Niagra talked on. “Now, and surely you must have noticed this, when they belch, you can smell the beer. When they kiss, you can hear heartbeats, sniff the juice, feel the undies waddin’. When they act mean, you just know they were raised up mighty wrong and have to be that way.”
I had lost her thread while in revery, but nodded anyway.
“And the thing is, Doyle, they have so much outright for real-ism to their style, why they can convince you of most anything with only a look. A sneer. The way they walk.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “Who’re these people again?”
“The Method people. A style of actors.”
“Well, yeah. Brando, Dean—all those mumbly, twitchy sorts, right?”
“They mumble and twitch to reach a new level of for real-ism.” She pulled her feet from my lap, signifying a slight miff, I guess, then curled them beneath her can. “Marilyn Monroe went in for it, too. That movie I’m named for she was the star of. I feel… well…”
“A connection?”
“That’s it.” She giggled and looked down. “There might could be somethin’ to that.”
“You’re named for her flick—that’s somethin’ right there.”
“More’n that. I don’t want to say out loud what all—but a strong goomer could tap into it.”
So there we sat, in the deep woods, armed fairly well, listening to freight trains whistle and clack across the hills, chatting about thespian matters. Niagra had come across a copy of Strasberg at the Actors Studio at the Book Nook down in Hardy, Arkansas, and had devoured it. I dropped a couple of complimentary comments about Method acting, mostly drawn from Tennessee Williams’s plays on film, and she shoved her bare feet back onto my lap. I flapped jaws about Julie Harris and Gena Rowlands, Al Pacino and Karl Malden.
“Karl Malden?” she said. “Ain’t he that tater-nosed fella, wears a hat, sells credit cards on TV?”
“That’s him now,” I said. “But he’s famous for bein’ Method, you know.”
“No,” she said, “I didn’t. But I guess I mean the Method more of James Dean, Al Pacino—like that.”
“The cuter Method ones.”
“Are they?” she said. “They’re the ones that really send me with those chills of for real-ism, anyhow.”
“Those Method actors, though, Niagra, they go into some scary places, emotionally scary, to give out those real-world chills.”
“I want to act,” she said. “Scary won’t much scare me.” Her toes wrinkled and flexed and she leaned back, her hands snapping twigs as her weight lowered. “The Method people make whatever they act seem like the real world, and that’s the only scary place I know of.”
“The real world?”
“Where the real world meets me—that’s the scary place.”
Along in there I was doing my best to ape a teenager in love. I’d never had one of those teenage heartbreaks the teenage years are so noted for. No lost love from my seventeenth year haunts me, and I suppose I feel a bit cheated by that. I hadn’t yet become too comfortable with decent girls before I hit the Marine Corps, and at Camp Pendleton I became comfortable with the wrong sort of girls, mainly from down along the Mexican border, most of them in the fifteen-to twenty-dollar range. It was my seventeenth year and all, but none of those quick pokes in whorehouse cribs were so true-blue or emotional as to haunt. Though there was a skinny li’l gal who chewed an orange while I flailed my manhood to and fro inside her, her jaws mashing hard on those orange wedges so that the juice splattered my eyes, the acidity causing them to well. She seemed starved for fruit. That’s an intimate moment I don’t imagine I’ll ever forget, but not because any high, wondrous emotions were involved.
So, stolen kisses in the school hallway between classes, prom night seduction, all that sort of young romance activity, was fresh to me. Smooching at the Dog’N Suds, my class ring worn on a string around a girl’s neck, parents who just didn’t understand—I’d never been there. Now here I was, having a sort of teenage love affair, only I was thirty-five years old having it, and hear this clear—it was everything common legend had glossed it up to be, and more.
But full of hidden shoals.
Niagra said: “I guess it’s big-headed, but I believe that somehow I am just, I don’t know—so much extra. There’s more to me than most. That’s why I’ll meet up with Mr. Lee Strasberg, make him be my guide, my teacher, until I have full powers.”
“Well,” I said. “It doesn’t have to be Lee Strasberg.”
“Yes, it does. He has a West Coast Actors Studio, too.”
