Give Us a Kiss: A Novel (11 page)

This was the sort of incident that repeated itself a few times in life, and got known, and blackballed me from teaching jobs. It was the type of raw act, though, I felt might get that wall of dead to nod in approval.

I didn’t want to see it if they did.

Imaru would know.

When Panda showed, he was grinning a big youthful grin, looking like a severely battered but joyful seven-year-old troll. He came clambering up from the cemetery, using his BB rifle as a cane, carrying two red squirrels by their bushy tails.

Looking at him I thought it must be true that the mighty old can turn suddenly childlike again, as when an odometer on a car turns over and it’s back to the first mile once more. Except now it’s a decrepit vehicle.

At the porch he lifted the squirrels high and said, “Lunch, boys. You clean, I’ll cook.”

Panda patted me on the shoulder, a buddy gesture, but wrapped his arms around Smoke and they hugged hard. There’s a bond of a special nature between them that’s not there between us. Smoke has always been the big delight of Panda’s granddaddyhood. He’s clearly the brag dog from our litter. There’s not even any shit slung about Smoke’s hair.

Since I was a toddler it seems I’ve displayed devious sensitivities that Panda could never take a shine to. I’m a grandson, a direct link, and that’s a strong link, but I doubt he’s ever considered me to be a big delight.

I fetched a knife from the kitchen and said, “I’ll take those.”

I carried the squirrels into the sunny side yard, squatted, and cut away. I needed to hide my feelings, this sense of being slighted, left out of the sincere Panda hugs. I’d rather clean almost anything than squirrels. Rabbits are easy, you can nearly clean them with sharp fingernails, they peel so
readily. Quail are a bit of trouble, but they fry up so incredibly tasty. Pheasant could be twice as much trouble and still worth it, their breast meat providing such fine dining. Squirrels are a job, then you have to eat them, and I don’t find their taste to be all that delicious. Their skin comes off slow, you have to pull and cut, pull and cut, and as the meat is revealed it’s impossible not to think of rat. Soaked in buttermilk overnight they get better, as the buttermilk leaches the tart acorn flavor, I guess, but these particular squirrels weren’t destined for a buttermilk bath.

The guts and skin went into the garbage bucket, then I laid the lunch entrées on the porch step. I sat and smoked. From the kitchen I heard the sounds of cold drinks being poured and warm words spoken.

Down the road a ways I could see two boys from that rental shack down there, kneeling on the black road with butter knives. They were happily lancing the tar boils the heat had raised. Both boys had a look I knew so well, and the shack they came from I came from, too. We’d lived there nearly four years after General Jo’s parole came through. Such shacks pock our region, hatching batches of children the regular world will have to deal with down the line. These wild kids are reared on baloney and navy beans, corn mush and Kool-Aid, and quick, terrible rough stuff. Their lips are circled by orange or red or green juice stains and their knees and elbows generally have scabs on them from two or three scraps at recess. All they ever know is that they want, and someday they’ll learn
you
got, and after that the rest is sirens and statistics and nods from the wall of dead.

Perhaps one of those butter knife–wielding boys will love to read, and he’ll read his way beyond the obvious path, or maybe he can hit a baseball four hundred feet, but likely he’ll just learn to tolerate his lot in life.

I went inside, dropped the meat in the sink, and turned on the faucet. A glass of Johnnie Red, the ice cubes melted down to thumbnail size, sat on the counter.

“There’s your drink,” Smoke said.

The scotch scratched the itch. I sipped and watched as Smoke chopped potatoes and Panda ladled grease into two black skillets. The grease came from an old Folger’s can, just like the can Mom kept under our sink all my life. The grease had been rendered from the gamut of meats. Bacon grease, pork fat, burger leavings, whatever. It all went into the bucket and mingled, and this mystery grease did wonders. The best fried potatoes or quail or catfish or onions you’ve ever had sizzled in this grease cooked from a United Nations of edible critters. Looking directly into the mingled-grease bucket should be avoided by the sensitive, but, voilà, the flavor it gave to everything!

I was pouring myself a second Johnnie Red when Panda said, “Your wife called.”

“Lizbeth called here?”

“She guessed you might show up.” Panda quartered the squirrels with a cleaver, rolled them through a pan of flour, and dropped them into the skillet. The grease popped like wild applause. “I told her you hadn’t.”

“Good.”

“She didn’t believe me, Doyle. I lied the best I could, which
is damned good, but she never swallowed it. She said to tell you that if she don’t get her car back in three days, she’s gonna start burnin’ your old notebooks and manu-whatnots.”

