The Last Good Kiss Read online

  “He musta got tired of lookin’,” Rosie said quietly, ” ‘cause he holed up here like chick come to roost.”

  “Well, if he’s only half as tired as I am, he’s plenty damn tired,” I said, “‘cause I’m worn to a frazzle. I could sleep for a week.”

  “But you probably won’t, will you?”

  “Probably not.”

  “What are you gonna do?” she asked, too casually to suit me.

  “Hang around the hospital until he gets out,” I said.

  “How long would that be?”

  “A week or so,” I said. “Depends.”

  For a few minutes we sat silently again, watching the

  soft spring sunshine spark green fire across the shallow hills, listening to the distant hum of traffic.

  “Hey,” she said suddenly, as if the idea had just come to her. “It might be that I could put you on to a piece of work while you’re hangin’ around. No sense in sittin’ idle.”

  “I usually work one thing at a time,” I said quickly. “That’s my only advantage over the big outfits.” When she didn’t say anything, I asked, “What do you have? A bundle of bad checks?”

  “Enough to paper a wall,” she said, “but that ain’t the problem.” When I didn’t ask her what the problem was, she continued. “It’s my baby girl. She run off on me, and I thought maybe you might spend a few days—whatever time you got—lookin’ around.”

  “Well, I don’t know .. . “

  “I know this place don’t look like much,” she interrupted, “but it’s free and clear and it turns a dollar now and again—”

  “It’s not that,” I interrupted her. “I just need some time off the road.”

  “You wait right here,” she said as if she hadn’t heard me, then flounced back into the bar.

  As I waited, what had earlier seemed a fine spring haze clearly became Bay Area smog, which reminded me that this wasn’t some country beer joint down in Texas on a spring afternoon in the ‘50’s. The maze of San Francisco lay just across the bay, a haven for runaways, and although the ‘60’s were dead and gone too, young girls still ran there to hide. That hadn’t changed, though everything else had. The flower children had gone sour and commercial or middle-class, and even the enemy was tired and broken, exiled to San Clemente. I didn’t want to hear what Rosie had to tell me—I didn’t want to stare at another picture of a lost child. Whichever wise Greek said that you can’t step into the same river twice was right, even though he forgot to mention that nine times out of ten, you’ll get your feet wet. Change is the rule. You can’t go home again even if you stay there, and now that everyplace is the same, there’s no place to run. But that doesn’t keep some of them from trying. And that didn’t stop Rosie either.

  “Here,” she said as she sat down and handed me a photograph. “Look here.”

  I glanced at the picture just long enough to see that it was a wallet-sized school photograph of a fairly pretty girl. Then I looked back and saw the dates: 1964-65.

  “She was a pretty girl,” I said as I tried to hand the picture back to Rosie.

  “Smart as a whip, too,” she answered, holding her hands between her knees.

  I had to look at the picture again. It could have been a picture from my high school days in the ‘5O’s. The face was pleasant, no more, though she seemed to have good bones beneath a soft layer of baby fat. The wide mouth seemed pinched, almost sullen, and the thick cascade of blond hair looked fake. The nose was straight but slightly too bulbous at the end to be pretty. Only the eyes were striking, darkly fired with anger and resentment, a redneck rage more suited to a thinner face. She wore an old-fashioned, high-collared lace blouse with a black ribbon threaded through the collar to hold a small cameo to her throat. As I looked at the face again, the blouse seemed oddly defiant, the face so determined not to be laughed at that it seemed sad, too sad.

  I knew the story: a nearly pretty girl, but without the money for the right clothes orbraces or confidence, the sort of young girl who either lurked about the fringes of the richer, more popular girls, and was thought pushy for her efforts, or who stood alone and avoided the high school crowd, and for her lonely troubles was thought stuck-up, stuck on herself without good reason. Ah, the sad machinations of high school. As I stared at the picture, I was once again pleased that I had missed most of those troubles. I lived in the country and worked, and although I hadn’t exactly planned it that way, I had joined the Army three weeks before I was supposed to graduate. Somehow the GED I had earned in the Army seemed cleaner than a high school degree. Less sad, somehow.

  “How long ago did she take off?” I asked Rosie, the photograph dangling from my fingers like a slice of dead skin.

  “Ten years ago come May,” she answered as calmly as if she had said a week ago come Sunday.

  “And you haven’t heard from her since?” I asked. “Not a single solitary word.”

  “Ten years is too long,” I said, still trying not to sound shocked. “Even a year is usually too long, but ten years is forever.”

  Once again, though, Rosie acted as if she hadn’t heard me. “She went over to San Francisco one Saturday afternoon with this boy friend of hers, and he said she just stepped out of the car at a red light and walked off without sayin’ a word or even lookin’ back. Just walked away. That’s what he said.”

  “Any reason to think he might have lied?”

  “No reason,” Rosie said. “I’ve known him all his life, and his momma’s a friend of mine. She’s been fixin’ my hair once a week for nearly twenty years. And Albert, he was tom up by it something terrible. He kept lookin’ for Betty Sue for years after I give up. His momma says he still asks about her every time she sees

  him.”

  “Did you report it to the police?” I asked.

  “Well of course I did,” Rosie answered angrily, her wrinkled eyes finding an old spark. “What kinda mother would I be if I hadn’t? You think I’d let a seventeen-year-old girl wander around that damned city fulla niggers and dope fiends and queers? Of course I told the police. Half a dozen times.” Then in a softer voice, she added, “Not that they did diddly-squat about it. I even went over there my own damned self. Twenty, maybe thirty times. Walked up and down them hills till I wore out my shoes, and showed pictures of her till I wore them out. But nobody had seen her. Not a soul.” She paused again. “I just hate that damned city over there, you know. Wish it would have another earthquake and fall right into the sea. I just hate it. I was raised Church of Christ, you understand, and I know I ain’t got no right to judge, runnin’ a beer joint like I do, but I swear if there’s a Sodom and Gomorrah in this wicked, sinful world, it’s a-sittin’ over there across the bay,” she said, then pointed a finger like a curse across the hills. When she saw an amused grin on my face, she stopped and glared down her sharp nose at me. “You probably like it over there, don’t you? You probably think it’s all right, don’t you, all that crap over there?”

  “You don’t have to get mad at me,” I answered.

  “I’m sorry,” she said quickly, then looked away.

  “That’s all right.”

  “No, it ain’t all right, dammit. Here I am askin’ a favor of you and hollerin’ at the same time. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I understand.”

  “You got any children of your own?”

  “No,” I said. “I’ve never even been married.”

  “Then you don’t understand at all. Not even a little

  bit.” “All right.”

  “And don’t go around pretending to, either,” she said, hitting me on the knees with her reddened knuckles.

  “All right.”

  “And goddammit, I’m sorry.” “Okay.”

  “Oh hell, it ain’t a bit okay,” she complained, then stood up and rubbed her palms on her dusty slacks. “God damn it to hell,” she muttered, then turned around and gave Fireball a fierce boot in the butt, which knocked the sleeping dog off the step
s into the skim of dust on the concrete. “Goddamned useless dog,” she said. “Get outa my sight.”

  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.”

  “C
ould 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.