Give Us a Kiss: A Novel (3 page)

I’ve never been told why he did it. No one, not even Mom or General Jo, would answer my questions on the topic. I suspect that if the facts were let out, Panda’s vicious act would look awful sorry, probably inexcusable.

But our whole legacy, a Redmond legacy that had taken generations to build, was burned up in bribes because of three finger jerks Panda couldn’t control.

2

THAT BULLHEAD LOOKS TASTY

THE BOTTLE OF Johnnie Red had gone a good ways south, and the sun was starting to slip down toward the rim of the world. I’d opened a few shades to let in some light, and Panda was standing by the sink, his feet rooted, but his upper body and arms were feinting and crouching and snapping short geriatric hooks at a badass phantom battler who’d had Panda’s number back in the heydays. In regression therapy, which I fell into to appease my wife, it appeared for a while that in a former life I might actually have fought Panda, but then the veiled memories began to focus on a ticket in my former hand. Otherwise, this might’ve been me Panda dreamed of licking. He had gotten a good, sweaty octogenarian lather up. A chewy cigar chunk stuck out of his mouth like an on-off knob.

Suddenly he stops whipping up on the phantom who isn’t me, and turns his drunk blue eyes my way.

“What kind of trouble you in?’

“No trouble at all.”

“
No
trouble?”

“Not really, I don’t think.”

Panda assessed my comments for a minute, that stogie stub twitching rhythmically. Then he said, “That shit ain’t goin’ to flush, boy.”

I sort of enjoyed being called boy. It made me feel like I had one hundred percent of my head hair again, and there was a long, rich life stretching before me instead of a promising future moldering behind me.

“That’s my story,” I said.

“You still married?”

“Legally,” I said. “That’s off-limits, Panda.”

He put his hands up alongside his mouth and pressed his cheeks together to create a comic, woeful facial expression.

“Ohhh, l’amour, l’amour,” he moaned in his notion of a pitiful Frenchman, then switched to what I imagine was an Italian immigrant, going, “Where da fore arta dou whanna I wanta you so a bad.”

I rattled my glass of ice cubes and said, “Something along those lines.”

Panda came to the table and dropped heavily to his chair.

“It’s always along those lines,” he said. He looked at the bottle and the ashtray full of Lucky butts. “We should be thinkin’ about eatin’,” he said, “and I know just what I want to fry.”

“Okay. So tell me.”

“Sweet, fat catfish.”

“From the IGA, you mean?”

“Why, hell no. Sweet, fat catfish noodled fresh from The Howl, over here a ways.”

“Boy howdy,” I said, and laughed. “I saw this fish noodlin’ trip comin’ ever since you first said, ‘Crack the seal, boy.’ ”

Panda couldn’t walk it, so I had to drive. He sat in the passenger’s seat, blackthorn cane between his legs, and shot scolding glances my way at any slight jostle, as if I was taking every bump in the road all wrong. If Panda’s face was carved on the prow of a seagoing vessel, it’d be a vessel that didn’t get fucked with much. He’s got the nose job common among leather pushers, a honker carelessly crafted into a memorable, intimidating lump by six hundred stiff jabs he didn’t slip. There’s a little swayback an inch above the nostrils that rules out the strict usage of “flattened” as a description. Jimmy Ware did the best he could on the plentiful splits in Panda’s skin, especially around the eyes, but his brows are yet cleaved by hairless puckers, and odd-shaped gashes have aged even odder on his cheeks and lips. He has the face of a man who early in life discovered pain and slow disfigurement as special delights, and never met the agony he didn’t seek more of. But it’s the overall glow of personality that gives his face that back-off-sucker sheen, as his smartness shows in his bright blue eyes, and along with the smarts obvious in those orbs, you can see the unabashedly mean and dauntless spirit of the man.

That is, he’s a wonderful figure for a grandpa, by Redmond standards.

I took the route through the new wing of the cemetery, the dead laid out in democratic rows across a hillock and a swale
where our hogs used to wallow. Then I pulled onto Jewel Road for a couple hundred yards until we came to the private drive of the newest owner of most of our land. He’d fenced everything in with pretty crisscrossed white lumber, and the only way to get to The Howl from this angle would be up the drive, then plow the Volvo across his immaculate grounds.

