“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 said, “I’d just as soon drive back to Meriwether.”

Trahearne laughed loudly, breaking the quiet in the cab, and said, “Don’t worry. Melinda’s a saint. She forgives me even before I transgress. So come in and let’s have a homecoming drink.” Then he slapped me on the shoulder and climbed out, shouting, “Whiskey, woman!” His great voice echoed across the shallow valley. Across the creek, a light appeared in an upstairs window of his mother’s house, and the dark blot of a woman’s head came to the window.

“In which order?” the woman in the doorway asked, her soft, unaccented voice unhoned by even a hint of rancor.

“Order be damned,” Trahearne shouted back. “Celebrate, love, the sailor, home from the sea, the hunter home from the hill.”

“On his cliche or bearing it?” she answered happily.

As the big man limped up the redwood steps to the deck, I followed with his suitcases and my duffle like some faithful native bearer. –

“Who’s that behind you?” his wife asked. “Gunga Din?”

“Come, Gunga Din, you swine, sahib needs water for the whiskey,” he said as he came back to help me with the bags.

“Thanks,” I said, then paused on the steps to ease the amphetamine trembles in my legs. Traheame and his wife embraced in the doorway as she fondly murmured you maniac, and she chuckled as she led him through the doorway. In the silence, the creek whispered in its rocky bed, and the face at the far window seemed to be staring at me. I crept up the stairs in silent guilt, away from the face.

By the time I reached the doorway, which opened directly into a living room as big as a house, Trahearne had fallen into a huge leather lounge chair and propped up his feet. His wife was behind a small bar, rattling ice cubes. Across the room, in a fireplace large enough to roast a Volkswagen, three four-foot logs crackled merrily against the mountain chill. From where I stood, it looked like a cozy little fire.

“A drink, Mr. Sughrue?” Traheame’s wife asked.

“A beer, please,” I said, and she opened a bottle and poured it into an earthenware mug, then brought the drinks around, Traheame’s first, then mine.

As she handed the mug to me, she said, “I’m afraid

Traheame has the social grace of a stone. I’m Melinda Trahearne.” She held out a rough hand, which I shook as I introduced myself. “Make yourself at home,” she said, then smiled. “Walk around until your butt wakes up , then have a chair.”

“Thanks,” I said as she walked back to Traheame.

So I stood around like a knot on a log while she sat on the arm of his chair and fiddled with his sparse hair. She was so obviously pleased to see him home that I did my best not to watch them, not to overhear her whispered greetings.

I had been so wound up with Betty Sue Flowers that I hadn’t thought about what Trahearne’s second wife might look like, and even as I tried not to look at her, she seemed a rather plain woman of about thirty, not at all what I would have expected if I had thought about it.

She wasn’t ugly, just plain, and she looked as if she had just come in from a hard day’s work in the fields. Her hair was a dull shade of brown, neither dark nor light, and she wore it in a closely cropped tangle that made her nose seem too long, her mouth too wide, and her eyes set too far apart. Except for a streak of pinkish-gray clay across her forehead, her face was unpainted, and even in the soft light, her tan seemed sallow, the skin color of a convict or a barmaid. She wore a pair of baggy jeans and a loose velour sweatshirt, so I couldn’t tell about her body; she didn’t seem fat or skinny but she moved with the sort of controlled grace rich girls seem to learn as soon as they take their first steps. Her bare feet, too, were slender and elegant, well-manicured, although her hands were as rough and hard as a brick mason’s, and her eyes were an odd shade of blue-green, which might have made them striking, but they didn’t seem to match her hair or coloring.

She glanced at me, caught me watching her, and her smile was generous, her teeth as straight and even as money could buy. If her voice hadn’t been completely without accent, I might have thought that she was one of those rich East Coast girls who majored in English Lit and field hockey at one of the seven sisters. As I watched, she slipped off the arm of the chair to stand behind Trahearne, her strong hands kneading the thick muscles of his shoulders. It looked like it felt good, but he groaned.

“Enough, woman,” he said, “the cure surpasseth the disease.” Then he patted her hands to hold them still.

“Sissy,” she said, laughing as she walked over to pick up his bags. When she lifted them, heavy as they were, her shoulders didn’t dip, and she carried them toward a dark hallway as if they were empty. I knew they weren’t. As she walked away from me, the firm outlines of her hips swayed with a force of their own beneath the baggy jeans. As I turned back, I caught Trahearne watching me watch his wife.

“How long have you two been married?” I asked, then applied my mouth to a worthier project, my beer.

“Nearly three years,” Traheame answered without interest.

“Seems like a nice lady,”

“Yeah,” he answered. “A nice lady.” His voice seemed to drift away with fatigue.

“Maybe I should unhook the cars and hit the road,” I said.

“Nonsense,” Melinda said from the hallway. “You’ve been on the road too long, and I insist that you at least stay the night.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” I said, “but I don’t want to impose.”

“No imposition at all,” she said graciously. “The basement is filled with guest rooms—it’s private, quiet, and you can come and go without bothering us at.all.

There’s a wet bar, an icebox full of beer, a small kitchen, and two color televisions. You must stay.” “Well …” I said.

“Oh to hell with him,” Trahearne growled. “He’s some kind of ultimate redneck country boy, and he can’t sleep except under the stars. Besides, he’s never been married and he’s scared shitless of domestic

strife.”

“Don’t be silly,” Melinda said, then laughed. “The only strife in this household is the sound of Trahearne’s snores.” She walked over and picked.up my duffle bag. “Come on, I’ll show you your room.”

“And I’ll show myself to bed,” Trahearne said as he stood up. “Good night, C.W., and all that social grace crap,” he added, then lumbered toward the hallway like a wounded bear.

