Niagra crouched forward with the ladystinger and let off a round. She scored the downed Dolly in the belly, then moaned and dropped the ladystinger and it did a short cartwheel before resting in the dust.
The dog fled about here.
The gunshot had gotten the Dolly to drop his pistol, but he wasn’t dead.
I picked the ladystinger from the dust, and the girl just bellowed about mercy, and the Dolly kept trying to crawl across the straw and dirt of the barn floor.
I believe I said, “Tonight ain’t exactly my first rodeo—but I’ve never done anything like this before. Me’n Smoke pulled a couple of things where we showed our guns, but never used them. Once, when I was at KU, gettin’ my bachelor’s in English, a rock’n roll fella, a drummer, had shorted me on a jar of speed and I shoved a pistol in his ear, but that boy saw the light.”
“Cut!” Niagra screamed. “Cut!”
The crawling man in black hadn’t gotten very far, his miserable passage charted by a blood trail in the dirt.
“Aw, Imaru,” I said. Then I sighted in on the Dolly and emptied the ladystinger into his back, li’l plumes of blood splashing up in the kind of li’l splashes pennies make when tossed into a wishing well. “There’s your mercy, girl.”
12
PEACE IN THE VALLEY
IT COULD WELL be that you’ve shouldered a drunk boyfriend up the front steps a time or two on pay night, or swooped your lady love from the kitchen to the boudoir, but the dead weigh different. There are no helpful staggers or neck hugs for balance. Even the smallish dead, I learned, have this obstinate, lumpish heft to them.
Carrying the corpse into the woods fell to me, as either an earned right or a punishment or a spiritual duty, I’m not certain, but the decision was silently made and mutual. I did the fireman carry, which is easier, but I felt Dolly blood running down my back and could hear creepy interior gurgles and poot noises from the corpse so near to my ear.
Smoke led the way, carrying a small flashlight and a hogleg magnum on the chance there might be more Dollys lurking about. Big Annie, showing a shading of her personality not exactly in the hippie groove, swung a twelve-gauge pump and seemed fairly expert in its usage. Niagra brought the shovel, and she had a quiet case of the mumbles. She was uttering whispered nonsense, likely, probably grandiose goomers, but her step was light.
We were not on a trail, as trails attracted walkers, but were cutting through tangled forest, and this made me work hard, tugging the Dolly through briar traps and low limbs and across the uneven earth. I enjoyed the physical expense, the effort, as it calmed me as Doyle, but I was enveloped by an embrace of spiritual certainty that Imaru was not unfamiliar with such occasions.
The shots had still been singing in my ears when Smoke and Big Annie came rushing into the barn. They took in the scene quickly, came to the correct conclusions without speaking, and Smoke hugged my neck while Big Annie did likewise on her daughter.
Niagra ran down the chain of events to the rest of the gang, in amazingly cool and precise sentences, with concrete details, while I wavered between worlds, experiencing a druggy kind of confusion as to which century I currently haunted. I had just absorbed raw and terrible insight about Imaru, who I realized was an eternal misfit and hothead set loose in time, and his/her problems with every world he/she passed through. This fresh self-awareness ironed out any hopeful doubts about the future.
I hoped my next-life penance could be as a dog, a pampered, coveted breed, who could chase a pastry wrapper from Zabar’s out an Upper West Side window or something, and set things straight with the spirit world by splattering on an exclusive sidewalk.
“The spider, there,” Smoke said. He hunkered down and raised the right hand of the dead man. “That spider is famous. It belongs to a mean Dolly they all call Bunk. I think this is Bunk, anyhow.”
“It’s him,” Big Annie said. “That face sort of looks like him.”
“Sort of looks like him if he’d been hit by a truck, at least.”
At this point Smoke laughed, and it was not a comforting laugh in tone or volume. Smoke’s laughter seemed to belittle the deceased somewhat, and then he explained the famous spider inked on the dead man’s hand.
