Give Us a Kiss: A Novel

  I started to laugh, dizzy, and Smoke did, too. He set me down and I had to squat to get my bearings.

  I said, “If you’re within six strokes of me tomorrow, it’ll be because I took pity on your clumsy ass.”

  Smoke cocked his head, then grinned.

  “That’s why I love you, Doyle. You’re too fuckin’ dumb to know when to quit.” He nodded four or five times. “A fella like that might just get something big done, someday.”

  Niagra slung the hash every evening, but it was never hash. One evening her hillbillyette surprise was pappardelle con il ragu di fegatini, which is a tongue-twister name for broad, homemade noodles with a fabulous chicken-liver gravy. Another night it was coq au vin, which I love anytime. Then she doubled back on my gustatory expectations and eschewed the continental cuisine in favor of navy beans with ham over cornbread, and collard greens and stewed turnips on the side. Real good redneck chow.

  She always watched me eat, and it was never a hardship to eat plenty.

  After one evening meal, the redneck one, a dusty Chevy sedan passed by on the dirt lane, and Big Annie said, “I bet you anything that’s a carload of Dollys, out scoutin’ us.”

  It was an afternoon I was languishing in when I got hit by the kind of impromptu horror that writers fear. That is, Niagra fell by my trailer with a copy of her screenplay. It was hot and I couldn’t lie fast enough to get out of it. I took a seat on the deck, muttered something about loving to read it.

  She fetched me beers as I turned pages. She only had sixty-some pages written, but I was only on the second beer when the other thing writers fear came true; that is, a total fuckin’ amateur you’ve had your eyes on sticks you with a piece of work close to her heart, and you, despite your years of study and experience, don’t know a thing you can do to improve it, or ever make it salable, but you have to come up with some sweet horseshit that can make her smile and be chummy instead of becoming an instant enemy. She’d titled it Goomer Doctor, and it was about a girl named Falls who was hippie spawn and lived in the woods with her mother, Large Lucy. Falls was always being shooshed out of the house when Large Lucy had gentlemen callers, so the little girl would climb to the fork of a big tree I could see in the side yard there and fantasize whilst listening to Large Lucy pleasure her company. The little girl’s fantasies featured bizarre, companionable forms of wildlife, until the evening she trailed a glowing coyote into the deep woods and the glowing coyote led her to the cave where a male goomer doctor lived. “Goomer doctor” is an ancient hillbilly term for a witch, basically, though they are of any sex. The goomer doctor takes Falls in hand and starts apprenticing her to the dark arts. Only a goomer doctor of the opposite sex can truly bring a new one into the fold. Eventually they must be joined in sexual intercourse to realize the full mojo. Falls is only eleven, and goomer doctor doesn’t mean pervert, so there are some years of schoolin’ to come before her doctorate of goomers can be realized.

  Cut to: Falls at sixteen. She now chants, “Pully-bone holy-ghost double-yolk! Pully-bone holy-ghost double-yolk!” and similar incantations. The right formula of words to cast goomers have been learned by her. She knows now how to conjure shape-shifting into swamp rabbits or crows, and toss off good charms and evil charms, but she has yet to consummate her doctorate, so her applications of black magic are still entirely theoretical. Then the goomer doctor takes her to the cemetery to confer the total powers on her, bare butt against an infidel’s tombstone, but he’s gotten up in age and acquired too many hexes of his own and is impotent.

  Falls is distraught, even surly.

  Then the goomer doctor says he knows of a young buck goomer doctor of considerable powers over by Bull Shoals Lake, and that’s where the pages ran out.

  Niagra watched me finish and she just stood there, in a red cotton dress, barefoot, awaiting my critique.

  “A good read,” I said finally. “The format is wrong, and most movies have quite a bit more dialogue.”

  “Film is a visual medium,” she said. “So I went with lots of visual.”

  “There’s only about fifty lines of dialogue, though.”

  “Yep,” she said. “I favor montage.”

  I stalled. I lit up. I swished the beer can about.

  “The goomer stuff is good,” I said.

  “I’m way into that,” she said. She was still standing over me in that red dress and I didn’t want to foul my chances of ever getting such a garment off her. “I’ve studied goomer doctorin’ a good deal. There’s a lot to it, you know.”

