Give Us a Kiss: A Novel

  That night, when he dropped me back in Lawrence, he’d said, “Baby bro, don’t it seem most everything you’n me do together we have to run from?”

  “Yeah. Or deny under oath, at least.”

  “Uh-huh. Us Redmond boys, we’re a good match.”

  “Now and then,” I said. “And always for reasons.”

  At sunset, cartoon colors riffled across the sky. Big Mama Nature had splashed a gaudy spread of hues at the outer rim of the world. The money garden was all cashed in, stashed in the black plastic bags. We took a rest break before loading the truck, as we couldn’t leave until full dark anyway.

  Tree toads buzzed, and you could hear gears mashing as trucks hit the hill on the slab highway beyond the woods.

  I felt good about most everything. I was champing to get my cut, write another novel. Maybe not one about Imaru after all, as I didn’t know him/her real well yet. It could be another Hyena story, The Hyena Down Home, something like that. There’s this thing about books and me that goes deep, to the core.

  As a boy I was often jammed-up for knowing things, things from books I swallowed straight, haunting the public library for more.

  Knowledge made me mix poorly. Boys’d be hanging around the stockyard, leaning on the fence, and some peckerwood scholar would venture something like, “Daddy told me China gals got snatches go sideways ’stead of up’n down,” or “George Washington lost us the war at Gettysburg,” or starts screaming that he’s been out of state plenty and knows damned well and for certain that Louisiana is in New Orleans and not the other way around.

  At such moments I’d pipe up with some pertinent insight or fact gleaned from the many pages I’d turned, something commonsensical and easily proven, get smacked or spit at, called a bookworm doofus smarty-mouth, fight back the best I could. I didn’t truly get my growth until I was in The Corps, so plenty of these anti-intellectual skirmishes were so unfair in terms of size and age that Mom’d make Smoke go and prove my point for me.

  But when I hit twelve or thirteen, Smoke, too, after many learned quibbles and snide asides from me, decided that I was a bookworm doofus smarty-mouth, and walked all over town saying he would no longer straighten out disputes caused by my incorrigible smart-assedness.

  It’s a trait he still watches me for signs of.

  He got good and even with me once. I was sixteen, and Jack London was to blame. I had long since begun to write my own stories in bed at night, but I needed a role model. Jack London became the one. I read this biography of him, by Irving Stone, I imagine, and found out that by age fifteen Jack had become an oyster pirate with his own boat and a whore who lived on board with him for free! Here I was, already sixteen, with no remotely similar romantic experiences behind me I could one day recount—life was just passing me right by!

  We had only recently moved to K.C., and I decided I should at least become a boxer. I beat the shit out of General Jo’s old army duffel bag in the basement. I made the house rattle. I stole every Ring magazine from Walgreens and studied.

  I got to the point where I thought I knew a thing or two about the manly art, the squared circle.

  Smoke was over to supper for his birthday. He was on wife number two then, Ruth Ann the beautician’s apprentice. Just before time to eat, Mom said to him, “Put the gloves on with Doyle, Smoke, see if the boy’s got anything.”

  We pulled the gloves on in the basement, a poor prize ring. The walls were bare concrete, and there were shelves of canned goods all over that Mom had bought on special. The ceiling was low enough Smoke had to hunch.

  I’d read several articles about Young Griffo, a boxer so smart and scientific he could stand on a hankie and yet couldn’t be punched in the face during a three-minute round. I thought, Smart? Scientific? Hell, that’s me.

  I popped two quick jabs to Smoke’s nose, and it reddened encouragingly, and I sensed I was in with a mere brute, an unschooled slugger, hooked once to his liver, and then I remember this train wreck in my head, and all these cans of creamed corn were raining on my face. I didn’t duck hardly any—the cans landed.

  “Just a li’l hook,” Smoke said. “You walked into it.”

  The creamed corn had drawn blood. My lips were busted, a gash split my forehead.

  “That’s enough,” he said. “I’m too big for you.”

  I got up, kicked the creamed corn aside, went after him. Science had taken a powder. I went after him, swinging stupidly, like a drunk trying to catch a butterfly.

  He held me back with a gentle jab or two, then clinched me close and said, “That’ll do, Cassius.”