The house is a mansion built by drumsticks. It’s a huge, impressive piece of architecture, even though Panda considered it just a boogered-up squatter’s hovel. The notorious owner, Sam T. Byrum, sucked beaucoup lucre into his pockets when the red-meat scare came in the seventies and his poultry interests boomed. Byrum, or maybe his wife, Helene, had a deep-rooted fixation on
Gone With the Wind,
because this house is held up by the aristocratic white columns of the ol’ Tara place the Yankees did wrong to in that flick. The power of film has resulted in this place, I guessed, and despite my atavistic allegiance to the land it sits on, the joint impressed me. There are white-bricked walls on either side of the drive, and though the gate was open I could see it carried brass-plated scrollwork that read TARARUM, a lazy mix of “Byrum” and “Tara.”

I had the car stopped outside the drive, and, by golly, Panda’s eyes had gotten misty.

“Go on in,” he said.

“What?”

“Go on in, I told you.” He stabbed that blackthorn cane on the floorboards a couple of times. “Drive on to The Howl.”

This was the sort of moment, a key instance in fact, when Redmonds drift wide of the dully acceptable. The Volvo, I knew, didn’t exactly belong to me, and was probably reported stolen, and there’s an open bottle of Johnnie Red on the dash, and the blue pillowcase with a ladystinger in it is on the backseat, and this land hasn’t been technically ours for near forty years. But we Redmonds haven’t accrued our pungent family history by meekly toeing the mark the world has laid down, as we have our own Redmond world stuck between our ears by cherished myths and lies, facts and memories and inherited animosities.

Cut to: me naked in the Howl River, the brown water warm as spit. Panda had squatted on the hood of the Volvo to direct me, a novice noodler, on how to hand fish. There was an obvious wheel rut running from Tararum, past the swimming pool and the flower beds and the sexy statues, clean to where the Volvo sat.

“Don’t be such a sissy,” Panda said. “Run your hand up under the bank, into those mud holes. The cats sit in there when it’s hotted up like today.”

This mode of fishing, noodling, is a crime. The fine is around five hundred dollars, but Panda had a love for it as it was a skill country men of his age excelled at. I did not excel. I did not even enjoy it, running hands blind under logs and into mud holes—I am cursed by a bounty of imagination. Vivid possibilities rushed my brain while my hands slid into holes, such as creatures neither fish nor snake, but toothy and scaly carnivores that had lived for eons in mud holes and would soon snack on my succulent digits. All kinds of folktales about
noodlers pulled under! by serpent-sized catfish and drowned (some of these stories are actually documented) or sliced like bacon by sharp fins, went boo! in my brain.

I’d gotten a two-pound bullhead by accident right quick, and I kept looking at it on the grassy bank, flopping at Panda’s feet, thinking, That’ll fry up to feed two.

“You’re sloshin’,” Panda yelled. “You won’t get none that way, boy.”

“I am not sloshin’.”

“You been citified. You ain’t worth a damn noodlin’.”

He wanted a jumbo catfish, but, truly, I was happy with that bullhead. The sun was about to fade out, but there was a tangle of blowdown crushed against the bank I hadn’t yet tried. So I slid that way, my feet sinking in mud. Just as I got there something came flitting out at thigh level, and brushed me like a cat in a dark room, but slimy and big, and all I could think of was a horrible thought about my privates dangling there like dough balls of bait, and I dove toward the middle and swam, thrashing hard.

As I clawed up the slick bank I said, “That bullhead is plenty.”

Then I saw the sheriff, on foot, following our wheel ruts, with Mrs. Byrum behind him, standing back by the pool. Helene Byrum was a smashing blond lady, probably forty plus, but rich and sleek and distant. She was dressed in white finery, a wafer-thin and snug dress, very comely and chic, but her body language was clearly shouting, Get the fuck off
my
land, you white-trash goobers!

The sheriff was a tall, slender bullwhip of a fella, only a few grades older than me. He sported a big handlebar
mustache he apparently doted on, pampered, as it was nigh perfect, and showed he was not only a handy fella with the tiny clippers and Butch Wax, but also fancied himself to be linked to the famously mustachioed frontier lawmen who had stood tall and firm and backshot so many white-trash bad boys and mixed-breed chicken snatchers while serving the public. That big official pistol slapped at his side as he came downhill. His name was Terence (never Terry) Lilley, and he was a butthole cousin to the Redmonds.

