At the close of this revery of larceny and higher learning, I rose up from my wicker chair, Stag beer in hand, and said, “I need to find Smoke.”
Niagra put her red boots to the deck and sort of poured herself into them until standing.
“Let’s drive,” she said. She set her can of beer next to the pistol that was still on the rail. The sun was emanating its meanest degrees of torture on all earthly items. “If you ain’t got some bugaboo about it, I’d rather ride down in your car, though Smoke ain’t far. A few big bumps and there you are.”
5
NAMED FOR TRAUMA
THE FEW BIG bumps Niagra guided me over beat my wife’s not-nearly-paid-for Volvo down in value a good deal more, as I oversteered some, clipped a stump, grazed a boulder, bottomed out in a gully once. It was not far in distance but a punishing drive, from the car’s perspective.
We were down past the barn, under a thickness of trees that I could see broke open shortly and gave way to a pasture gone white in the heat.
“Stop there,” Niagra said. She had her boots on the dash to brace herself. “Whoa, Nelly.”
We got out and stood in the heavy shade, and it took a bit for my eyes to adjust before I saw Smoke’s hideout. A fifteen-foot trailer had been shoved up cozy against a couple of trees and rested on tires gone flat. It was cellhouse gray in color, a color that I personally shun. A couple of metal chairs, the kind that rock, sat on the bare dirt in front of the trailer. Rust had attacked them pretty thoroughly. Busch beer cans were scattered around like strange blue blooms. The door was screened, and cordwood was stacked low around the gap between trailer and earth.
“Nice,” I said.
“Well, hard to find,” Niagra said.
When you’re a boy you think someday you want to live like this. A little hole in the woods, your living space like a cave or a fort. The woods right up to your bedroom window, a rifle by the door in case supper strolls along and is standing in the yard when you wake. Women housed separately, nearby but up the road. Smoke’s hideout would’ve met the standards of Thoreau, I imagine, if Thoreau had drunk a lot of canned beer and laid off of the heavy reading and philosophical inquiries in favor of ruttin’ with Big Annie of a mornin’.
Smoke came walking in from the woods behind the trailer, a roll of shit paper in one hand. We saw each other simultaneously. He let out a big, throaty bellow and charged toward me. He wore blue-jean shorts and white tennies.
I knew what was coming. I braced for the assault of genuine masculine affection.
“Doyle, my baby bro,” he said, and flung the shit paper toward the door. Then I was in the huge embrace, the rough hugs of my big brother, who squeezed me up off my feet and thumped my back with big fists of love. I did some back, with less effect.
He still had me in that big, rib-shakin’ hug, when I said, “Smoke, man, what you been up to?”
He let go of me then, smiling hugely.
“Let’s see, Doyle. I wrestled the devil down and fucked him in the ass. Other’n that, the same ol’ same ol’.”
I hadn’t seen him in three years. Life on the lam seemed to agree with him. He’s always been monster big, but up in K.C. he’d gone to fat for a while, but now, living in hard communion with nature, he was firm and fit and mud brown. He stood about six five, and I’d guess he didn’t weigh over two forty or two fifty. Sleek. Smoke had spent his entire lifetime in mad pursuit of the elementary pleasures and his face showed it, with laugh crinkles all around his hungry brown eyes and a slanting pool-cue scar on his forehead he’d acquired from a husband who didn’t appreciate Smoke’s joie de vivre. Smoke always was the breed of boy and man who after he’d opened a bottle of whisky would throw the cap away. His hair was shoulder length, laced with gray, and somebody, Big Annie I found, had attended to his locks. They were braided in thin ropy strands, sort of hillbilly dreadlocks. His beard was perfectly groomed and streaked with gray, like tines in a pitchfork.
“You’re lookin’ good,” I said.
“You too, baby,” he said, then grabbed my ponytail and said, “Yee-hah!”
“Whatever,” I said.
He let go, looked fondly at Niagra, and said to her, “You’re gonna like Doyle—he’s overeducated and starry-eyed, too.”
She shrugged, considering it.
