I guess I was the only one who heard the car door slam. The flick had reached the happy finale, the banker was eating crow, the Arab was under arrest for fraud, and the dweeb had matured into a mere nerd and found true love. I looked out the window, then calmly said, “A Chevy full of strangers just pulled in.”
Smoke jumped up, peeked out.
Damned Spot had started barking.
“Where’s your pistol?”
“On the shelf.”
“Put it in your belt, baby bro. That’s Roy Don Springer and what looks to be a few Dollys.”
“If they ain’t Dollys,” I said, “they’re Dolly imitators.”
“What is that they’re carryin’?”
18
HEY, NEIGHBOR
MEAT,” SPRINGER SAID. He gestured at one of the two surly thug-puppy Dollys who accompanied him, the one carrying a foil-wrapped object. “Venison. Twitchin’ fresh.”
“Poached her today, huh,” Smoke said.
“No, no—not poached,” Springer said. He was pushing fifty, I’d guess, with red skin, a permanent flush. I recognized him from round and about, though I’d never known his name. The male pattern problem had worked over his head, and what hair he had left was long, uncombed, and black. He stood near five ten, thick limbed, with a pony keg of beer for a gut. His stag-cut shirt had blood smears on the chest and his jeans looked stained along the thighs, and these duds were all wrinkled and drooping and seemed to be straining to cling on to him. “This doe here, she had a accident, just one of those things.”
“Of course,” Smoke said. He was acting cordial but his eyes were watchful. “You were test-firin’ at a barn door or somethin’—”
“Right, right. That’s the story. Just a test shot at a apple tree, but out she sprang from nowhere, leaped right into the slug.”
“An emotionally stressed doe,” Smoke said. “Clearly suicide.”
“That’s it,” Springer said, an exemplar of the shit-eatin’ grin on his face. “That’s surely the way it happened, Mr. Smoke.” The thug puppies murmured their amusement, and the one female in the group shyly lowered her face. “Only you know them pissant laws—they don’t understand how nature truly is.”
“There’s lots of deer suicides,” I said. “Especially out of season.”
“They’re high-strung that way, sure ’nough.” He gestured at the package. “Ed, hand that meat over to Miss Annie, there.”
When Big Annie accepted the package, she said, “You’d like to have us eat some evidence for you, would you?”
“Sure would, Miss Annie,” Springer said. Then he gestured at his entourage. “These are my cousins, Ed Dolly, there, and Milton Dolly over here.” Ed and Milton aped Springer’s dress in every particular, including the ill-fitting clothes. They were in their early twenties and wore their hair about like Elvis, only instead of ducktails they had manes that flopped to midback. A home dye-job had been done on both of them so they had the jet-black locks of The King. Their eyebrows were blond still, imparting a two-tone, forest-creature aspect to their looks. “And this is my woman, Shareena.”
Shareena said a cautious “Hey.” Ozarker women who had men the breed of Springer tended to avoid eye contact with other men, especially strangers. If possible, when meeting strange men these gals would stand back until they just blended into the draperies. Shareena was scarce-hipped, with short brown hair, and looked to have lived about thirty-three rough and frightened years.
“Too bad we’ve eaten,” Niagra said. She was in the kitchen, behind me and Smoke, leaning on the fridge. There wasn’t much welcome in her body language, but she flashed a showstopper smile. “Not long ago, either.”
“Now that is too bad, Miss Niagra.” Springer was one of those down-home types that affects a faux courtly style, so overly respectful in manner as to signify no respect at all. He then turned to me, hand out. “Haven’t had the pleasure, sir—you’d be?”
“I’d be the Nobel Prize winner,” I said, “if I could. But so far I’m just ol’ Doyle Redmond.”
I shook his hand, and he surveyed me pretty thoroughly.
“Roy Don Springer, sir.”
“Charmed,” I said.
“Ah. Another of Mr. Panda’s kids, are you?”
“Grandson.”
“If you say so, Mr. Doyle.”
The thug puppies eased back onto the deck and drifted out of sight. They looked like the sort of fellas who might spend their idle hours dropping thumbtacks on beaches. I tried to see them over Springer’s shoulder, but I couldn’t.
