bottle, the bulldog came out of

his drunken nap, belched like a dragon, then heaved his

narrow haunches upright and waddled across three

rickety stools through the musty cloud of stale beer and

bulldog breath to trade me a wet, stringy kiss for a hit

off my beer. I didn't offer him any, so he upped the

ante by drooling all over my sunburnt elbow. Trahearne barked a sharp command and splashed a measure of beer into the ashtray. The bulldog gave me

a mournful stare, sighed, then ambled back to a sure

thing.

As I wiped the dogspit off my arm with a damp bar

rag that had been used too lately and too often for the

same chore, I asked the barmaid about a pay telephone. She pointed silently toward the gray dusty reaches beyond the pool table, where a black telephone

hung from ashen shadows.

As I passed Trahearne, he had his heavy arm draped

over the bulldog's wrinkled shoulders and recited

poetry into the stubby ear: "The bluff we face is

cracking up . . . before this green Pacific wind

. .. this . . . The whale's briny stink ... ah, christ . . .

dogged we were, old friend, doggerel we became, and

dogshit we too shall be . . . " Then he chuckled aimlessly, like an old man searching for his spectacles.

I didn't mind if he talked to himself. I had been

talking to myself for a long time too.

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That was what I had been doing the afternoon

Trahearne's ex-wife had called me-sitting in my little

tin office in Meriwether, Montana, staring across the

alley at the overflowing Dempster Dumpster behind

the discount store, and telling myself that I didn't mind

if business was slow, that I liked it in fact. Then the

telephone buzzed. Traheame's ex-wife was all business.

In less than a minute, she had explained that her

ex-husband's health and drinking habits were both bad

and that she wanted me to find him, to track him down

on his running binge before he drank himself into an

early grave. I suggested that we talk about the job face

to face, but she wanted me on the road immediately, no

time wasted driving the three hours up to Cauldron

Springs. To save time, she had already hired an air-taxi

out of Kalispell, which was at this very moment winging

its way south toward Meriwether with a cashier's check

for a retainer, a list of Trahearne's favorite bars around

the West-particularly those bars about which he had

written poems after other binges-and a dust-jacket

photo off his last novel.

"What if I don't want the job?" I asked.

"After you see the size of the retainer, you'll want

the job," she answered coolly, then hung up.

When I picked up the large manila folder at the

Meriwether Airport, I glanced at the check and

decided to take the job even before I studied the

photograph. Traheame looked like a big man, a retired

longshoreman maybe, as he leaned against a pillar on

the front porch of the Cauldron Springs Hotel, a drink

shining in one hand, a cigar smoking in the other. His

age showed, even through his boyish grin, but he

clearly hadn't gone to Cauldron Springs for the waters.

Behind him, through the broad darkened doorway, two

arthritic ghosts in matching plaid bathrobes shuffled

toward the sunlight. Their ancient faces seemed to be

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smiling in anticipation of dipping their brittle bones

into the hot mineral waters.

In the years that I had spent looking for lost

husbands, wives, and children, I had learned not to

think that I could stare into a one-dimensional face and

see the person behind the photograph, but the big man

looked like the sort who would cut a wide swath and

leave an easy trail.

At first, it was too easy. Back at my office, I called

five or six of the bars and caught the old man up in

Ovando, Montana, at a great little bar called Trixi's

Antler Bar. Trahearne had left, though, by the time I

drove the eighty miles, telling the bartender that he was

off to 1\vo Dot to check out the beer-can collection in

one of 1\vo Dot's two bars. I chased him across

Montana but when I reached 1\vo Dot, Trahearne had

gone on to the 666 in Miles City. From there, he

headed south to Buffalo, Wyoming, to write an epic

poem about the Johnson County War. Or so he told the

barmaid. As it turned out, Trahearne never made a

move without discussing it with everybody in the bar.

Which made him easy to follow but impossible to catch.

We covered the West, touring the bars, seeing the

sights. The Chugwater Hotel down in Wyoming, the

Mayflower in Cheyenne, the Stockman's in Rawlins, a

barbed-wire collection in the Sacajawea Hotel Bar in

Three Forks, Montana, rocks in Fossil, Oregon, drunken Mormons all over northern Utah and southern Idaho--circling, wandering in an aimless drift. 1\vice I

hired private planes to get ahead of the old man, and

twice he failed to show up until after I had left. I liked

his taste in bars but I was in and out of so many that

they all began to seem like the same endless bar. By the

middle of the second week, my expenses were beginning to embarrass even me, so I called the former Mrs.

Trahearne to ask how much money she wanted to pour

down the rolling rathole. "Whatever is necessary," she

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answered, sounding irritated that I had bothered to

ask.