  “Well, sure.”

  “That’s my big ace,” she said. “When I get to Hollywood, why, I’ll cast a goomer down Sunset Boulevard, then I’ll do one toward Burbank for TV work.” She sort of laughed, a bit self-consciously. “If you’d shave, I’d cast a goomer or more for you, too, Doyle. You could stand havin’ a good goomer or two on your side, boostin’ you along.”

  Niagra, so full of scrumptious hope, is looking at me, there, afraid I won’t share her vision. She’s afraid I’ll tell her that the world won’t let her have her dreams realized quite so easily, and probably not at all. That her dream is just a thread of fantasy to hang by for a while, but it’ll go limp one horrid night somewhere down life’s road and start coiling around her pretty neck. But I don’t want to tell her. I won’t do it. Because those young dream-years are by far the best years, when you have hardy faith and gallops of energy and go for it all, perhaps in a dumb fashion but with gusto, right up ’til the night the dream goes limp and starts that coil.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “That could be my next future.”

  10

  BOOGERDOG

  YOU’RE CUTE,” NIAGRA said. That compliment was a reward for shedding my whiskers into the sink. “You look three and a half years younger, too.”

  “Grazie.”

  We were on the blind stretch of the dry creek bed. There was a half moon and a slight odor of skunk in the night. Something nosy had gotten sprayed. Imaru was being paged, but not distinctly.

  Apropos of nothing, except perhaps my graphic telepathic memos, Niagra asked, “Do you go oral on women?”

  “Only when I can,” I said. “Otherwise, no.”

  “Huh. I figured as much.”

  At the money garden we ran the hose out and did the watering job. Neither of us spoke. She was in those shorts again, the ones that almost covered her butt, and those flame-lick boots and a blue halter.

  Eventually I spoke up.

  “Niagra, I’m only going to warn you this once. Don’t tease me, and don’t lead me on.”

  “I hear that.”

  After the water was all gurgled out, instead of getting in the Toyota, she slithered up right next to me and grabbed my hand.

  “I want to show you something,” she said. “Come along.”

  I trailed her like she was a glowing coyote. She’d swept me into her fairy tale. Her hand never left mine, and she led the way through the thick and spooky woods, over a hill and around a pond. Mosquitoes were biting that night and that was the only part of nature that went against the enchanted spell.

  I’d say it was fifteen minutes before Tararum came into view. The drumstick palace was lit up clear across the lower story, and citronella candles flickered all about the patio and pool area. You could see shadows moving around, and hear voices and an occasional splash.

  “Isn’t it beautiful?” Niagra said.

  “I guess.”

  “I see that,” she said, “and my whole soul just screams, I want! I want! I want!”

  “I’ve seen better,” I said. “Out around Palo Alto and Pacific Heights and Carmel, in California. Mission Hills in K.C.”

  Her hand squeezed mine excitedly.

  “Oh, Doyle,” she said, “better’n Tararum would make me faint, I reckon, with all the want that’d be shootin’ through me.”

  She led on again, not toward Tararum but parallel to it. Her hand steered me across an area of mowed grass, her blond hair shining. She le
d to a gazebo or cupola or whatever, about a hundred yards from Tararum, near The Howl. It was over a slight ridge from where I’d noodled that bullhead, so I hadn’t seen it before, and there was a path from it going straight toward the big house. The gazebo was shaped like a bell, sort of, with a considerable amount of ornate lacework of lumber near the eaves. The floor was six steps from the ground, and up we went.

  The gazebo was painted bright white, and with the moon and all, vision wasn’t too bad, not exactly in focus but like a gauzy art film. Niagra let go of me, and went to the rail, and stared toward Tararum.

  “This is my secret spot,” she said.

  She had her hands on the rail and stretched her body, and those shorts rode way high on her ass; then she went taller on the toes of those flame-lick boots and those shorts slipped clear up and in like a thong bikini.

  I fell to my knees and went right after it.

  I encircled her waist from behind and undid the shorts and gave a yank, yanking them down to her knees. She had on white cotton schoolgirl panties, and I just slid those aside, got my nose to her butt and my tongue in her bush. I pushed her forward some for cleaner licking, and after about six tongue flicks her knees sagged and she moaned, then said, “I’m virgin.”

