“When did you talk to her father?” I asked, and Trahearne muttered yeah as he fondled her square shoulder through the rough wool.

Peggy’s face stiffened and she slipped her glasses back on, sighed and lifted her hands. I thought I was about to get a long question about who the hell I was to ask about Betty Sue, but she turned to Trahearne, saying, “Hey, man, I ain’t into starfucking, okay? See that lady over by the back door? The one with the scarf around her head and all that heavy metal hanging off her neck? That’s where your action is, man, okay?” Then she lifted his large hand off her shoulder by the fingers, dangling it as if it were a dead crab, and dropped it in his lap.

“Excuse me,” he muttered without a trace of sincerity, looking at his lap and peeking toward the back door at the same time.

“Don’t be bummed out, man,” Peggy said.

“No sweat,” he said, then slid off the bench and limped toward the house.

“What’s wrong with him?” she asked.

“Artistic temperament,” I said. “He thinks famous writers are supposed to get fucked a lot.”

“Not that, dummy,” she said. “What’s wrong with

his leg?”

“Old war wound,” I said.

“Which one?”

“Pick one,” I said, “they’re all the same.” I had been 91

trained in the right radical responses by a crew-cut first lieutenant with a text on radical responses.

“Right on, man,” she answered on cue.

“But back to Betty Sue,” I said. “How long ago did you talk to her father?”

“At least six years ago,” she said. “I know because I was still married to that redneck asshole from Santa Rosa. We were down in Bakersfield on some kind of United Farmworkers blast, and I saw Betty Sue’s daddy’s name in the paper. He was playing at a place called the Kicker, which I assumed was short for Shitkicker, so a bunch of us got high and went out to test the rednecks. Of course, we took two of the biggest hippies in the world, two logger kids from up around Weed. We wanted to look back to see how the other

half lives.”

“How were they doing?”

“Just like you’d expect, man, living high, wide, and handsome in Bakersfield,” she answered, grinning. “But old man Flowers, he was one cool dude.”

“How’s that?”

“Singing in the band, running the bar, and dealing nose candy like a bandit,” she said. “Cocaine?”

“Nothing else makes you feel so good,” she said. “At first we thought he was bragging to impress the hippies—you know how straight people do—talking about selling coke to all the big names playing around Bakersfield, but after the second set, he took us back to his office, and we did a ton and bought five grams. Good stuff and fairly cheap.”

“And you talked about Betty Sue,” I said, trying to bring her back from her cocaine memories. And mine too.

“Right. I asked if he’d heard from her, and he said she’d called once, a year, maybe two years before, asking for money to split from the commune scene.

Probably one of your typical fascist hippie scenes, you know, man.”

“But you don’t remember the name?”

“Like I said, man, Sun-something,” she said, then paused to glance up at me. “You looking for her because she’s in trouble?”

“No, not that,” I said, then realized that after the film I didn’t know why I was looking for Betty Sue anymore. “I stumbled into her mother, and she hired me to look around for a few days,” I said.

“Sorry, but I can’t help.”

“That’s okay,” I said, “she’s been gone too long anyway.”

“Just barely long enough,” Peggy whispered, looking down, all the stoned laughter gone now.

Behind her, the clouds surrendered their last crimson streaks to a soft, foggy gray. A single tall evergreen tilted against the falling sky. Behind me, the party began to rumble like thunder. Peggy relit the hash pipe, and this time I accepted it from her. We shared the smoke as the evening winds rose off the cold sea, rose up the wooded ridges, and herded the party inside, people muttering thin complaints like little children called from play to the fuzzy dreams of their early beds. The plate-glass windows along the back of the house reflected the last vestiges of the sunset, and beyond, like a double exposure, the party trundled silently onward, mouths opening, wounds without sound, gestures without meaning. Beside a doorway against the opposite wall, Traheame stared sadly at the sunset.

“What else can I tell you, man?” Peggy asked when the pipe had gone out.

“I don’t know,” I said, then moved around the table to sit beside her, close but not too close, my fingers locked behind my head as I leaned against the littered table. “I just don’t know,” I said as I tried to see the ocean swells and the evening fog below the wide and empty sky being overcome by a nascent darkness. “Maybe you could just tell me about her,” I said. “All about her.”

“That’s too much,” she said.

“Just barely enough.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Tell me what she looked like in the sixth grade with pigtails and elbows and knees, or tell me—”

”I’ll be damned,” she interrupted. “I’ll just be damned.”

“Why?”

“You’ve never met her, right?” “Right. Why?”

“I can tell by the way you’re talking,” she said, “that you’re stuck on her.”

“It’s a professional hazard,” I said, trying to wriggle out of it. “I get stuck on everybody I hunt for. They stop being pictures and words and become people, that’s all.” I nipped at my drink to ease the dry bite of the hashish. “Sometimes the people I think I’m hunting for don’t turn out to be the people I find,” I babbled. “Or something like that.”

“Cut the bullshit, man,” she said. “You’re stuck on her. I never met a man who wasn’t. Goddammit, she could do a lot of things well, but nothing better than

that.” “What?”

“Getting men stuck on her—she did that best of all. They used to come for miles around just to sit at the queen’s feet, just to touch her hem—oh, hell, that’s not

fair.” “What?”

“She just never found anybody as good as she was,” Peggy said, then picked up a wine glass in her stubby fingers. “She was the most beautiful woman in the world and she was only a girl—just like me, man, just a little high school kid from Sonoma, but she was so beautiful, a beautiful, lonely lady, lonely because nobody was good enough for her.”

“Stuck up?”

