The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley
“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
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 things—our 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
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 Turkey 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 andhuffed over to the VW convertible, then raced away on a cloud of dust. Perhaps the 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 164
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 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.
12••••
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 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,
On Monday nights the Baron was the scene of amateur topless dancing, feckless young ladies exposing their mediocre bodies with enthusiasm in place of talent to a horde of young men driven quite mad by the mere idea of amateurism. The middle of the week was devoted to straight semi-pro tits and ass, and the maniacs usually settled into a dull roar, broken by the occasional drunken fistfight. Friday and Saturday nights were given over to heavy metal rock or bluegrass and free-form boogie, but Sundays were, thankfully, a day of rest from the reckless abandon of entertainment. On Sunday night, the drinkers had to have their own fun, and the place was usually as quiet as a graveyard.
Catherine Trahearne could have come in on a Sunday night, but she didn’t. It had to be Monday. When she came in the vinyl-padded door that night, she looked as out of place as a chicken in church, but she walked directly to the bar and stood behind a group of flushed and shame-faced young men until they cleared a space for her. Dressed in wool and leather-—soft beige slacks, a dark cashmere pullover, and a deerskin vest—she looked even better than she had in a tennis dress. The dark umber tones of her clear skin hinted at sultry, mysterious nights, and her slim, athletic body promised to fulfill the hints. Whatever women were supposed to lose in their early fifties, she hadn’t lost it yet. Not a bit of it. A hunk of polished but uncut turquoise as large and roughly the same shape as a shark’s tooth dangled from a heavy silver chain between her breasts.
When she- sat down at the bar, she took out a cigarette, and I leaped to light it for her. She stared over my shoulder toward the stage, where Boom-Boom, our resident amateur heavy-weight, lifted her shift to reveal breasts as large and round as a bald man’s head with a screaming giggle that should have shattered glassware. As always, the crowd exploded into hoots and cheers, table-thumping fists and whistles. In her real life, Boom-Boom was an improbably demure barmaid, but on Monday nights she came out and killed them. Catherine smiled at the furor, seemingly with honest amusement. I ignored the shrill pleas of the topless dancers doubling as cocktail waitresses, ignored the bar customers, and asked her if she wanted a drink.
“What an odd way to make a living,” she said, then blew out the match before it burnt my fingers. “She’s an amateur,” I said.
“But joyously enthusiastic, don’t you think?” she said, staring into my eyes with a steady gaze that reminded me of how I had felt when she told me she had to take a shower the first time I met her. To get away from the gaze, I glanced over my shoulder. Boom-Boom was having a hell of a time, and I felt like a cretin for not having noticed before. “Actually, though, I was talking about your new line of endeavor, Mr. Sughrue.”
“Just filling in for a sick friend, Mrs. Trahearne.”
“Catherine,” she commanded softly.
“C.W.,” I said.
“What do the initials stand for?” she asked, smiling. “Chauncey Wayne,” I confessed. “C.W. will do fine,” she said, then laughed. “Would you like a drink?”
“Actually, I’m here on business,” she said. “But it could be conducted over a drink. Later, perhaps? Someplace more conducive to conversation?”
“Where are you staying?”
“The Thunderbird.”
“They’ve got a quiet piano bar,” I said, “and I could meet you around midnight. If that isn’t too late?”
“Not at all,” she said, “it’s a date.” Then she extended her slim hand. Her nails were painted a dark, dusky red that matched her lips and picked up the tones of her skin and hair. When I shook it, she held my hand and focused her bright green eyes on mine until I nearly blushed. “Trahearne is quite fond of you,” she said, “and I hope we can be friends.” I had heard that before; all Trahearne’s women wanted to be friends of mine. Catherine gave me an expensive smile and left. As she walked out, even the dumbest, drunkest of the kids turned away from Boom-Boom’s mighty breasts to watch Catherine’s delicately switching hips.
In the rosy, diffuse light of the piano bar, she looked even better. She could have passed for thirty. A great thirty. And she damn well knew it. After we had settled into a plush booth with our drinks, she went to work on me with the wise eyes, the slightly amused smile, and more random body contact than the law allows in public places.
“Thank you for coming,” she whispered.
“You said something about business,” I said nervously as I finished my drink before the cocktail waitress walked back to the bar. As much as I had enjoyed the first trip, I didn’t feel up to chasing Trahearne around
Western America just yet, and I certainly didn’t want to mess around with his ex-wife.
