Fireball must have been accustomed to Rosie’s outbursts. He slunk away without glancing back, not hurrying exactly, but not waiting around either. At the corner of the building, he stumbled over the black tomcat, who was curled asleep in the deep grass below the eaves, and they had a brief but decisive and probably familiar encounter, then went their separate ways, the cat beneath the building, and Fireball right back to his place in the sunshine warming the steps. As he lay down, he gave Rosie one slow glance, then shut his eyes, sighing like an old husband saddled with a mad wife. But Rosie was watching the breeze weave through the hillside grass.

“How about another beer?” I asked.

“I’d like that just fine,” she answered without turning. Sadness softened her nasal twang, that ubiquitous accent that had drifted out of the Appalachian hills and hollows, across the southern plains, across the southwestern deserts, insinuating itself all the way to the golden hills of California. But somewhere along the way, Rosie had picked up a gentler accent too, a fragrant voice more suited to whisper throaty, romantic words like wisteria, or humid phrases like honeysuckle vine, her voice for gentleman callers. “Just fine,” she repeated. Even little displaced Okie girls grow up longing to be gone with some far better wind than that hot, cutting, dusty bite that’s blowing their daddy’s crops to hell and gone. I went to get her a beer, wishing it could be something finer.

“It was the damndest thing,” she said when I came back, “when I was looking for Betty Sue over there.” Rosie still stood upright, her wrists cocked on her hips, still stared southwest across the gently rounded hills toward the cold, foggy waters of the Bay. “I never had no idea there’d be so many folks lookin’ for their kids. Musta been a hundred.or more walkin’ up and down too, holding out their pictures to any dirty hippie that would look at it. Some of the nicest folks you’d ever hope to meet, too, some of them really well-off. But, you know, not a single one of them had the slightest idea how come their kids run off. Not a one. And the kids we asked why, they didn’t seem to know either. Oh, they had a buncha crap to say, but it sounded like television to me. They didn’t even know what they were doing there. Damndest mess I ever did see, you know.”

“I know,” I said.

And in my own way I did, even though I had no children to run away. In the late ‘60’s, when I came back from Vietnam in irons, in order to stay out of Leavenworth I spent the last two years of my enlistment as a domestic spy for the Army, sneaking around the radical meetings in Boulder, Colorado, and when I got out, after a brief tour as a sports reporter, I headed for San Francisco to enjoy the dope and the good times on my own time. But I was too late, too tired to leave, too lazy to work, too old and mean to be a flower child. I found a profession, of a sort, though, finding runaways. For a few years, Haight-Ashbury was a gold mine, until I found one I couldn’t bear. A fourteen-year-old boy decomposing into the floorboards of a crash pad off Castro Street, forty-seven stab wounds in his face, hands, and chest. The television crew beat the police to the body, and none of it was any fun at all. Not anymore. I knew. I had seen Rosie in her best double-knit slack suit and a pair of scuffed flats wandering those hills, staring into each dirty face that came down the street, then back into the photograph in her hand, just to be sure that it wasn’t her baby girl hiding behind lank hair, love beads, a bruised mouth, and broken eyes.

“It’s been so long,” I said to Rosie, “so long. Why start looking again now?”

“She’s all I got left, son,” she answered softly. “The last child, the only one I ain’t seen in a coffin. Lonnie got blown up in Vietnam right after she run off, and . Buddy, he got run over by a dune buggy down at Pismo Beach last summer. Betty Sue’s all I got left, you see.”

“Where’s their daddy?” I asked, then wished I hadn’t.

“Their daddy? Their wonderful, handsome, talented daddy?” she said, giving me another hard, accusing look. “Last I heard he was down in Bakersfield sellin’ aluminum cookware on time to widow-wimmen.” She let that stand for a moment, then added, “I run the worthless bastard off when Betty Sue was a junior in high school.”

“You mind if I ask why?”

“He thought he was Johnny Cash,” she said, and stopped as if that explained it all. “Damn fool.” “I’m not sure I understand.”

“Ever’ other year, he’d get drunk and clean out the bank account and take off for Nashville to find out if he could make the big time as a singing star. Only thing the damned fool ever found out was how long my money would last, then he’d drag-ass home, grinnin’ like an egg-suckin’ dog. Last time he done that, he showed up and found himself divorced and slapped in jail for nonsupport. That’s the last I seen of him,” she said with a grin. “He was sure enough a good-lookin’ devil, but like my daddy told me when I married him, he’s as worthless as tits on a boar hog.”

“He’s never heard from Betty Sue either?”

“Not that I know of,” Rosie said. “Betty Sue was always stuck on her daddy, but Jimmy Joe was stuck on himself and he did favor the boys too much, so I don’t know if she ever forgave him for that, but I think he’d told me if he heard from her. He knows I been lookin’ for her, and he’s plumb scared I’ll dun him for all that back support, so I think he’d mentioned it.” Then she paused and looked down at me. “So what do you

think?

“You want the truth?”

“Not a bit of it, son. I want you to spend a few days lookin for my baby girl,” she said, then handed me a wad of bills that had been clutched in her fist all this time. “Just till the big fella gets out of the hospital,

that’s all.”

“It’s a waste of my time,” I said trying to hand the sodden bills back to her, “and your money.”

“It’s my money,” she said pertly. “Ain’t it good enough to buy your time?”

“What if she doesn’t want to be found?”

“Did that big fella ask you to come huntin’ for him?” she asked.

