“I’d appreciate that,” she said, “but you’ve already done more work than I paid for.” Down the hallway behind the living room, the squeak of springs and a series of muffled curses filled the close air. Fireball had joined the gentleman in bed, and the gentleman hadn’t enjoyed it. Rosie looked embarrassed and turned to quiet the man. When she did, she exposed a life-sized poster of Johnny Cash on the wall behind her. Then she glanced back at me. “You did more work than I paid

for, didn’t you?”

“I told you it was wasted money,” I said.

“It’s mine to waste,” she said, “and I thank you for

trying. Give me a call, collect, you hear, whatever you find in Oregon, and if you’re ever down this way, you got a place to drink where your money’s no good.”

“Sounds like heaven,” I said, and Rosie smiled.

“You taking the big fella’s car home?” She nodded over my shoulder. I had already hooked Trahearne’s Caddy to the tow bar and my El Camino.

“The big fella too,” I said.

“What’s the matter? Can’t he drive?”

“He can’t even walk yet,” I said.

“Must be nice,” Rosie murmured.

“What’s that?”

“To have enough money to hire somebody to tow you around,” she said.

“I don’t know,” I admitted, then as Rosie and I exchanged goodbyes, a bald, hairy man, his beer belly drooping over his sagging boxer shorts, wandered into the picture, demanding cold beer, scrambled eggs, and true love. Rosie asked me in for lunch, her eyes pleading for me to leave, so I did. I had to drive Trahearne home anyway.

Trahearne had made his literary reputation with six highly praised volumes of poetry, two of which had been nominated for national prizes, but he had made his fortune with three novels, the first published in 1950, the second in 1959, and the third in 1971. I had read all three, and although they were set in different places with different characters, I couldn’t keep them separate in my mind. The first one, The Last Patrol, had been set on a nameless island in the Pacific during the final week of World War II. A Marine squad had been sent on a mission behind Japanese lines to blow up a crucial bridge. Before they can make the march, though, they receive a radio signal telling them that the war is over, but the young lieutenant who is leading the patrol keeps the information to himself. At the bridge, the Japanese soldiers, sick and hungry, rush out to surrender, and the Marines slaughter them. During the one-sided fire-fight, the young lieutenant takes a round through the chest, and as he is dying, he tells his men the truth, and he laughs, happy that he is dying before the fighting ends. The war is over, he says, and the peace is going to be hell.

In the second novel, Seadrift, the survivors of a yachting accident, cast adrift on a small raft, work hard to elude their rescuers. One of the survivors, a Hollywood screenwriter, convinces the others that surviving on their own in more important than living. By the end of the novel, I expected them to be eaten by a whale, but only the screenwriter dies, leaping into the jaws of a shark, his sole regret that he doesn’t have time for a dying speech.

In the third one, Up the River, an alcoholic playwright and his pacifist son team up to wreak a terrible vengeance on a party of elk hunters who have accidentally killed the wife and mother. Even as the last of the hunters dies in a bear trap, the father and son still don’t know which hunter actually did the shooting, and they don’t even care, trapped as they are by their love of this wild justice. The son joins the Army to go to Vietnam and the father sobers up to write a great play about love.

All three novels were best sellers, all made into successful movies, and perhaps because of his reputation as a poet, well reviewed. But as far as I could tell, the books were fair hack work cluttered with literary allusions and symbols. Fancy dreck, one unimpressed reviewer called them. The male characters, even the villians and cowards, cling to a macho code so blatant that even an illiterate punk in an east L.A. pachuco gang could understand it immediately. The female characters serve as stage props, scenery, and victims. And the stories were always incredible. But Traheame had found his niche and mined it as if it were the mother lode instead of a side vein, and he made a great deal of money, back in the days when money was still real.

But maybe that was the only choice he had. When he came back from the war, he found that his mother had become a rich and successful writer with two novels about the tender, touching, and comic adventures of a young widow with an infant son as she makes her way in the world as a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse in western Montana. As Trahearne said, she made a million dollars, then never wrote another word, and she made it up out of whole cloth, since she only taught one year in Cauldron Springs before she became pregnant and lost her job. And he told me also that she didn’t bother to write the best novel of all, she lived it. When the money came flooding in, she left Seattle and moved back to Cauldron Springs, where she bought the hot springs and the hotel and most of the town, and she kept the town running through the lean years when hot baths were no longer in vogue, when the cattle market fluctuations ruined the ranchers. She never said an unkind word to a soul, never mentioned the fact that the small town had run her off, she just lived in her house on the hill and looked down, smiling kindly, watching the town look up.

