Give Us a Kiss: A Novel (13 page)

I never learned why I’m that way, but I sort of knew why I thought of that, out on the deck, schmoozing with Springer.

“I’ll let it pass,” I said.

“Is that right? Mighty big of you. You’ll let it pass.” Springer gave a heavy, slow shake of his head. “You know who I am?”

I fired a Lucky, then said, “I reckon.”

“No, you don’t, Mr. Doyle, Mr. Doyle Redmond. You’ll let it pass—
that’s
fuckin’ funny. I mean,
you’ll
let a li’l joke pass, but settin’ right over there is Ed and Milton, who is grandkids to a feller named Logan, who your Mr. Panda murdered, stone cold.”

“He paid what the Dollys said Logan was worth.”

“Uh-huh. Logan was my uncle, you know.”

“I didn’t know.”

“I’ll let
that
pass,” he said. “Logan”—he began to wave that
bottle of one-fifty-one around—“I understand from our people, and a couple of recollections of my own, that he was a man of ideas. Couldn’t seem to keep ’em to himself when he had one, neither. He was good at numbers, could count up to nine, anyhow. That give him one of his ideas he couldn’t keep to himself. The idea he got, because he could count to nine, see, was that Mr. Panda might could be Mr. Smoke’s daddy.”

I just stood there, inhaling.

He went on.

“The man you call Daddy, see, the way I had it run down to me, you know, he was in Korea or some gook spot for quite a few months more than nine, whilst your mama lived with Mr. Panda, the seed bull, you see, over by the…”

My first punch, a left hook, caught him high on the skull, as he’d sensed the blow’s route and turned just that much. He grunted, came around with that one-fifty-one bottle, and I jammed him hard near his wrist and the bottle came loose, caught me on the ear. I grabbed him inside both elbows, stubbing my Lucky on his flesh, and he splashed beer toward my eyes, so I lowered my face and butted him, jumping the hard part of my forehead against his nose. I felt it give. There was a sound, a piffle, sort of, and he went “Uh!” This brought his hands up some, the pain, you know, and I snapped a strong knee into his manhood package. My ear felt swollen, maybe gone. I brought my left arm up, cocked the elbow, pivoted fast and beat him in the face with that sharp bone like a cudgel, time and again.

I said something along the lines of, “You wife-beatin’ sack of shit.”

He went down—he was only human. I had just planted one solid kick in on him around the beltline when the thug puppies came hurdling over the deck rail.

Damned Spot got all frenzied and baffled, not sure if she was expected to sink fangs into those who’d so recently petted her.

Milton and Ed both had blades out pretty quick, Buck knives, but they squared up in front of me and hesitated instead of shanking me before I could pull my sweet ladystinger.

They stared at that pistol, a big Huh? expression on both their weird faces.

The screen door opened, I heard that, and the thug puppies started to close in with those blades, ladystinger or no ladystinger, coming as they did from a bloodline noted for engendering in its members a rare sort of invincible stupidity.

I was only two finger jerks away from becoming a mass murderer, when,
wham!
Smoke belted one of them from behind (Milton, I’m gonna guess), then the other turned and caught a big Smoke fist flush on his chin.

Boy howdy, Smoke had gone through them two knife-wielding Dollys faster’n hot sauce through a widow woman! Those thug puppies were both down and out, as unconscious as toddlers who’d mistook mommie’s flask of Old Crow for Co-Cola.

“Doyle, man, what the fuck is with you?”

“He bothered me.”

“He what? He
bothered
you? Jesus, baby bro, he’ll backshoot you now—that’ll
really
bother you.”

The trio of women came onto the deck. They weren’t in a
talking mood. They just stood there, watching Damned Spot sniff around the flattened Dollys. Springer had begun to make a bit of noise, sputters and moans, that sort of thing.

“I enjoyed the game,” Shareena said to Niagra and Big Annie. “I learned some answers.” Then she walked to the site of the fight. “I reckon I better carry the menfolk on home right quick. They’ll come to and be mad, don’t you know.”

“We’ll drag ’em to your car,” Smoke said. “Give you a hand. I want you to know we don’t have a thing in the world against you, Shareena.”

“I understand how it is,” Shareena said. “It’s just that one-fifty-one rum, it leads to bad stuff every time. My mister, he can’t live without it, though it makes him awful crazy. Course it don’t make him near as crazy as you peckerwoods is, if you ain’t got sense enough to shoot the whole three of them Dollys this very minute.”

