The Last Good Kiss

by James Crumley

  “I guess the trick is to take what you get for parents and try to live with it,” I said lightly.

  “That’s very easy to say,” she said, “and often very difficult to do.” I understood that I had been rebuked for a lack of gravity. “Parents must make their children feel loved and wanted. If they do nothing else, they must do that, they owe at least that to their children,” she said with such a- brittle tone to her voice that I thought she must have been either an unwanted child or a failure as a parent. But I didn’t ask.

  “You had the body cremated?” I said.

  “Graves are too sad, don’t you think?” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said, “it’s just that her mother might not like the idea—country people are sometimes funny about cremation.”

  “It’s done,” she said sharply, “and there’s little to like or dislike about it now.”

  “Of course,” I said. “You wouldn’t have a snapshot of Betty Sue?” I asked, nodding toward a corkboard covered with photos. “Her mother might like a picture.

  “Those are photographs of those who have found otherlives after leaving,” she said. “They send them back. We take no photographs here, no reminders of how they looked here to remind them of how they came to be here.”

  “I guess I can understand that,” I said. “Do you mind if I ask why you do all this?”

  “I would mind very much,” she answered. “My motives are my own.”

  “Then I won’t ask,” I said, and she smiled at me. “I’m sure Mrs. Flowers would want me to thank you for your kindness and love, and I want to thank you for talking to me.”

  “I’m sorry to be the bearer of sad tidings,” she said, then shook my offered hand. “Once, years ago, I believed that after death we moved on into some universal consciousness, some far better life than this flawed world upon which we must somehow survive, but now I know, I understand that terrible knowledge that the dead do not rise again to walk the earth, and I take no false joy in the knowledge, I simply endure it, so I am immensely sad to tell you ofBetty Sue’s death.”

  “I guess we should be glad she had some happy times here,” I said, “since she was so unhappy everywhere else. You have a lovely place here.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “I’m a little old to give up 152

  strong drink, red meat, and women all at once, but some morning you might find me curled up on your front steps,” I added. “If I can make the hill.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment,” she said as she patted my hand. “My door is always open.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I guess I should know the date of her death, too. Her mother will want to know.”

  She told me without hesitation, and I left.

  Down the switchbacks of the dusty path, I walked without looking to either side, and as I drove down the sweeping curves of the canyon highway, I didn’t watch the sunlight dancing on the riffles, didn’t see the towers and battlements of pink rock rising above the river. I didn’t stop or think or look until I reached the Larimer County Courthouse and checked the death certificates. It was there. I cursed myself for a suspicious bastard, cursed the emptiness of my success, the long drive to California before the long drive home. Then I thought about getting drunk, a black ceremonial wake, a sodden purge.

  Thus did the good luck tum bad.

  The bad luck turning worse came later when I stumbled back to my motel room more tired than drunk, tired of trying to get drunk without success. As I reached with my key for the lock, somebody sapped me just hard enough to drop me to my knees, to bring bright flashes of darkness, stunned me long enough to hustle me soundlessly into the room, pat me down, and shove me into a comer. When I could see, I saw the man who had been inside Jackson’s office sitting relaxed in the motel chair, his large ugly associate, and another hired hand with his back against the wall as he covered me with a small silenced automatic.

  “No trouble,” I muttered.

  “You’re in no position to cause any trouble at all,” the man in the chair said mildly.

  “That’s what I meant,” I said. “Mr. Sughrue, you have to understand that I can’t allow you to treat my friends badly,” he said. “Hired help,” I said. “What?”

  “Jackson’s hired help,” I said, “not your friend.”

  “Whatever, I can’t have you shoving a gun down his throat and making empty threats,” he said.

  “Okay, I’ll give it up for Lent.”

  “I’m afraid that won’t do,” he said.

  “Listen,” I said, “if you wanted me dead, you wouldn’t be here—”

  “Don’t be so sure,” he interrupted.