“Let’s have a beer,” I said. Niagra gave me a sour glance at that. “It’s hot. A couple of cold ones on the deck.”
“I’ve got some rum in the car,” Springer said. “Shareena, how about gettin’ it?”
“Huh—no,” Shareena said. “Not that one-fifty-one rum.”
“Beer’s fine,” Smoke said. “We’ve got plenty.”
“That one-fifty-one,” Shareena said, her glance averted from her man, “it stirs up crazy stuff.”
Springer took a sudden step toward Shareena and she flinched, but before he could raise a hand to her Big Annie shoved a beer can at him. He took it, popped the tab.
“Beer it is,” he said. He raised the can. “To all the lovely ladies,” he toasted, then had a loud slurp.
A few beers down the line, we males stood on the deck, swatting mosquitoes, doing a sort of talk-talk macho sparring, each of us subtly implying that we were secretly ultradangerous dudes who ought not be fucked with by less than a regiment. I’d say Springer was winning on points, as his innuendos and veiled boasts had the flavor of fact, whereas Smoke and me’s came across as mere warnings.
The thug puppies sat under a tree, away from the deck, sharing a tiny pipe of herb, petting Damned Spot. They’d been all over the grounds, down to the barn, around the house, skulking here and there, claiming they had to take leaks.
That ladystinger in my belt felt sweet to me.
I stayed in front of Springer the whole time. The man had the fingernail on his pinkie grown out an inch or better into a permanent coke spoon accoutrement. I hadn’t seen many fingernail coke spoons for some time, as others who’d sported them had munched them down to the bloody quick in detox years ago. But this tush hog, Springer, stuck with the fashion of his younger manhood, I suppose. I couldn’t imagine me, for instance, wearing a roach-clip necklace or a Grand Funk Railroad T-shirt ever again, but this cat had found a groove he never wanted to leave.
The females were in the kitchen, sitting at the table, playing Trivial Pursuit. Country folk love their board games, the kind that can eat up a whole evening and be called entertainment.
Springer had fetched the one-fifty-one rum himself. I held a brew, Smoke, too, and Springer held the rum in one fist and a beer in the other. Peepers and crickets had set up a constant racket, like an edgy soundtrack to our socializing.
Springer said, for some reason, “Pipe bombs really are simple, you unnerstan’? They only take a few minutes to patch together.”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said.
“They make nice booms.”
“Seems like it’d take more’n a few minutes.”
“The boom impresses whoever hears it.”
“To do it right, seems like it’d take more’n a few minutes.”
“But C-4, that’s what I wish I had.”
“That’s serious stuff, C-4.”
“You bet it is. It’ll blast a hole in somebody’s front yard so deep they won’t never testify.”
“I’d guess that’s right.”
“I could use about a case of it,” he said. “They’re callin’ another grand jury, I reckon.”
Smoke said, “I hadn’t heard that.”
“Well, I have.” The man was well along to drunk.
“Them laws—they think we do everything. Dollys, you know. My mom’s a Dolly, and that’s it to these laws round here—I must be guilty of somethin’.” He staggered a little stagge
r. “Or everything.”
“Boo-hoo,” I went, and Smoke laughed, but he nudged me and gave me a kind of “Be cool, bro” look.
“Huh?”
“That they do,” I said.
“Yeah, Mr. Doyle. That could be what you said. It ain’t what I heard, but…”
The ladies began to loudly fuss over something in the kitchen. We all glanced that way. They weren’t mad so much as excited. Big Annie stood next to the screen door and called for Smoke.
“Smoke, come here.” She turned back to the other contestants and said, “He’ll know.” As Smoke approached the door she asked, “ ‘The Galloping Ghost,’ that was a white guy, wasn’t it? Not Jim Brown.”
I heard Smoke chuckle, then he went inside to referee.
He said something along the lines of, That dude was way back, back when there were white running backs.
“Pussy at play,” Springer said. “Gives me raunchy thoughts.”
He thought he was funny, thought I wouldn’t mind him molesting our women in his mind. I had begun to resent his slovenly swagger, his confidence that he was the apex predator, straw boss of the food chain.
“You ever fuck a woman wasn’t scared of you?” I asked. “Or shit-faced drunk?”
