Give Us a Kiss: A Novel (20 page)

The Hyena novels are scheduled to be reprinted in the spring.

Lizbeth, smelling a honey pot of publicity, claims she loves me again.

Most of my time here in the Howl County Jail I spend thinking about golf. Over and over I think about a certain tee-shot at the seventeenth cow pattie, and sometimes I let my shot miss the turd stack, drift wide or fall short, but usually I can’t make myself do it, the golf ball flies high and inevitably and irrevocably busts that cow pattie stack to bits.

Uncle Bill sent a postcard from Jeff City saying my room is ready.

Niagra writes long letters expressing her love and regrets, and details of her assault on the silver screen, from Venice, California.

If I ever get out of prison, I’ll be who I always dreamed of being.

My hook found me.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

DANIEL WOODRELL was born in the Missouri Ozarks, left school and enlisted in the marines at seventeen, received his bachelor’s degree at twenty-seven, graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and spent a year on a Michener Fellowship. He is the author of nine works of fiction, including the novel
Winter’s Bone,
the film adaptation of which won the Grand Jury Prize for best picture at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and received five Academy Award nominations.
The Death of Sweet Mister
received the 2011 Clifton Fadiman Medal from the Center for Fiction, an award created “to honor a book that deserves renewed recognition and a wider readership.” His first collection of stories,
The Outlaw Album,
was published in 2011. Woodrell lives in the Ozarks near the Arkansas line with his wife, Katie Estill.

Reading Group Guide

G
IVE
U
S A
K
ISS

A novel by

Daniel Woodrell

HOW MUCH OF THE OZARKS IS IN ME?

TWO HOURS BEFORE beginning this essay we had yet another encounter with residents of the meth house on the corner, our nearest neighbor to the west. The lead male over there is a cutter; dozens of little slashes have made risen scars on his arms. He has a ponytail, is known well by all cops in town, and never wears a shirt. He accused us of “eyeballing” him as we passed his house, something we have no choice but to do many times a day. The derelict shack has in the past been home to sex criminals, rapists, and pedophiles, other meth users, and some criminals who would have to be called general practitioners—whatever crime looks easiest tonight is what they will be arrested for tomorrow. Meth-heads are the worst to deal with. They are unpredictable and frequently violent after they’ve been sleepless for a few days. We are dedicated to minding our own business about most things, legal or not so much, but cooking meth releases toxins and is a peril to the whole neighborhood. A decade ago there were several houses much like this operating nearby, but they’ve been weeded down to this, the last one, and these tweakers should start packing.

My mother was born less than a hundred yards from my house. She was the first generation raised in town and played
in my yard as a child. I can see the roof of her father’s place from the porch when the leaves are down. Both sides of my family have been in the Ozarks a long time. It was hard from the beginning to eke a living from thin dirt and wild game, and it stayed hard. The Woodrell side (surnames Mills, Terry, Dunahew, and Profitt) have been here a bit longer than the Daily side (Davidson, DeGeer, Riggs, Shannon). Woodrells arrived on this continent around 1690 and settled in these parts during the 1830s, after Kentucky and Tennessee became too gussied up and easily governed for their taste. The early white settlers came here to avoid the myriad restraints that accompany civilization—sheriffs, taxes, social conformity. They sought isolation. There has never been much belief in the essential fairness of a social order that answers most readily to gold; it’s always been assumed the installed powers were corrupt and corruptible, hence to be shunned and avoided, except when you couldn’t and must pay them.

A Davidson ancestor did kill a man in the center of town, before many witnesses, and land, livestock, everything that could be sold had to be sold to buy him out of a conviction, which was done. He’d killed his long-time pal, a man who beat him always in the wrestling contests featured at most picnics. They got drunk on Washington Avenue and decided to wrestle again in the street. Davidson won this time, as the other man could not stand unaided, and is alleged to have pulled his pistol in victory and said as he shot the pal at his feet, “Now I finally whupped you, I might as well kill your ass, too.” Once the money was spent, this became an act of self-defense and he never did a week in jail. That was over a
century ago, but we still remember, and the family of the dead man does, too—as late as the 1970s there was friction when my older brother dated a girl with that name.

