“Listen,” I said, “as far as I’m concerned Betty Sue Flowers is dead. I only walked up that damned hill to be sure. If you want your mother to think you’re dead, that’s on your conscience, and if you want to act like Trahearne doesn’t know who you are, that’s between the two of you. I’m out of it. I’m going home.”

“I’ll pay anything,” Selma moaned.

“Hush,” Melinda said kindly. “It had to happen sometime. It’ll work out.” Then she looked at me. “Wait for me, please,” she said. “At the bottom of the trail. I’ve got to take Selma inside and calm her down. But please wait. I have to talk to you.”

“You’ll just tell me things I don’t want to know,” I said.

“I’ll pay!” Selma screamed. The dogs in the kennel 184

woke and began to yap, which in turn woke Fireball out of his sun-dazed stupor. He yawned, sniffed the air, then trotted over to greet me. As I scratched his head, Melinda helped Selma to her feet and led her toward the cabin. When they were inside, I headed down the

hill.

“Please wait for me,” Melinda said from the doorway. “Please.”

“All right,” I said from the edge of the clearing.

Fireball followed me down the trail, plodding steadily through sunlight and shade, his nose lifted in the morning air as if he could smell a beer.

“No drugs on the mountain,” I said to him, and he quickened his step.

At the bottom of the trail, I crossed the highway to wash my face in the river, to lave the miles away with cold water. Fireball gave me a dirty look, then lapped up a quick drink, shaking his head as if the water horrified him. I took him back across the road and gave him a beer. We had both earned one.

I woke up with the can warm in my hand in the middle of the afternoon. Melinda was sitting in the passenger seat, dressed now in hiking boots, shorts, and a tank top. It was as if she had shed her baggy clothes to show me what it was all about—long, shapely legs rippling with muscle, high, firm breasts, the sort of body men dream about.

“You were sleeping so hard, it seemed a shame to wake you up,” she said. “Selma doesn’t have any coffee, but I made you some herb tea,” she added, holding up a thermos.

“I’ll have a beer,” I said. “I don’t want to get too

healthy.”

As I rustled up a beer, she said, “Trahearne must know, then?”

“He led me right to your mother’s place, and then after Rosie hired me to find you, he encouraged me. He must have had it in mind.”

“I should have told him the truth about my … my life,” she said as she poured herself a cup of the weak tea.

“You should have told him,” I agreed. “In the course of my search, he had the wonderful chance to see your acting debut.”

She sighed. “Oh, that poor, poor man. Now he’ll never believe me.”

“About what?”

“I have to travel a lot, have to be alone, too,” she said, “and he’s convinced that I … I sleep with other men when I’m away from him.” When I didn’t say anything, she added, “And it isn’t true. He just wants it to be true. I know he does, and it doesn’t matter to me, but I don’t fool around.”

“Okay.”

“You don’t sound convinced,” she said. “I don’t care,” I said, “and it’s none of my business anyway what either of yeu do or don’t do, okay?” “You don’t even care why Betty Sue had to die, do

you?” “Nope.”

“They came looking for me,” she said, “and I had to die to make them leave me alone.”

“Randall Jackson and the Denver hoods,” I said.

“You know them?” she asked, amazed all over again.

“Intimately.”

“I was in jail,” she said defiantly, “and I …”

“I know,” I said. “You got busted for soliciting.”

“ … I lost thirty pounds in jail, a pound a day,” she continued as if she hadn’t heard me. “Selma came to the jail when I was in, and I wanted to come up here, but I had to go by Jack’s place to get some things, some books and things, and he saw me, you know, with all the fat gone, and he made me go to work for those awful people. It wasn’t like San Francisco at all—that time we were just high and having fun and making money for bread and dope—this was a business, and they made me go to the hospital to have this scar I have …made me have plastic surgery on this scar, and they spent a lot of money and they wouldn’t let me leave. You understand, don’t you?” “Right.”

“So I stole a little money from Jack’s billfold and ran up here to hide, but they came looking for me in a week or two, and I had to hide in the woods and Selma had to lie—she hates to lie, she hated lying to you before. Then later that summer her daughter drowned in the wreck, and she told the sheriff it was me, you see, and I could start over again, could act like none of it ever happened, don’t you see?” She sat the plastic thermos cup very carefully on the dash, then began to weep. “But you don’t care, do you?” She sobbed between her hands.

I had had a bellyful of weeping women. “Jesus fucking Christ!” I shouted as I threw my unfinished beer can out the open door and across the road. “Your mother paid me eighty-seven dollars to find you,” I said, “and I chased you all over the fucking country, and I don’t know if I did it for Rosie or for myself or for some idea I had of you, but I know fucking-a well that I didn’t do it for eighty-seven fucking dollars, so don’t tell me I don’t fucking care!”

“I’m sorry.” She giggled, then moved her hands and began to wipe away the tears. “I was so involved in my own problems that I forgot how hard you had worked trying to find me.”

“You didn’t know,” I said huffily.

“I understood without knowing,” she said with a smile.

“Bullshit.”

“You’re cute when you’re mad, C.W.,” she said.

I got out of the pickup and kicked a few rocks around, raising a cloud of dust that nearly choked me.

“So what now?” I said as I climbed back into my seat.

“I truly don’t know,” she said. “I’ll have to think about it for a few days. That was always the trouble before—I did so many things without thinking about them first.”