Bunk Dolly was a remainder of one of the several Dolly tribal units that had squatted on National Forest land in the thirties, over by the Twin Forks River, just off BB Highway, and had been allowed to stay permanently when the process of evicting them all turned out to be far more perilous than was worthwhile. These BB Dollys are revered by some and resented by others, as their penchant for arson and ambush had resulted in such a sweet real estate deal, to their sole benefit. They’ve been there ever since, raiding their neighbors’ barns and hog pens from prime forest acres they’d never put a penny down on in payment.
Bunk must’ve been about forty-three, and he’d followed the Dolly career track in an exemplary fashion. He climbed the Dolly rungs happily, it appeared. Reformatory bits, county jail time, then the big top in Jeff City, where there are probably enough Dollys to make a chorale group. Like many a dumbass career criminal, ol’ Bunk had allowed himself to be boogered up with readily identifiable tattoos, which of course heightened the odds of quick return to the chorale group after each release.
Seven or eight months back he’d been in a halfway house in Kansas City with only six weeks to go when he decided to escape, and inevitably he escaped to BB Highway and started robbing country markets. The last job he pulled was in West Table, where he took off Caulkins Grocery over by the high school. He’d picked up some fine points of criminal mastery, and wore a Halloween mask, a scarf around his neck, and sunglasses over his eyes behind the mask, but when he raised his chopped 410 single-shot toward the store clerk it must’ve hit him he’d forgotten his gloves. He let go with a blast of birdshot, but the clerk, a gal named Chichester I’d gone to school with, wasn’t killed, merely ruined forever.
The spider on his hand had the crime solved in about ninety seconds, and Bunk had remained in hiding amongst his tribe ever since.
I understood, now, why Smoke laughed.
“That makes me feel more okay about killing him,” I said. “Me’n Paula Chichester, hell, we went from kindergarten on up together.”
“You should feel fine about it,” Big Annie said. “Karma is as karma does.”
“I didn’t even know Paula’d been shot,” I said. “Jesus. In science class she was the girl who kissed the Jell-O, you know, so we could study how mold’d grow even from a pretty girl’s kiss. It did, too. Younger, I recall, Paula always did really dig that kickball game, could boot the ball to the fence. This son of a bitch, here, had it comin’. I mean, shit, that’s clear-cut, ain’t it?”
The nature of our region made digging the hole a long stretch of miserable spade work. The rocks, the thinness of the soil, the roots running everywhere the shovel stabbed. The grave never did reach regulation proportions. When we tired out it was still fairly shallow and maybe a foot shorter than it needed to be.
We were all sweated up and gamey in the heat, stinking of mortal dread and adrenaline and plain effort.
The Dolly got crammed into the grave, tight fit that it was, his head bent over to where the other head would’ve been if he’d had a Siamese twin.
Dirt and rocks were flung over him, then we gathered bigger rocks to top off the burial, seal the grave. The last thing we needed was for coyotes to get at him for a feast and leave his leftovers near roads or trails, to prompt speculation among humans on whose leg is this? or this skull? or that spider looks familiar.
Oddly, to my mind anyhow, Smoke started singing a spiritual over Bunk Dolly. His selection was “Peace in the Valley,” a real meaningful church tune, though none of us could be considered churched-up folks.
The whole gang of us joined in on the opening of the hymn in decent harmony, but after that first line or two confusion set in as to the lyrics, and the singing became ragged and pitiful, maybe blasphemous.
Niagra sighed
. “Please, stop! This singin’ is a flop—we don’t know the words, and he don’t deserve ’em if we did.”
Smoke dropped the song in midstanza.
“You’re right, hon,” he said. “Piss on him.”
13
CLAWFOOT WASH
I STOOD ON THE cedar deck for quite a spell, eye-fuckin’ the night sky, trying to stare down the stars. Blood had crusted on my neck, back, in my hair, down the legs of my jeans, to where I was as spattered as a thumbless beef packer. I kept on with my close study of the higher reaches, fantasizing that a comet was due to streak by trailing a message meant only for me, spelled out clearly and printed huge. Some epigram from way out there that’d clue me in on how to feel after killing a man.
My feelings so far were pretty much tilted toward the okay, and the remainder shaded toward the So what? That’s the feeling that’s most wilting, sad, like long, slow cello music played in the lowest register. Hollow. Death don’t mean diddly to the wide world, or, as Mister Stephen Crane more or less said it, at the most it creates no sense of obligation in the universe.