“In the morning,” I said, then followed his wife through the large, open kitchen to the stairway.

Downstairs, a large room with full-length glass walls on the daylight side filled most of the basement, and the bedrooms lay down a hallway that followed the track of the upstairs hall. Melinda carried my bag to a small bedroom beside the bathroom, then led me back to the game room to show me the bar and the small kitchen.

“Please make yourself at home here,” she said. “You’ll find everything you need for breakfast in the icebox. For lunch too. I’m sorry, but because Trahearne and I work at different hours, we only eat one formal meal at dinner. Usually around seven. Until then, I’m afraid you’ll have to fend for yourself.”

“I’ll be fine,” I said.

“I’m sure you will, Mr. Sughrue,” she said. “Bachelors always make the best houseguests. They’re more capable of fending for themselves than most married men, it seems.” She smiled slightly. “You never married?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Do you mind if I ask why not?”

“I don’t mind,” I said, “but the truth is that I don’t rightly know why not. I’ve never jumped out of an airplane on purpose. Even in jump school they had to kick me out. I guess nobody ever kicked me into marriage.”

“I’ve done some skydiving,” she said softly, “and found marriage to be just as exciting.”

“You seem to be happy,” I said.

“Yes, I am,” she said. “And as I’m sure you noticed, I’m very fond of my husband.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And he seems fond of you,” she said. “I’m pleased about that. I don’t begrudge my husband’s friends. I only hope we can be friends too.” Then she held out her hand again.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said as I shook her hand.

“Of course, if you cail me ‘ma’am’ again, I’ll have to knock the shit out of you,” she said calmly, then burst out in a fit of giggles.

“I guess I could break down and call you Miz Melinda,” I said, and we both smiled.

“That’s an improvement,” she said, then wished me pleasant dreams.

As she left me, her voice echoed in my head, words and phrases that seemed to have no meaning—“my husband” and “icebox”—but I didn’t pay any attention to myself.

The drive and the Desoxyn had left me too rattled to sleep, so I sat down in front of the television to drink beer and catch the late movies by cable from Spokane. Although they were quiet for twenty or thirty minutes, after that the Trahearnes made a great deal of commotion for a couple not engaged in domestic strife. Since I began in the business, I always did the whole number, so I had done more divorce work than I should have, more than my share back in the days when I still had a partner. I didn’t want to hear it unless I got paid for it, so I turned up the volume on the television, but I could still hear the heavy rumble of Traheame’s voice through the thick floors. Whatever he was angry about, he told her about it all the way through the second half of Johnny Guitar and through the first half of The Beast with a Thousand Eyes. I switched to whiskey, found a pack of cigarettes behind the bar, then stepped outside through the sliding glass doors. Even there, the sound of his complaints, of her lilting compliance still echoed. I went back to the movie and turned up the sound again.

Finally, it was over, and the noises changed to the groan of bedslats, the slap of flesh. That made me even sadder than the fight. I left the basement again and walked all the way out to the cars and leaned against the dew-damp fender of the El Camino. In the pasture, cattle shifted their hooves and breathed in soft, snuffling grunts, and their flat teeth ground gently against the grass. Across the creek, the other house was dark now, but I still felt the watching face, hidden behind the frail glimmer of a nightlight that glowed like a spectre beyond the black windows.

Once more, I took Betty Sue Flowers’ picture out of my pocket. I had been carrying it for over a week and hadn’t shown it to anybody but myself. In the sudden flare of a match, she looked somehow familiar, as if she were a girl I had grown up with, but as the flame died, the flickering image of the film filled my blindness. I didn’t even know why I cared about it, didn’t know what to think. I was like the rest of them now, I suspected, I wanted her to fit my image of her, wanted her back like she might have been, but I feared the truth of it was that she wanted to stay hidden, to live her own life beyond all those clutching desires. Unless she was dead, and if she was, she had already lived the life she made, as best she could. I stared at the picture in my hand, the one I couldn’t see, and saw the pictures I couldn’t look at without flinching, the pale, doughy flesh that moved with an undeniable grace, both fragile and determined, endlessly vulnerable but unharmed. Ashamed that I had been aroused, ashamed that I was ashamed, and aroused again thinking about it, I went back to the now-silent house, back to my empty bed.

Not to sleep, though, or even unpleasant dreams. I drank and smoked and watched the ceiling. When the ashtray beside the bed filled, I took it to the bathroom to empty it, and out of habit I wiped it clean. It was a lump of glazed clay, as formless as any rock, with a smooth, shallow depression in the center. As I wiped away the caked ashes, a woman’s profile came into view, a high, proud face molded into the clay, a tangle of long hair streaming away from the face, as if the woman stood in a cosmic wind. When I looked more closely, I saw what seemed to be a ring of watchers, lightly impressed eyes around the rim of the depression, staring at the woman’s face with a lust akin to hatred. Then I noticed a slim ceramic vase on the bathroom counter, which held a small bundle of straw flowers, and on the vase a series of women’s faces, their hands over their eyes, their long, tangled hair bleeding over their shoulders. The pieces must be Melinda’s, I thought, a plain woman understanding the curse of beauty, and I was impressed. The ashtray was as heavy as a stone, the vase as light as if it had been moulded from air, and the women’s faces too fragile for words.

Usually, on those sleepless nighttime trips to the bathroom, I had to take a long look at my own battered, whiskey-worn face, searching it for a glimpse of the face it might have been but for the wasted years, the bars, the long nights. But this night, I rubbed my thumb over the faces locked beneath the brown translucent glaze, all the weeping women, and I had no pity left for myself.

I had made my own bed and went to it to sleep, then to rise and do what I knew I had to do, to pay what I owed the women.