The dust from the departing Chevy had settled. The gang stood around in the kitchen, not saying much. Smoke kept looking at me and shaking his head. I’d had the normal postscrap case of frantic butterflies, but now the scared was out of me. Finally Smoke’s constant but unasked questions forced me to a response: “Old sins cast long shadows.”

Big bro merely stared.

Niagra pulled the venison from the fridge, slapped it on the counter. She unwrapped the foil and revealed a mound of red doe steaks.

“We ain’t eatin’ this poor girl,” she said. “I suspect this meat.” She shuffled the steaks with delicately pinched fingers. “We best not even feed it to Damned Spot.”

19

FOR REAL-ISM

THE MOON HAD gotten blood on its face. There was some wind kicking up in the night, a hint of fractious weather on the way. The tall trees wobbled in sudden stops and starts, like paranoid druggies, their leaves speed-rappin’ nonsensical prattle. Yet the sky was spread wide and clear, in sharp focus, no clouds at all visible in the frame. The money garden swayed beneath the red moon, too, the individual plants spread about us, standing mute, as a stoic tribe might, each somber stalk occasionally nodding in grim approval.

We were on guard, Niagra sitting cross-legged with a shotgun splayed across her lap, me packing the ladystinger. I didn’t believe we could be ripped off this night, as the Dollys were busted up pretty sore. But Smoke and Big Annie weren’t so sanguine of that, so there we sat, posted in the deep woods to oversee the financial flora, protect the blue-chip greenery. On the slim chance that patch bandits might tail us, we’d parked the Volvo at Panda’s, then snuck through the cemetery, past Tararum and into the woods.

I had pulled Niagra’s boots off and now held her bare feet in my lap. My ear throbbed and had swelled some, but the
main feeling I throbbed with was romantic. She’d brought a roll of clear tape and I applied swatches from it to her ankles and feet. Seed ticks are too small to pluck individually, and if you’ve got one you’ve got an army on you. The tape swatches pick them up best, a squad at a time. I sat there, holding her pretty feet, rolling that tape after seed ticks, and hell, man, I knew I was in love.

She knew it, too. She spoke of many things, the casual and the deeply felt. The girl had some dreams that were mighty fleshed out, full of detail, and she spoke of them as nearly factual.

I’ve always been vulnerable to my own dreams, too. I could relate to the symptoms if not to the exact fever. It seems Niagra read every biography of old Hollywood in paperback, and some of her dream-plans would need updating. I tried to impart current knowledge gently to this kid, who I guess I loved.

She said, “Then, maybe I’ll have to get work. Square work. Probably start as a hatcheck girl at The Mocambo, I imagine.”

“I believe The Mocambo is gone,” I said.

“Since when?”

“Oh, I guess twenty or thirty years ago.”

“No! Shit.” Her feet squirmed in my lap. “So, it’ll have to be Ciro’s, then.”

I didn’t have the heart.

I let Ciro’s still exist.

The night wind goosed my mood, gusting along with summertime warmth. The temperature was at that exact,
fabulous level where body heat and air are on a par and there’s a weightless sense, an overwhelming oneness with the atmosphere. Hardy amounts of sweat, but still the feeling of a godly cuddle out there amidst the smell of the forest and the creek and a hillbilly girl’s feet in August.

Niagra talked on. “Now, and surely you must have noticed this, when they belch, you can smell the beer. When they kiss, you can hear heartbeats, sniff the juice, feel the undies waddin’. When they act mean, you just know they were raised up mighty wrong and have to be that way.”

I had lost her thread while in revery, but nodded anyway.

“And the thing is, Doyle, they have so much outright for real-ism to their style, why they can convince you of most anything with only a look. A sneer. The way they walk.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “Who’re these people again?”

“The Method people. A style of actors.”

“Well, yeah. Brando, Dean—all those mumbly, twitchy sorts, right?”

“They mumble and twitch to reach a new level of for real-ism.” She pulled her feet from my lap, signifying a slight miff, I guess, then curled them beneath her can. “Marilyn Monroe went in for it, too. That movie I’m named for she was the star of. I feel… well…”

“A connection?”

“That’s it.” She giggled and looked down. “There might could be somethin’ to that.”

“You’re named for her flick—that’s somethin’ right there.”

“More’n that. I don’t want to say out loud what all—but a strong goomer could tap into it.”