But I felt I had come to know a few telling anecdotes and salacious footnotes concerning the universe, and one certain fact about the eternal: it just keeps coming.
The screen door slapped and I turned toward it. The whole gang stood there, bunched together in the square of light coming from the kitchen. Smoke stepped toward me, then put both big hands on my shoulders and pressed me into a chair. He raised my leg and pulled my left boot off, then the right.
“Strip,” he said.
“Say again, bro?”
“Your duds, Doyle. They’re evidence. They need to be burned.”
For a moment I sat there unmoving, thinking that though we were a gang, this solo stripping act on my part would indicate a new level of gang intimacy. Once I had been goaded by single-malt scotch and sinsemilla into stripping for my wife and two of her girlfriends, believing I was laying the table for one of the most memorable sex feasts of my life, the kind you read about rock stars having, but when I was bared down to the skin I was born in, the ladies pelted me with popcorn and turned on a video of Mildred Pierce. As I retreated, stoned and confused, my wife said, “I told you he would.”
This, however, was not figuring to be a repeat of that sort of brutal ruse, so I stood, then pulled my shirt over my head. My acquiescence set the gang in motion. Big Annie said she’d run the water and went inside, while Niagra grabbed my boots and said she’d shine the blood spots out. I emptied my jeans pockets, pulled my belt loose, and that was it.
Smoke carried the bloody clothes to the barbecue grill and made a loose mound of them. He squirted starter fluid on them in heavy splashes.
I fired a Lucky with a wooden match, then dropped the flame to my duds. The fire took hold slowly at first, then there occurred a sudden whoosh and I watched naked as my clothes became a ball of fire. The heat column rose and made the wind chimes tinkle.
The flame excited the peacocks up in their roosts, and they gave out cries that set my skin scurrying.
Smoke said, “I’m proud to be your brother, Doyle. I truly am. Now go take your bath.”
I skittered naked into the house. Niagra had gone to work on my boots and didn’t look up. I went into the bathroom, and the huge clawfoot tub was filled. A candle burned by the sink.
The water temp was as high as I could stand, and the tub had the size that allowed a man to stretch out. These old clawfoot tubs are the only kind I’ve encountered that make bathing an actual pleasure. I’d spent the hottest summer in Kansas history, thirty some straight days that crested the century mark on thermometers, in an upstairs apartment with a clawfoot tub. Candles melted, peanut butter became a beverage. Whole families were sleeping in the air-conditioned public library, and old folks were dying as if heatstroke was a Kansas fad. That tub had kept me alive and sane, as I filled it with cold water and lived in it from mid-afternoon to near midnight. I drank Falstaff from an ice chest and read the likes of Turgenev and Jackie Susann, D. H. Lawrence and Mickey Spillane, until the heat broke. That clawfoot had been my salvation.
Big Annie came into the bathroom. I had begun to see her as a sister-in-law, pretty much, except her hippie sunbeam of personality and earthy physique had a tingle of attraction for me. She had her shirt off and a loofah in her hand. Her nipples had the circumference of coffee cups.
She bent over the tub and dunked the loofah, and started lathering me up. She covered me in soapsuds.
“I used to be a nurse’s aide,” she said, “so relax.”
“Is that right?”
“No. But I figured it’d put you at ease if I said so.”
She washed me like I was a fresh-born babe, or an ancient man who’d lived too long. I was neither, or both, but I gave myself up to her cleansing ministrations, and the sensation was entirely soothing, warm, and intimate.
When she scrubbed my jewels, I saw Smoke in the doorway, grinning like a coon in the roastin’ ear patch. She stroked that loofah across all my secret regions. After that, she shoved my head underwater, raised me back, and began to wash my hair. She pruned for ticks as she rubbed.
“You have nice hair,” she said.
On the second round of shampoo Niagra came in. She was biting a thumbnail, to keep from giggling, I think. Then she took her thumb out, giggled, and said, “I’ve done your boots.”
Big Annie’s Big Annies bobbled against my wet skin quite a few times, but I felt no stir.
