The Last Good Kiss (22 page)

partner. I didn't want to hear it unless I got paid for it,

so I turned up the volume on the television, but I could

still hear the heavy rumble of Traheame's voice

through the thick floors. Whatever he was angry about,

he told her about it all the way through the second half

of Johnny Guitar and through the first half of The Beast

with a Thousand Eyes. I switched to whiskey, found a

pack of cigarettes behind the bar, then stepped outside

through the sliding glass doors. Even there, the sound

of his complaints, of her lilting compliance still echoed.

I went back to the movie and turned up the sound

again.

Finally, it was over, and the noises changed to the

groan of bedslats, the slap of flesh. That made me even

sadder than the fight. I left the basement again and

walked all the way out to the cars and leaned against

the dew-damp fender of the El Camino. In the pasture,

cattle shifted their hooves and breathed in soft, snuffling grunts, and their flat teeth ground gently against the grass. Across the creek, the other house was dark

now, but I still felt the yvatching face, hidden behind the

frail glimmer of a nightlight that glowed like a spectre

beyond the black windows.

Once more, I took Betty Sue Flowers' picture out of

my pocket. I had been carrying it for over a week and

hadn't shown it to anybody but myself. In the sudden

flare of a match, she looked somehow familiar, as if she

were a girl I had grown up with, but as the flame died,

the flickering image of the film filled my blindness. I

didn't even know why I cared about it, didn't know

what to think. I was like the rest of them now, I

suspected, I wanted her to fit my image of her, wanted

her back like she might have been, but I feared the

truth of it was that she wanted to stay hidden, to live

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her own life beyond all those clutching desires. Unless

she was dead, and if she was, she had already lived the

life she made, as best she could. I stared at the picture

in my hand, the one I couldn't see, and saw the pictures

I couldn't look at without flinching, the pale, doughy

flesh that moved with an undeniable grace, both fragile

and determined, endlessly vulnerable but unharmed.

Ashamed that I had been aroused, ashamed that I was

ashamed, and aroused again thinking about it, I went

back to the now-silent house, back to my empty bed.

Not to sleep, though, or even unpleasant dreams. I

drank and smoked and watched the ceiling. When the

ashtray beside the bed filled, I took it to the bathroom

to empty it, and out of habit I wiped it clean. It was a

lump of glazed clay, as formless as any rock, with a

smooth, shallow depression in the center. As I wiped

away the caked ashes, a woman's profile came into

view, a high, proud face molded into the clay, a tangle

of long hair streaming away from the face, as if the

woman stood in a cosmic wind. When I looked more

closely, I saw what seemed to be a ring of watchers,

lightly impressed eyes around the rim of the depression,

staring at the woman's face with a lust akin to hatred.

Then I noticed a slim ceramic vase on the bathroom

counter, which held a small bundle of straw flowers,

and on the vase a series of women's faces, their hands

over their eyes, their long, tangled hair bleeding over

their shoulders. The pieces must be Melinda's, I

thought, a plain woman understanding the curse of

beauty, and I was impressed. The ashtray was as heavy

as a stone, the vase as light as if it had been moulded

from air, and the women's faces too fragile for words.

Usually, on those sleepless nighttime trips to the

bathroom, I had to take a long look at my own

battered, whiskey-worn face, searching it for a glimpse

of the face it might have been but for the wasted years,

the bars, the long nights. But this night, I rubbed my

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thumb over the faces locked beneath the brown translucent glaze, all the weeping women, and I had no pity left for myself.

I had made my own bed and went to it to sleep, then

to rise and do what I knew I had to do, to pay what I

owed the women.

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, ....

AN OLD DRINKING BUDDY OF MINE HAD COME HOME FROM

a two-week binge with a rose tattooed on his ann.

Around the blossom was written Fuck 'em all/and sleep

till noon. His wife made him have it surgically removed, but she hated the scar even more. Every time he touched it, he grinned. Some years later she tried to

remove the grin with a wine bottle, but she only

knocked out a couple of teeth, which made the grin

even more like a sneer. The part that I don't understand, though, is that they are still married. He is still grinning and she is still hating it.

I didn't have any tattoos or any marriages, but the

morning after I brought Traheame home I slept until

noon anyway. When I woke, I knew that I had to roll

out of the sack and shuffle into my sweat suit and

jogging shoes. I had been on the road too long, and I

could hear various invaluable parts of my body whine

for exercise. Maybe it would clear my mind. Maybe I

would break my leg and have to forget about driving to

Oregon.

Eventually, I did just that, dressed in tired athletic

gear and strolled outside into the noon sunlight. I sat

down in a deck chair to survey the landscape.