  “—wouldn’t be within thirty miles of here, but if you’ve got some misguided sense of vengeance for whatever it was I was supposed to have done to Jackson, I’m willing to take my medicine,” I said as I eased up the wall, “and I’ll be as quiet as I can.”

  “How nice,” the man in the chair said.

  “Nothing personal,” Torres said softly as he eased a glove on his right hand.

  “Nothing personal,” I agreed, then took it as best I could.

  They didn’t seem to have their hearts in it, and I didn’t resist a bit, didn’t give them the slightest reason for any emotional involvement. Maybe it worked or maybe they didn’t plan to hurt me too badly from the beginning. Whatever, they didn’t do any permanent damage. No broken bones, no missing teeth, no ruptured spleen. I had forgotten, though, how much a professional beating hurts, and I was very glad when they stripped me, strapped me with tape, and sat me in the bathtub. I didn’t know why they did it, I was just glad the hard part was over. Maybe they knew what I had planned for Jackson in the motel room in Aurora.

  Before they gagged me and turned oil the cold shower, the one in charge said, “Hey, buddy, you’ve got discipline, and I like a man with discipline. You ought to come to work for me.”

  “Leave your name with the desk clerk,” I muttered.

  “Your only problem is that you think you’re both tough and smart,” he said as he patted me on the cheek, “and the truth is that you’re only tough because you’re dumb.”

  “What the hell,” I grunted. “I don’t take orders worth a damn, either.”

  “Maybe you should take up another line of work,” he crooned, as he held up the photostat of my license.

  “Is that an order?”

  “You never quit, do you?” he said laughing. “I hope this was worth it, you know, hope you found the chick you were hassling Jackson about.”

  “She’s dead,” I said. “She’s been dead for nearly five years. It was a waste of time.”

  “Too bad,” he said, then laughed again. “Just be thankful that you didn’t hurt my friend and be thankful that I’m in a good mood.”

  “I am,” I said.

  Then his associates gagged me with a sock. I was thankful that it was clean, thankful that after they left I was able to shove the water control off with my foot, and thankful too that when the maid came in the next morning, she jerked the sock out of my mouth instead of screaming. I had no idea how I might begin to explain my condition to the police. I tipped the maid and told her to tell the desk that I would be staying over another day. I needed the rest.

  11••••

  “IT’S JUST NOT TRUE,” ROSIE SAID FOR THE FIFTH TIME.

  “I’m sorry,” I repeated, “but I saw the death certificate and talked to the woman she was living with who saw the body. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is.”

  “No,” she said, and struck herself between the breasts, a hard, hollow blow that brought tears to her eyes. “Don’t you think I’d know in here if my baby girl had been dead all these years?”

  It was an early afternoon again in Rosie’s, soft, dusty shadows cool inside, and outside a balmy spring day of gentle winds and sunshine. Even the distant buzz of the traffic seemed pleasant, like the hum of bees working a field of newly blossomed clover. After a quick vi
sit to the emergency room for an X-ray and some painkiller, I had left Fort Collins and driven straight through on a diet of speed, codeine, beer, and Big Macs, and had arrived at Rosie’s dirty, unshaved, and drunk. My nerves felt as if their sheaths had been lined with grit and my guts with broken glass. Even bearing good news, I wouldn’t have looked like a messenger from the gods, and with bad tidings, I was clearly an aged delivery boy from Hell’s Western Union. I looked so bad that Oney hadn’t even asked me to sign the cast on his foot, and Lester expressed real concern. He even offered to buy me a beer. Fireball woke up long enough to slobber all over my pants, but when I didn’t give him any beer, he slunk over behind the door. Rosie wouldn’t look at me, though, not when I came in, not even when I told her the news.

  “I’m sorry,” I said again, “but she’s dead.”

  “Don’t say that anymore,” she said, not pausing as she furiously wiped off the bar one more time.

  “She is,” I said, “and you’ll have to accept it.”

  Finally, she stopped cleaning and looked at me. “Get out. Just get out.”

  “What?”