  My response was, “Mmph.”

  “I’ve got to lay down, Doyle, my legs are gone.”

  I jerked her down to the floor of the gazebo and she shoved her shorts and panties to her knees, and I dove straight in under the tangle of garments and went hungry, hungry, hungry after her virgin muff.

  I felt inspired. She was as so much nectar, divine honey, a potion. She was that song. My tongue employed the strokes of a Picasso, li’l light flicks on the clit, the lips, then traced tiny, gentle circles around the pleasure button, then up and down. I had both hands under her butt, roaming and squeezing and raising for deep tonguing. Those flamelick boots were beating against the wooden floor, sounding like a jungle drum, and somebody was beating a piano at Tararum.

  “Oh, sin me up,” Niagra said. “Sin me up good’n evil.”

  Suckin’ that split, I felt transported, enlightened, only with a huge boner. Those boots kept drumming to the strumming, and when she busted her kicks she fairly screamed an orgasmic hallelujah.

  I crawled back, then sat up, breathing hard.

  Niagra laid there, looking gorgeous, raunchy, and magical, her eyes closed, her fingertips tweaking at her nipples through her shirt.

  “Goodness,” she said. “That was weird. I liked it a lot.”

  I snatched back my wind, and snap, like that, my own nature required reciprocity. I stood, posed in the moonglow so bright in the white gazebo, and unbuckled. My bird dog stood out, on a hard point toward her brunette bush.

  Niagra looked up, then baffled me.

  “What’re you doin’?” she asked. Immediately, instinctively, she began to scurry. She jumped up and jumped up her garb and buttoned it. “What’re you thinkin’, Doyle?”

  “I don’t get your confusion, here.”

  “I ain’t ready for that,” she said. “That’s the whole hog.” She took baby steps backward. “It’s important I stay virgin.”

  “I hope that’s the punch line,” I said. “ ’Cause this best be a joke.”

  She bit her lip. She lowered her face. She tossed her mane.

  “I’ve got to lose my cherry accordin’ to the bylaws,” she said. “I’m serious about my goomerin’, Doyle. It’s got to be in a cemetery at midnight.”

  “Didn’t I warn you about this?”

  “Well, yeah, listen, though. I have to say the Lord’s Prayer backwards at the tombstone of an infidel, and fire seven silver bullets, then…”

  I lunged and she scampered, high-booting down the steps and across the mowed grass, toward the deep woods. She glowed away into the dark thicket.

  Niagra left me there, in the shadows and the pits, in a molten state of thwarted desire, on the brink of a major testosterone tantrum.

  Four Luckies later I arrived at the truck. I was in a blue-balled snit. I told her to shove her silly ass over and let me drive. She didn’t argue. She shoved over and I saw her hand was on the latch, ready to flee.

  I punished the Toyota, running her mean down the creek bed blind, four or five times as fast as Niagra drove. We were in rich dark made by the tunnel of trees that sagged over the creek bed and leaned against one another in the middle. I kept staring at her as I drove, rocks thumping against the undergut and fenders, the truck bouncing high and wild, but she stayed against the far door, clinging, eyes shifty.

  “How could you do me like that?” I asked. She wouldn’t meet my eyes. “Look at me, would you?”

  Niagra turned her head toward me, her expression a clotted frown, then she looked out the windshield and her mouth dropped. Her hand came up to aim through the glass in alarm, but before her message reached me there was a weighty thump and something skidded wet and heavy across the hood and over the windshield.

  “What on earth was that?” I asked.

  “Boogerdog!” she screamed.

  “Deer, maybe.”

  “Boogerdog!” she said. “Boogerdogs are always around, provokin’ fiendish events.”

  “Will you shut the fuck up with your goomers and your boogerdogs and shit! Please!”

  She spoke more quietly next time.

  “Boogerdog. I saw its paw scrape across the windshield.”

  11

  BOILED ONION EYES

  I HAVE A SENSE I’m living in more than one world at a time and they’re all out to get me. Wicked worlds. Vindictive. Parallel and relentless worlds bullying me now for whatever bad acts I pulled when I was other people in other epochs.