“Not a bit of it, man,” she said, “or.why would she like me? Listen, man, I spent my school years watching pretty girls try to be my friends so they’d look good standing next to me, but Betty Sue, she didn’t care about that, she was my friend, and better-looking than the whole bunch of them, and smarter and nicer—the whole bit.”

“You’ve thought about her some?”

“Not a day goes by, man, that I don’t.”

“I see.”

“You don’t see shit, man,” she said quietly. “I loved her, you see, loved her. I didn’t know what it was all about until I had survived two nightmare marriages, but since then I’ve found out, and I loved her. When she ran away, I cried my eyes out, man, cried myself blind. Before that, I thought that was a cliche, but when she left, I wept until I couldn’t see.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“I hated her too,” she confessed, “but that was my fault. I lined up with the smitten swains but didn’t know what I was doing for years. And hell, if she was here tonight, you and I could stand around with our tongues out.” Then she tried to laugh as she socked me on the arm. “Lined up to meet the lady.”

“I never stand in line for anything,” I said lightly.

“This is a lady you’d kill for a chance just to stand in line,” she said with a sad smile. “Or something like that. That didn’t make sense, did it?”

“I know what you meant,” I said. “Thanks for your trouble.”

“No trouble, man,” she said. “I’m like this all the time now. And when I finish law school, I’m gonna make the world pay for it.”

Since it was the first happy thing I had heard her say, I wished her well and thanked her again. Then I wandered toward the far side of the yard to find a bush to water.

Betty Sue Flowers. I had talked to three people but hadn’t found out anything worth knowing, except that everybody who knew her was stuck on her still. Maybe I was too. Maybe I didn’t have any choice in the matter any more. But I had to make up my mind. Her daddy lived down in Bakersfield, Randall Jackson might still be in Denver, and the remains of the commune were in southern Oregon—long trips in three different directions, and none of them on the way to Montana. Rosie’s eighty-seven dollars was getting a workout, and I was getting nowhere, but that’s always where I knew this one was heading anyway. So I shook it off and headed back to the party.

When I walked through the kitchen, Traheame was leaning against the wall beside the lady with the chains, offering her the slug they had removed from his hip, saying, “You charming little devil, you, I’d like you to have this as a good-luck piece.” He tickled her under the chin.

“Why don’t you lick her on the arm,” I said, but they both ignored me. She giggled and accepted the good-luck gift, and Trahearne lifted her hand to his lips. As I tried to walk past, he grabbed my neck with a meaty hand and hugged me toward him, his huge face rubbery and flushed with the whiskey, hanging over mine like something butchered in a nightmare.

“And what did the little dyke have to say?” he asked.

“Nothing I didn’t already know,” I said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

“The party’s just getting interesting.” He leered at the chained lady, sloshed whiskey into my glass, and patted my shoulder. “Hang around,” he said, gathering

the lady with silken clinks beneath his arm and leading her into the twinkling night.

“Have a good time,” I said. “Have a hell of a good time.”

“You’ve got to learn to relax,” he advised over his shoulder, “learn to have a good time.”

Ah, yes, the good times. The parties that last forever, the whiskey bottle that never runs dry, the recreational drugs. Strange ladies draped in denim and satin, in silver and hammered gold. Ah, yes, the easy life, unencumbered by families or steady jobs or the knave responsibility. Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ else to lose, right, and the nightlife is the right life for me, just keep on keepin’ on. Having fun is the fifth drink in a new town or washing away a hangover with a hot shower and a cold, cold beer in a motel room or the salty road-tired taste of a’ hitch-hiking hippie-chick’s breast in the downy funk of her sleeping bag. Right on. The good times are hard times but they’re the only times I know.

The next morning, I woke up with a faceful of sunshine in the back seat of Trahearne’s convertible, sodden with dew, dogspit, and recriminations of high degree. When I sat up to look around, it looked like California, then a passing paperboy told me it was Cupertino, but that didn’t tell me anything at all. Two houses up the street, a curly-headed guy was standing in his driveway, sucking on the remains of a half-pint as he tried to dodge a barrage of kitchen utensils that flew from an unseen hand inside the house and glittering out into the morning light. He ducked a large spoon and a heavy ladle, chortled and dancing, but a potato masher caught him on the lower lip with a sudden burst of bright blood. As he started weeping, a blond woman in a housecoat rushed outside and led him back inside.

I shook my head, shared the last cold beer with Fireball, then let him out to water somebody’s lawn. As soon as he was finished, I leaned on Trahearne’s horn until he stumbled out of the house across the street, his shirt in one hand, his shoes in the other, his tail tucked between his legs.

“Damned crazy woman,” he complained as I drove away. “How was I supposed to know she wanted to wear all that goddamned junk jewelry to bed. Jesus Christ, it was like fucking in a car wreck.”

“Beats sleeping in the car,” I muttered.

“Wasn’t my fault,” he grunted as he tied his shoe. “You refused to come in the house.”

“At least you could have put the top up.”

“I did,” he said. “Twice. But you insisted on having it down, and you gave the world a forty-minute speech about sleeping under the stars to clean out your system, so I left you alone.”

“Good idea,” I said.

“You’re a surly drunk, Sughrue.”

“Surly sober, too.”

“What happened to the woman?” he asked. “What woman?” “The one with you.”

“Whatever happened,” I said, “I’m sure I enjoyed it. What did she look like?”

“Soft and furry,” he said. “She’s not dead in the trunk or something awful, is she?”

“I don’t have any idea,” I said, “and I’m not about to look before I have a drink.”

“Let’s not even act like we’re going to have breakfast,” he said, grinning. “Let’s just find the nearest

bar.”

“Then it’s off to Bakersfield,” I said. “Oh my god,” Trahearne groaned.