12••••

I DROVE BACK DOWN TO MERIWETHER THE NEXT DAY, AND for lack of anything better to do, I went back to work. One midnight repossession up on the reservation, some lackadaisical collection work, and a divorce case so sordid that I checked my bank account and found it still fat with Catherine Traheame’s money. I shut down the operation, closed my office, and told the answering service that I was unavailable, out of town on a big case, then I spent a few easy days and nights playing two-dollar poker and staring at the remains of my face in barroom mirrors. In the right light, I could pass for forty, though I was a couple of years younger than that. I stayed fairly sober and faintly sane, and although the highway called to me several times, I stayed in town. Then a bartender out at the Red Baron had to take off for his mother’s funeral over in Billings, so I filled in for him.

When I first moved to Meriwether, and for years before, the Red Baron had been a fine working and drinking man’s bar called the Elbow Room, the sort of place where the bartender comes out into the parking lot at seven A.M. to wake up the drunks sleeping in their cars, then helps them inside, and buys the first drink. The Elbow Room didn’t have a jukebox or a pool table or a pinball machine. Just a television set for the games and an honest shot of whiskey for the watchers. Then one summer old man Unbehagen died in his sleep a few weeks after I had come into the possession of a bundle of very hot cash, so hot nobody would claim it. So I went in with the Schaffer twins as a silent partner, and we bought the license and premises. Unfortunately, the Schaffer boys were as loud and ambitious as I was silent and outvoted. They took my favorite bar and turned it into a business, a topless-dancer, pool, and pinball success. Since I was tied to the hot money, I couldn’t even raise my voice in silent protest. I took my cut and kept my mouth shut.

On Monday nights the Baron was the scene of amateur topless dancing, feckless young ladies exposing their mediocre bodies with enthusiasm in place of talent to a horde of young men driven quite mad by the mere idea of amateurism. The middle of the week was devoted to straight semi-pro tits and ass, and the maniacs usually settled into a dull roar, broken by the occasional drunken fistfight. Friday and Saturday nights were given over to heavy metal rock or bluegrass and free-form boogie, but Sundays were, thankfully, a day of rest from the reckless abandon of entertainment. On Sunday night, the drinkers had to have their own fun, and the place was usually as quiet as a graveyard.

Catherine Trahearne could have come in on a Sunday night, but she didn’t. It had to be Monday. When she came in the vinyl-padded door that night, she looked as out of place as a chicken in church, but she walked directly to the bar and stood behind a group of flushed and shame-faced young men until they cleared a space for her. Dressed in wool and leather-—soft beige slacks, a dark cashmere pullover, and a deerskin vest—she looked even better than she had in a tennis dress. The dark umber tones of her clear skin hinted at sultry, mysterious nights, and her slim, athletic body promised to fulfill the hints. Whatever women were supposed to lose in their early fifties, she hadn’t lost it yet. Not a bit of it. A hunk of polished but uncut turquoise as large and roughly the same shape as a shark’s tooth dangled from a heavy silver chain between her breasts.

When she- sat down at the bar, she took out a cigarette, and I leaped to light it for her. She stared over my shoulder toward the stage, where Boom-Boom, our resident amateur heavy-weight, lifted her shift to reveal breasts as large and round as a bald man’s head with a screaming giggle that should have shattered glassware. As always, the crowd exploded into hoots and cheers, table-thumping fists and whistles. In her real life, Boom-Boom was an improbably demure barmaid, but on Monday nights she came out and killed them. Catherine smiled at the furor, seemingly with honest amusement. I ignored the shrill pleas of the topless dancers doubling as cocktail waitresses, ignored the bar customers, and asked her if she wanted a drink.

“What an odd way to make a living,” she said, then blew out the match before it burnt my fingers. “She’s an amateur,” I said.

“But joyously enthusiastic, don’t you think?” she said, staring into my eyes with a steady gaze that reminded me of how I had felt when she told me she had to take a shower the first time I met her. To get away from the gaze, I glanced over my shoulder. Boom-Boom was having a hell of a time, and I felt like a cretin for not having noticed before. “Actually, though, I was talking about your new line of endeavor, Mr. Sughrue.”

“Just filling in for a sick friend, Mrs. Trahearne.”

“Catherine,” she commanded softly.

“C.W.,” I said.

“What do the initials stand for?” she asked, smiling. “Chauncey Wayne,” I confessed. “C.W. will do fine,” she said, then laughed. “Would you like a drink?”

“Actually, I’m here on business,” she said. “But it could be conducted over a drink. Later, perhaps? Someplace more conducive to conversation?”

“Where are you staying?”

“The Thunderbird.”

“They’ve got a quiet piano bar,” I said, “and I could meet you around midnight. If that isn’t too late?”

“Not at all,” she said, “it’s a date.” Then she extended her slim hand. Her nails were painted a dark, dusky red that matched her lips and picked up the tones of her skin and hair. When I shook it, she held my hand and focused her bright green eyes on mine until I nearly blushed. “Trahearne is quite fond of you,” she said, “and I hope we can be friends.” I had heard that before; all Trahearne’s women wanted to be friends of mine. Catherine gave me an expensive smile and left. As she walked out, even the dumbest, drunkest of the kids turned away from Boom-Boom’s mighty breasts to watch Catherine’s delicately switching hips.

