Honeymooners A Cautionary Tale (14 page)

Jim had spent that whole
first day fried but cool and relatively calm at that window, and
then lingered there into the evening and the night, never even
pulling himself away for nourishment, as best he could later
recall. Jim had studied the native life on Higgins, the dangerous,
drunken cowboys cruising their gaudy pickups; the peaceful, drunken
Native Americans leaning about the landscape below, reddish-yellow
with liver failure, glowing on corners like streetlamps. When they
coughed, burped, or even laughed, they blinked as leisurely as
caution lights. Higgins Avenue was aglow with neon. Every building
front in town seemed to be trimmed with neon. What churches were
still standing had been trimmed with neon, too, and transformed
into bars, whose thin, blinking neon names seemed to change often,
not unusually several times in the course of a single
night.

The garden city of the
Northwest Jim staggered around in those first fried days was mostly
an imagined town for him. He stared at his haunted reflection in
the blue-tinted mirrors behind bars, seeing a face he didn’t know
anymore, with a continuous shock of recognition. Who was that
ghostly dead ringer for himself in the smoky mirror, and what
wrong turn had led that tragic-eyed, handsome stranger down the
dubious path into this forlorn, loveless, lonesome, but essentially
heroic, country-song sort of life?

Jim discovered that the
garden city of the Northwest was landlocked, surrounded by ancient
Indian nations, but there were lingering rumors of lost coastlines
of forgotten enormous bodies of water. The drumbeats and constant
howls from those surrounding bare hills were unlike any heard in
any other town. Once in a while an animal thought extinct wandered
into town from the dark hills. For a glass of Thunderbird any
Indian in town would interpret the ancient petroglyphs painted on
the older buildings by the river. For a hit off your pint, any old
derelict cowpoke would interpret the television set perpetually
playing in the Sears store window. For a round, anybody would trade
memories with you, stories of lost love and distant, happy
lifetimes, until they became the same as your own. After a time,
nothing needed to be said, time saved for drinking. You could sit
for days in contented silence, among strangers who remembered the
color of your mother’s eyes.

The garden city of the
Northwest was a town of patrons with hypothetical pasts. On certain
nights, as you stumbled bar to bar, your past might gradually
change. In some bars the foreignness of who you no longer were lay
in wait. Sometimes you came upon evidence of a past you did not
know you had. This happened to Jim one night at Eddie’s Club on
South Higgins, an establishment which served also as the de facto
city hall. Covering the walls of Eddie’s Club back in those days
were row upon row of photographs of the honored town drunks. Each
spring, when the snowbanks surrounding town melted, gold stars were
pasted in the lower-right corners of the photographs of the revered
drunks found frozen. One night on a dim back wall Jim found his own
dusty photograph pasted with a celebratory star. Befuddled, Jim had
asked the bartender for the story. Seems one spring they had sadly
identified some stiff as Jim, the bartender related. The bartender
offered to remove the star with a special ceremony conjured for
just this situation. Leave it, Jim had told him, for
luck.

There was no spot in the
garden city of the Northwest safe from the possibility of memory,
romance, or violence. One night Jim found himself drinking in the
Flame Lounge on Front Street, a sort of fancy bar favored by the
white-shoe crowd Jim could not recall entering. The realization had
just swept over Jim that he was not a rich and famous author in
town incognito, who was up in the Big Sky country as a sort of
advance talent scout for the movie being made from his last
bestselling novel, as he had confided to about a dozen folks over
the course of that night, nor had his photograph once been featured
on the cover of Life magazine, as he had intimated to one
black-eyed bar babe.

