The Last Good Kiss (14 page)

revolution, the open marriage, the growing-togetherapart relationship. She's meeting her boyfriend, the doctor, at her mother's house. He spent last night

pranging his second ex-wife, her sister, her sister's

boyfriend, and a bisexual Airedale."

"If that's true, that's sad."

"It's fairly accurate," I said.

"That's sad, then," he said. "I remember true love."

"You mean the old days when you had to get

engaged before you could show your girl's ass to your

buddies?"

"Cynicism doesn't become you," he said blithely.

"I'm sorry; it's the champagne, I guess."

"That's odd," he said. "It always fills me with

romance. "

"No shit."

"Where in the world did Catherine find you, boy?"

he asked "Surely not in the Yellow Pages or something

as mundane as that . "

"I'm listed," I said, "but she found out about m e i n a

bar."

"Of course," he said, raising an eyebrow built like a

woolly worm. "Where?"

"The Sportsman in Cauldron Springs," I said. "The

guy who owns it is an old Army buddy of mine."

"Bob Dawson?"

"Right. She went in to see if anybody had seen you,

and he told her he had a friend who found lost things,

like ex-husbands, and one thing led to another."

"I'll just bet it did." he said, oddly bitter, then I

understood.

"She's your ex-wife, isn't she?" I said. "So what the

hell do you care?''

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"For myself, I don't," he said. "It's just that it

embarrasses my mother."

"Your mother?"

"Catherine lives with my mother. In her house," he

said, "and it upsets her when Catherine whores her way

across the state."

"You live with your mother?"

"My house is within a stone's throw of hers."

"You don't sound very happy about it," I said.

"Sometimes I'm not."

"Move."

"It isn't that simple," he said. "She's an old woman

now, crippled with arthritis, and I promised her I'd live

on the ranch until she died. I certainly owe her that,

you understand, at least that. And besides, every place

is the same," he said.

"The people are different," I said, but he ignored me

as he took a long drink from the champagne bottle,

drank until he choked, then he smiled at me with wet

eyes.

"If I had known how much fun we were going to

have, Sughrue," he said, "I would have let you catch

up with me sooner."

"Pretty expensive fun," I said.

"Worth every penny," he said as he tossed the empty

bottle on the carpet. "I would have spent it all just to

see that lady walk across the room." He eased himself

upright, propped on his good buttock. "Wonderful

naked ladies, by god, I love them," he said. "I've seen

a horde of them in my time, boy, but I just can't get

used to it." He shook his head and grinned. "Pop the

cork on that other bottle," he said, "and let's drink to

naked ladies. "

When I did, the cork bounced off the ceiling and

skittered across the carpet like a small . rabid animal.

Then I filled our glasses, and Trahearne held his up into

a soft beam of sunlight that had filtered through the

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eucalyptus trees, watching the bubbles rise like floating

jewels.

"That's funny," he said.

"What?"

Then he told me about naked women and sunlight.

And that he was a bastard.

His mother had been an unmarried schoolteacher in

Cauldron Springs when she was impregnated by a local

rancher, who was married, and the school board had

run her out of town. She had moved to Seattle to have

the baby and stayed there after he was born, working at

menial jobs to provide for them. By the time he started

school, his mother had begun to publish stories in the

Western pulps and free-lance articles in newspaper

supplements and magazines, so they moved uptown

into a tenement neighborhood on the edge of Capitol

Hill. After school Trahearne walked home through the

alleys to talk to the people his mother wrote about, the

unemployed seamen and loggers, the old men who

knew about violent times and romantic faraway places.

Sometimes, though, on these aimless walks, he saw a

woman standing naked in front of her second-story

back window. Only when it rained, though, as if the

gray rain streaked on her dark window made her

invisible. But the child could see her, dim but clearly

visible beyond the reflections of the windows and

stairways across the alley. In the rain, at the window,

sometimes lightly touching her dark nipples, sometimes

holding the full weight of her large, pale breasts in her

white hands, always staring into the cold rain. Never in

sunlight, always in rain. Sometimes she tilted her face

slowly downward, then she smiled, her gray eyes locked

on his through the pane, and hefted her breasts as if

they were stones she meant to hurl at him. And

sometimes she laughed, and he felt the rain like cold

tears on his hot face. At nights he dreamed of sunlight

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in the alley, and woke to the insistent quiet rush of the

gentle rain.