“It could happen,” she said. “I’ve been known to like people now and then.” She started walking off toward the house. “I’ll let you brothers be with your re-union. But don’t draw blood out of happiness or anything.”
I dropped into a rusty chair and watched Niagra walk. Smoke did likewise. It was a walk worth watching. There was a slithery élan to Niagra’s movements, as in the old blues phrase, “Like her back ain’t got no bone.” When she had gotten out of earshot, I said, “Is she legal?”
“Legal, hell,” Smoke said, “she’s an old maid. Turned nineteen last month. Got a year of JUCO under her belt at the extension college in town.”
“Got a man, does she?”
“Nope.”
“I can’t believe that.”
“Well, she’s got her some strange ways and standards that rule out damn near every buck in the Ozarks.”
“I see,” I said. “Strange ways, huh?”
“Yeah. But you might get in there—she thinks you’re brilliant. Read your books like they were love letters.”
“No shit,” I said, and my mouth filled with saliva, and I swallowed rather than spit so soon after hearing such an enchanting review of my efforts.
“But enough about poozle,” Smoke said. “How’s about a stick of boo and a drink? I don’t have ice here, but I got a bottle.”
“Hold off on the boo and booze, Smoke. We need to talk, so let’s do it now and be done with it.”
“Say it,” he said.
I leaned forward, elbows to knees.
“I’m on a secret mission from the folks.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I accepted this mission for reasons of my own.”
“Yeah?”
“They want you to turn yourself in.”
“It’s come to that, huh?”
“They want you to try’n plead out some sort of deal.”
“Uh-huh.”
“They’ve been leaned on pretty heavy up there.”
“I know.” Smoke stroked at his facial hair, his splayed fingers neatly matched to the pitchfork tines in his beard. “Let me think a bit,” he said. Then, in about four seconds, “Okay, I gave it full consideration.”
“And?”
“Ain’t gonna be no days like that. Smoke don’t figure to turn himself in just yet.”
I got up, fetched the ladystinger from the car, and assumed a gun-totin’ pose.
“General Jo sent this pistol with me,” I said. “I’m supposed to do whatever it takes. So”—I waved the gun his way—“Freeze, Bubba!”
Smoke laughed, then said, “He sent that pistol? A li’l ol’ flesh-wounder?”
“I don’t think he trusts me with his strong armaments.”
“That figures. A man that don’t trust his grown son to drive his car sure ain’t gonna trust that same son with strong armaments. He’s a smart ol’ man, you know,” Smoke said. “But I got plans that require my presence on this side of the jailhouse bars. So I reckon that wraps that up.”
I sat back down and relaxed, letting the ladystinger dangle. My eyes stuck on Smoke’s wide, hairless chest, hairless because it was one huge burn scar, the proud flesh thick like a hide, from his nipples to his belly button. That’s how he got nicknamed Smoke, because as a boy he really loved that bacon. Mom was walking the hot black skillet of bacon toward the table one morning, and Smoke couldn’t wait, leaped up and grabbed the skillet side and doused himself with bubblin’ grease. He was near six, I think, I was about two. I believe I recall his cries, or maybe not. After that, “Smoke” was tagged on him as a name, which he doesn’t seem to mind. And me? I don’t know. We’ve all had our traumas, but I wouldn’t care to b
e named for any of them.
“Okey-doke,” I said. “I tried. Gave it my best effort. Let’s have at that bottle and boo now, big bro.”
6
COW-PATTIE LINKS
LATER WE WERE out in the bone-white pasture, trying to get in a good eighteen holes of golf on the cow-pattie links Smoke had designed. Everything was a short-iron shot, and the white weeds created a rough the PGA boys wouldn’t go into on a John Deere tractor. The heat was there, of course, and seed ticks and cuff stickers attached to our socks and shorts and legs. Smoke only had two clubs, both nine irons, but he had a grocery sack of nicked balls and we both had the boozy imagination to see this activity as fun.
“How’d you like to find the path to financial security?” Smoke intoned, sounding somewhat similar to the mellifluous voice of golf on CBS Sports. He then smacked his orange golf ball, and we watched it fly across the deep white rough toward the stack of dried cow patties he called The Ninth Hole. He landed the ball pattie-high but left, not nearly in the turd. “Not rich rich,” he went on, “but rich enough to sit down and whip out any book you want and not give a fuck if the public buys it.”