In the rosy, diffuse light of the piano bar, she looked even better. She could have passed for thirty. A great thirty. And she damn well knew it. After we had settled into a plush booth with our drinks, she went to work on me with the wise eyes, the slightly amused smile, and more random body contact than the law allows in public places.

“Thank you for coming,” she whispered.

“You said something about business,” I said nervously as I finished my drink before the cocktail waitress walked back to the bar. As much as I had enjoyed the first trip, I didn’t feel up to chasing Trahearne around

Western America just yet, and I certainly didn’t want to mess around with his ex-wife.

“Yes, I have a small complaint about how you handled the recovery of my ex-husband,” she said with mock seriousness.

“What’s that?”

“When you called from the hospital,” she said, “you told me a little white lie about Trahearne’s accident which we won’t even bother to discuss, but now I want a full report into all the lurid details of his latest odyssey.”

“Right,” I said. It seemed odd that Trahearne’s ex-wife seemed to know more about what had happened than his present wife did. I assumed that he didn’t care if I told Catherine. “What do you want to

know?”

“Everything,” she answered sweetly. “Where he went, how you found him, how he came to be wounded in the butt. All the sordid details.” She sipped her vermouth. “I’ve always wanted to know exactly what transpired on one of his trips,” she continued, “but his versions were already literature by the time he returned, and none of the other gentlemen I hired were able to either find him or provide me with the details. They seemed to lack both intelligence and imagination. Are most of the members of your profession as pedestrian as those I’ve done business with in the past?”

“This may sound strange,” I said, “but the only other private investigator I know is my ex-partner here in town, and he’s an even worse drunk than I am. I know PI’s have conventions, but I’ve never been to one. They’re all about electronics and industrial security and crap like that. I just repossess cars and chase runaways and follow cheating husbands, stuff like that.”

“You don’t sound very ambitious,” she said.

“I’m not,” I said, “not about anything. I spent nine years in the Army in three separate hitches, mostly playing football or sitting in a gym or writing sports stories for post newspapers, and I spent four years playing football for three different junior colleges under two diferent names, and I got in this business strictly by accident, so I’m not Johnny Quest or the moral arbiter of the Western world. More like a second-rate hired gun or a first-rate saddle tramp.”

“A classic underachiever?” she said.

“Classic bindle-stiff, apple-knocker, pea-pickin’ bum,” I said.

“But still you found Trahearne,” she said, “and you must tell me about it.”

As I told her what I thought she wanted to hear, she moved closer, occasionally smiled and touched my hand with her fingers, then our hips and thighs were nudging each other, and her nails drifting across my wrist. When I finished, she told me to tell the rest of it now, and she laughed and held my hand as I filled in the gaps. When I finished the second time, she hugged my arm against her breast.

“How simply delightful,” she said.

“Hey,” I said, trying to make a joke of it, “you’re going to have to turn it down a few notches.”

She didn’t play coy at all, just laughed openly, the tones ringing crystal through the cozy bar like vesper bells chiming in a pastoral dusk.

“Don’t be so serious,” she said. “I won’t attack

you.”

“Damn it,” somebody using my voice complained. I knew better than to fool around with the ex-wives of friends, and for all our troubles, Trahearne had become a friend. But I said it again anyway, “Damn it.” And Catherine lifted my hand to touch a flattened knuckle with her lips. Damned if I wasn’t as spooky as a sixteen-year-old kid as I followed her out of the lounge.

Afterward, as we lay on her motel bed, my hand resting on the taut muscles of her thigh, I asked her, “Is this what you drove down for?”

“Flew,” she said, and laughed. “I flew down by way of Seattle. I’m supposed to be visiting friends there. This is what I came for, yes, and I would have walked.”

“Why?”

“Please don’t be shocked when I tell you this,” she said, pausing to light two cigarettes, “and please remember that I might have chosen you anyway. I work like the very devil keeping this aged body intact, and I endure yearly humiliations at the hands of expensive plastic surgeons so I can enjoy my declining years. You see, I sleep with whomever pleases me” —she paused again and her voice grew hard—“especially Trahearne’s friends. Do you mind?”

“Well, it makes me feel a little like I’ve been rutting in the old man’s track,” I said, thinking about the skinny whore in the desert, “but it’s a damn fine track. So I guess I don’t mind.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I’ve only a few more years before I become withered and old—don’t interrupt me—and I have a great many lonely years to recover.”

She stopped to look at me. I watched the cigarette smoke drift across the shadowed ceiling in mare’s tails.

“You’re not curious about my motives?” she asked, her fingernails lightly plucking at the hair on my chest.

“Nope.”

“I thought detectives were endlessly curious,” she said.

“Only inthe movies.”

After another long silence, she said, “It’s odd, you know.” “What?”

“I almost never explain my actions to anyone,” she murmured, “but since you didn’t ask, I feel somehow obligated to tell you.”

“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.