He gave me his number-one killer look, a slit-eyed, impervious stare.
“Just your mama,” he said. At my silence, he gave me a li’l shove. “Now, go on and laugh, Mr. Doyle, we’s just a couple of fellers, funnin’ around.”
In therapy, the straight therapy I’d gone through before entering regression therapy and discovering Imaru, I’d recounted my memories of life in pathetic detail. The lady therapist who was interpreting my history back at me said that one constant seemed to be a need in me to confront or fight both institutions of society and individuals where I had slim or no chance of victory. That my raising had planted in me a need to stand sullen and defiant, especially against those forces that could crush me like a Bass Weejun on a nightcrawler.
This trait is a frequent pain producer but, by God, it keeps life simmering.
I never learned why I’m that way, but I sort of knew why I thought of that, out on the deck, schmoozing with Springer.
“I’ll let it pass,” I said.
“Is that right? Mighty big of you. You’ll let it pass.” Springer gave a heavy, slow shake of his head. “You know who I am?”
I fired a Lucky, then said, “I reckon.”
“No, you don’t, Mr. Doyle, Mr. Doyle Redmond. You’ll let it pass—that’s fuckin’ funny. I mean, you’ll let a li’l joke pass, but settin’ right over there is Ed and Milton, who is grandkids to a feller named Logan, who your Mr. Panda murdered, stone cold.”
“He paid what the Dollys said Logan was worth.”
“Uh-huh. Logan was my uncle, you know.”
“I didn’t know.”
“I’ll let that pass,” he said. “Logan”—he began to wave that bottle of one-fifty-one around—“I understand from our people, and a couple of recollections of my own, that he was a man of ideas. Couldn’t seem to keep ’em to himself when he had one, neither. He was good at numbers, could count up to nine, anyhow. That give him one of his ideas he couldn’t keep to himself. The idea he got, because he could count to nine, see, was that Mr. Panda might could be Mr. Smoke’s daddy.”
I just stood there, inhaling.
He went on.
“The man you call Daddy, see, the way I had it run down to me, you know, he was in Korea or some gook spot for quite a few months more than nine, whilst your mama lived with Mr. Panda, the seed bull, you see, over by the…”
My first punch, a left hook, caught him high on the skull, as he’d sensed the blow’s route and turned just that much. He grunted, came around with that one-fifty-one bottle, and I jammed him hard near his wrist and the bottle came loose, caught me on the ear. I grabbed him inside both elbows, stubbing my Lucky on his flesh, and he splashed beer toward my eyes, so I lowered my face and butted him, jumping the hard part of my forehead against his nose. I felt it give. There was a sound, a piffle, sort of, and he went “Uh!” This brought his hands up some, the pain, you know, and I snapped a strong knee into his manhood package. My ear felt swollen, maybe gone. I brought my left arm up, cocked the elbow, pivoted fast and beat him in the face with that sharp bone like a cudgel, time and again.
I said something along the lines of, “You wife-beatin’ sack of shit.”
He went down—he was only human. I had just planted one solid kick in on him around the beltline when the thug puppies came hurdling over the deck rail.
Damned Spot got all frenzied and baffled, not sure if she was expected to sink fangs into those who’d so recently petted her.
Milton and Ed both had blades out pretty quick, Buck knives, but they squared up in front of me and hesitated instead of shanking me before I could pull my sweet ladystinger.
They stared at that pistol, a big Huh? expression on both their weird faces.
The screen door opened, I heard that, and the thug puppies started to close in with those blades, ladystinger or no ladystinger, coming as they did from a bloodline noted for engendering in its members a rare sort of invincible stupidity.
I was only two finger jerks away from becoming a mass murderer, when, wham! Smoke belted one of them from behind (Milton, I’m gonna guess), then the other turned and caught a big Smoke fist flush on his chin.
Boy howdy, Smoke had gone through them two knife-wielding Dollys faster’n hot sauce through a widow woman! Those thug puppies were both down and out, as unconscious as toddlers who’d mistook mommie’s flask of Old Crow for Co-Cola.
“Doyle, man, what the fuck is with you?”
“He bothered me.”
“He what? He bothered you? Jesus, baby bro, he’ll backshoot you now—that’ll really bother you.”
