revolution, the open marriage, the growing-togetherapart relationship. She's meeting her boyfriend, the doctor, at her mother's house. He spent last night
pranging his second ex-wife, her sister, her sister's
boyfriend, and a bisexual Airedale."
"If that's true, that's sad."
"It's fairly accurate," I said.
"That's sad, then," he said. "I remember true love."
"You mean the old days when you had to get
engaged before you could show your girl's ass to your
buddies?"
"Cynicism doesn't become you," he said blithely.
"I'm sorry; it's the champagne, I guess."
"That's odd," he said. "It always fills me with
romance. "
"No shit."
"Where in the world did Catherine find you, boy?"
he asked "Surely not in the Yellow Pages or something
as mundane as that . "
"I'm listed," I said, "but she found out about m e i n a
bar."
"Of course," he said, raising an eyebrow built like a
woolly worm. "Where?"
"The Sportsman in Cauldron Springs," I said. "The
guy who owns it is an old Army buddy of mine."
"Bob Dawson?"
"Right. She went in to see if anybody had seen you,
and he told her he had a friend who found lost things,
like ex-husbands, and one thing led to another."
"I'll just bet it did." he said, oddly bitter, then I
understood.
"She's your ex-wife, isn't she?" I said. "So what the
hell do you care?''
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"For myself, I don't," he said. "It's just that it
embarrasses my mother."
"Your mother?"
"Catherine lives with my mother. In her house," he
said, "and it upsets her when Catherine whores her way
across the state."
"You live with your mother?"
"My house is within a stone's throw of hers."
"You don't sound very happy about it," I said.
"Sometimes I'm not."
"Move."
"It isn't that simple," he said. "She's an old woman
now, crippled with arthritis, and I promised her I'd live
on the ranch until she died. I certainly owe her that,
you understand, at least that. And besides, every place
is the same," he said.
"The people are different," I said, but he ignored me
as he took a long drink from the champagne bottle,
drank until he choked, then he smiled at me with wet
eyes.
"If I had known how much fun we were going to
have, Sughrue," he said, "I would have let you catch
up with me sooner."
"Pretty expensive fun," I said.
"Worth every penny," he said as he tossed the empty
bottle on the carpet. "I would have spent it all just to
see that lady walk across the room." He eased himself
upright, propped on his good buttock. "Wonderful
naked ladies, by god, I love them," he said. "I've seen
a horde of them in my time, boy, but I just can't get
used to it." He shook his head and grinned. "Pop the
cork on that other bottle," he said, "and let's drink to
naked ladies. "
When I did, the cork bounced off the ceiling and
skittered across the carpet like a small . rabid animal.
Then I filled our glasses, and Trahearne held his up into
a soft beam of sunlight that had filtered through the
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eucalyptus trees, watching the bubbles rise like floating
jewels.
"That's funny," he said.
"What?"
Then he told me about naked women and sunlight.
And that he was a bastard.
His mother had been an unmarried schoolteacher in
Cauldron Springs when she was impregnated by a local
rancher, who was married, and the school board had
run her out of town. She had moved to Seattle to have
the baby and stayed there after he was born, working at
menial jobs to provide for them. By the time he started
school, his mother had begun to publish stories in the
Western pulps and free-lance articles in newspaper
supplements and magazines, so they moved uptown
into a tenement neighborhood on the edge of Capitol
Hill. After school Trahearne walked home through the
alleys to talk to the people his mother wrote about, the
unemployed seamen and loggers, the old men who
knew about violent times and romantic faraway places.
Sometimes, though, on these aimless walks, he saw a
woman standing naked in front of her second-story
back window. Only when it rained, though, as if the
gray rain streaked on her dark window made her
invisible. But the child could see her, dim but clearly
visible beyond the reflections of the windows and
stairways across the alley. In the rain, at the window,
sometimes lightly touching her dark nipples, sometimes
holding the full weight of her large, pale breasts in her
white hands, always staring into the cold rain. Never in
sunlight, always in rain. Sometimes she tilted her face
slowly downward, then she smiled, her gray eyes locked
on his through the pane, and hefted her breasts as if
they were stones she meant to hurl at him. And
sometimes she laughed, and he felt the rain like cold
tears on his hot face. At nights he dreamed of sunlight
75
in the alley, and woke to the insistent quiet rush of the
gentle rain.