There was a bottle of ordinary scotch, King’s Deluxe or something, set on the ground to mark the tee-off spot. I gripped my nine iron and took my stance. I wanted to win, you know. I hunched down, then straightened up, shuffled my feet for the perfect alignment.
“You mean a grant?” I asked.
“I mean a hillbilly endowment toward the support of artsy bullshit. Only without the bureaucracy and red tape.”
I had my swing grooved, and let her rip. I took a mean divot but the ball really soared, way high, the kind that makes a soft landing.
“Who do I have to kill?” I asked.
The ball flew directly on line, but came up short of the turd stack and sank from sight in the white rough.
“Maybe nobody,” Smoke said. He crouched to the bottle of King’s Deluxe, had a gulp. “Course, you never do know.”
Listen, here’s the deal with me. I’ve got just one true love, and that’s the art of following my fantasies out and scribblin’ them down. I tell stories, yarns, tiny snickering contes, big wet whoppers; only eventually, nearly against my will, they shade toward truth.
My imagination is always skulking about in a wrong place, a bad neighborhood of fantasy. Everything in there takes place on Twelfth Street, U.S.A., and of course there are joints and dives called The Pink Pussycat, The Aces High, or Joe’s, and fellas named Buster or Jake or Gyp the Blood agitate the area, and rain murmurs along in the gutter, clogged with trash but reflecting the neon lights. Who hasn’t been there? The hero I chronicle is not much of a hero, but he’s given up four books to me. He’s a little bit of a sleaze, really, but he hangs in there and pays his own way. He’s called merely The Hyena, no other name required, and that’s because he always gets a bite of the meat. What he does is float around Twelfth Street, U.S.A., where the interesting vices and poorly plotted crimes tend to be centered, and sniffs out deals going down. He stalks, trails, sniffs, watches. After a deal is done and the folks with the Twelfth Street, U.S.A., names and attitudes have culled out a carcass of ill-gotten gains, why The Hyena moves in to rip them off and eat all the pie himself. The Hyena is not too noble, but he’s robust and goal-oriented and thinks of his deeds as butthole cousins to justice.
My books sound like I’m someone else, someone of much more age who hails from a time zone that’s gone out of business. The Hyena talks like an old fart Panda’s age might’ve talked if he’d been a rough cob in the city when the Big Crash came. The Hyena’s approach could’ve been in favor among the Populists in 1932 or along in there. He’s always describing people as “gunsel” or “jackroller” or “thrush,” and he lips off to anybody with over three bucks to his name or a badge.
I always get called a crime writer, though to me they are slice-of-life dramas. They remind me of my family and friends, actually. I hate to think I’ve led a “genre” life, but that seems to be the category I’m boxed in.
It’s hard not to like The Hyena, or anyway, I do.
“Hey, bro,” Smoke said, giving me a shove. “Find your ball, huh?”
“I saw it land,” I said, but I wondered if the dead voices from past lives were ever-so-faintly trying to hector me toward sound judgments, or taunt me toward bold action.
I didn’t ask Smoke just how I might get this hillbilly endowment for artsy bullshit, steered clear of the leading question, and he let the subject drop while we got in our sweaty eighteen holes of golf.
The score was close, one forty-seven to one forty-five, not bad scores given the conditions of the fairways and the tough course design, me nipping Smoke because of a tee-shot at the seventeenth cow pattie that actually hit the stack of turds, and busted them apart. I want to say they busted apart as do dried-up dreams, or public trust, but, truly, they flew apart exactly like yesterday’s shit.
7
THAT SMELL
SUPPER MATERIALIZED AND was a shocking and wonderful feedbag to strap on, but, by the time the classic hippie dessert of quartered raw apples and honey in a bowl came out, I felt there was a conspiracy afoot all around me. Smoke huddled with Big Annie, then Niagra, then all of them made trips inside the house and I could hear that they were whispering and so forth. I couldn’t pick up any words or phrases, but I didn’t need any hot flashes for Imaru to imagine the subject.
