The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley
“Old Chinese interrogation tactic,” I said, and she chuckled and slapped me on the belly.
“Be serious,” she said,.still chuckling. “I’m about to tell you the story of my life.”
“Okay.”
“We met during the war, you see,” she said as she leaned over to stub her cigarette out. “I was still a child, only eighteen, but already widowed. My first husband was one of those smart young men from Carmel who stabled his polo ponies and dashed of to join the RCAF, visions of the Lafayette Escadrille dancing in his head. In the excitement of his departure, he took my virginity, then with a burst of daylight remorse he drove us up to Reno, where he made an honest woman of me. Six months later, his Spitfire went down into the Channel during Dunkirk. It was like something out of a novel at the time, and I suppose it still seems that way to me.
“Then I met Trahearne, and it seemed like the next scene,” she continued. “To the horror of everyone concerned, I married him still wearing widow’s weeds, then sent him too of to the war.”
“You’re the woman on the bridge,” I whispered.
“Oh, he told you that absurd story too,” she said. “I didn’t know what it all meant to him, but something inside me knew what to do.”
“I wonder who the woman in the window was,” I said absently.
“His mother, of course,” Catherine answered softly.
“Jesus Christ,” I said, then sat up and fumbled for another cigarette. “That’s why I’m not curious,” I said. “I find out too many things I don’t want to know as it is. Jesus Christ.”
“I don’t suppose it was that terrible,” she chided me. “And it was such a long time ago. Trahearne only acts as if it was so important because he’s never been able to write about it.”
“Let’s get back to the war,” I said, “something I can understand.”
“Four long years of wretched fidelity,” she said, “then another fifteen years while he worked out his guilt because I could be faithful and he simply couldn’t. I don’t think I minded his whoring, you know, not nearly so much as I minded his guilty rages of which I was the object of hatred. It wasn’t an easy life at all.” She took my cigarette from me. “One day two years ago he called from Sun Valley to tell me that he was divorcing me. I wasn’t surprised; he had done that sort of thing before. This time, though, he went through with it, and let me tell you, he paid dearly for it. I stripped him, as he said, like a grizzly strips a salmon, left him wearing fish eyes and bones. That might have been enough to bring him back, but he had already remarried before he realized just how badly I had taken him. Now he has a wife who is as recklessly unfaithful as he is, so he doesn’t have to feel guilty anymore, and he hasn’t written a word worth keeping in two years. It’s driving him quite mad, I suspect.”
“And you’re living with his mother,” I said in amazement.
“Edna was quite kind to me during all those years,” Catherine said, “and it was the least I could do. She was more like a mother than my own had been, and living with her, I can keep an eye on Trahearne. I have my freedom now, more money than I can possibly spend before I die, and I also have my revenge.” She paused and rolled over to hold me, saying, “Don’t let them tell you that revenge isn’t sweet, either.”
“You still love the old fart,” I said.
“Of course,” she said as she straddled my hips, “but I love this, too. You don’t mind, do you?”
The complications and confusion worried me a bit, but Catherine was a sweet and loving woman, her passion fired by the years when she had kept it banked, and during the night I didn’t seem to mind at all. The next morning, though, when she checked out of her motel and moved her bags into my apartment, I had a few doubts. We laid those to rest, though, for the next three days. She cooked a better breakfast than Trahearne and she was easier to get along with, but I had to admit that I was relieved when she announced that she had to fly back to Seattle, then home. It wasn’t until we were standing in the airport terminal that I realized how much I was going to miss her.
“Somehow, this stopped being a weekend fling,” I said as we watched the passengers disembark from her flight.
“I know, I know,” she said, squeezing my hand angrily. “It sounds so terribly trite, but I wish I had met you twenty years ago. It’s not only trite, it’s a lie. Thirty years ago would be closer to the mark, and you didn’t have your first pair of long pants yet.”
“I was born an old man,” I said, but she ignored me.
