The Last Good Kiss (15 page)

than I expected. " But that wasn't what I wanted to say.

"Listen, boy, I don't have a damned thing to do at

home," he said as I poured the last of the champagne

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into our glasses, "and I feel that I've earned a few days

of entertainment-what the hell, I've been shot again

and survived-so why don't you give it a couple more

days."

"Well, sure, if you don't mind . . .

"

"Mind, boy? Hell, I insist," he said grandly.

"Great."

"But I've got one little favor to ask," he said as he sat

up gingerly on the side of the bed.

"What?"

"Take me along," he said shyly, mumbling and

scuffing his feet on the carpet.

"What?"

"Let me go with you," he said. I laughed, and he

jerked his head up. "I won't get in your way. I

promise. "

"Promise to stay relatively sober," I said, "and

you're welcome to come along for the ride."

"How sober?"

"At least as sober as me. "

"That's no problem," he crowed. "You sure you

don't mind?"

"It's your ass, old man," I said.

"Please don't remind me," he muttered, grinning as

he stood up stiffly. "It's a lovely day, boy. Let's stop by

and pick up my barge, let the top down, and have some

fresh air and sunshine, let the four winds blow the

hospital stench and the, ah, ineffable odor of lust out of

our noses. By god, I'll even buy the gas and the

whiskey."

"What will I do for expenses?" I asked as he hobbled

toward the bathroom, but he waved his hand at me as if

to say The devil take the expenses.

While I replaced the rotor and moved our gear into

his convertible, Trahearne tried to lure Fireball, dour

with a hangover, out of the back seat, but the bulldog

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obviously intended to defend his position to the death.

Or at least until Trahearne poured a cold beer into a

rusty Hudson hubcap. Muzzle-deep in his morning

beer, Fireball ignored us as we climbed in and lowered

the top, but when we drove away, he glanced at the

locked doors of Rosie's, then followed us down the

road with a damned and determined trotting waddle, as

if he knew we had the only cold Sunday-morning

hangover beers in Northern California, as if he intended to fetch the Caddy by a rear tire and shake them loose. I slowed down to keep an eye on him.

"Dumb bastard's bound to quit," Trahearne said

after we had driven nearly half a mile.

Maybe that's the definition of dumb bastards: they

never quit. After another two hundred yards, I stopped

the car to we.it for the dog. He showed up petulant and

thirsty. Trahearne opened his door, let him in, and gave

him a beer. Fireball turned up his nose at it and

scrambled into the back seat, where he sat with a great

deal of dignity, waiting like a stuffy millionaire for the

help to drive on. I did. His jowls quivered in the

slipstream, and he seemed to enjoy the sunlight and the

Sunday drive.

"All he needs is a cigar," Trahearne grumbled. I

handed him the ones I had lifted from poor Albert, but

he kept them for himself. "What a lark!" he shouted as

he fired up a fog and settled back to enjoy the ride.

"What a fucking lark!"

Outside of San Rafael, I had to brake hard to avoid a

gaudy van as it cut across three lanes of traffic toward

an exit. Trahearne flinched, then propped his haunch

higher on the pillow we had stolen from the motel.

"By god," he said, "if I were a younger man--or hell

if I were just whole-we'd run those punks down and

see if they couldn't learn some manners. "

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"You sure this is what you want to do, old man?" I

asked.

"Son, this is all I've ever wanted to do," he said, still

grinning through his pain. "Hit the road, right? Move it

on. And here I am wandering around America with an

alcoholic bulldog, a seedy private dick, and a working

quart of Wild Turkey." He reached into the glove box,

took a nip, and passed the quart to me. "But don't call

me old man. That's all I ask."

"Don't call me a seedy dick."

"It's too lovely a day to be crude," he said. "And if

you'll pass the painkiller instead of holding it, I'll see

about easing the pain." He hit the bottle hard when I

handed it to him.

"No thanks," I said when he offered it to me again.

"Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?"

"We're in this together, aren't we?"

"What were you doing on the road?" I asked.

"Looking for your runaway wife?"

