The Last Good Kiss (20 page)

the Japanese soldiers, sick and hungry, rush out to

surrender, and the Marines slaughter them. During the

one-sided fire-fight, the young lieutenant takes a round

through the chest, and as he is dying, he tells his men

the truth, and he laughs, happy that he is dying before

the fighting ends. The war is over, he says, and the

peace is going to be hell.

In the second novel, Seadrift, the survivors of a

yachting accident, cast adrift on a small raft, work hard

to elude their rescuers. One of the survivors, a

Hollywood screenwriter, convinces the others that

surviving on their own in more important than living.

By the end of the novel, I expected them to be eaten by

a whale, but only the screenwriter dies, leaping into the

jaws of a shark, his sole regret that he doesn't have time

for a dying speech.

In the third one, Up the River, an alcoholic playwright and his pacifist son team up to wreak a terrible vengeance on a party of elk hunters who have accidentally killed the wife and mother. Even as the last of the hunters dies in a bear trap, the father and son still don't

know which hunter actually did the shooting, and they

don't even care, trapped as they are by their love of this

wild justice. The son joins the Army to go to Vietnam

and the father sobers up to write a great play about

love.

All three novels were best sellers, all made into

successful movies, and perhaps because of his reputation as a poet, well reviewed. But as far as I could tell, the books were fair hack work cluttered with literary

allusions and symbols. Fancy dreck, one unimpressed

reviewer called them. The male characters, even the

villians and cowards, cling to a macho code so blatant

that even an illiterate punk in an east L.A. pachuco

gang could understand it immediately. The female

characters serve as stage props, scenery, and victims.

And the stories were always incredible. But Traheame

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had found his niche and mined it as if it were the

mother lode instead of a side vein, and he made a great

deal of money, back in the days when money was still

real.

But maybe that was the only choice he had. When he

came back from the war, he found that his mother had

become a rich and successful writer with two novels

about the tender, touching, and comic adventures of a

young widow with an infant son as she makes her way in

the world as a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse in

western Montana. As Trahearne said, she made a

million dollars, then never wrote another word, and she

made it up out of whole cloth, since she only t.aught one

year in Cauldron Springs before she became pregnant

and lost her job. And he told me also that she didn't

bother to write the best novel of all, she lived it. When

the money came flooding in, she left Seattle and moved

back to Cauldron Springs, where she bought the hot

springs and the hotel and most of the town, and she

kept the town running through the lean years when hot

baths were no longer in vogue, when the cattle market

fluctuations ruined the ranchers. She never said an

unkind word to a soul, never mentioned the fact that

the small town had run her off, she just lived in her

house on the hill and looked down, smiling kindly,

watching the town look up.

With his first money, Traheame had built a house

across the creek from hers, and except for occ�ional

trips to Europe and a few visiting-writer jobs at

colleges, he had never lived anyplace else, but had

never written a poem set within fifty miles of Cauldron

Springs. He wrote about the things he saw on his

binges, about the road , about small towns whose future

had become hostage to freeways, about truck-stop

waitresses whose best hope is moving to Omaha or

Cheyenne, about pasts that hung around like unwelcome ghosts, about bars where the odd survivors of 107

some misunderstood disaster gathered to stare at dusty

brown photographs of themselves, to stare at their

drinks sepia in their glasses. But he never wrote about

home. As I drove him there, I had too much time to

think about all the runaways.

My El Camino was a bastard rig-half sedan, half

pickup, a half-crazy idea out of Detroit for lazy

drugstore cowboys who want to drive a pickup without

driving a pickup-and I loved it. The Indian kid up in

Ronan who had ordered it out had it set up so he could

hit the rodeo circuit as a calf-roper, which means plenty

of high-speed travel towing a heavy load. The kid got

tired of the circuit and bored with making payments,

and when I repossessed it, I bought it from the dealer

cheap. It was a beauty, fire-engine red with a black

vinyl roof and a fancy topper for the pickup bed, all

chrome and conception, but it had a heavy-duty racing

suspension, a four-speed box, and a tricked up 454-

cubic-inch engine stuffed under the hood. It was a real

beast, it could dust a Corvette on the straight, outcorner a Porsche Carrera, and I carried an honest ticket from a South Dakota radar trap for 137 mph. Of course

it got six miles to the gallon, if I was lucky, and not even

Lloyd's of London would sell me insurance, but with a

CB radio, a radar detector, and a stack of 15-grain

Desoxyn speed tabs, even a child could make time

towing Traheame's barge, and I burned up the highway.