“You or somebody like you might have saved me from this damned emotional martyrdom I seem to have chosen,” she said bitterly. Then it was time to go, and she presented me with a tilted cheek for a matronly goodbye kiss. “We’ll pretend you were some anonymous lover I picked up in a cocktail lounge,” she said.
“Whatever you say.”
“This is goodbye,” she said, then tilted her cheek toward me again.
“To hell with that,” I said as I grabbed her shoulders and kissed her on the mouth so hard that it blurred the careful lines of her lips, mussed her hair, and made her drop her carry-on bag.
“You bastard,” she muttered when she caught her breath and picked up her bag. A blush rose up her slender neck like a flame, touching her cheeks with umber sweetly burnt. She reached up to wipe my mouth, repeating, “You bastard. That was the last one.” Then she walked through the security check and boarded the airplane without glancing back.
As she climbed the steps, I swallowed some dumb pain and walked away too.
Nobody lives forever, nobody stays young long enough. My past seemed like so much excess baggage, my future a series of long goodbyes, my present an empty flask, the last good drink already bitter on my tongue. She still loved Trahearne, still maintained her secret fidelity as if it were a miniature Japanese pine, as tiny and perfect as a porcelain cup, lost in the dark and tangled corner of a once-formal garden gone finally to seed.
After she left, I wandered around in a dull haze for days, telling myself what an idiot I was, trying to swallow with measured amounts of whiskey the stone in my chest. It was June in Montana, high enough up the steps of the northern latitudes to pass for cruel April. Blue skies ruled stupidly, green mountains shimmered like mirages, and the sun rose each morning to stare into my face with the blank but touching gaze of a lovely retarded child. I drove down to Elko to try to find a landscape to suit my mood, but the desert had bloomed with a spring rain and the nights were cool and ringing with stars. I put Rosie’s eighty-seven dollars in a dollar slot machine and hit a five-hundred-dollar jackpot. Then I fled to the most depressing place in the West, the Salt Lake City bus terminal, where I drank Four Roses from a pint bottle wrapped in a paper bag. I couldn’t even get arrested, so I headed up to Pocatello to guzzle Coors like a pig at a trough with a gang of jack Mormons, thinking I could pick a fight, but I didn’t have the heart for it. Eventually, none the worse for wear, I drifted north toward Meriwether like a saddle tramp looking for a spring roundup.
13••••
ONE OF THE ADVANTAGES OF MY BUSINESS WAS THAT IT didn’t leave me much inclined to mourn lost loves too long. Back in town, I worked a couple of divorces and repossessed a few televisions from households where domestic strife was the commodity of exchange. It worked like a charm. My cynicism restored itself, and my bank account remained flush. Then Traheame called one afternoon.
“Hey, I’m sorry I left the cabin in such a snit,” he said.
“Looked more like a funky blue huff,” I said.
“Always with the jokes, Sughrue,” he complained. “When are you coming up to get your damned dog?”
“My dog?” I said. “You stole him, old man, you bring him back.”
“Not a chance. I’m at home for as long as I can manage it,” he said.
“How’s Fireball?”
“Last time I saw him, he was the bull of the woods around here.”
“The last time?”
“Yeah, he took to Melinda like a long l
“In style,” I said. “If she’s down this way, maybe she could drop him off.”
“Be too far out of her way,” he said too quickly. “You don’t know where she is, do you?” “Not exactly, no,” he said, “but it’s okay.” “Want me to go looking for her?”
“She’s not lost.”
“Neither were you,” I said, “but I found you anyway.”
“Yeah, thanks,” he said. Over the telephone, his sneer sounded like the snort of a wounded cape buffalo. “What’s the matter? Are you getting bored down there?”
“I was born bored.”
“Well, hell, drive up and help me stay dry,” he said. He almost sounded serious.
“Isn’t that like the halt leading the lame or something
like that?”