"She hadn't run away," he said. "Like most artists,

Melinda needs a change of scene occasionally-fresh

vistas and all that-a chance to be alone, to be

anonymous, to see the world with an eye uncluttered by

companionship. My god, I understand. If I can't

understand that, who can? I need the same things

myself. Luckily, in this marriage there's plenty of room

for that sort of freedom, in this marriage, unlike my

first, my wife and I aren't completely dependent upon

each other .. " Then he paused. "Goddamned Catherine.

I divorced her, but I can't seem to get her off my back. I

think she had some insane idea that Melinda had run

away, which I'm sure delighted her no end, and that I

was searching for her with murder on my mind. Or

something equally melodramatic. She thought she

could save me by sending you to find me. Or something

like that. I don't know. Damn it, I was married to the

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woman--saddled by the woman-for more than twenty

years, and I still don't have any idea what goes on in her

mind. I wouldn't be surprised to discover that she had

hired you to have me shot in the ass."

"Pretty slick, the way I handled it, right?"

"Don't make jokes about Catherine," he said,

grinning, "she's great at arranging things. She arranged

my life for years." He was telling me something more

than I had asked, but I had no idea what. "You're not

married, are you?"

"Never have been."

"I thought not," he said. "You're not complex

enough to survive it."

"That's what I always said."

After a long pause as. he watched the frail monuments of apartment complexes soar past the moving freeway, he asked, "Do you mind if I ask you a

question?"

"Nope;"

"Where the hell are we going?" he asked, then

laughed wildly.

When he stopped, I told him what I had found out

about Betty Sue Flowers, what I planned to do, and

where I meant to look, shouting above the road noise

until we kicked off into the windy, blue space of the

Golden Gate. As I talked, Traheame drank, and as we

crossed the bridge, he stopped listening, thinking, I

suppose, of the young widow. He stared at the bottle,

clutched in his hand like a grenade; then frowned, the

feathers on his lark already saddly ruffled.

In the back seat, the bulldog hunkered like a heathen

idol, some magical toad with a ruby as large as a

clenched fist in his head, glowing through his stoic eyes,

an inscrutable snicker mystic upon his face.

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7 ••••

THEY SAY THE GODS WATCH OVER FOOLS AND DRUNKssurely Trahearne and I qualified-and whoever they are, they're right too often for comfort.

Once we were downtown, we stopped at a quiet bar,

and I called every dope dealer, police officer, and old

girl friend I knew. They gave me some names and

numbers, all of them absolutely useless. How was I

supposed to know that every porno kingpin and czar in

the city spent Sunday afternoons in religious retreats,

consciousness-raising sessions, or est seminars? Out of

boredom and hoping to stay sober, I hit the bars and

theatres around Broadway and found a bored college

student taking tickets. He knew a sociology professor

who knew more about pornographic movies than either

the Legion of Decency or the Mafia.

The professor was home on Sunday afternoon like

any good citizen, watching an old silent porno flick

about a young fellow who is fooled by two young girls

at the beach into fucking a goat through a knothole in a

fence. Several mont-hs later, the girls con him out of his

walking-around money when one of them slips a pillow

under her old-fashioned bathing suit and accuses him of

having fathered it.

"I'll be damned," Trahearne whispered as he wrig-

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gled on the hard metal folding chair. "That's almost

funny ."

"Almost?" Professor Richter said, glancing down his

sharp nose. "Almost?" he repeated with the proprietary air of someone who had written, directed, and starred in the movie. He did resemble the young

protagonist. "It's hilarious!" he screeched. "And that is

the major problem of modern pornography: it's too

serious. With minor exceptions, of course. Usually,

when it attempts humor the modern pornographic film

tries for the lowest level, and when it succeeds,

however slightly, as in the case of Deep Throat, they

have a national hit on their hands," he said gravely.

"It's the same in all the arts: as technology advances,

humor declines. The limits and definitions of art

disappear, then the art is forced to satirize itself too

earnestly, and the visual arts become literary, and that,

my friends, is the very first sign of cultural degeneracy." Then he slapped his slender, dusty hands together lightly, lifted the corners of his mouth, and added,

"Don't you agree?"

He had the glittering eyes and pained smile of a