The Last Good Kiss (29 page)

thankful that it was clean, thankful that after they left I

was able to shove the water control off with my foot,

and thankful too that when the maid came in the next

morning, she jerked the sock out of my mouth instead

of screaming. I had no idea how I might begin to

explain my condition to the police. I tipped the maid

and told her to tell the desk that I would be staying over

another day. I needed the rest.

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1 1 ••••

"IT'S JUST NOT TRUE," ROSIE SAID FOR THE FIFrH TIME.

"I'm sorry," I repeated, "but I saw the death

certificate and talked to the woman she was living with

who saw the body. I'm sorry, but that's the way it is. "

"No," she said, and struck herself between the

breasts, a hard, hollow blow that brought tears to her

eyes. "Don't you think I'd know in here if my baby girl

had been dead all these years?"

It was an early afternoon again in Rosie's., soft, dusty

shadows cool inside, and outside a balmy spring day of

gentle winds and sunshine. Even the distant buzz of the

traffic seemed pleasant, like the hum of bees working a

field of newly blossomed clover. Mter a quick visit to

the emergency room for an X-ray and some painkiller,

I had left Fort Collins and driven straight through on a

diet of speed, codeine, beer, and Big Macs, and had

arrived at Rosie's dirty, unshaved, and drunk. My

nerves felt as if their sheaths had been lined with grit

and my guts with broken glass. Even bearing good

news, I wouldn't have looked like a messenger from the

gods, and with bad tidings, I was clearly an aged

delivery boy from Hell's Western Union. I looked so

bad that Oney hadn't even asked me to sign the cast on

his foot, and Lester expressed real concern. He even

offered to buy me a beer. Fireball woke up long enough

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to slobber all over my pants, but when I didn't give him

any beer, he slunk over behind the door. Rosie

wouldn't look at me, though, not when I came in, not

even when I told her the news.

"I'm sorry," I said again, "but she's dead."

"Don't say that anymore," she said, not pausing as

she furiously wiped off the bar one more time.

"She is," I said, "and you'll have to accept it. "

Finally, she stopped cleaning and looked at me. "Get

out. Just get out."

"What?"

"Out of here," she said softly. "Get out."

"Aw now, Rosie . . .

" Lester began, but she turned

on him.

"You just shut your damned mouth, you worthless

bastard. And get out. All of you get out. Especially

you." She pointed an angry finger at my face.

"I'll get out, all right," I said, then threw her

eighty-seven dollars on the bar, "but you take your

damned money back."

"You keep it," she said, her voice as flat and hard as

a stove lid. "You earned it, you keep it."

"You damned right I earned it," I said as I picked it

back up. "I've been lied to, run around, and beat up,

by god, and I've driven four thousand goddamned

miles and I'm still twelve hundred from home, and

you're damned right I earned it. "

"Nobody asked nothin' extra of you, so don'.t come

whinin' to me," she said. She couldn't look at me,

though. Her eyes faded to a brittle, metallic gray, like

chips of slate. "Just get the hell away from me. "

"I'm going," I said.

"And take that damned worthless dog with you too,"

she added. "He ain't been worth killin' since you

brought him back."

I snapped my fingers and Fireball woke up and

followed me out the door. Lester and Oney had beat us

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outside, and they were walking in aimless circles like

children during a school fire drill.

"Woman's got a temper on her," Lester said, shaking

his head.

"She's got some grieving to do," I said as I walked

toward my pickup.

"Where're you headed?" he asked.

"Home," I answered, as if I knew where that was.

Home? Home is Moody County down in South

Texas, where the blackland plain washes up against the

caliche hills and the lightning cuts of the arroyos in the

Brasada, the brush country. But I never go there

anymore. Home is my apartment on the east side of

Hell-Roaring Creek, three rooms where I have to open

the closets and drawers to be sure I'm in the right place.

Home? Try a motel bar at eleven o'clock on a Sunday

night, my silence shared by a pretty barmaid who thinks

I'm a creep and some asshole in a plastic jacket who

thinks I'm his buddy. Like I told Traheame, home is

where you hang your hangover. For folks like me,

anyway. Sometimes. Other times home is my five acres

up beyond Polebridge on the North Fork, thirty-nine

dirtroad miles north of Columbia Falls and the nearest

bar, ten miles south of the Canadian border. There's an

unfinished cabin there, a foundation and subflooring

and a rock fireplace, and wherever home might be, I

had been up on the North Fork for a week or so when

Trahearne fotind me.