“I’m doing pretty good on my own,” he said. “I’m just about ready to go back to work.”
“Your public’s waiting with bated breath,” I said. “Hey, you’re a literary type—what the hell’s that
mean?”
“How should I know? Maybe it just sounds good.”
“Great,” I said. “Give me a call when she comes back with my dog, and I’ll drive up for a weekend.”
“All right,” he said cheerfully.
Then we chatted aimlessly about the weather and the fishing we intended to do—all the assorted foolishness that keeps Ma Bell whistling a happy tune. It wasn’t until we had hung up that I thought of Catherine, which I assumed meant that I was cured. As they say, I heaved a sigh of relief. When I tell folks that I’ve never been married, I neglect to mention the fact that I’ve been engaged about forty times.
Once I decided that I had stopped moping about,
though, my foot started itching so badiy that I had to take my boot off. I scratched it furiously, but the itch went deeper than I could reach with anything but five hundred road miles. I got back on the horn and called every bailbondsman I knew, but nobody had any jumpers to chase. Then I tried all the usual things— walking around my tiny office, three steps one way, four the other. I got a glass and tried to listen to the marriage counselor next door, but the aluminum walls didn’t do much for vocal reproduction. My office is in a double-wide trailer house that I share with the marriage counselor, who gives me a lot of business, and two shady, real-estate salesmen. None of my neighbors were known for their conversational versatility, so I moved the plastic drapes to look at my view. How long can you stare across an alley at a battered Demster Dumpster behind a discount store, though. I thought about going out to talk to the current inept secretary I shared with my neighbors, but she buzzed me before I could leave. “You have a call,” she said.
“Who is it?”
“Long distance,” she crooned.
“Ol’ long calls a lot,” I said. “Sir?”
“Nothing,” I said. “If it’s not collect, put them on.”
“Oops,” she muttered. “I’m sorry, sir, but we seem to have been disconnected.” Which meant she had forgotten how to use the hold button again. “Maybe the party will call back.”
“Hope so.”
The party did. It was Rosie. Before I could say hello, she said, “I tol’ you she wasn’t dead.”
“You told me,” I answered. The itch raced upmy leg and burrowed under the skin between my shoulder
blades. “What happened?”
“Jimmy Joe called me and said he got a picture 180
postcard from her this morning,” she said, “mailed from Denver.”
“Was he sure it was her handwriting?”
“It had to be,” Rosie said. “Who’d be playing a mean trick like that?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“He read it to me and it sounded like Betty Sue,” she added.
“You haven’t heard from her in ten years,” I said. “How would you know what she sounds like?” “I just know,” she said.
“I’ll be damned.”
“Don’t be down on yourself, C.W., anybody can make a mistake,” she said. “How much would you charge to go down to talk to that lady who said my baby girl was dead and in her grave?”
“Not a cent,” I said.
“Now, don’t be that way,” she said.
“Okay, I’ll send you a .bill. If I find anything,” I said. “You can do me a favor, though.”
“What’s that?”
“Call your ex-husband back and ask him to send me the postcard general delivery in Fort Collins, Colorado,
okay?”
“Good as done.”
“I’ll call you in a couple of days,” I said.
“If you should just happen to find her, just tell her she don’t have to come home or nothing,” Rosie pleaded. “Just ask her to call me collect. That’s all. Just hearing her voice would be more than enough.”
“Okay.”
“Say,” she said, “how’s that worthless bulldog
doing?”
“He’s doing fine,” I said, “but he’s homesick. I thought I might tote him back down that way sometime. If you’d like me to.”
“I guess I would at that,” she said. “And, say, I’m terrible sorry for the way I talked to you before … when …”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Take care.” “You too, son.”
Within the hour, I had the El Camino packed and headed out for Colorado.