We’d dined on the cedar deck at dusk. Finally the day had gotten cool enough to comfortably eat in. I’d napped in Smoke’s shady yard and come to feeling pretty sober and rested and mighty interested in food. The meal was Niagra’s creation. She’d cooked up the first of her hillbillyette surprises for me: pesto sauce over homemade pasta, with a lovely salad of garden tomatoes and cucumber slices in olive oil, with fresh basil seasoning and goat cheese slivers. This marked her as a bookworm, a trait I dig in anyone, for clearly Niagra had done a useful gob of reading in at least the cookbook section of the West Table Library, because the nearest place to have learned this sort of culinary preparation by taste-testing it would’ve been Memphis, probably, or maybe Little Rock. The classic hippie dessert was served for the convenience of its preparation, I imagine, and was perfectly groovy, but by then, in my goggled state, I’d sort of been expecting tiramisu, maybe, or a scoop of spumoni.
As full dark settled I was left alone at the table while another big confab occurred somewhere in the house. I lit a Lucky and sat there, petting the dog. The dog it turned out was a spayed bitch, the best kind of dog for a pet, I think, and was named Damned Spot because Niagra had played Lady Macbeth in high school and cherished the “Out, damned spot” speech. I was the new “big one” in her midst, and Damned Spot had decided to love me into the pack immediately. I smoked and rubbed her, and plucked a few fat ticks from behind her ears. I put the bulbous blood ticks on the table, belly up, and dispatched them with the hot end of the Lucky.
In the dark, there, I started talking to Damned Spot. I slung all kinds of folderol her way, mostly about romance gone sour and along in that vein, and I was glad to have the dog there to say it to. A dog that listens is so handy to validate that, though you’re having a conversation with no human present, you are talking to a dog, which is next best and means you aren’t touched in the head. A person alone talking to a dog seems sort of cute, capable of tenderness and so forth, whereas if you sat there having the same exact conversation without a dog present to ameliorate the wackiness, people would quit making eye contact with you, call your mother suggesting mental health facilities. The dog makes all the difference.
When the confab broke up and the whispering trio returned, they were intent on business. They stood over me, executives lined together as a united front, the kitchen light behind them casting their forms in ominous relief.
Smoke said, “We need to know if you’re in or you’re out.”
“In or out of what?”
They all copped squats then around the table. They took tu
rns talking, a microdemocracy at work, but Smoke’s words and Niagra’s presence heaved the most weight. The long and the short of it was pretty much what I’d imagined it might be: wacky backy croppin’. Smoke knew I’d had some considerable truck with that product in years past, moved a bit of herb in the vicinity of various campuses, and also worked harvest two seasons when I was in grad school at Iowa and strapped for mad money.
Eventually I asked, “What might my share be?”
“You’re comin’ in late,” Smoke said. “But we need extra security now.”
“Why is that?”
“Some Dollys have been sniffin’ around,” Big Annie said. Dollys sniffing around is about the worst news a person could get in the Howl County area. They are a legendary clan for thievery and nasty shenanigans, legion in number, taking over three columns in the West Table phone book. “A bunch that runs with an awful man named Springer, who might be a Dolly by intermarriage.”
“They’re not as far advanced beyond the caveman as most of us are,” Niagra said. “Rip artists. Not nice.”
“Springer,” Smoke said, “is a bad, bad man—he’d be good research for you to know.”
I lit a Lucky.
“This would all be good research,” I said.
“We act friendly to them,” Niagra said, “but we’re not.”
“They’ll burn you on a deal,” Smoke said, “then dare you to come on and kill them.”
“I reckon I’d snub a bunch like that,” I said. I was thinking that this might be too much research of first-hand quality, though the quest for verisimilitude had previously provided me with an artistic alibi for many vices and scandalous companions. “Keep my distance.”
“Springer’ll shoot quick, too,” Smoke said. “I’m pretty sure he killed a dude down in Viola there, across the Arkansas line. And I saw him shoot Bond Collins in the leg outside The Inca Club.”