  That’s just the sense I have. It’s a sense of being haunted full-time that makes for a certain amount of midnight anguish and round-the-clock creeps.

  The scene in the barn after the boogerdog encounter was one where I felt stuck in a cusp, hung between various worlds, I guess, and I saw everything happen as from an aerie, a cold distance, for I was there, but then again, I wasn’t.

  I left the headlights on when I slammed the truck inside the barn. The light beams played off the grayed wood and gave a glow to the interior. I got out, went to the Toyota hood to check for damage, or a raccoon tail in the grill, maybe, or a tuft of deer hide.

  Some words passed my lips, something like, “There’s no special damage.”

  Then Niagra screamed. She was still sitting in the cab but looking out the rear window to the truck bed, and her scream got mixed with oaths and moans coming from behind her.

  I hustled over, gave a look, and felt sick.

  In the truck bed there was a man in black. One leg was busted above the ankle and white bone protruded, and the below-the-ankle part of the leg seemed to be stepping in the wrong direction. Plenty of blood. And the man’s face was rising like bread dough, swelling big from the cheeks to the hairline, only purple in hue. The man didn’t seem too large, nor too young, but all wrecked, and his eyes were of that blue type, with extra white, filmy around the blue. Boiled onion eyes.

  Niagra shouted, “That’s a Dolly! That’s a fuckin’ Dolly!”

  The man in black had a problem in the shoulder area; his right arm just flopped there, limp. There was a pale tattoo of a huge spider between the thumb and forefinger on the hand that went with that arm.

  I stalked out of the barn, into the night. Then I stood there, and ten thousand lightning bugs were flickering away across the countryside. The dog loped by, into the barn, and Niagra shuffled out. She draped her arms around me from behind, rested her head on my shoulder. We stood like that, together, trembling, trying to reach out for our composure.

  “It’s down to the nut cuttin’, now,” I said.

  “I know,” she said. “You ain’t a false alarm, are you?”

  “I wonder.”

  Back in the barn, Damned Spot, her tail swishing, was jumping back and forth over the man in black, who had dragged his wrecked self
out of the truck to the dirt and had begun crawling. That broken bone wiggled as he crawled, and he bellowed.

  “Damn,” I said.

  The man kept crawling, and a scarifying question hit me. Are all Dollys as dead game as this one?

  Niagra stepped up, put her boot to the man in black and rolled him over onto his back. The roll earned a scream.

  “I don’t know his name,” the girl said, “but he’s one of the ringleader Dollys.”

  The man spit at her and she jerked backward, out of spittin’ range.

  Those boiled onion eyes stared up, alive with fierce agony. His left hand pawed at his beltline.

  “I can’t stand this,” Niagra said. “We need to extend mercy to this man.”

  “Mercy?”

  “Uh-huh. A hole in the head that ends his misery.”

  “I don’t know if I can be like this.”

  “Let me enhance upon my point,” Niagra said. “He’s a Dolly out here scoutin’ us for a rip-off, so we can’t let him go.”

  “But, just killin’ him, I don’t know.”

  The ladystinger is in my pocket. Niagra takes it.

  “You figure we could nurse him back to health like a sick bunny or somethin’? Then release him back to the woods?”

  “Hold your mud,” I said. Then, what could I do except look down at the Dolly, and the Dolly’s boiled onion eyes were terrible, full of hurt but committed to ruin. “Shit, he’s got a pistol.”

  The Dolly made a feeble try to raise a revolver, a thirty-eight, with his left hand, but his thumb appeared broken or sprung. He was making slow progress. His eyes fixed on me, his selected target, and this intense attention caused me to freeze. The writer’s disease, that of preferring acute observation to action, had seized me up. I’d gone still in a trance of observations, noting the way the Dolly’s mouth tugged to the right, a tuft of whiskers below the nose the razor had missed and were gray, while the head hair was black, only a few lines of gray, and the black T-shirt the man had on featured a St. Louis Cardinals emblem, red, in the heart zone, and he’d gotten purchase on that revolver, finally, and raised it above his belt buckle, a buckle that sported a horse head in profile inside a horseshoe, and I, the writer, just stood there, frozen, trying to get a prose poem, a conte, out of this event that might well climax with my being shot.