“There’s a towel,” she said when I was clean. “Get out when you want.”
“I’ll kill another man tomorrow, Big Annie, if it means you’ll do this again.”
She toweled her wet bosom, then laughed full throat.
“Stop it,” she said.
I did not linger long in the soapy water. I wanted my bed. A warm, heavy fatigue had come over me. I wore the towel to my trailer.
At the bed, I laid out in a manner that brought me into contact with every crystal. I needed them all. I stared up at the dream catcher, watched it flutter in the night breeze.
Sleep almost had me when Niagra slid in beside me. No speech seemed required. We wrapped together, hugged tight, and her breath broke against my neck and her heart beat beneath my hands.
I believe we spent the whole long night held strongly in one another’s arms, without so much as a mumbled promise or a sneaky kiss to spoil the purity of our electric, loving cuddle.
14
THE PENNIES TELL ALL
WHEN THE SUN woke me, Niagra was sitting on the edge of the bed, studying me. She looked more beautiful than I deserved. “Doyle,” she said. “I’ve got to know just one thing—what’s the deal with your wife?”
After the third straight slow song my wife had danced in the arms of the visiting poet, I figured it was time to find my suitcase in the garage and wipe away the cobwebs. They were dancing to Smokey Robinson in a groin-grinding, rhythmic ballet d’amour that publicly rubbed my nose in their affair. Clearly it had been more than merely their minds meeting in his guest cottage on campus the last week or so. He was the visiting Big Name for the summer poetry workshop, and she the host, so they were supposed to have been evaluating manuscripts. But as I watched that nice, hard can of hers shake and jook, I knew those cottage walls had heard some recent howling and seen red fingernails raking along sweaty flesh.
The party had dwindled down to half a dozen faculty sipping wine, and a few student poets overdrinking to display their intensely troubled, lyric soulfulness. A couple of the faculty sorts glanced at me, nervously I thought, no doubt expecting me to hop up and demonstrate my white-trash temperament by essaying something savage with the fondue pot.
My seat was across the room from where the lovebirds danced, my arm resting on a TV set that had the screen turned to the wall in case an actual wild party occurred. This bash took place in the home of one of Lizbeth’s colleagues at Hichens College, and there were still a few Corona beers in the fridge.
I ca
n’t say why I wasn’t more upset.
I have fallen off a cabbage truck, maybe, but not yesterday. I knew my wife really needed to fuck this legendary dude, so I tried to chalk it up to the vicissitudes of the literary life, or, more to the point, of my life. Lizbeth danced like liquid, undulating and unfettered by care, or bra or undies probably. She’d been in a frenzy to be a poet who was both revered and lusted after ever since I met her. A hybrid of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Carolyn Forché, and Gypsy Rose Lee. She was definitely talented, but not enough so to indulge in self-destructive monogamy, and I no longer even wanted her to. This man, Chamberlin Post, could make her name known, boost her poetry, grease the skids under a fat grant or two, and muscle the quarterlies until they reviewed her work. Those were basically Lizbeth’s short-term goals.
I couldn’t help her with any of those things, or even the rent, lately. So, what my wife was doing over in the dark corner was mean and vain and absolutely the right move for her, letting the visiting Big Name familiarly rub her ass with his bony red hands.
Chamberlin Post was one of those commandingly tall, silver-haired, Cape Cod sailor-aristocrats with a lean, blade face of sharp features and gin blossoms budding on his cheeks. He’d taken nearly all the awards except the Nobel, I guess. He’d had most of the gaudy adventures money can make happen: surfing the dangerous coast of Peru, the standard mystical journey up the Amazon, scuba diving the Red Sea, and on and on. There always seemed to be a photographer nearby when he came up out of the drink, or the thick bush, or down from the mountains, and some of the pictures were famous. His poetry concerned forbidden love in Third World circumstances, the often unappreciated social burdens the born-too-rich had to shoulder, and foreign peasants he had come to know on a deeply spiritual level. Most of his work was very good, which distressed me. A lot of personal publicity attached to him because of the famous adventurer pictures and his status as a Brahmin poet.