“Yes, I have a small complaint about how you handled the recovery of my ex-husband,” she said with mock seriousness.
“What’s that?”
“When you called from the hospital,” she said, “you told me a little white lie about Trahearne’s accident which we won’t even bother to discuss, but now I want a full report into all the lurid details of his latest odyssey.”
“Right,” I said. It seemed odd that Trahearne’s ex-wife seemed to know more about what had happened than his present wife did. I assumed that he didn’t care if I told Catherine. “What do you want to
know?”
“Everything,” she answered sweetly. “Where he went, how you found him, how he came to be wounded in the butt. All the sordid details.” She sipped her vermouth. “I’ve always wanted to know exactly what transpired on one of his trips,” she continued, “but his versions were already literature by the time he returned, and none of the other gentlemen I hired were able to either find him or provide me with the details. They seemed to lack both intelligence and imagination. Are most of the members of your profession as pedestrian as those I’ve done business with in the past?”
“This may sound strange,” I said, “but the only other private investigator I know is my ex-partner here in town, and he’s an even worse drunk than I am. I know PI’s have conventions, but I’ve never been to one. They’re all about electronics and industrial security and crap like that. I just repossess cars and chase runaways and follow cheating husbands, stuff like that.”
“You don’t sound very ambitious,” she said.
“I’m not,” I said, “not about anything. I spent nine years in the Army in three separate hitches, mostly playing football or sitting in a gym or writing sports stories for post newspapers, and I spent four years playing football for three different junior colleges under two diferent names, and I got in this business strictly by accident, so I’m not Johnny Quest or the moral arbiter of the Western world. More like a second-rate hired gun or a first-rate saddle tramp.”
“A classic underachiever?” she said.
“Classic bindle-stiff, apple-knocker, pea-pickin’ bum,” I said.
“But still you found Trahearne,” she said, “and you must tell me about it.”
As I told her what I thought she wanted to hear, she moved closer, occasionally smiled and touched my hand with her fingers, then our hips and thighs were nudging each other, and her nails drifting across my wrist. When I finished, she told me to tell the rest of it now, and she laughed and held my hand as I filled in the gaps. When I finished the second time, she hugged my arm against her breast.
“How simply delightful,” she said.
“Hey,” I said, trying to make a joke of it, “you’re going to have to turn it down a few notches.”
She didn’t play coy at all, just laughed openly, the tones ringing crystal through the cozy bar like vesper bells chiming in a pastoral dusk.
“Don’t be so serious,” she said. “I won?
you.”
“Damn it,” somebody using my voice complained. I knew better than to fool around with the ex-wives of friends, and for all our troubles, Trahearne had become a friend. But I said it again anyway, “Damn it.” And Catherine lifted my hand to touch a flattened knuckle with her lips. Damned if I wasn’t as spooky as a sixteen-year-old kid as I followed her out of the lounge.
Afterward, as we lay on her motel bed, my hand resting on the taut muscles of her thigh, I asked her, “Is this what you drove down for?”
“Flew,” she said, and laughed. “I flew down by way of Seattle. I’m supposed to be visiting friends there. This is what I came for, yes, and I would have walked.”
“Why?”
“Please don’t be shocked when I tell you this,” she said, pausing to light two cigarettes, “and please remember that I might have chosen you anyway. I work like the very devil keeping this aged body intact, and I endure yearly humiliations at the hands of expensive plastic surgeons so I can enjoy my declining years. You see, I sleep with whomever pleases me” —she paused again and her voice grew hard—“especially Trahearne’s friends. Do you mind?”
“Well, it makes me feel a little like I’ve been rutting in the old man’s track,” I said, thinking about the skinny whore in the desert, “but it’s a damn fine track. So I guess I don’t mind.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I’ve only a few more years before I become withered and old—don’t interrupt me—and I have a great many lonely years to recover.”
She stopped to look at me. I watched the cigarette smoke drift across the shadowed ceiling in mare’s tails.
“You’re not curious about my motives?” she asked, her fingernails lightly plucking at the hair on my chest.
“Nope.”
“I thought detectives were endlessly curious,” she said.
“Only inthe movies.”
After another long silence, she said, “It’s odd, you know.” “What?”
“I almost never explain my actions to anyone,” she murmured, “but since you didn’t ask, I feel somehow obligated to tell you.”