Trahearne's mother owned a half section of land

northwest of the small town of Cauldron Springs. Her

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land lay in a shallow valley between two low ridges. At

their highest elevations, the ridges were timbered, but

on the lower slopes they were covered with sagebrush

scrub. Between the houses and-the highway, she kept a

few head of cattle in a small pasture. Cold Spring Creek

ambled between the ridges to the pasture, where it

broke into a series of long smooth willow-choked

bends, then it flowed alongside the highway until it

joined the warm mineral waters of Cauldron Springs

Creek east of the small town. Traheame's house

sat on the east side of the creek, his mother's on the

west. Her house looked like something off the Great

Plains, a square and sturdy farmhouse, its only decoration a porch across the front, and it seemed to stare down upon the small town with the austere gaze

of a wheat farmer driven mad by the whims of the

weather.

The town had grown up around a hot spring that

bubbled up in a limestone cup the size and shape of a

washtub. An old man who had made his fortune in

silver and tin mines had built the hotel and the

bathhouse, claiming great curative properties for the

spring waters. He had sunk his fortune into the project,

built a huge wedding cake of a spa around the spring,

then settled back to enjoy his declining years, but he

had built his spa too far from the people, and the flow

from the spring didn't have enough volume to keep his

pools and baths hot enough to please those few who

came. When he died, he was the only guest in his hotel,

the only bather.

Traheame's mother had reopened the bathhouse and

one floor of the hotel, but only as a courtesy to the

town, like the tennis courts she built behind the

bathhouse, a reminder of her money. She wouldn't

have the buildings repainted, though. She let them fade

and weather from white to an ashen gray as dull as raw

silver.

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As I jogged slowly down the gravel road toward the

highway, Melinda ran past me like a deer. Six seasons

of Army football and four at various junior colleges had

left me with legs that only remembered running swiftly,

and I envied Melinda's easy, quick pace. She ran as

nicely as she walked but she still kept her body

bundled, hidden now beneath a loose sweat suit. She

reached the highway and turned west up the long rise

toward the end of the pavement. When I got to the

highway, I followed her briefly, then slowed to a walk

as she topped the rise and turned back. I waited where I

stood, and when she carne back, I swung alongside her,

and we jogged back to the gravel road.

"You'll never get in shape that way," she said,

breathing slow and easy.

"This is penance," I puffed, "not physical therapy."

She laughed, then ran away from me, dust spurting

from beneath her tennis shoes with each powerful

stroke of her legs, her short hair bouncing ragged in the

sunlight.

When I finally reached the house, she was standing

up on the deck watching me, her fists on her hips, her

legs spread in a wide, strong stance. I limped up the

steps and fell into a redwood lounger.

"I wish I could get Trahearne to exercise;'' she said.

"I wish you could get me to stop," I huffed.

"Don't you just love to run?'' she asked.

"It's not as bad as getting poked in the eye with

a sharp stick," I said, "but at least that's a quick

pain. "

"Exactly," Trahearne boomed as he stepped out the

front door. "How about a Bloody Mary?" he asked

as he rattled a pitcher at me as if it were magic

charm.

"Only because it's before breakfast," I said as he

poured me a drink.

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"Around here, this is breakfast most days," Melinda

said.

I turned around to study her face for some evidence

of wifely irony, but she was smiling, almost prettily,

and patting Trahearne on his plump cheek. Whatever

the shouting had been about during the night, they both

seemed to have forgotten it, or had chosen to act as if

they had. Melinda kissed him lightly on the comer of

his mouth, then stepped inside. Traheame settled into a

lounge chair beside me.

"That's an exceptional woman," I said, "for a wife."

"You don't know the half of it," he said, then

blushed. I grinned at his blush, but he didn't smile

back. He just filled up my glass again, saying, "Drink

this, my boy, and then I'll show you what real people

do with their hangovers."

"So this is what taking the waters is all about?" I said

as Traheame and I lowered ourselves into the warm

waters of the hotel's main pool. He just grunted and

sank to his shoulders. His white T-shirt, which he had

insisted upon wearing, billowed briefly with trapped

air, then burped under his neck. After we had finished

the Bloody Marys, Traheame had forced me to drive

him to town to take the waters. He had a key to the

back door and to a private dressing room, where we

changed, and we had the pool to ourselves except for an

old couple from Oklahoma. They had left as we

climbed in, on their way to a hot mud bath for their

feet, behind a door appropriately labeled The Com

Hole.

"How do you like it?" Traheame sighed.

"It's okay," I said, lying to be polite. The water,

which stank faintly of sulphur and other minerals my

nose refused to identify, was tepid rather than hot and

it seemed slimy like a fever sweat.

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"It beats the hell out of running around," he said,