The Last Good Kiss (30 page)

returned from his afternoon explorations, trotting

down the road like a man returning from a serious

mission. He nosed Traheame's ankle, and the big man

leapt up.

"What the hell's he doing here?"

"Rosie said we had ruined him for polite company,"

I answered.

"You've been back to California?"

"There and other places," I said. "I've been on the

road so much I think I've worn out my ass."

"Looks like you've done considerable damage to

some other parts, too," he said, nodding toward the

yellowed bruises on my abdomen. I hadn't been

working on my tan hard enough to hide them.

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"I took second-best in a political discussion in

Pinedale, Wyoming," I lied. I still didn't know what

to think about the beating, and even if I had known,

I didn't want to talk about it.

"Did you find Rosie's daughter?" he asked as he

rummaged through the ice for another beer.

"Found out that she died some years ago," I said.

"How?"

"Drowned after a car wreck."

"That's too bad," he said. "How'd Rosie take it?"

"She ran me off her place," I said.

"Why?"

"She didn't believe me," I said.

"Why not?"

"Said she knew in her heart that her daughter was

still alive," I said. "But I checked the death certificate

and talked to a woman who identified the body."

"That's too bad," he said again.

"Runaways get killed all the time," I said. "For

every three or four I find, one will be toes-up on a slab.

Running away is not a good life. At least Rosie's

daughter had six good months before she died. " I stood

up and struck a match and dropped it into the logs laid

in the fireplace. The kerosene-soaked sawdust caught

swiftly, and the logs began to crackle. Instead of a

cheery fire, though, it seemed too much like a funeral

pyre. "Six good months," I repeated.

"Sometimes I think I'd give up the rest of my life for

six good months," he said softly.

"It doesn't work that way."

The flames rose without smoke, sparks flaring up the

stubby chimney and into the velvet night waiting to the

east.

Traheame stayed sober that night, easing by on slow

beers, and the next day he stayed dry. The third

morning he limped the five miles down and back to the

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Polebridge store to buy of box of pencils and a Big

Chief school tablet. The fourth morning he went to

work at the picnic table beside the tent. After that, for

more than a week, our days and nights became as

orderly and measured as the rising and falling of the

sun, the gentle waxing and waning of the fickle moon.

In the mornings, I jogged up the North Fork road,

heading for the border and dodging logging trucks. I

never made it, of course, but the walk back was always

nice. Until I stopped at the creek for a heart-stopping

plunge into the shallow pool below the culvert. When I

got back to the cabin, Trahearne would close his tablet,

boil another pot of cowboy coffee and fix breakfast on a

Coleman stove while I sat on the steps with a cup of

coffee and my first cigarette of the day, coughing and

spitting up phlegm and what felt like scraps of lung

tissue.

One morning as he stroked a fluffy pile of scrambled

eggs in the skillet, he asked, "What's all that running

about?"

"It makes me feel so good. " I choked, then coughed

and spit again.

"Boy, I guess I'm the lucky one," he said, grinning.

"Why's that?"

"I can feel like shit without doing all that work," he

said, then laughed like a man full of himself and empty

of cares.

In the afternoons and evenings, we talked about

thing�ur wars, our runaway fathers, the nature of

things-then we crawled into sleeping bags to wait for

the next day, wait for it to begin all over again.

Then one morning I came back to find a note nailed

to the steps. Sorry, it read. Back in a few days. I

thought about the bars myself but went fishing instead.

Two nights later, about three A. M. , he roared back,

crunched the right front fender of the VW on the pile of

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logs, then stumbled into bed, muttering about his life

and hard times. I acted like a dead man until he finally

went to sleep. He stayed in bed the next day, rising

only to piss, guzzle water, and gobble aspirins and

Rolaids. The next day he wasted bitching about the

weather: it was too nice to suit him. Then he went back

to work.

This time he only lasted four days. On the fifth

morning, when I showed up dripping cold water, he

had the whiskey bottle sitting on the tablet like a child's

dare. In the fireplace wads of crumpled paper huddled

like the scat of some odd nocturnal beast.

"How long do you think you can stand this goddamned solitude?" he asked peevishly as he splashed Wild 1\ukey into his cup.

"What solitude is that?"

"Goddamn it, Sughrue, has anybody ever talked to

you about your hospitality?"

"Never twice," I said.