I was raised on such stories in exile, and the old stories get rubbed together plenty in the retelling; dates and facts become blended. Did such and such happen in 1885, 1965, or not at all? Is that a DeGeer story or a Dunahew? The violent stories are the first I remember—they are many and fed me as a boy—but now I am more taken with how Grandma Mills lost a slice of nose to disease; how Dad got that patch of skin torn from his leg as a boy when barbed wire snagged him after he’d raided a garden for melons and the gardener spotted him; how Grandad Daily rode a mule to church in the 1920s because he wanted to impress girls. I like trains in the night, dogs baying after coons, the long hours when the wind sings as it channels between hills and hollers and flies along creek beds. I’ve known a thousand plain kindnesses here. It is generally a pleasure to live among so many individuals who refuse to understand even the simplest of social rules if they find them odious. This trait can, of course, raise trouble. I have had a few close relatives do time in the penitentiary, some recently, not for being thieves, ever, but always for refusing to take each and every piddling law seriously—trouble is bound to happen once in a while when you love life so wildly.

I believe I became a writer because of my grandmother Woodrell. She was proud that she had attended school to the completion of third grade, but she was not quite literate. She worked as a domestic: maid, cook, housekeeper. My grandfather was a drunken bum and fled the family when Dad was
tiny. Grandma toted three sons alone, one with leukemia, all hungry, hungry, hungry. At age nine my father became the sole support of the family. Uncle Mills James went off to the navy, and Uncle Alfred was dying in the main room of the house, so Grandma left work to care for him. Dad carried paper routes, was a rack-boy in a pool hall where he often slept to avoid hearing his beloved brother fight so hard for breath. On weekends he was given over to a Polish farm family, and he loved them and his days spent there, named me for their son, killed in the war. Dad never turned mean and he never turned criminal, though among his favorite memories from childhood was of the night there was a tapping at his window, and the adult Cousin C asked the boy to aid him in escaping the area, for good, and it was done and recounted gleefully. Could scarcely be a rougher upbringing, but Dad found books somehow and dove in deeply, reading whenever still for a moment. War introduced him to the wider world and better libraries, and he liked an awful lot of what he saw and read. It has always been difficult to earn a living in the Ozarks, each generation winnowed as folks depart on the “hillbilly highway” to Detroit, Houston, Cincinnati, Kansas City—Steve Earle sings a great song about this. When I was a toddler Dad took us on the hillbilly highway to St. Louis so he might earn a decent living there and seek the education he’d dreamed about. He had three sons, a six-hundred-square-foot cracker-box house, with never fewer than five residents, sometimes seven. He worked all day selling metal and for years went to night college at Washington University. I have so many memories of him, a
complete grown-up, doing homework at the kitchen table, empty beer cans shoved aside as he studied, smoke billowing from his Pall Malls. I always thought homework and school were great privileges. I loved literature young and haven’t been able to kick the habit yet. I think illiterate Grandma put something important into Dad that changed the future for all his sons who cared to notice. At twenty-three I declared that I would be a writer or a nightmare, and he said, “Let’s hope the writing pans out….”

Two blocks from my home there is a big old cemetery and in its acres many relatives are at rest. I walk through often. Sometimes in an odd corner I find kinfolk I hadn’t known were buried there. A Davidson murdered and left in a cave, never solved. A Mills dead in a horrible wreck that we don’t believe was an accident—no proof, but we know the name. Dead babies, flu victims, all that sorrow. I think about the carts pulled by hand across Appalachia, kids and hogs trailing, the years of scratching a subsistence living from ruined dirt. The dirt was always thin but became thinner with the arrival of progress. When the timber barons came to the Ozarks they cut the great forests down to stump and mud and the mud thinned more with every rainfall. They took all the timber. They left us the stumps. This is the Ozarks I needed to know, and know to the bloody root, in order to write as I do.