During the fourteen-hour trip, I had plenty of time to think about things, this all-too-convenient postcard and the beating I had suffered on my last trip to Colorado, but nothing made any sense. Even if I had had fourteen years instead of fourteen hours, I probably wouldn’t have worked it out. That’s not how I work. My ex-partner once found me in a bar puzzling over a contorted divorce case that had me completely baffled’—I couldn’t find out who was doing what to whom—and he advised me to forget about thinking and to get my ass out on the street and put my hands on somebody. He was drunk, of course, but drunk or sober, he was a hell of a divorce detective.
But I was on the road, instead of the street, and didn’t have any idea who to put my hands on. Either Selma Hinds had lied, for reasons that made no sense, or somebody had lied to her, which made even less sense. If she had lied and wanted to keep on lying, my hands were tied. Unlike Jackson, Selma Hinds was a proper citizen, and if I laid a finger on her, she would scream for the laws, and I would probably end up in the slammer down in Canon City doing twenty to life. I didn’t know what was going on, didn’t understand a bit of it, didn’t like any of it. Maybe that’s why the first thing I packed was my guns. If your brain won’t work, wave a gun around. Sometimes that helps.
As it turned out, though, all the worry and thought was wasted. When I pulled off the Poudre Canyon highway at Selma Hinds’ trailhead, I parked behind a red Volkswagen convertible with Montana plates and a crunched right fender. At first, I wondered what the hell Melinda Trahearne was doing up at Selma’s, then I wondered why I had been so blind and dumb. That crazy, goddamned Trahearne had been leading me around by the nose from the moment I had found him in Rosie’s. Maybe even before that, which would explain that long insane jaunt through the bars, explain why he had been so easy to follow and so hard to find, why he waited at Rosie’s. He wanted me to look for Betty Sue Flowers, wanted me to nose around in her past, like a hungry dog turning up the buried bones and ripe flesh of her life so he could have an excuse for the bitter taste in his own mouth, the stink of corruption in his nose. If I hadn’t been looking so hard for Betty Sue, I would have seen her face in Melinda’s the first time. Goddamned Trahearne. I had been bounced around like a foolish little rubber ball on an elastic string, and seeing it now made me so tired that I didn’t even care who held the paddle—I just wanted off the string.
Selma and Melinda were on their knees weeding the garden, their soft voices and laughter echoing across the ridge like windchimes. At the edge of the garden, cur
“Excuse me,” I said when I stopped at the edge of the garden.
The two women paused, then stood and turned toward me. Selma’s face wore the same forgiving look, but now it seemed like a gaze painted on a stone, passive and permanent. When she recognized me, though, her face broke into a thousand fragments, wild and frightened like that of a deer poised to run. Melinda sighed and relaxed with the patience of an eternal victim flooding her eyes.
“I guess I knew that you’d come,” she said. “I guess I’ve been waiting. How did Trahearne find out?”
“Find out what?” I said. “Your mother sent me.”
“But I’m her mother,” Selma whimpered.
“Didn’t you tell her I was dead?” Melinda said.
“She wouldn’t believe me,” I said. “And then you sent your daddy a postcard.”
“A postcard?” she said, looking amazed.
“I’m her mother,” Selma repeated, trying to draw herself back together.
“If you didn’t, somebody did,” I said. “Trahearne, maybe, or some of your friends in Denver. Somebody sent a postcard so Rosie would know you’re alive, so I’d come here. I just don’t understand why.”
“I don’t either,” she said. “Nobody’s looking for me anymore but my mother.”
“I’m your mother,” Selma wailed, then sank to her knees in the soft dark soil, weeping.
“It’s all right,” Melinda said, holding Selma’s head against her thigh.
“Tell him I’ll pay … pay anything for his silence,” Selma sobbed. “Pay anything.”
“Listen,” I said, “as far as I’m concerned Betty Sue Flowers is dead. I only walked up that damned hill to be sure. If you want your mother to think you’re dead, that’s on your conscience, and if you want to act like Trahearne doesn’t know who you are, that’s between the two of you. I’m out of it. I’m going home.”