  Upstairs, Mom looked at the blood on me, then said to Smoke, “Well?”

  “He’s okay,” Smoke said with a shrug. “Plenty of desire, anyhow.”

  This bout proved I wasn’t Young Griffo, but Jack was yet so far ahead of me I felt compelled to at last get off the dime and do something. I decided I should become either a famous hippie or a war hero. The different myths dueled in my fantasies: Iwo Jima, Woodstock, knapsacks, bayonets, body paint, love-ins, night patrols, Chesty Puller, Henry David Thoreau, The Jefferson Airplane, and The Shores of Tripoli.

  Two months later I figured hippies were too topical, and joined the Marines.

  As the shadows stretched full-length, we loaded the black bags onto the truck. We worked easily together, at a slow pace, as befits the newly rich. The stumps of the Razorback Red stalks blended into the landscape of less valuable plants nicely, reassuringly. Once we’d cashed this crop in you’d have to know just where to look to find the grow site.

  Now and again we’d pause to gloat over especially well-formed buds, feeling a heady mix of fresh avarice and green-thumb pride.

  During one rest, after a splash of iced tea, Smoke said, “I’m hoping to buy my way out of that Kansas warrant, see.”

  “You think?”

  “My lawyer thinks. I have to catch up my payments to him, first, don’t you know. But he figures ten grand might get the facts remembered different, and charges dropped.”

  “If it doesn’t?”

  “Shit,” Smoke said. “I can keep on hidin’ down here, only with better beer and better scotch.” He gave me a shove, and grinned so that the scar on his forehead wriggled. “And you, baby bro?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Head back west, maybe. Write another book.”

  “You need a hit, don’t you.”

  “I need a hook. It takes a hook to get a hit. A publicity hook, I mean.”

  “I don’t want no part of that,” Smoke said. “Publicity.”

  “Yeah, but I need it.”

  “You only just think you need it.”

  About two heartbeats shy of dark we finished the grunt work. The bags were stacked into the truck bed, open ends toward the cab. We were wiping our bodies free of debris, leaves and gnats and so on that had gloomed to our sweat, when I went still, thinking I’d heard a bad sound.

  “Something wrong?” Smoke asked.

  “Maybe not.”

  I led us toward the sound, a muted mechanical growling. Smoke chambered a round in the shotgun, and I had the ladystinger in hand. We gentled toward the dry bed of Gum Creek, taking it slow, until we saw her.

  A young girl, maybe fourteen, with fabulously long hair, lustrous black hair, sat on a dirt bike across the creek bed. She wore bib overalls and boondocker boots. She made eye contact with us, I think, and I believe she smirked, or smiled a little. I think Smoke and me both thought about shooting her, right then, right there, not fucking around. She snorted and shook her head, as if she held our hesitation in contempt, then smugly popped a wheelie and blew away toward the bridge.

  “Aw, shit,” Smoke said as we watched.

  The girl’s black hair spread wide about her, as would the great wings of something eager to feed on the dead.

  “I know,” I said. “That girl can’t be no kind of news but bad.”

  22

  THIS DREAM MEANS IT

  OUR COUNTY WAS named aft
er an early pioneer who I suspect couldn’t quite spell his own name. Moses Howl put up the first trading hut hereabouts, over at the main spring, near where the picnic park in West Table is now, in 1847. I’m fairly certain ol’ Moses lost a vowel off his surname along the trail between the Carolinas and the Ozarks, but the short version has been cemented into history, and ours is a misspelled county on Missouri maps to this day. I don’t know that anyone hung a name on West Table but nature. Our town is on a flat, a plains, a table, west of the river, between distant hills, and the name likely came about through common usage, just as a fat boy becomes Pudge or a bully becomes Buster.

  I drove the Volvo carrying Niagra and Damned Spot to Pritchard’s on the square. The tires barked when I steered off the rock road and onto the slab roads of town. We passed the sign, the civic booster sign that says IF YOU LIVED HERE YOU’D BE HOME NOW.

  “I loved the way it looked,” Niagra said.

  “What’s that?”

  “All them money plants hung upside down to dry in the barn. The smell, the way it looked, I loved all that.”

  “It is encouraging,” I said. “Uplifting.”

