The Last Good Kiss Read Online Free PDF

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.
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    "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 steps 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
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    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 fourteenyear-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