So I settled back into the bucket seat of my fancy El

Camino pickup for a long siege of moving on, following

Trahearne from bar to bar, down whatever roads suited

his fancy, covering the ground like an excited redbone

pup just to keep from losing him, following him as he

drifted on, his tail turned into some blizzard wind only

he felt, his ear cocked to hear the strains of some

distant song only he heard.

By the middle of the second week, I had that same

high lonesome keen whistling in my chest, and if I

hadn't needed the money so badly, I might have said to

hell with Abraham Trahearne, stuck some Willie

Nelson into my tape deck, and tried to drown in a

whiskey river of my own. Taking up moving on again.

But I get paid for finding folks, not for losing myself, so

I held on his trail like an old hound after his last coon.

And it made me even crazier than Trahearne. I found

myself chasing ghosts across gray mountain passes,

then down through green valleys riddled with the snows

of late spring. I took to sleeping in the same motel beds

he had, trying to dream him up, took to getting drunk

in the same bars, hoping for a whiskey vision. They

carne all right, those bleak motel dreams, those whiskey

visions, but they were out of my own drifting past. As

for Trahearne, I didn't have a clue.

Once I even humped the same sad young whore in a

trailerhouse complex out on the Nevada desert. She

was a frail, skinny little bit out of Cincinnati, and she

had brought her gold mine out West, thinking perhaps

it might assay better, but her shaft had collapsed, her

veins petered out, and the tracks on her thin arms

looked as if they had been dug with a rusty pick. After I

had slaked too many nights of aimless barstool lust

amid her bones, I asked her again about Trahearne.

She didn't say anything at first, she just lay on her

s

crushed bed-sheets, hitting on a joint and gazing

beyond the aluminum ceiling into the cold desert night.

"You reckon they actually went up there on the

moon?" she asked seriously.

"I don't know," I admitted.

"Me neither," she whispered into the smoke.

I buttoned up my Levis and fled into the desert, into

a landscape blasted by moonlight and shadow.

Then in Reno I lost the trail, had to circle the city in

ever-widening loops, talking to bartenders and

service-station attendants until I found a pump jockey

in Truckee who remembered the big man in his Caddy

convertible asking about the mud baths in Calistoga.

The mud was still warm when I got there, but his trail

was as cold as the eyes of the old folks dying around the

hot baths.

When I called Trahearne's ex-wife to admit failure,

she told me that she had received a postcard from him,

a picture of the Golden Gate and a cryptic couplet.

Dogs, they say, are man's best friend, but their pants

have no pockets, their thirst no end. "Traheame has this

odd affinity for bar dogs," she told me, "particularly

those who ddnk as well as do tricks. Once he spent

three weeks in Frenchtown, Montana, drinking with a

mutt who wore a tiny crushed officer's cap, sunglasses,

and a corncob pipe. Traheame said they discussed the

Pacific campaign over shots of blackberry brandy." I

told her that it was her money and that if she wanted

me to wander around the Bay Area looking for a

drinking bar dog, I would surely comply. That's what

she wanted, so I hooked it up, headed for San

Francisco, a fancy detective hot on the trail of a

drinking bar dog, a fool on her errand.

I should have guessed that the city of lights would be

rife with bar dogs-dancing dogs and singing dogs, even

hallucinating hounds--so it wasn't until three days

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later, drinking gimlets with a pink poodle in Sausalito,

that I heard about the beer-drinking bulldog over by

Sonoma.

The battered frame building was set fifty yards off the

Petaluma road, and Trahearne's red Cadillac convertible was parked in front. In the days when the old highway had been new, back before it had been rebuilt

along more efficient lines, the beer joint had been a

service station. The faded ghost of a flying red horse

still haunted the weathered clapboard walls of the

building. A small herd of abandoned cars, ranging from

a russet Henry J to a fairly new but badly wrecked

black Dodge Charger, stood hock deep in the dusty

Johnson grass and weeds, the empty sockets of their

headlights dreaming of Pegasus and asphalt flight. The

place didn't even have a name, just a faded sign wanly

promising BEER as it swung from the canted portico.

The old glass-tanked pumps were long gone-probably

off to Sausalito to open an antique shop-but the

rusted bolts of their bases still dangled upward from the

concrete like finger bones from a shallow grave.

I parked beside Trahearne's Caddy, got out to stretch

the miles out of my legs, then walked out of the spring

sunshine into the dusty shade of the joint, my boot

heels rocking gently on the warped floorboards, my

sigh relieved in the darkened air. This was the place,

the place I would have come on my own wandering

binge, come here and lodged like a marble in a crack,

this place, a haven for California Okies and exiled

Texans, a home for country folk lately dispossessed,

their eyes so empty of hope that they reflect hot,

windy plains, spare, almost Biblical sweeps of horizon

broken only by the spines of an orphaned rocking chair,

and beyond this, clouded with rage, the reflections of

orange groves and ax handles. This could just as easily

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