As I dried on a dirty sweat shirt, he grunted to his

feet and·huffed over to the VW convertible, then raced

away on a cloud of dust. Perhaps t.he same one he had

ridden in upon.

That evening, as I used the scraps of poetic paper to

start a fire, I found one that seemed longer than the

others, and I smoothed it out on the table.

It read:

Once you flew sleeping in sunshine, amber limbs

locked in flight. Now you lie there rocky

still beyond the black chop, your chains

blue light. Dark water holds you

down. Whales sound deep into the glacier's

trace, tender flukes tease your hair,

your eyes dream silver scales.

Lie still,

wait. This long summer must break before

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endless winter returns with tombstone glaciers

singing ice.

I will not mourn.

When next the world rises warm, men will chip

arrowheads from your heart . . .

His large, childish scrawl raced across the page,

breaking at times into an almost indecipherable frenzy.

I didn't know what he meant by the poem, but the

handwriting was that of an insane child. For a moment,

I felt sorry for him. I folded the poem and slipped it

into my wallet. It seemed mannered and stilted to me,

but for reasons I wouldn't think about, I wanted to

keep it.

Later that evening, I took a tin cup full of his whiskey

down by the river. A new moon burnished the rough

waters. The river was rotten with the stink of old snow,

cold and brackish green, roaring like a runaway freight,

an avalanche of molten snow.

Once, when I summered with my father in that

basement on the Colorado plains, he had come home

drunk and awakened me to take me to see my first

snow. He lashed me behind him on his motorcycle, an

old surplus Harley with a suicide shift, and drove across

the midnight plains toward the mountains, flying as if

he were being pursued by fiends, the rear wheel spitting

gravel on the twisting curves. He found snow, finally,

on the northern face of a cut bank, and he stopped and

we took off our clothes under a slice of moon to bath in

the snow. He meant something mystic, I think, but like

me, he was a ftatlander who had grown up without

knowing snow, and within minutes the two of us were

engaged in a furious snowball fight, laughing and

screaming at the stars, wrestling in the shallow skim of

frozen snow. On the way home, tied once more to his

back with baling twine, I slept, my cold skin like fire,

and dreamed of blizzards and frozen lakes, a landscape

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sheathed in ice, but I was warm somehow, wrapped in

the furs of bears and beaver and lynx, dreaming of ice

as the motorcycle split the night.

As I thought of that and sipped the smoky whiskey, I

heard Traheame return, more slowly than he had

departed. He parked by the cabin and left the engine

running, grinding like teeth in the darkness, as he

gathered his gear, stumbling about like a drunken bear.

I waited by the river until I heard liis car door slam,

then I walked back to the cabin. He drove away slowly,

jammed into the tiny car, slow and almost stately, like a

funeral barge loosed on a black, deep-flowing, silent

river. The embers of his taillights grew pale in the dust.

It wasn't until the next morning that I missed the

bulldog.

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1 2 ••••

I DROVE BACK DOWN TO MERIWETHER THE NEXT DAY, AND

for lack of anything better to do, I went back to work.

One midnight repossession up on the reservation, some

lackadaisical collection work, and a divorce case so

sordid that I checked my bank account and found it still

fat with Catherine Traheame's money. I shut down the

operation, closed my office, and told the answering

service that I was unavailable, out of town on a big

case, then I spent a few easy days and nights playing

two-dollar poker and staring at the remains of my face

in barroom mirrors. In the right light, I could pass for

forty, though I was a couple of years younger than that.

I stayed fairly sober and faintly sane, and although the

highway called to me several times, I stayed in town.

Then a bartender out at the Red Baron had to take off

for his mother's funeral over in Billings, so I filled in for

him.

When I first moved to Meriwether, and for years

before, the Red Baron had been a fine working and

drinking man's bar called the Elbow Room, the sort of

place where the bartender comes out into the parking

lot at seven A.M. to wake up the drunks sleeping in their

cars, then helps them inside, and buys the first drink.

The Elbow Room didn't have a jukebox or a pool table

or a pinball machine. Just a television set for the games

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and an honest shot of whiskey for the watchers. Then

one summer old man Unbehagen died in his sleep a few

weeks after I had come into the possession of a bundle

of very hot cash, so hot nobody would claim it. So I

went in with the Schaffer twins as a silent partner, and

we bought the license and premises. Unfortunately, the

Schaffer boys were as loud and ambitious as I was silent

and outvoted. They took my favorite bar and turned it

into a business, a topless-dancer, pool, and pinball