  “Out of here,” she said softly. “Get out.” “Aw now, Rosie …” Lester began, but she turned on him.

  “You just shut your damned mouth, you worthless bastard. And get out. All of you get out. Especially you.” She pointed an angry finger at my face.

  “I’ll get out, all right,” I said, then threw her eighty-seven dollars on the bar, “but you take your damned money back.”

  “You keep it,” she said, her voice as flat and hard as a stove lid. “You earned it, you keep it.”

  “You damned right I earned it,” I said as I picked it back up. “I’ve been lied to, run around, and beat up, by god, and I’ve driven four thousand goddamned miles and I’m still twelve hundred from home, and you’re damned right I earned it.”

  “Nobody asked nothin’ extra of you, so don’.t come whinin’ to me,” she said. She couldn’t look at me, though. Her eyes faded to a brittle, metallic gray, like chips of slate. “Just get the hell away from me.”

  “I’m going,” I said.

  “And take that damned worthless dog with you too,” she added. “He ain’t been worth killin’ since you brought him back.”

  I snapped my fingers and Fireball woke up and followed me out the door. Lester and Oney had beat us outside, and they were walking in aimless circles like children during a school fire drill.

  “Woman’s got a temper on her,” Lester said, shaking his head.

  “She’s got some grieving to do,” I said as I walked toward my pickup.

  “Where’re you headed?” he asked.

  “Home,” I answered, as if I knew where that was.

  Home? Home is Moody County down in South Texas, where the blackland plain washes up against the caliche hills and the lightning cuts of the arroyos in the Brasada, the brush country. But I never go there anymore. Home is my apartment on the east side of Hell-Roaring Creek, three rooms where I have to open the closets and drawers to be sure I’m in the right place. Home? Try a motel bar at eleven o’clock on a Sunday night, my silence shared by a pretty barmaid who thinks I’m a creep and some asshole in a plastic jacket who thinks I’m his buddy. Like I told Traheame, home is where you hang your hangover. For folks like me, anyway. Sometimes. Other times home is my five acres up beyond Polebridge on the North Fork, thirty-nine dirtroad miles north of Columbia Falls and the nearest bar, ten miles south of the Canadian border. There’s an unfinished cabin there, a foundation and subflooring and a rock fireplace, and wherever home might be, I had been up on the North Fork for a week or so when Trahearne found me.

  I was working. On my tan and my late afternoon buzz. It had been a dry spring, and I saw the plume of dust rising like a column of smoke ten minutes before I saw the VW beetle convertible that had caused it as it charged through the chugholes like a midget tank. It skidded into my road and braked to a stop about six inches from a stack of stripped logs. Through the beige fog of dust, Trahearne looked like a man wearing a bathtub that was too small for his butt.

  “What the hell is that?” I asked as he pried himself from behind the wheel.

  “Melinda’s idea of transportation,” he grumbled. “My car’s in the body shop.”

  “Well, listen, old man, the next time you come up the road raising a cloud of dust like that,” I said, “one. of the natives is liable to shoot holes in the poor beast until it’s dead.”

  “Spare me your country witticisms, Sughrue,” he said as he pounded dust from his khakies like a cowhand after a long drive. “Where the hell have you been?’.’ he demanded.

  “Here and there,” I said.

  “You’re the devil to find,” he said.

  “I wasn’t hiding,” I said. “You just don’t know how

  to look.”

  “Cut that crap,” he said. He hadn’t shaved or changed clothes in several days, and he still limped, but he seemed reasonably sober.

  “What’s happening?”

  “Not a thing,” he growled as he sat down on my steps and struck a kitchen match on the subftooring, “not a damned thing, and since you do nothing as well as anybody I know, I thought we could do it together. It’s not as dangerous or boring as when I do it alone.”

  “Is that a compliment or an insult?”

  “Just give me a beer and shut up,” he said, and I pitched him a can from the cooler I had been using as a footstool. “So what are you doing?” he asked out of a billow of beer foam and cigar smoke.