We were in Lovelock, Nevada, before Traheame

woke up from his nap, and when I stopped for gas

there, he moved up to ride with me. He was quiet,

except for the occasional gurgle of Wild Turkey, until

we reached Elko.

"I'm tired," he said, "and my ass hurts, so let's stop

and sleep."

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"Why don't you go back to your car and sleep

there?" I said. "I've got so much speed in my system

that I couldn't sleep if you knocked me out."

"That's not my fault," he said. "Let's stop. "

" I thought you were in a hurry to get home. "

"Listen, son, I'm paying the ticket here, and when I

say stop, we stop, you understand," he said.

"Right," I said. "One minute I'm your best drinking

buddy and the next I'm your nigger for the day." I

pulled into a darkened service station and got out.

"What are you doing?" he asked. Then he followed

me to the rear of my rig to repeat the question.

"I'm taking this son of a bitch off," I grunted as I

heaved on the tow-bar nuts. "You can drive yourself

home, old man-you can go when you're ready, stop

when you want to. I quit."

It took him a bit, but he finally said it. "Hey, I'm

sorry. And hell, I'm not even sleepy anymore. "

"You sure?"

"Yeah."

"You ain't going to change your mind?"

"No," he said. "And I am sorry. Money makes a

man stupid sometimes, you know."

"I don't know yet," I said, "but when your ex-wife

pays me, I'll have a better idea."

Trahearne laughed and got me a beer out of the

cooler. "You have to learn to relax," he said, "to take it

easy . "

" I didn't want to stop," I reminded him, and he

laughed again as we drove on.

South of Arco as I watched the headlights flash

across the sagebrush and desert scrub, Trahearne woke

up again and wanted to know what Betty Sue's father

had had to say.

"I tried to tell you on the way back to San Francis-

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co," I said, "but you wanted to talk about this lady poet

I was going to love."

"She's mean, son, but she's full of life," he said, then

he laughed. "She gave you a hard time, huh?"

"You could say that."

"You don't like them mean, huh?" he said.

"Do you?"

"Sometimes," he murmured, "sometimes it helps."

"Helps what?"

"Helps me forget that I'm performing a mindless act

that I've performed too many times already," he said

quietly, "with too many different women in too many

shabby places."

"That's a different tune," I said.

"Right," he said without further explanation. "Did

her father know where she had been in Oregon?"

"No. And if he had, he wouldn't have told me

anyway."

"I sort of thought you might drive back that way," he

said.

"I thought about it," I admitted. "Then I decided to

take you home first. I'll drive down next week."

"You're going to a lot of trouble over that girl," he

said.

"Storing up my treasures in heaven," I said. "Rosie

promised me free beer for a month the next time I'm

down in Sonoma."

"Don't kid me," he said. "You're obsessed with the

girl."

"Maybe," I said. Then we passed a sign telling us

how far it was to the Craters of the Moon National

Monument. "Hey," I said, changing the subject. "We

banged the same whore at the Cottontail, you know."

"Why did you do that?" he asked.

"Thought it might give me a clue. "

"Jesus Christ," he said, "no wonder you're such a

cynic, you're a goddamned mystic in disguise." Then he

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paused. "Did she tell you anything?" he asked nervously.

"She expressed some doubts about man having

conquered the moon," I said, "but that's all she said. "

"That's the way women are, son-either too easy to

fool or too hard," he said, then sighed. I didn't ask him

what that meant. I just drove on toward the dark heaps

of the mountains beyond the desert, trying to push

Betty Sue Flowers to the back of my mind with the

gentle shove of Trahearne's whiskey.

In spite of a minor drunk, I got Trahearne home

around midnight the next evening. His house was a

long, low expanse of log and stone set over a daylight

basement that jutted into the side of a shallow hill. As

we parked in front, I saw a woman leaning in the open

doorway, silhouetted against the light, her arms and

ankles crossed patiently as if she had been waiting for

us, had stood for days like a woman on a widow's walk

staring into a dark and stormy sea.

"Home again," Trahearne said. "Every time I get

home, I'm surprised that I made it back alive. I keep

thinking I'm bound to die on the road. But I guess I'm

doomed to die in my own bed."

"I know what you mean," I said.

"You'll stay the night, of course," he said.

"If there's going to be a big domestic strife scene," I