Even after high school, through the first years of
college at the University of Washington, when he still
lived at home, he saw the woman. And even later, after
he had moved closer to the campus, he came back to
the neighborhood on rainy days to once again stride the
bricks of that littered alley, red bricks glistening in the
rain. Only when he graduated and could find n9 work
in Seattle, after he moved to Idaho to work in the
woods setting chokers, only then did he stop haunting
the alley behind her house, watching, waiting.
There were girls, of course, during those days, but it
was never the same in cheap tourist cabins or upon
starlit blankets beneath the pines. There was one,
almost, once. A plump Indian girl who went skinnydipping with him at dawn in a lake, which had flooded an old marshy forest and filled with tiny dark particles
of wood fiber held in pelucid suspension, the naked girl
near but distant too, like a skater twirling in a paperweight snowstorm. One, once, almost.
Then the war came. Trahearne enlisted in January of
1942, in the Marines, and after officer's training, his
gold bars brightly gleaming, he took his leave in San
Francisco instead of going back to Seattle to see his
mother before he shipped out to the Pacific war. In the
center of the Golden Gate Bridge, he met a young
widow, still in her teens, whose husband had been an
ensign on the Arizona at Pearl Harbor. At first, seeing
her black dress and pale young face ruined with tears,
he thought she might be preparing to jump, but when
he spoke to her he found out she wasn't. She had only
come there to throw her wedding ring into the bay. One
thing, as he said ruefully, led to many others, and they
fell in love, the young lieutenant anxious to be away to
the war, to glory, the teenaged widow who had already
76
lost one man to the war with a sudden violence that was
as shocking as that first blot of blood that had marked
the end of her girlhood only a few years before. Their
love, he said, was sweet with the stink of death from
the beginning, and each time they coupled, it was as
if it were the last time for both of them.
On his final day of leave, they went back out on the
bridge, and there on a blustery spring afternoon, the
wind full of sunlight, booming through the girders like
the echoes of distant artillery, cold off the green sea,
fragrant as a jungle, there he told his new love about
the naked woman and the rain. Before_he could finish,
though, she began to unbutton her blouse, and oblivious to the people around them, she bared her small breasts to the afternoon sunlight, then nestled his face
between them, sending him off to die.
"Of course," he said to me, "it was the most exciting
thing that had ever happened to me. And maybe still is.
I don't know. " Then he paused, and in his rumbling
voice, added, "I'd never been so touched. Such a lovely
gesture. "
"What happened to her?"
"Always with the questions, huh," he said, and gave
me a long, hard stare. "What happened to everybody
then? The war happened, that's what. But I don't
suppose you remember much about that."
"I remember my daddy went away, then he carne
back, and went away for good," I said.
"Killed?"
"No," I said. "After seeing North Africa, Italy, and
Southern France, he said South Texas didn't look like
much. He came out West, and my mother and I stayed
home. She said the war just gave him an excuse to be as
worthless and shiftless as he always wanted to be."
"Women are like that, boy," he philosophized.
77
"They don't understand moving on. Give them a warm
cave and a steady supply of antelope tripe, and they're
home for good."
"Maybe so, maybe not," I said. "But what happened
to the woman?"
"What woman?" he asked, seeming confused and
angry.
"The one with the tits."
"For a man with at least a touch of imagination, my
young friend, you have a callous soul and a smart
mouth. "
" I told you I was a nosy son of a bitch."
"I'll buy that," he said. "What's the C. W. stand
for?"
"Nothing," I lied. "What happened to the woman?"
"Hell, boy, I don't know," he grumbled. "She
married a 4-F or a dollar-a-year man or another officer
with a longer leave than mine. What difference does it
make? It's the story that counts."
"Not until I know how it ends," I said.
"Stories are like snapshots, son, pictures snatched
out of time," he said, "with clean, hard edges. But this
was life, and life always begins and ends in a bloody
muddle, womb to tomb, just one big mess, a can of
worms left to rot in the sun."
"Right."
"And speaking of messes," he said, smiling, "what
are you going to do now?"
"Take you home, I guess."
"What about Rosie's missing daughter?"
"It's a waste of time," I said. "If I had a year with
nothing else to do, I might be able to find her, or find
out what happened to her. But not in a couple of days.
I'll just tell Rosie that you got out of the hospital sooner