I got a third scotch, quick.

“She wouldn’t,” I said, though I knew she might.

“For every day you’re late, she’ll burn another armful.”

Smoke laughed, not seeing my side of this at all.

“I don’t have copies,” I said, anguished.

They both laughed, and I felt left out again, excluded by virtue of outside interests they didn’t, couldn’t, share or appreciate.

I sat at the table and moped about my apprenticeship scrawlings being burned, wondering how future biographers could get the total picture of my creative development without them, until the fried potatoes and squirrel were served. It’s a meal that’s not on many restaurant menus, not even à la carte, but it could be if the chef had access to our bucket of mingled grease. The potatoes acquire six flavors at least, all of them good. They don’t even want for ketchup. But the true wonder of the grease is such that the gamey squirrel meat has become succulent, so much so it puts the surviving cemetery squirrels on the hit list. The meat is traced with thin, light bones that will bring rat once more to mind if you let them, but the squirrel now rips between your teeth to give a splendid, greasy flavor.

I was gnawing on the last bone when Smoke said, “Panda, I feel I should warn you—Doyle killed him a Dolly last night.”

“Doyle? Bullshit.”

“No. He did. We buried him way yonder.”

Panda undid a cigar, stuck it in his mouth but didn’t light it. He was looking at me real steady, watchful, with a new respect or something.

“He need killin’?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “He needed it. His name was Bunk, Bunk Dolly.”

“I’ve heard of him.” Panda lit his cigar, puffed and sighed. “We ain’t got the money for killin’ Dollys no more, boys. You have to get away with it clean. The cash just ain’t there no more.”

“We know,” I said.

“I believe we’ll get away with it,” Smoke chipped in. “He’s buried pretty good.”

Panda stood and walked toward the kitchen window. His big limp seemed bigger, his shuffle tired. Cigar smoke hung around his head, and his shoulders had a slump I’d never noticed before.

“Aw, boys,” he said, his back to us, his eyes trained on the cemetery below the house. He was a close, dark outline again, leaning on the sink. “It just seems that every time a Redmond kills a Dolly, why, something bad happens.”

16

ROCKY DROP

THE CLIFF HAD been formed by volcanic rock, a stream trickling down its gray face, and Niagra was first to leap from it. She stood poised on the edge of rock, in cutoffs and a T-shirt, staring at the clear and alluring pool of water below.

“Make a wish!” she shouted, then pushed away from the cliff and into the air.

In the air Niagra had center stage. A couple of families with a crowd of children were clustered at the far edge of the pool. They all turned to watch her from there, as we did from the cliff known as Rocky Drop. The drop was eighteen or twenty feet, and Niagra attempted a full forward tumble in the air, but as she righted herself her T-shirt billowed up to her face and she made an innocent, bare-breasted entry into the water.

We cheered, especially me, as it was my first actual viewing of her breasts. The families clapped, the husbands more heartily than the children, the wives rather sullenly. From our perch we could see Niagra in the clear water, slicing to the stony floor of the pool below the drop, or falls. Her hair
fanned out and the sunlight caught it, giving a dreamy luminescence to her submerged form.

When her head rose above the surface she went, “Oops!” Then she backstroked, looking at me. “Make a wish, Doyle, and come on down!”

My wish was too obvious to require mention. I stood at the edge, a pair of Smoke’s shorts held wadded around my hips by a cinched length of rope. For my dive I selected the classic swan, but I overarched my torso, lost control straightaway, and hit the surface in a spastic, butt-first flop.

I swam to Niagra, who said, “What was that?”

“Death of a swan,” I said. “It’s my best dive.”

The pool at Rocky Drop is near a mountain crest and miles off any paved road, hard to get to. Trees grow near the waterline and tower protectively around three sides of the pool. Rocky Drop looms at the other end, a series of gray boulders and ancient lava slabs where the ripples the cooling lava made are yet visible. The climb to the cliff requires several minutes of delicate stepping and occasional bounds up the volcanic slabs and from boulder to boulder. A few resolute shrubs grow among the rocks and offer roots for handholds.

Niagra put her arms around my neck from behind and clung buoyantly to my back. We watched Smoke and Big Annie smooch hot and funny on the cliff, then down they came. Theirs was a sort of Butch- and-Sundance plummet. Big Annie held her T-shirt in place, and Smoke crouched into a massive cannonball. The whopping splash they made caused the little kids to laugh, though no one else clapped.