  “Working on my retirement home.”

  “Nice place you’ve got here,” he said, looking around.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I like it better than cheap irony.” Actually, I liked it far better than that—enough so that finishing it seemed redundant. I had built the foundation and subflooring three summers before, and had helped with the fireplace and the chimney base the summer after that. Instead of walls and a roof, though, I had erected a wooden-framed surplus officer’s tent that faced the fireplace. Beyond the missing front wall, a small pine grove caught some of the road dust, and beyond the North Fork road, a range of soft, low mountains partially blocked the western sky. To the north, Red Meadows Creek scattered across a grassy flat, then gathered itself to plunge through a large culvert and on into the spring-thaw swollen waters of the North Fork. Across the river to the east, the towering spires of the peaks in Glacier Park rose into a sky as pristinely blue as an angel’s eye. To the south, however, the view, mundane on the best of days, was sullied by the dirty haze that still roiled and billowed in the road thermals.

  “I guess it’s all right,” Traheame allowed, “but there’s no place to hang the Mondrian.” Then he chuckled and finished his beer.

  “Abstract painting gives me—”

  “Goddamn it,” he interrupted, “can I hole up here for a few days?”

  “Be my guest,” I said.

  “That’s what I had in mind,” he said. “Thanks.” He sat, waiting for me to ask him why, but when I didn’t he told me anyway. Traheame was dependable that way. “Nothing was happening at home. I couldn’t work. Not a lick. Goddamn it, sometimes I wonder if I haven’t topped the last good woman, had the last good drink out of the bottle, and written the last good line, you know, and I can’t seem to remember when it happened, can’t remember at all.” He glanced up at me, tears brimming his bleary eyes. “I can’t remember when it happened, where it went.”

  “Try to relax,” I said.

  “Don’t give me my own lines.”

  “You shouldn’t have given itto me in the first place,” I said, as I pitched him another beer.

  “You can be a real bastard, can’t you?” he muttered, his trembling fingers struggling with the pull tab.

  “Want me to open that for you, old man?”

  “I guess that’s why I came,” he said, smiling suddenly and brushing at his tears with fingers as thick as sausages, “for the quality of the sympathy. It’s got a sharp
edge on it here, Sughrue, and I can deal with that.” He sounded like a man who got more sympathy than he wanted at home, but I wasn’t about to say that. He did it for me anyway. “I just can’t stand all that damned solicitude. It’s as if she was an intensive-care nurse and I was about to croak.” Then he paused. “I always go back to work eventually,” he said. “I just haven’t found the right moment yet.”

  Since I didn’t have anything to say, he finally shut up, and we sat around enjoying the silence. A light wind rustled the lodgepole pines, clearing the road dust, and behind us the river roared mightily in its stony course. The afternoon drifted slowly toward dusk, lingering like wisps of feather ash in the air, and Fireball returned from his afternoon explorations, trotting down the road like a man returning from a serious mission. He nosed Traheame’s ankle, and the big man leapt up.

  “What the hell’s he doing here?”

  “Rosie said we had ruined him for polite company,” I answered.

  “You’ve been back to California?”

  “There and other places,” I said. “I’ve been on the road so much I think I’ve worn out my ass.”

  “Looks like you’ve done considerable damage to some other parts, too,” he said, nodding toward the yellowed bruises on my abdomen. I hadn’t been working on my tan hard enough to hide them.

  “I took second-best in a political discussion in Pinedale, Wyoming,” I lied. I still didn’t know what to think about the beating, and even if I had known, I didn’t want to talk about it.

  “Did you find Rosie’s daughter?” he asked as he rummaged through the ice for another beer.

  “Found out that she died some years ago,” I said.

  “How?”

  “Drowned after a car wreck.”

  “That’s too bad,” he said. “How’d Rosie take it?”

  “She ran me off her place,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “She didn’t believe me,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “Said she knew in her heart that her daughter was still alive,” I said. “But I checked the death certificate and talked to a woman who identified the body.”