“There’s plenty of teachers of the Method. A lot of them would probably do.”
“Uh-uh. It’ll be Lee Strasberg his own self for me.”
“That won’t work,” I said. “Niagra, ol’ Strasberg is dead.”
Her face drained, went slack-jawed and deflated.
“Don’t say that, Doyle. It’s not funny.”
“Kid—he passed several years ago.”
“No!”
“Eighty-two, -three, in there.”
As she began to believe me, she began to weep. I’d caused my hillbillyette beauty to cry by waylaying her with unwanted knowledge. She fell back on the dirt and leaves and twigs, sobbing. She said, “So, it’s more tough titty to me, huh?”
One leg of her dream had withered, and not a word would be said for over an hour. I rubbed her bare feet, avoiding any urge to offer comment, watching her shoulders shake as she wept tears for Lee Strasberg into her clenched fists.
20
SHOOKY BIZNESS
NIAGRA AND ME followed the young-love urge, holding hands as we picked our way through the woods. A burgeoning courtliness compelled me to carry her shotgun loosely at my side, the ladystinger riding in a back pocket. Trees and shrubs and sudden gullies forced our hands apart now and then, until we reached the clear-cut lawn of Tararum. It was the hour before dawn and the air blew cool. The drumstick palace loomed lightless and Gothic, and we took advantage of the privacy the time of night afforded to sidle alongside the sexy yard statues and grope them.
Whichever of the Byrums had chosen the statues had clearly swooned for the ancients, as all the human forms seemed to aspire to an ancient Greekness in anatomical ideology. The females had smallish breasts and pitchers or platters in their hands, and the males were curly-haired bucks with impeccable butts. Niagra placed her hands on one such rump, the intensity of her groping indicating her fondness for the artsy, cheap thrill of it all.
She stared at Tararum and said, “These mansion folks, they live these lives where all the accessories are at hand.”
“This should be our land still.”
“I’ve got to tell you something, Doyle,” she said. Her fingers slid all over that Greek dude’s classic butt. “I’m truly quotin’ my feelings here—I need to be fucked.”
Those words, long awaited, hit me like happy slaps.
There are acres of tombstones, headstones, and small metal crosses spread across the cemetery, and I led her by the hand, walking without clear thought but directly to the section where Redmonds are planted. Two knobby oak trees overhang the prime family plot, and the headstone inscriptions put names to many faces from the wall of dead. Several of the graves have sunk into the earth, leaving depressions of the shape and size common to soft mattresses long slept on.
“Here?” I asked.
“Good as any.”
The sky had begun to pearl, the sun’s arrival but a small twist of the globe away. The grass was cut short and slathered with dew. A pickup truck hacked slowly to life somewhere nearby, then began to roar.
Niagra assumed a stance, looked at the graves, then slid her shorts down, pulling them around her red boots, then stepping free. She wore bright white panties, panties of the everyday, innocent sort, and the boots rode high on her calves. Her expression was studious, sincere, as she walked among the headstones, tapping her fingers to each one.
“Any of these special?” she asked.
/> I pondered the question, the pearly light allowing me to read the Redmond names: Isaac, Thomas, John W., Permelia and child, Aquilla, devoted father, Charlotte, baby Louisa, another Thomas, another Aquilla, baby Earl, Jeb, Manfred, Regina, then Doyle. Sun-bleached bouquets of plastic flowers had gotten scattered among the graves, the cup stands blown over, the fake blooms rearranged by the breeze and the casual kicks of kids playing games of war and revenge in the natural playground afforded by these acres of dead.
I couldn’t say no to Doyle. Doyle had a rounded headstone, perhaps three feet tall. Doyle lived rough, and Doyle died young.
Imaru likes him.
“I reckon he’d be good for a goomer.”
I leaned the shotgun against an Aquilla, the devoted father. I saw Niagra clear enough, the red boots, white panties, strong legs.
“Your top,” I said. “Take it off.”
Her eyes, those green eyes, so smart and sleepy, were hidden from me, but her shoulders fluttered in a shrug.