I was working. On my tan and my late afternoon

buzz. It had been a dry spring, and I saw the plume of

dust rising like a column of smoke ten minutes before I

saw the VW beetle convertible that had caused it as it

charged through the chugholes like a midget tank. It

skidded into my road and braked to a stop about six

inches from a stack of stripped logs. Through the beige

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fog of dust, Trahearne looked like a man wearing a

bathtub that was too small for his butt.

"What the hell is that?" I asked as he pried himself

from behind the wheel.

"Melinda's idea of transportation," he grumbled.

"My car's in the body shop."

"Well, listen , old man, the next time you come up

the road raising a cloud of dust like that," I said, "one.

of the natives is liable to shoot holes in the poor beast

until it's dead."

"Spare me your country witticisms, Sughrue," he

said as he pounded dust from his khakies like a

cowhand after a long drive. "Where the hell have you

been?'.' he demanded.

"Here and there," I said.

"You're the devil to find," he said.

"I wasn't hiding," I said. "You just don't know how

to look."

"Cut that crap," he said. He hadn't shaved or

changed clothes in several days, and he still limped, but

he seemed reasonably sober.

"What's happening?"

"Not a thing," he growled as he sat down on my steps

and struck a kitchen match on the subftooring, "not a

damned thing, and since you do nothing as well as

anybody I know, I thought we could do it together. It's

not as dangerous or boring as when I do it alone. "

"Is that a compliment o r an insult?"

"Just give me a beer and shut up," he said, and I

pitched him a can from the cooler I had been using as a

footstool. "So what are you doing?" he asked out of a

billow of beer foam and cigar smoke.

"Working on my retirement home."

"Nice place you've got here," he said, looking

around.

"Thanks," I said. "I like it better than cheap irony."

Actually, I liked it far better than that�nough so

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that finishing it seemed redundant. I had built the

foundation and subflooring three summers before, and

had helped with the fireplace and the chimney base the

summer after that. Instead of walls and a roof, though,

I had erected a wooden-framed surplus officer's tent

that faced the fireplace. Beyond the missing front wall,

a small pine grove caught some of the road dust, and

beyond the North Fork road, a range of soft, low

mountains partially blocked the western sky. To the

north, Red Meadows Creek scattered across a grassy

flat, then gathered itself to plunge through a large

culvert and on into the spring-thaw swollen waters of

the North Fork. Across the river to the east, the

towering spires of the peaks in Glacier Park rose into a

sky as pristinely blue as an angel's eye. To the south,

however, the view, mundane on the best of days, was

sullied by the dirty haze that still roiled and billowed in

the road thermals.

"I guess it's all right," Traheame allowed, "but

there's no place to hang the Mondrian. " Then he

chuckled and finished his beer.

"Abstract painting gives me-"

"Goddamn it," he interrupted, "can I hole up here

for a few days?"

"Be my guest," I said.

"That's what I had in mind," he said. "Thanks." He

sat, waiting for me to ask him why, but when I didn't he

told me anyway. Traheame was dependable that way.

"Nothing was happening at home. I couldn't work. Not

a lick. Goddamn it, sometimes I wonder if I haven't

topped the last good woman, had the last good drink

out of the bottle, and written the last good line, you

know, and I can't seem to remember when it happened,

can't remember at all." He glanced up at me, tears

brimming his bleary eyes. "I can't remember when it

happened, where it went."

"Try to relax," I said.

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"Don't give me my own lines."

"You shouldn't have given it to me in the first place,"

I said, as I pitched him another beer.

"You can be a real bastard, can't you?" he muttered,

his trembling fingers struggling with the pull tab.

"Want me to open that for you, old man?"

"I guess that's why I came," he said, smiling

suddenly and brushing at his tears with fingers as thick

as sausages, "for the quality of the sympathy. It's got a

sharp edge on it here, Sughrue, and I can deal with

that." He sounded like a man who got more sympathy

than he wanted at home, but I wasn't about to say that.

He did it for me anyway. "I just can't stand all that

damned solicitude. It's as if she was an intensive-care

nurse and I was about to croak." Then he paused. "I

always go back to work eventually," he said. "I just

haven't found the right moment yet."

Since I didn't have anything to say, he finally shut up,

and we sat around enjoying the silence. A light wind

rustled the lodgepole pines, clearing the road dust, and

behind us the river roared mightily in its stony course.

The afternoon drifted slowly toward dusk, lingering

like wisps of feather ash in the air, and Fireball