  There are some fine houses to gawk at when passing through West Table. Victorian mansions built by the highgloss goobers of the town back when Victorian was a fresh style. These notable places still tend to be referred to by the surnames of the families that built them, though said families seldom own them yet. The concept of zoning never caught on here, too undemocratic to knuckle to, I suppose, so in between mansions and merely nice homes there are plenty of dumps, shacks. A perfectly maintained Victorian with a spruced lawn will have for a neighbor a shotgun shanty with a screen door that’s sprung and a porch that teeters and bare dirt for a yard. This is the sort of cranky democracy hill folk insist upon, but it’s also the sort of squatters’ pluralism that tends to stunt what the real estate types term “appreciation.” This aspect holds West Table back from ever becoming broadly picturesque, though it can be so in squinty portions.

  Damned Spot rode on the backseat and had the window down, doing that dog thing, muzzle pointed into the breeze, that apparently gives mutts this weird big kick I’ve never quite figured out. Her paws had muddied up Lizbeth’s fine upholstery some, and Damned Spot also clawed at the cloth now and again to maintain balance, which I appreciated.

  We parked just off the square, to the side of Pritchard’s. They sell groceries there, and dry goods, and rent out videos. The store was cooled to nearly cold, and me and Niagra lounged in the ice-cream section awhile, the climate providing such relief.

  I grabbed a cart and led over to the soda pop aisle. Our selection was easy—Coke. Those big plastic jugs. One Coke, two Coke, six Coke, a dozen.

  Niagra got a half-gallon of vanilla ice cream, and we added that to the dozen jugs of Coke. The cart looked like maybe we were fixin’ to go home and try’n catch diabetes.

  But we were on a mission, as Smoke believed Co-Cola worked best for squaring up the pounds. A li’l warm Coke splashed on the dope helped the greenery clot good and make pretty bricks.

  The checker was one of those old gals who has switched her do color away from the naturally occurring shades of head hair, toward a sort of blue that aged femmes must think makes their pink cheeks look fresher in contrast. Or something.

  She rang us up, counting out the jugs. It was harvest time in the hills, and those old gals aren’t stupid. She just smiled, though, and stole a look or two at me. I’d known her once, before that hair went blue.

  Finally she says, “Do I know you, hon?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Pritchard.”

  She paused to stare, then asked the most direct and crucial of down-home questions. “Who’re your people?”

  “Redmonds.”

  “My word—you must be one of General Jo’s, I reckon, ’cause Bill, they don’t let him have kids in the pen, there, do they?”

  “No,” I said, and laughed. “I’m one of General Jo’s.”

  “Good people,” she said. “Redmonds have traded here since Daddy opened for business in thirty-three.”

  “I know that,” I said.

  “Redmonds, that was a good ol’ family around here. You owe me twenty-two thirty-two, hon.”

  “There you go,” I said, and gave her the cash. “We’ll just wheel the cart to the car.”

  “Sure thing, hon.”

  I’d shoved the cart nearly to the door, and then I heard Mrs. Pritchard call to the ol’ boys who hung around the cool benches at the front of the store, “That fella there’s son to General Jo Redmond—remember him?”

  A duo of old boys grinned and nodded, and one of them said, “Your daddy still fightin’ the bottle, or has he flat surrendered to it?”

  “Well,” I said, “that fight never has been much of a fight.”

  “No. No, sir, it ain’t never been.”

  There’s no place else like home, I hope, for memories.

  On the streets, as I loaded the car, I heard that bike, looked to the alley, saw those black wings flying wide and away.

  Damned Spot howled.

  Imaru shivered.

  After lunch Big Annie stalked me. I could feel her eyes on me. Whenever I looked up, she looked away, but she didn’t go away.

  Niagra said something about me and she going to Twin Forks River, and I nodded.

  Niagra wandered into the house to get ready, and that’s when Big Annie decided to pounce. I was sitting with Smoke in the shady corner of the deck, reading the West Table Scroll, and she came over and took a stand about a foot from my face. She had her hands on her hips, legs spread, the total wet hen stance.

  She said, “She’s in love with you.”

  “We’re just goin’ canoeing.”

  “You’re her first.”

  “Smoke, can you drop the Volvo at Blaney Bridge for me?”

  “Sure. No sweat.”

  “Listen to me—she’s in love with you, and you’re her first.”