The trio of women came onto the deck. They weren’t in a talking mood. They just stood there, watching Damned Spot sniff around the flattened Dollys. Springer had begun to make a bit of noise, sputters and moans, that sort of thing.
“I enjoyed the game,” Shareena said to Niagra and Big Annie. “I learned some answers.” Then she walked to the site of the fight. “I reckon I better carry the menfolk on home right quick. They’ll come to and be mad, don’t you know.”
“We’ll drag ’em to your car,” Smoke said. “Give you a hand. I want you to know we don’t have a thing in the world against you, Shareena.”
“I understand how it is,” Shareena said. “It’s just that one-fifty-one rum, it leads to bad stuff every time. My mister, he can’t live without it, though it makes him awful crazy. Course it don’t make him near as crazy as you peckerwoods is, if you ain’t got sense enough to shoot the whole three of them Dollys this very minute.”
The dust from the departing Chevy had settled. The gang stood around in the kitchen, not saying much. Smoke kept looking at me and shaking his head. I’d had the normal postscrap case of frantic butterflies, but now the scared was out of me. Finally Smoke’s constant but unasked questions forced me to a response: “Old sins cast long shadows.”
Big bro merely stared.
Niagra pulled the venison from the fridge, slapped it on the counter. She unwrapped the foil and revealed a mound of red doe steaks.
“We ain’t eatin’ this poor girl,” she said. “I suspect this meat.” She shuffled the steaks with delicately pinched fingers. “We best not even feed it to Damned Spot.”
19
FOR REAL-ISM
THE MOON HAD gotten blood on its face. There was some wind kicking up in the night, a hint of fractious weather on the way. The tall trees wobbled in sudden stops and starts, like paranoid druggies, their leaves speed-rappin’ nonsensical prattle. Yet the sky was spread wide and clear, in sharp focus, no clouds at all visible in the frame. The money garden swayed beneath the red moon, too, the individual plants spread about us, standing mute, as a stoic tribe might, each somber stalk occasionally nodding in grim approval.
&
nbsp; We were on guard, Niagra sitting cross-legged with a shotgun splayed across her lap, me packing the ladystinger. I didn’t believe we could be ripped off this night, as the Dollys were busted up pretty sore. But Smoke and Big Annie weren’t so sanguine of that, so there we sat, posted in the deep woods to oversee the financial flora, protect the blue-chip greenery. On the slim chance that patch bandits might tail us, we’d parked the Volvo at Panda’s, then snuck through the cemetery, past Tararum and into the woods.
I had pulled Niagra’s boots off and now held her bare feet in my lap. My ear throbbed and had swelled some, but the main feeling I throbbed with was romantic. She’d brought a roll of clear tape and I applied swatches from it to her ankles and feet. Seed ticks are too small to pluck individually, and if you’ve got one you’ve got an army on you. The tape swatches pick them up best, a squad at a time. I sat there, holding her pretty feet, rolling that tape after seed ticks, and hell, man, I knew I was in love.
She knew it, too. She spoke of many things, the casual and the deeply felt. The girl had some dreams that were mighty fleshed out, full of detail, and she spoke of them as nearly factual.
I’ve always been vulnerable to my own dreams, too. I could relate to the symptoms if not to the exact fever. It seems Niagra read every biography of old Hollywood in paperback, and some of her dream-plans would need updating. I tried to impart current knowledge gently to this kid, who I guess I loved.
She said, “Then, maybe I’ll have to get work. Square work. Probably start as a hatcheck girl at The Mocambo, I imagine.”
“I believe The Mocambo is gone,” I said.
“Since when?”
“Oh, I guess twenty or thirty years ago.”
“No! Shit.” Her feet squirmed in my lap. “So, it’ll have to be Ciro’s, then.”
I didn’t have the heart.
I let Ciro’s still exist.
The night wind goosed my mood, gusting along with summertime warmth. The temperature was at that exact, fabulous level where body heat and air are on a par and there’s a weightless sense, an overwhelming oneness with the atmosphere. Hardy amounts of sweat, but still the feeling of a godly cuddle out there amidst the smell of the forest and the creek and a hillbilly girl’s feet in August.