Even after high school, through the first years of

college at the University of Washington, when he still

lived at home, he saw the woman. And even later, after

he had moved closer to the campus, he came back to

the neighborhood on rainy days to once again stride the

bricks of that littered alley, red bricks glistening in the

rain. Only when he graduated and could find n9 work

in Seattle, after he moved to Idaho to work in the

woods setting chokers, only then did he stop haunting

the alley behind her house, watching, waiting.

There were girls, of course, during those days, but it

was never the same in cheap tourist cabins or upon

starlit blankets beneath the pines. There was one,

almost, once. A plump Indian girl who went skinnydipping with him at dawn in a lake, which had flooded an old marshy forest and filled with tiny dark particles

of wood fiber held in pelucid suspension, the naked girl

near but distant too, like a skater twirling in a paperweight snowstorm. One, once, almost.

Then the war came. Trahearne enlisted in January of

1942, in the Marines, and after officer's training, his

gold bars brightly gleaming, he took his leave in San

Francisco instead of going back to Seattle to see his

mother before he shipped out to the Pacific war. In the

center of the Golden Gate Bridge, he met a young

widow, still in her teens, whose husband had been an

ensign on the Arizona at Pearl Harbor. At first, seeing

her black dress and pale young face ruined with tears,

he thought she might be preparing to jump, but when

he spoke to her he found out she wasn't. She had only

come there to throw her wedding ring into the bay. One

thing, as he said ruefully, led to many others, and they

fell in love, the young lieutenant anxious to be away to

the war, to glory, the teenaged widow who had already

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lost one man to the war with a sudden violence that was

as shocking as that first blot of blood that had marked

the end of her girlhood only a few years before. Their

love, he said, was sweet with the stink of death from

the beginning, and each time they coupled, it was as

if it were the last time for both of them.

On his final day of leave, they went back out on the

bridge, and there on a blustery spring afternoon, the

wind full of sunlight, booming through the girders like

the echoes of distant artillery, cold off the green sea,

fragrant as a jungle, there he told his new love about

the naked woman and the rain. Before_he could finish,

though, she began to unbutton her blouse, and oblivious to the people around them, she bared her small breasts to the afternoon sunlight, then nestled his face

between them, sending him off to die.

"Of course," he said to me, "it was the most exciting

thing that had ever happened to me. And maybe still is.

I don't know. " Then he paused, and in his rumbling

voice, added, "I'd never been so touched. Such a lovely

gesture. "

"What happened to her?"

"Always with the questions, huh," he said, and gave

me a long, hard stare. "What happened to everybody

then? The war happened, that's what. But I don't

suppose you remember much about that."

"I remember my daddy went away, then he carne

back, and went away for good," I said.

"Killed?"

"No," I said. "After seeing North Africa, Italy, and

Southern France, he said South Texas didn't look like

much. He came out West, and my mother and I stayed

home. She said the war just gave him an excuse to be as

worthless and shiftless as he always wanted to be."

"Women are like that, boy," he philosophized.

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"They don't understand moving on. Give them a warm

cave and a steady supply of antelope tripe, and they're

home for good."

"Maybe so, maybe not," I said. "But what happened

to the woman?"

"What woman?" he asked, seeming confused and

angry.

"The one with the tits."

"For a man with at least a touch of imagination, my

young friend, you have a callous soul and a smart

mouth. "

" I told you I was a nosy son of a bitch."

"I'll buy that," he said. "What's the C. W. stand

for?"

"Nothing," I lied. "What happened to the woman?"

"Hell, boy, I don't know," he grumbled. "She

married a 4-F or a dollar-a-year man or another officer

with a longer leave than mine. What difference does it

make? It's the story that counts."

"Not until I know how it ends," I said.

"Stories are like snapshots, son, pictures snatched

out of time," he said, "with clean, hard edges. But this

was life, and life always begins and ends in a bloody

muddle, womb to tomb, just one big mess, a can of

worms left to rot in the sun."

"Right."

"And speaking of messes," he said, smiling, "what

are you going to do now?"

"Take you home, I guess."

"What about Rosie's missing daughter?"

"It's a waste of time," I said. "If I had a year with

nothing else to do, I might be able to find her, or find

out what happened to her. But not in a couple of days.

I'll just tell Rosie that you got out of the hospital sooner