“In spite ofwhat I said up there, I’ve got to tell your mother something.”

“Will you wait a few days?” she asked. “Just until I’ve straightened this out with Trahearne?”

“I’ve got to call your mother tomorrow,” I said.

“All right, I’ll call Trahearne tonight,” she said. “I’d

rather not do it by telephone, but if he already knows about me, I can tell what he thinks about it. Come back tomorrow. I’ll meet you down here about ten. I think it might be best if you didn’t come up the hill …you know, for Selma’s sake. She’s taken this whole thing so hard. She buried her daughter with my name, and of all the things I owe her, I owe her most for that. She gave me my life back, you see, and that’s the most one person can do for another. That’s how I feel about Trahearne sometimes—that I can give him his life back, take it back from those two awful women who have held him captive so long. You’ve seen them—you understand.”

“Maybe I do,” I said, “and maybe I don’t. It doesn’t matter. I would like to know one thing, though.”

“I thought you didn’t want to know anything,” she said with a gentle smile. I was amazed that I hadn’t noticed how beautiful her smile was before. “I thought you had no curiosity at all.”

“Don’t be a smartass,” I said. “Just tell me why you ran away in the first place.”

“Well, you don’t know everything, do you?” “Nope.”

“I was pregnant,” she said, “and my boy friend took me to San Francisco for an abortion. On the way out of the hotel where they did it, I started hemorrhaging— it’s an old story, you know, so old it’s almost trite until it happens to you—and he ran off and left me bleeding to death on the emergency room steps of the Franklin Hospital. He dumped me there and ran away—”

“Albert Griffith?” I interrupted.

“You know some things, don’t you?” she said. “They stopped the bleeding all right, but I came down with a raging case of septicemia, and they had to do a hysterectomy to stop the infection. Pretty, isn’t it? I had left my purse in Albert’s car and lied about my name and my age, so nobody knew. I was afraid for anybody to know, ashamed, too, I guess. Anyway, by the time I was released from the hospital, I had been gone too long to go home, or so I thought, so I lived on the streets in the Haight until Jack took me in, and then so many other things happened that I just couldn’t face going home at all. Not even when I heard about Bubba getting killed in Viet Nam.”

“Is that your brother Lonnie?”

“Yes.”

“Your little brother’s dead too,” I said.

“I know,” she whispered. “I sneak back every now and again to hang around Sonoma, and I heard about it. I nearly went home then, too.”

“You should have gone home in the first place,” I said. “A lot of grief could have been spared a lot of folks, including you.”

“I know,” she said, “god, I know, but my daddy was gone and he didn’t care, I called him once and he didn’t care, and my momma was a slut …”

– “Hey,” I said.

She looked at me. “Guess I’ve no right to judge, huh?”

“Not even if you had lived the life of a vestal virgin,” I said.

“You’re right,” she sighed. “It seemed so important back then. Momma tried to act like it didn’t mean anything when she divorced Daddy, but I could tell it did. She got to drinking a lot and bringing men into the trailer house, and I’d lie back there in the back bedroom and listen to them laughing and banging around and tell myself that if she’d stop that, my daddy would come home, which was silly, since he never paid any attention to me when he was there. About the nine hundredth time he looked at me like a stranger when I was a little girl, I decided I had been adopted. I guess every little kid does that, huh?”

“It’s an easy way out,” I said.

“And it was all so long ago,” she whispered.

“Now it’s all come back.”

“I think I’m glad, you know,” she said as she patted me on the thigh. “I really think I’m glad it’s all over.” “Me too.”

“You drove straight through from Montana, didn’t

you?” “Right.”

“You must be exhausted,” she said, then moved her hand from my thigh to the back of my neck. “Go check into a motel and sleep,” she said, “then come back tomorrow about ten. I’ll meet you down here. Is that all

right?”

I yawned. “It’s fine.”

“You’ve been so kind to me,” she said, “kind to everybody—Trahearne and Selma and my momma. It’s always like that, you know, for me. Every time things look bad somebody shows up in my life, and they’re so much kinder than I deserve—like you and Selma and Trahearne, even poor old Jack in his own twisted way.”

“Maybe you deserve it,” I said.

“Nobody deserves it,” she said, “it just happens. I’ll see you tomorrow.” Then she leaned over to kiss me lightly on the corner of my mouth, a sisterly kiss, but her breath smelled of herbs and dried flowers and spring water, fresh and cool. “About ten,” she whispered, and I kissed her on the mouth. Her lips parted slightly, our tongues touched for a brief electric moment, and her eyes widened, darkened to a stormy blue. “I’m sorry,” she said, apologizing for something she hadn’t done, something she wouldn’t do, then she climbed out of the pickup, snapped her fingers at Fireball, who lumbered out from under the VW, and they pranced up the trail.

In that sudden sleepy moment, it became clear to me that, like it or not, I was standing in the lady’s line and I didn’t care about my position. She left me breathing like a hard-run horse. As I eased back down the sweeping curves of the canyon highway, I told myself that if I didn’t watch out, Trahearne’s women were either going to break my heart or change my life or be the death of me. I also told myself to drive north toward home as fast as the El Camino would go, but I didn’t. I had a few drinks instead of lunch, but the taste of her mouth remained in mine like a sweet communion cracker unbroken before the bitter wine. In the middle of the afternoon, I checked into a Holiday Inn, checked out into a dreamless sleep, a wake-up call waiting like a death sentence.