Damned Spot was over in the shallows, getting her ankles wet, lapping cool drinks. I’d insisted the dog come along, as her scent had gone high in the heat and a long swim might rinse her down to a ho-hum level of dog-stink.

The water was a delight, clear and clean, with occasional fish on view along the rock bottom. Old tennis shoes, which we all wore, made for perfect comfort. Down home, old tennis shoes should always be retained for canoeing and swimming purposes. Every flow of water has a stone lining in the Ozarks, and you never know when you’ll have the urge to dive in someplace, so it’s best to keep a pair or two of otherwise useless shoes in the trunk. Water, I’d say, is the major compensation nature blessed our region with. Most of the streams and rivers run clear and pretty, often spring fed and clean enough for trout, even, let alone the more hardy fish. This runoff eventually fills a string of huge and magnificent lakes along the Missouri-Arkansas border, the Lake District. Norfork, Bull Shoals, Table Rock, and Beaver. All this fine water makes up for a lot in terms of cultural deprivation, especially in summer, and I’d rather float down the Current River in an inner tube than sit through a show of modern dance or opera anytime, anyway. The two operas I’d been dragged to by Lizbeth had been way too much like acid flashbacks for me to truly enjoy. I’d eventually been swept over by a kind of narcissistic terror, a sixth sense that the Latin dandies with the long knives and the puffy shirts were hollering about me, somehow.

But down here we’ve got the water, and banjos and fiddles and sly-fox storytellers around the square, and not much else.

The gang of us splashed about the pool, committing the standard acts of water mischief: underwater pinches, accidental glimpses of mams, quick little bites, hidden rubs, and surprise splashes to the face. Kid stuff that never dies. You dive into water anywhere at any age and pretty soon your acts will jibe with a sassy eleven-year-old.

I went after Damned Spot during a lull in the playpen. I sat at the water’s edge, called her over, and tossed her out a few feet so she’d get wet. She swam back to me, grinning a loose-jaw mutt grin. Next time I carried her out about twenty feet and released her. Her dog paddle to shore looked to be a pretty vigorous washing motion. The thing about dogs is they’re not people, so there’s never any cause to abuse them, even if they smell or yowl. In California I was popped by the law for knocking tar out of a neighbor fella who’d been beating his animal, a handsome young shepherd with a bark habit, with a tree limb thicker’n my wrist. The man put up a fair scrap ’til I got a thumb in his eye, then I learned him several things about hurt. He dropped charges the next day and apologized to me and moved away within the month, though he stayed on faculty at Hichens College. Dogs don’t ever call for that kind of bad treatment, or that’s what’s in my heart, and I reckon it goes back to grade school and our heinz mutt, Sentry.

I can’t talk about Sentry without blubbering to this day. It occurs to me sometimes that Sentry was paid back to the eternal for something Imaru pulled and got away with. That’s a line of thought I’d rather shake off and forget, though, so there.

Smoke and Big Annie had floated over to where the green reeds grow, and I could see his big hands were under her wet shirt but I couldn’t spot hers. The couples were diligently steering their kids’ eyes away from the reeds, pointing up Rocky Drop to watch Niagra climb to the cliff once more.

The way she climbed, with the surefooted grace of a native Ozarker born to hills and hardship and rough pleasure, made my chest swell. Her legs had hillbilly muscles and her swift steps amounted to a prance. The soaking of her garments had resulted in a smashing outline. The wet duds were sealed on her like gift wrap. I could see her nipples from the bank, where I sat cupping clean water over Damned Spot’s neck.

I glanced at the crowd watching her ascent and it was pure star appeal at work.

Watching her be so raptly watched, it occurred to me that there were longer shots than Niagra who had made it in pictures. Dick Powell came from across the Arkansas line at Mountain View, and Tess Harper from close by there, too. Sheilah Medley, star of several B flicks and a spy-oriented TV series, had been reared out at Daphne Spring, only seven miles from the West Table square. The blond gal from
The Beverly Hillbillies
lived about a three-beer drive north at Rolla. Anything can happen from anywhere. Niagra had the piss and vinegar to maybe accomplish more than I suspected. She wanted to take her pout and strut and bottle-blond beauty and merge it with the undying style of certain celluloid icons. Take her interior weirdness and nurture it until a singular art bloomed from the fertile warp. But the key to it
all was her looks, which might alone ease open a few Wilshire Boulevard doors to her lifetime plans.