“I reckon that’s the way,” she said. She slid her fingers beneath the straps to yank off the top, then said, “You let your ponytail loose, too. Like a wild man. A goomer doctor.”
Done. My long dark hair flew forward, tangled, and her top whisked up, then dropped to the dew. She posed there in red boots and clean white panties, her hands at her side, one knee cocked at an angle, arched above a narrow red toe stabbed into the dirt, heel raised, a shitkicker pointe. She smiled serenely, confident of her effect, then placed her hands to her breasts and lightly brushed the nipples until they ripened like berries.
“I know you know,” I said, “that you’re gorgeous.”
“Oh, yeah, I know.” Niagra then dropped her hands to her waist, crouched, and slithered the schoolgirl panties off over her boots, the entire movement executed with a frolicsome grace that promised rhythm and force and lubricious delight. “We’ve got to beat dawn,” she said, then tossed the undies to the wet grass. “I’d like this to be private—so get naked.”
My clothes were shed like they were aflame, boots tossed here, shirt there, jeans wherever the kick took them to. In the pearly light Niagra’s blond hair approached radiance, beckoning, and the word “gossamer” perched on the tip of my tongue.
“That looks sort of big,” she said.
“Well,” I said—then a pathetic honesty got a grip on me, and I heard myself blurt the sort of fact a teenage boy tends to feverishly research, then dwell on—“just about an inch over the national average.”
She nodded slowly.
“Proud to know it.”
I made a move toward her, arms wide, about to embark on the preliminary touches, an array of lips and tongue and fingertips, courtly foreplay to reassure a novice. But this virgin would have none of that: she scanned the sky, saw the yellow rim to the east. I’d sunk to my knees, thinking to demonstrate phase two of my oral technique, but she pushed my head back.
“No time,” she said. “My twitchet’d be sour, anyhow—sittin’ in the woods all night, peein’ behind trees and everything.”
Niagra spit on the fingers of her right hand, then massaged saliva into her twitchet. She bent over Doyle, the 1923–1947 He Rests In His Arms Now Doyle, belly to the headstone, ass up.
“Do me this way—they say it’s the most potent for goomers.”
She had happily assumed a coital position I never object to. I approached, noting the taper of her back from broad shoulders to narrow waist, the striations of muscle, trapezius, I think, and the way in which her ass was defined separately from her thighs, not all of one piece, the butt firm and round and succulent. Then a quick scoot up, bare feet squishing in dew, and entry.
“Uhn,” she goes. “Uhn.”
When the pumping picked up pace, Niagra shook her hair from her eyes and gave me a look over her shoulder. She clutched tightly to the headstone, her hair flying with each stroke. She wore an impatient, gnarled expression.
“Uhn. Uhn.”
The sex act was of rude quality. Clearly no orchestra burst into sound in her head, there was no sudden string section serenading such lovers as us to passionate fulfillment. There was me, pumping, not so unhappily, but in a utilitarian spirit, and the Virgin Niagra staring over her shoulder, green eyes wide, lips clinched thin.
“Uhn. Uhn.”
My hair whipped wide and tangly, and as I neared the squirt, rubberless and conscious of it, I pulled out and splashed come on her behind and legs, the white drops firing wildly, spattering her from thigh to hair. As the hot drops dropped, Niagra laughed, and quivered, and laughed, until she gasped for air.
I plopped to the ground, lay back, and Niagra stood. She patted her hands to the hot spots, and inspected the semen on her rubbing fingers.
“Aw, shooky!” she said. She held her fingers to her lips, tried a lick, then laughed again. “Shoo-ky!”
The dawn had reached us. Daybreak squirrels chattered in the graveyard trees. I watched Niagra bend to the ground, her red boots slipping on the dew as she retrieved her panties. She used them as a towel, drying her hair, her back, her legs.
“I’ll put all this in my ‘useful experience’ memory bank,” she said. “I’ve got to say it, though—I liked the oral better. But now, at last, I reckon you’n me done the whole shooky bizness.”
21
CREAMED CORN AND DESIRE
SMOKE TOOK THEM down with a machete slash a couple of feet above the ground. They fell to the side, the branches shuddering, five-point leaves fluttering like hands held up before terror. He slashed away beneath the evening sun, becoming more expert with each swing of the machete.