When the tall woman with
long, thick, fierce hair swept into the Flame, Jim recognized her
in a heartbeat, and he knew exactly what was in store. Lindsay sat
down at the for end of the bar, to be surrounded in moments by half
the dipshit high-rollers of romance in the joint. Her mane of
reddish-blond hair was lighter than in old Ralph’s snapshot, which
hadn’t done this woman justice at all. This woman was a dead ringer
for Lauren Bacall, back when she whisked Bogie in. Those slightly
out-of- focus eyes, otherworldly gray and far apart. That moist,
full lipped, wide, generous mouth. She had a laugh that rang the
room, and this dazzling smile, with big, brilliant, white teeth
that snapped the tails off sentences. She was wearing white short
shorts and a tangerine halter top, and with his fedora pulled low
over his shaded, outlaw-of-love eyes, Jim stared unabashedly at her
golden shoulders and pretty, round arms and trim, tan midriff and
long brown legs, and, yes, at her full breasts straining that
skimpy halter top, her great tits, yes, and great ass, that, too,
and her breathtaking loveliness made Jim ache with a jealous
amazement that old, rotten Ralph had actually tasted that wide
mouth, licked and sniffed that smooth, glowing skin. The image of
Ralph rooting around sweet, secret places popped into Jim’s mind
and ran amok.

Then, egged on by her
admirers, a grinning, drooling audience of assholes, this
shamelessly flirty hussy of a Lindsay character went fishing for
the ribbony blue eel in the huge tank behind the bar with a piece
of string and bobby-pin hook, and Jim flung himself sullenly from
that wretched establishment.

2

Back in his hot hotel room,
Jim flopped down on the creaky bed, clicked on the table lamp, and
reread this Lindsay character’s letters to Ralph for maybe the
tenth time, and Ralph’s to her. Her letters were wonderfully
written, Jim had to admit, smart and insightful and funny, and,
yes, real sexy, dirty even, you’d have to call them, but full of
falsehoods. Jim reread parts where this Lindsay character
proclaimed her love, her endless, undying, blah blah blah love for
Ralph, which, judging from her flirty, hussy behavior at the bar,
was clearly a cruel joke on poor old Ralph, that fool for love.
Clearly Jim was going to have to take matters

into his own hands, for his
idiot buddy’s sake. Jim just couldn’t stand by and watch old dumb
Ralph wreck his life any more than he already had, could he? What
were best buddies for?

And then Jim reread his
favorite dirty parts of this Lindsay character’s letters once more
intently, parts where this Lindsay harlot spoke of sexual secrets
she and Ralph shared. Petting his parrot, Jim found himself
somewhat inadvertently committing these juicy parts to memory. Jim
called information for her phone number and memorized it. He dialed
her number then, this Lindsay whory character, and lay there simply
listening to the ringing. Somehow Jim knew he was getting closer to
the real beginning of his life, or rebirth, as it were, and he
imagined it dangerous and dramatic, like his teenage dreams of
becoming a diver for sunken treasure, or a gunrunner, or a
pirate.

Early the next morning Jim
rented a car and located the address written on the envelopes. Jim
parked up the street from Lindsay’s townhouse on South 6th Street
and waited. When Lindsay came out and drove off in her car, he
followed her. He saw where she parked near her office, which was a
real estate company in a restored old Victorian house at the edge
of town not far from the university. Jim drove around for a while,
took a spin out Rattlesnake Creek as far as Danny O’Brien Gulch, to
get some air, clear his head, then got something to eat at a drive-
through.

Jim parked up the street
from Lindsay’s vehicle and waited while he puffed a joint and
sipped from a pint bottle of bourbon in a brown paper bag. He
slouched down into the seat and gazed into that great blue bowl of
sky that domed over the beautiful Missoula Valley, within whose
long lap the garden city of the Northwest nestled. When there
weren’t any sounds of traffic, Jim could hear the low rumble of the
Clark Fork River, which flowed through the heart of town, and upon
whose banks at about any time of day you could find fishermen fly
casting, the white filament of their lines gathering sunlight into
curves, bright arabesques flicking out toward the swift current.
Jim fired another joint and looked up at the steep slope of Mount
Sentinel, rising behind the brick buildings of the university, to
that huge design of whitewashed stones arranged in a shape not
unlike the letter My high up on the bare brown hillside, which
shone intensely in the brilliant sunlight, like a landing signal to
alien craft or the ceremonial snake sign of an ancient, fallen
race, the nearly forgotten ancestors of the Salish Indian nation,
say. He had heard various tales about that mysterious totem, and
even initiated a few refried ones of his own. Jim puffed leisurely
and let his gaze drift north to Mount Jumbo, which got its name
because townfolks thought it looked like a sleeping elephant. In
the distance, the snow- covered, high granite peaks of the Rockies
glistened bluish in the sunlight as they ranged north toward
Canada. Jim could hear the whistle of a Northern Pacific freight as
it headed east up Hell- gate Canyon toward Milltown and beyond.
When this Lindsay character finally came out at lunchtime, Jim
pulled his fedora low over his shaded, steely eyes and sank down in
the seat. When she drove off, Jim followed her again; then he
followed her when she got off work.