“She might be dead, you know,” I said, ignoring the point she had made. “Have you thought of that?”

“Not a day goes by, son, that I don’t think of that,” she answered. “But I’m her mother, and in my heart I know she’s alive somewhere.”

Since I had never found any way to argue with maternal mysticism, I shook my head and went over to the El Camino for my note-and receipt books, carrying the wad of bills carefully, as if the money were a bomb. Then I went back, asked questions, took notes, and counted the money—eighty-seven dollars.

Rosie gave me the name of the boy mend, who was a lawyer over in Petaluma now, Betty Sue’s favorite high school teacher, who still taught drama in Sonoma, and her best girl friend, who had married a boy from Santa Rosa, named Whitfield, divorced him and married a Jewish boy from Los Gatos, named Greenburg or Goldstein, Rosie wasn’t sure, divorced him, and was supposed to be going to graduate school down at Stanford. Details, details, details. Then I asked what sort of girl Betty Sue had been.

“You’ll see,” she answered cryptically, “when you talk to folks. I’ll let you find out for yourself.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “Why did she run away?”

After a few moments thought, Rosie said, “For a long time I blamed myself, but I don’t now.”

“For what?”

“I live in a trailer house behind here,” she said, “and one time after I divorced Jimmy Joe, Betty Sue found me in bed with a man. She took it pretty hard, but I don’t think that’s why she run off anymore. And sometimes I used to think she run off because she thought she was too good to live behind a beer joint.”

“Did the two of you have a fight before she left?”

“We didn’t have fights,” Rosie said proudly. “No-thin’ to fight about. Betty Sue did as she pleased, ever since she was a little girl, and I let her ‘cause she was such a good little girl.”

“Could she have been pregnant?”

“She could have. But I don’t think she would have run away for that,” Rosie said. “But then, I don’t know.” Then, in a shamed voice, she added, “We weren’t close. Not like I was to my momma. I had to run the place ‘cause Jimmy Joe wouldn’t, most of the time, and when he did, he’d give away more beer than he sold. Somebody had to make a living, to run things.” Then she paused again. “I guess I still blame myself but I don’t know what for anymore. Maybe I blame her too, still. She always wanted more than we had. She never said anything—she was a sweet child—but I could tell she wanted more. I just never knew what it was she wanted more of. If you find her, maybe she’ll be able to tell me.”

“If I find her,” I said, then handed her a receipt for the eighty-seven dollars.

“Is that enough?” Rosie asked. “I didn’t get a chance to count it.”

“That’s plenty.”

“You give me a bill if it’s more, you hear,” she commanded.

“It’s already too much,” I said. “I’ll talk to this Albert Griffith over in Petaluma and this Mr. Gleeson here, and see if I can get in touch with Peggy Bain, then I’ll bring back your change. But I’m telling you up front, it’s a waste of money.”

“Fair enough,” she said, then glanced at the receipt again. “What’s that name? Sughrue?”

“Right.”

“My momma had some cousins back in Oklahoma, lived down around Altus, I think, name of Sughrue,” she asked. “You got any kin down that way?”

“l got kin all over Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas,” I admitted.

“Hell, we’re probably cousins,” she said, then stuck out her hand.

“Could be,” I said, then shook her firm, friendly hand.

“Folks don’t understand about kinfolks anymore,” she said.

“World’s too big for that,” I said. “I guess I’d best head for town to see if my other client is still alive and kicking.”

“Want a road beer?”

“Sure,” I said, then went to the john to make room for it.

When I came back, she leaned over the bar to hand me the beer and said, “You’re a drinking man yourself.

“Not like I used to be.” “How come?”

“Woke up one morning in Elko, Nevada, emptying ashtrays and swabbing toilets.”

“But you didn’t quit,” she said.

“Slowed down before I had to quit,” I said. “Now I try to stay two drinks ahead of reality and three behind, a drunk.” She smiled with some sort of superior knowledge, as if she knew that the idea of having to quit drinking scared me so badly that I couldn’t even think about it. “Would you keep an eye on- Mr. Trahearne’s Cadillac?” I asked.

“Get the rotor,” she said, “and I’ll let Fireball sleep in it after I close nights.” After I removed the rotor from the distributor and closed the hood, Rosie nodded at my Montana plates and asked, “Don’t it get cold up

there?”

“When it does, I just drift south,” I said. “Must be nice.” “What’s that?”

“Goin’ where you want to,” she said softly. “I ain’t been more’n ten miles from this damned place since I went to my momma’s funeral down in Fresno eleven years ago.”

“Footloose and fancy-free ain’t always all it’s cracked up to be,” I confessed.

“Neither’s stayin’ home,” she said, then smiled, the wrinkles etched into her face softened and smoothed, some of the years of hard living fell away like happy tears. “You take care, you hear.”

“You too,” I said. “See you the first of next week.”

As I climbed into my El Camino, a carload of construction workers in dirty overalls and bright yellow hardhats skidded into a rolling stop beside me, the transmission clanking loudly as the driver jammed it into park. The men scrambled out, laughing and shouting at Rosie, goosing each other in the butts, happy in the wild freedom of quitting-time beers, and they charged into Rosie’s open arms like a flock of baby chicks.

I knew the men were probably terrible people who whistled at pretty girls, treated their wives like servants, and voted for Nixon every chance they got, but as far as I was concerned, they beat the hell out of a Volvo-load of liberals for hard work and good times.