kid. How do you do it? What should I do?'
'Throw up in your typewriter every morning.'
'Yeah.'
'Clean up every noon.'
'Yeah!'
The foghorn out in the bay started blowing, saying over and over in a long gray voice, Constance Rattigan would never come back.
Crumley started typing.
And I drank my beer.
That night, at ten minutes after one, someone came and stood outside my door. Oh, Jesus, I thought, awake. Please. Not again.
There was a fierce bang and a hard bang and then a terrible bang on my door.
Someone out there was asking to get in.
God. Coward, I thought. Get it over with. Now, at last.
I jumped up to fling the door wide.
'You look great in those lousy torn jockey shorts,' said Constance Rattigan.
I grabbed and yelled, 'Constance!'
'Who in hell would it be?'
'But…but I went to your funeral.'
'So did I. Hell, it's Tom Sawyer time. All those bimbos on the beach and the crappy organ. Shove your ass in your pants. We gotta get out of here. Jump.'
Gunning the engine of an old beat-up Ford V-8, Constance made me fast-zip my fly.
Driving south along the sea I kept mourning, 'You're alive.'
'Hold the funeral and wipe your nose.' She laughed at the empty road ahead.
'Jesus God, I fooled everyone.'
'But why, why?'
'Well, crud, honey, that bastard kept combing the surf line night after night.'
'You didn't write, I mean, invite him to…'
'Invite? Jesus, you got no taste.'
She braked the car in behind her shut Arabian fort, lit a cigarette, puffed smoke out the window, glared.
'All clear?'
'He's never coming back, Constance.'
'Good! He looked better every night. When you're one hundred ten years old it's not the man, it's the pants. Besides, I thought I knew who he was.'
'You were right.'
'So I decided to fix things for good. I stashed groceries in a bungalow south of here, and parked this Ford there. Then I came back.'
She jumped out of the old Ford and led me to the back door of her house.
'I turned on all the lights, music, fixed food that night, opened every door and window, and when he showed up, ran down, yelled, beat you to Catalina and wdove in. He was so stunned he didn't follow, or he might have, part way, and given up. I swam out two hundred yards and lay easy. I saw him on the shore the next half-hour, waiting for me to come in, then he ran like hell. I had really spooked him. I swam south and surfed in by my old el cheapo bungalow near Playa Del Rey. I had a ham sandwich and champagne on the porch, feeling great. Hid there ever since. Sorry to worry you, kid. You okay? Give me a kiss. But no phys. ed. '
She kissed me and unlocked the door and we walked through to open the beach-front door and let the wind haunt the curtains and sift sand on the tiles.
'Jesus, who the hell lived here?' she wondered. 'I'm my own ghost come home. I don't own this any more. You ever feel, back from vacation, all the furniture, books, radio, seem like neglected cats, resentful. They cut you dead. Feel? It's a morgue.'
We walked through the rooms. The furniture, white sheeted in the dust and wind, moved restlessly, perturbed.
Constance leaned out the front door and yelled. 'Okay, son-of-a-bitch.
Gotcha!'
She turned back. 'Find some more champagne. Lock up. Place gives me the creeps. Out.'
Only the empty shore and the empty house saw us drive away.
'How about this?' yelled Constance Rattigan against the wind. She had put the top of her Ford down and we drove in a warm-cold flood of night, our hair blowing.
And we pulled up in a great sluice of sand next to a little bungalow by a half-tumbled wharf and Constance was out shucking clothes down to her bra and pants. The embers of a small fire burned in the front- yard sands. She stoked it with kindling and paper and, when it flared, shoved some forked hotdogs into it and sat knocking my knees like a teenage ape, drinking the champagne, and tousling my hair.
'See that hunk of driftwood there? All that's left of the Diamond Dance Pier, 1918. Charlie Chaplin sat at a table there. D. W. Griffith beyond. Me and Desmond Taylor at the far end. Wally Beery? Well, why go on. Burn your mouth. Eat.'
She stopped suddenly and looked north along the sands.
'They won't follow, will they? He or they or them or whatever. They didn't see us, did they? We're safe forever?'
'Forever,' I said.
The salt wind stirred the fire. Sparks flew up to shine in Constance Rattigan's green eyes.
I looked away.
'There's just one last thing I have to do.'
'What?'
'Tomorrow, around five, go in and clean out Fannie's icebox.'
Constance stopped drinking and frowned.'Why would you want to do that?'
I had to think of something so as not to spoil the champagne night.
'Friend of mine, Streeter Blair, the artist, used to win blue ribbons at the county fair every autumn with his baked bread. After he died they found six loaves of his bread in his home freezer. His wife gave me one. I had it around for a week and ate a slice with real butter once in the morning, once at night.
God, it was swell. What a great way to say goodbye to a wonderful man. When I buttered the last slice, he was gone for good. Maybe that's why I want Fannie's jellies and jams. Okay?'
Constance was disquieted.
'Yes,' she said at last.
I popped another cork.
'What do we drink to?'
'My nose,' I said. 'At last, my damn head cold is over. Six boxes of Kleenex later. To my nose.'
'Your lovely big nose,' she said, and drank.
We slept out on the sand that night, feeling safe two miles south of those funeral flowers touching the shore by the late Constance Rattigan's former Arabian lean-to, and three miles south of an apartment where Cal's piano smile and my battered Underwood waited for me to come save earth from Martians on one page and Mars from earthmen on the next.
In the middle of the night I awoke. The place next to me on the sand was empty, but still warm from where Constance had lain cuddling the poor writer. I got up to hear her thrashing and chortling with seal- bark commotions out in the waves. When she ran in, we finished the champagne and slept until almost noon.