—Daniel Woodrell

Originally published November 29, 2010, on
MulhollandBooks.com
. Reprinted with permission.

QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION

1. Although the literary community sees him as a somewhat dangerous “shitkicker from the sticks,” Doyle is self-conscious about his bookishness back in the Ozarks. He grew up a “bookworm doofus smarty-mouth,” and even in adulthood many of the Ozark lifers seem to view him with suspicion. Which do you think is Doyle’s truer nature: writer or outlaw? Are the two mutually exclusive?
   
2. The supernatural plays a significant role in
   Give Us a Kiss.
   There’s Niagra and her goomers and boogerdogs, which Doyle seems to tolerate only due to his interest in Niagra herself. But then there’s Imaru, Doyle’s inner being, who links together all of his past lives. What role does Imaru play in Doyle’s character? Do you believe that Doyle’s supposed link to his former selves is real or imagined?
   
3. The once proud Redmond family has been reduced to Doyle, Panda, and Smoke, as “a Redmond legacy that had taken generations to build was burned up in bribes because of three finger jerks Panda couldn’t control.” Do you think that it was worth selling off the family property to save Panda from serving life in Jefferson City? How does the indignity of having something as ridiculous as Tararum erected on their ancestral homeland shape the lives and outlooks of the three Redmonds?
   
4. Doyle and Smoke are presented as brothers for the bulk of the novel, but eventually we learn that they may very well be half brothers. How is Doyle more like General Jo and how is Smoke more like Panda? Where did you see the author drop hints to suggest that the two may have different fathers?
   
5. Niagra’s dreams of Hollywood are earnest but misguided. Doyle is reluctant to disabuse her of them, though, as he says, “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…” Once Niagra reaches Hollywood, do you think her dreams will survive? Do you think Doyle’s dreams have truly gone limp?
   
6. Before Doyle and Niagra’s mescaline-fueled float down the river, Big Annie implores Doyle to make things “memorably nice,” since her daughter is so in love. Are Doyle and Niagra actually in love? Do you agree with Big Annie that “the first can have a lot to do with all of them”? If so, what do you think the legacy of having Doyle as a first love will be?
   
7. Much is made of the Dollys’ reputation as “a legendary clan for thievery and nasty shenanigans.” And true to their reputation, Bunk Dolly and Roy Don Springer are both hardened menaces to society. But on the whole, how different do you think the Dollys are from the Redmonds? In their heyday before the property was liquidated to free Panda, do you think the Redmonds upheld a more civilized brand of criminality, or were they just as ruthless and mean-spirited as the Dollys?
   
8. Doyle is constantly influenced by his Redmond blood, in particular being haunted by the wall of photographs of his outlaw forebears, always aware of “that horrible bloodstream urge to go on and do the questionable deeds that might make those dead faces nod in grim approval.” Do you agree that blood has that much influence? That by his elemental Redmond nature Doyle is “fated to be, not, say, a college prof of English, but inmate 2679785”? By that token, what might your own family history dictate that you be?
   
9. Before Doyle’s final trip into the Inca Club, he taps into the Redmond legacy of violent justice to exact vengeance for Smoke. As he says, “Forget the modern world, forget what century this is—some stuff runs deeper than that.” Do you think he is right about that? Are there certain bedrock principles that transcend time and place?
   
10. Although
    Give Us a Kiss
    is most certainly fiction, there are elements of Doyle’s life that match Woodrell’s own biography—both are Ozarks natives who left school for the military at a young age, both started making their names in the literary world as adults. Where do you think the two converge? Where do you think they diverge?
    
11. For those familiar with Woodrell’s later works, the epilogue-like final chapter may come as a bit of a surprise—Smoke is alive, Niagra has made it to Hollywood, and Doyle finally seems to be on a path to literary celebrity. The ending might not be truly happy as Doyle is headed for a stint in federal prison with no more Redmond land to sell off to buy his freedom. How does the upbeat tone of the ending affect your feelings for the characters or the novel as a whole?