So there we sat, in the deep woods, armed fairly well, listening to freight trains whistle and clack across the hills, chatting about thespian matters. Niagra had come across a copy of
Strasberg at the Actors Studio
at the Book Nook down in Hardy, Arkansas, and had devoured it. I dropped a couple of complimentary comments about Method acting, mostly drawn from Tennessee Williams’s plays on film, and she shoved her bare feet back onto my lap. I flapped jaws about Julie Harris and Gena Rowlands, Al Pacino and Karl Malden.

“Karl Malden?” she said. “Ain’t he that tater-nosed fella, wears a hat, sells credit cards on TV?”

“That’s him
now,
” I said. “But he’s famous for bein’ Method, you know.”

“No,” she said, “I didn’t. But I guess I mean the Method more of James Dean, Al Pacino—like that.”

“The cuter Method ones.”

“Are they?” she said. “They’re the ones that really send me with those chills of for real-ism, anyhow.”

“Those Method actors, though, Niagra, they go into some scary places, emotionally scary, to give out those real-world chills.”

“I want to act,” she said. “Scary won’t much scare me.” Her toes wrinkled and flexed and she leaned back, her hands snapping twigs as her weight lowered. “The Method people make whatever they act seem like the real world, and that’s the only scary place I know of.”

“The real world?”

“Where the real world meets me—that’s the scary place.”

Along in there I was doing my best to ape a teenager in
love. I’d never had one of those teenage heartbreaks the teenage years are so noted for. No lost love from my seventeenth year haunts me, and I suppose I feel a bit cheated by that. I hadn’t yet become too comfortable with decent girls before I hit the Marine Corps, and at Camp Pendleton I became comfortable with the wrong sort of girls, mainly from down along the Mexican border, most of them in the fifteen-to twenty-dollar range. It was my seventeenth year and all, but none of those quick pokes in whorehouse cribs were so true-blue or emotional as to haunt. Though there was a skinny li’l gal who chewed an orange while I flailed my manhood to and fro inside her, her jaws mashing hard on those orange wedges so that the juice splattered my eyes, the acidity causing them to well. She seemed starved for fruit. That’s an intimate moment I don’t imagine I’ll ever forget, but not because any high, wondrous emotions were involved.

So, stolen kisses in the school hallway between classes, prom night seduction, all that sort of young romance activity, was fresh to me. Smooching at the Dog’N Suds, my class ring worn on a string around a girl’s neck, parents who just didn’t understand—I’d never been there. Now here I was, having a sort of teenage love affair, only I was thirty-five years old having it, and hear this clear—it was everything common legend had glossed it up to be, and more.

But full of hidden shoals.

Niagra said: “I guess it’s big-headed, but I believe that somehow I am just, I don’t know—
so much extra
. There’s more to me than most. That’s why I’ll meet up with Mr. Lee Strasberg, make him be my guide, my teacher, until I have full powers.”

“Well,” I said. “It doesn’t have to be Lee Strasberg.”

“Yes, it does. He has a West Coast Actors Studio, too.”

“There’s plenty of teachers of the Method. A lot of them would probably do.”

“Uh-uh. It’ll be Lee Strasberg his own self for me.”

“That won’t work,” I said. “Niagra, ol’ Strasberg is dead.”

Her face drained, went slack-jawed and deflated.

“Don’t say that, Doyle. It’s not funny.”

“Kid—he passed several years ago.”

“No!”

“Eighty-two, -three, in there.”

As she began to believe me, she began to weep. I’d caused my hillbillyette beauty to cry by waylaying her with unwanted knowledge. She fell back on the dirt and leaves and twigs, sobbing. She said, “So, it’s more tough titty to me, huh?”

One leg of her dream had withered, and not a word would be said for over an hour. I rubbed her bare feet, avoiding any urge to offer comment, watching her shoulders shake as she wept tears for Lee Strasberg into her clenched fists.

20

SHOOKY BIZNESS

NIAGRA AND ME followed the young-love urge, holding hands as we picked our way through the woods. A burgeoning courtliness compelled me to carry her shotgun loosely at my side, the ladystinger riding in a back pocket. Trees and shrubs and sudden gullies forced our hands apart now and then, until we reached the clear-cut lawn of Tararum. It was the hour before dawn and the air blew cool. The drumstick palace loomed lightless and Gothic, and we took advantage of the privacy the time of night afforded to sidle alongside the sexy yard statues and grope them.