Jim followed this Lindsay
character for days like that, snapping photographs of her at every
opportunity with a cheap Polaroid he had picked up at a drugstore,
photographs (if you could call them that) of her getting in and out
of her car, and other people’s cars, men’s sometimes, as she came
and went from restaurants, bars, and, on a couple of occasions,
with this one clown in particular, from a fancy edge-of-the-river
motel only a few blocks from her office. Some photographs captured
this Lindsay character coming and going with this same man, who was
an older fellow, in his late forties, say, who walked with a slight
limp, from her own townhouse at the crack of dawn. Jim was doing
detective work for his best pal, Ralph. Jim would do anything for
his dopey friend. Jim was going to get the goods on this Lindsay
character, amass so much incriminating evidence that old
fool-for-love Ralph could not help but come to realize that this
Lindsay character did not truly love him, and that her wonderfully
written, smart, amusing, insightful, sexy letters were loaded with
lies.

Shot through the curved
glare of windshield glass, shadowy and grainy, as though culled
from ancient newsreel footage, the pictures Jim took of this
Lindsay were poor mugshots at best. In this one shot she seemed to
be looking directly at him, although through her huge, dark
sunglasses he could not see her lovely, gray, otherworldly eyes, so
who could be sure. Lindsay seemed, however, to be making a face in
Jim’s direction, sort of clowning for the camera, touching her nose
with her wondrous tongue.

Sitting in his rented car
late one night, while he waited for Lindsay to emerge from that
fancy motel at the river’s edge, what Jim had let himself imagine
as he studied that particular mugshot in the iridescent light of
the dashboard was that trollop and her old coot lover up in that
motel room, in the shower, say, soaping each other up, committing
unspeakable, sudsy sexual acts. Then, out of the blue, old Ralph
climbed into the shower, too. Then, holding hands and naked, Judy
and Melvin showed up and asked to borrow some soap. Whereupon Jim
had whipped out old nasty Mister Monkey for some serious
spanking.

Black Widow

1

Lindsay goes to the party
Buffalo Bill and Kathy throw for Ken Kesey after his reading at the
university. Her old drinking pal Jim Crumley is there, up from
Texas to show off his new detective novel, which is set in Missoula
and dedicated to Dick Hugo, the grand old detective of the American
heart. Buffalo had speculated that Crumley and this Jim Stark guy,
Ralph’s friend up recendy from California, would rooster around
each other when they met, but apparently it had been best-buddy
love at first sight, and Buffalo, Crumley, and this Jim Stark
regale the kitchen hardcore drinking crowd with outrageous tall
tales of miscreant misadventures, while Kesey slouches in a doorway
bemused. This Jim Stark guy is big and bearded and, when babbling
with the boys, seems loud and bullshitty, but then suddenly
terribly shy and awkward when Kathy introduces him to Lindsay. He
looks down at his boots and mumbles something to Lindsay about
having some items to deliver to her from Ralph, and Lindsay nods
knowingly, and Kathy, who overhears, widens her blank, unblinking,
Orphan Annie eyes with curiosity. Lindsay can’t figure this Jim
Stark character out, but in an aside she predicts to Kathy a lot
more trouble in this old town in the near future. He is Ralph’s
trusted friend, and Bill’s buddy from Bill’s time at Stanford, and
Kathy says he has published a novel. Another writer! God! Just what
Missoula needs. So this guy is just splitting with his wife,
according to Kathy, which, by the looks of him, translates to
Lindsay that the poor wife probably parked his butt at the curb.
Why did people think Missoula was a town where they could land on
their feet?