I followed my big brother, gathering the plants into sheaves of four, then inserting them as far as I could into black plastic bags. A big brother can loom so hugely in the younger brother’s eyes, and one such as Smoke takes on legendary and critical import. I watched Smoke work that blade, his shirt off, and a comment of his original ex-wife, Sandra, came to mind. “Honey, the first time I ever saw Smoke was at the Eleven Point River, and I thought, Goodness gracious, Hercules has come for a swim!” He’d been eighteen and perfect then, and they’d married within a month of her first thought of him. But it was soon plain that Hercules and domesticity didn’t jibe, and Sandra divorced him a year later.
The harvest was a hot bit of itchy work. A lot of hunching low and scrambling under was involved. The heat was still hanging about, even as the sun went yonder, and we both sweated like politicians on Judgment Day. A jug of iced tea sat on the dirt nearby, and we drank straight from the spigot, the cold liquid spilling over our lips and onto our chests and bellies as we quenched our thirsts with a sort of barbaric license.
Part of my job was to look sharp for any buds that might have jangled loose when the blade met the plant. I squatted, duckwalked along the trail of weed, listening to the swoosh and crack of Smoke’s machete strokes. It’s a strange, powerful, bloodline poetry, I guess, but there’s something so potent to us Redmonds about bustin’ laws together, as a family. It’s hard to say no to it.
Once, when I was twenty-six or so and in Lawrence, Kansas, living briefly with an older lady who tried to control me with her pocketbook and published status, Smoke fell by and said, “I need you to take my back.” At the time he lived in K.C., just an easy stagger from Jimmy’s Jigger, with a real young girl who went to the art institute. He carried me to K.C. in his big ol’ Cutlass and we parked in the Country Club Plaza area. He fronted me a pistol and I stashed it in my coat.
It seems this abstract expressionist girl Smoke was nuts about had gotten to be a fresh young decadent amongst the student art crowd, which was fine, but he’d come home to find her in the arms of concerned neighbors, turning blue of skin behind an intellectual experiment with smack. Smoke had found out where she’d gotten it, so he led us from the Plaza over to Volker Park.
The man in question was a dashingly scuzzy dude, with skin a beguiling shade of junkie pallor, who set up shop near the fountain most days, and feasted o
n the coeds and outright chicks from both the nearby university and the art institute. Smoke’s girlfriend was at that age where needle- and-spoon street life and all seem to the yearning and bold to offer a kind of back-alley route to significant spiritual development.
But Smoke hated smack just one notch less than he did smack dealers.
The dealer wore the cool long black coat and far-out footwear and doper sunglasses that befit his role in life. He sported a porkpie hat and an air of existential danger, as if he saw himself as a mélange of Bogart and Charlie Parker and Pretty Boy Floyd. He landed on his ass, though, already in deep shit before he realized he had a problem. Some sort of cheapskate armament was in his pocket, but Smoke flipped it into the fountain and went to work. He put a few gruesome kicks into the man’s body. The fella kept sayin’, “What is it? What is it?” Wondering, I reckon, if he was under arrest or just on the spot.
Two or three of the dude’s acolytes stood close by, near the treeline, there, but I put the pistol on them and said, “This is only his problem.”
They backed off, out of sight, probably jumped an express bus to Prairie Village, but a bunch of strollers and loungers saw the whole thing. Most of them gathered up their works, or picnic blankets, and hustled away, but a few shouted derogatory comments at us.
The dude was a mess in swift order, and glassine smack squares floated beneath the splashing waters of the fountain. Smoke looked at me once, his knuckles bloody, face a li’l crazy, his mad eyes asking the question, Do you recognize me?
Then he stopped, maybe one ugly skull thump shy of murder.
I went through the man’s pockets, found the money roll. I was disappointed in the amount.
“We might as well rob him, too,” I said. “Gas money.”
The painter girl with the artist’s yen for the creative revelations thought to be comprehensible only through degrading experience was soon okay, and furious with Smoke. She moved out on him, but never did snitch to the dealer or the law.