  “Leave the keys on the front right.”

  She slapped the Scroll from my hands, grabbed my ponytail, and gave a hard jerk that made my eyes water.

  “Big Annie!” I said.

  “Now, now, Doyle,” she said in a softer tone. She sat on my lap, then, and stroked my cheeks. “You’re her first big love, that’s all. She wants to drop mescaline and do the river with you. I’ve fronted her the mescaline from my hidey stash, ’cause she’s growed up and tumbled so in love with you, but, kiddo, what I want is—Christ, the first can have a lot to do with all of them, you understand?”

  She kept stroking my cheeks.

  Smoke merely aped a preoccupied paterfamilias, rigorously studying his fingernails, lost in a big think. He didn’t contribute so much as a harumph.

  Damned Spot tried to join Big Annie on my lap but got shoved down for it.

  “I only just want you to go and show my baby some fun, some big fun she can hold to her heart for forever.”

  “Big Annie, that’s a lot of pressure.”

  There went that motherly hand to my ponytail again, the hard jerk, the tears.

  “You can damned sure be extra nice to her at least, can’t you?”

  “Hell, yes.”

  “Memorably nice.”

  “I can do that.”

  She hadn’t let go of my ponytail yet, and she said, “I know you will, too. Don’t I?”

  So, we took a slow, mescaline-enhanced float on a clean, clear stream, scuttling over orange rocks in the shallow riffles, spinning languorously out of control at the larger pools. The high bluffs gave good shadow even in the heat of the day. The water ran cold from the many springs that fed into it, the bottom fist-sized stones and long gray slab rocks that were always visible at any depth. Fish were frequently on view, as if suspended on display to be studied and admired, or lunged at with open hands and no chance at all. Trout, sucker, panfish, and silver shiners passed in the shadow of the canoe.

  It was purt near to rapture, really, floating on mescaline
and spring water, in a rubber canoe, with a beautiful girl, slapping a paddle into the stream now and again to fully participate. There was beer, and Luckies, and a couple of sticks of weed whose effect was redundant and puny, what with that mescaline running free through our blood and brains.

  Niagra lay in my arms, a dope-grin on her face almost constantly. When we’d slide beneath limbs that held sunning snakes, hog snakes and cottonmouths and such, she cuddled up so sweetly and lowered her face to my chest. We kissed a bunch, tongue wrestled and so on.

  Somewhere along The Twin Forks, the drugs took over the spare rooms in our brains, and things got a trifle tottery, hard to follow. Especially words.

  “Is this a episode?” Niagra asked.

  “Huh?”

  “Am I a episode to you?”

  “I’m not, you know, having an episode—am I?”

  “To be only a episode—that would sell our love cheap.”

  “Episode? I’m not there.”

  When other canoes passed us, and the occupants shouted howdy, all we could muster were smiles in return. We seldom looked where we were going, hardly steered, just took our river journey one leap of faith at a time. Niagra’s pretty hand rested on my stomach, and my stomach, see, ain’t really that far from my testicles. She’d rub my belly and my dick would tingle. That is, of course, the fun angle to sex and drugs, that the senses run off the chain and the mind just eggs them on toward foolish splendors. A little breath in your ear, or a foot rub, can feel like six with-it lovers are hummin’ your tune in concert.

  Mind dope has always made me horny. A horny liquid of high-proof want. Once, on Guam, after I’d been busted from lance corporal back to private, I worked the main gate, wearing my official tropical pith helmet and a red lanyard and white web belt with a forty-five strapped to my side, tripping on something called Orange Speckle Acid. I got intensely into my assigned task of waving vehicles through the gate, lost my soul to the job, snapping salutes that trailed sparks at all and sundry, even those passers not of the salute-required class. I was a magic Marine until two women, Aussie tourists I believe, asked me where someplace was and I apparently just walked off, deserted my post, and began to follow their slim, tanned legs. I was in a dreamscape of carnal want, and thought those tanned legs and attached felt likewise. I have this recollection of being several hundred yards off post, and the Aussie gals were going on about how I can’t come with them. Go home, they were saying, like you would to a super dumb dog. The sergeant of the guard, an almost college graduate named Liggett, took me away from them, laughing hard, and said, “I told you not to drop a whole tab.”