With his first money, Traheame had built a house across the creek from hers, and except for occasional trips to Europe and a few visiting-writer jobs at colleges, he had never lived anyplace else, but had never written a poem set within fifty miles of Cauldron Springs. He wrote about the things he saw on his binges, about the road, about small towns whose future had become hostage to freeways, about truck-stop waitresses whose best hope is moving to Omaha or Cheyenne, about pasts that hung around like unwelcome ghosts, about bars where the odd survivors of some misunderstood disaster gathered to stare at dusty brown photographs of themselves, to stare at their drinks sepia in their glasses. But he never wrote about home. As I drove him there, I had too much time to think about all the runaways.

My El Camino was a bastard rig—half sedan, half pickup, a half-crazy idea out of Detroit for lazy drugstore cowboys who want to drive a pickup without driving a pickup—and I loved it. The Indian kid up in Ronan who had ordered it out had it set up so he could hit the rodeo circuit as a calf-roper, which means plenty of high-speed travel towing a heavy load. The kid got tired of the circuit and bored with making payments, and when I repossessed it, I bought it from the dealer cheap. It was a beauty, fire-engine red with a black vinyl roof and a fancy topper for the pickup bed, all chrome and conception, but it had a heavy-duty racing suspension, a four-speed box, and a tricked up 454-cubic-inch engine stuffed under the hood. It was a real beast, it could dust a Corvette on the straight, outcor-ner a Porsche Carrera, and I carried an honest ticket from a South Dakota radar trap for 137 mph. Of course it got six miles to the gallon, if I was lucky, and not even Lloyd’s of London would sell me insurance, but with a CB radio, a radar detector, and a stack of 15-grain Desoxyn speed tabs, even a child could make time towing Traheame’s barge, and I burned up the highway.

We were in Lovelock, Nevada, before Traheame woke up from his nap, and when I stopped for gas there, he moved up to ride with me. He was quiet, except for the occasional gurgle of Wild Turkey, until we reached Elko.

“I’m tired,” he said, “and my ass hurts, so let’s stop and sleep.”

“Why don’t you go back to your car and sleep there?” I said. “I’ve got so much speed in my system that I couldn’t sleep if you knocked me out.”

“That’s not my fault,” he said. “Let’s stop.”

“I thought you were in a hurry to get home.”

“Listen, son, I’m paying the ticket here, and when I say stop, we stop, you understand,” he said.

“Right,” I said. “One minute I’m your best drinking buddy and the next I’m your nigger for the day.” I pulled into a darkened service station and got out.

“What are you doing?” he asked. Then he followed me to the rear of my rig to repeat the question.

“I’m taking this son of a bitch off,” I grunted as I heaved on the tow-bar nuts. “You can drive yourself home, old man—you can go when you’re ready, stop when you want to. I quit.”

It took him a bit, but he finally said it. “Hey, I’m sorry. And hell, I’m not even sleepy anymore.”

“You sure?” “Yeah.”

“You ain’t going to change your mind?”

“No,” he said. “And I am sorry. Money makes a man stupid sometimes, you know.”

“I don’t know yet,” I said, “but when your ex-wife pays me, I’ll have a better idea.”

Trahearne laughed and got me a beer out of the cooler. “You have to learn to relax,” he said, “to take it easy.”

“I didn’t want to stop,” I reminded him, and he laughed again as we drove on.

South of Arco as I watched the headlights flash across the sagebrush and desert scrub, Trahearne woke up again and wanted to know what Betty Sue’s father had had to say.

“I tried to tell you on the way back to San Francisco,” I said, “but you wanted to talk about this lady poet I was going to love.”

“She’s mean, son, but she’s full of life,” he said, then he laughed. “She gave you a hard time, huh?”

“You could say that.”

“You don’t like them mean, huh?” he said.

“Do you?”

“Sometimes,” he murmured, “sometimes it helps.” “Helps what?”

“Helps me forget that I’m performing a mindless act that I’ve performed too many times already,” he said quietly, “with too many different women in too many shabby places.”

“That’s a different tune,” I said.

“Right,” he said without further explanation. “Did her father know where she had been in Oregon?”

“No. And if he had, he wouldn’t have told me anyway.”

“I sort ofthought you might drive back that way,” he said.

“I thought about it,” I admitted. “Then I decided to take you home first. I’ll drive down next week.”

“You’re going to a lot of trouble over that girl,” he said.

“Storing up my treasures in heaven,” I said. “Rosie promised me free beer for a month the next time I’m down in Sonoma.”

“Don’t kid me,” he said. “You’re obsessed with the girl.”

“Maybe,” I said. Then we passed a sign telling us how far it was to the Craters of the Moon National Monument. “Hey,” I said, changing the subject. “We banged the same whore at the Cottontail, you know.”

“Why did you do that?” he asked.

“Thought it might give me a clue.”

“Jesus Christ,” he said, “no wonder you’re such a cynic, you’re a goddamned mystic in disguise.” Then he paused. “Did she tell you anything?” he asked nervous-

“She expressed some doubts about man having conquered the moon,” I said, “but that’s all she said.”