“Goddamn it, Panda,” he said when he got close enough. His voice was thinner than he was, high and scratchy, but his face was stern. “You been warned to not come in here.”

Panda gave him a straight stare.

“My mind, she is old, rattly,” Panda said. “Things have melted out a here.” He pushed a finger hard against his head. “Such as do this, don’t do that.”

“The lady is pissed,” Terence said, then saw me come over the lip of the bank, naked. “And who is
this,
bareassed and grinnin’ like the wave atop a slop bucket?”

“Doyle,” I said. “Redmond.”

Terence nodded some, did a little fine-tuning of his handlebars.

“Oh, sure, Doyle, the little Redmond.”

I’m six two in boots, haulin’ two hundred pounds, but to many herebouts I am still Smoke’s li’l bro. I stood there, shakin’ water drops loose like a dog. I smelled strongly of Howl River, but that’s a stink I never could hate. I started to pull my jeans on, and I noted that, up the hill, there, Helene hadn’t looked away from me once, or gone into a high-toned,
elegant swoon, either. In fact, she had a hand held above her eyes to clarify distant objects.

I cupped some fingers under my love works and made a show of whippin’ river drops off. I made it appear to be a heavy job.

When I pulled my jeans up, her hand dropped.

Suddenly she was immensely likable, and the huge socioeconomic gulf between us seemed narrowed down to a mere crack that one good jump could carry me across.

Sheriff Lilley began to slowly amble around the Volvo, looking at its bad color in the fading light.

“Who did this paint job?”

“Oh, I forgot the name.”

“Around here?”

“Kansas City.”

“I’d sue,” he said. He backed a few steps from the Volvo and the sad-assed paint job me and General Jo had done, trying to spray over yellow with blue. “I see paint jobs that a way when kids have stolt a car or something.”

“I like it,” I said. “It’s different.”

“It’s real different,” he said. Then he faced me and said, “You see Smoke, and I know you will, tell him to settle things with those Kansas cops. They’ve had a man down here twice, and they’re pesterin’ the hell out of me.”

“If I see him, I’ll tell him.”

“Quit it—you’ll see him. I’ve
seen
him a few times, and I could find him again if I gave two shits about what he done up in the city.”

I imagine Sheriff Lilley’s lack of resolve vis-à-vis Smoke
traces back to us bein’ butthole cousins. A butthole cousin is a cousin, sure enough, but it’s such a distant, hard-to-trace blood mixin’ that such relatives are called butthole cousins. It doesn’t mean you’re friends or swap Christmas cards or any of that, but it means you’re kin of a sort, and kin of any sort means a little something in the Ozarks.

“You know,” he said, “my wife fetched home one of your books, Doyle. She’s a reader, I’m not, really. I never did finish it—too violent and silly.”

I stood there and took it, this capsule review from a sheriff who’d once been the object of ridicule for spelling “law enforcement” as “law engorgement” on a campaign poster. I had learned to be calm before such philistines.

“And you,” he said, whirling on Panda, “this is the last time I catch you trespassin’ on Byrum land and don’t ring you up. I mean it, Panda, goddamn it. You’re an old man and all, but I’ll ring your ass up good next time.”

“I could do ninety days without changin’ cigars,” Panda said.

“Next time we’ll see if that’s so.”

I picked the bullhead up, finger in the gills, which I guess I shouldn’t have.

“And that fish is an illegal catch,” Sheriff Lilley said. He came a little closer for a look at the bullhead. There was good eating on that bullhead, and it was still floppin’ fresh. “I could ring you both for that right now, but I’m headed home.” He held a beckoning hand toward me and I let him take the fish. “Now I’m gonna overlook your crimes if you get your asses out of here right now—’cause my, oh, my, that bullhead looks tasty.”

3

FLAME LICKS

WHENEVER SMOKE AND me got together, something not too savory seemed to happen. In our teenage years we were like car wrecks that you knew would happen again, almost nightly, at the same old crossroads of Hormones and Liquor. I suppose I figured a little more age might have made us brothers less combustible companions, though I’m not sure it wasn’t those dangerous possibilities that had me on this family errand at all.

The morning was hot by breakfast. There was a slight, hot breeze carrying the scent of the feedlot, which is a good stink, a stink cattlemen always say smells like money. There was lots of loot in the wind. Now and again, in the gustier moments, you could hear the beef bawling richly down in the pens.

I set out to find Smoke using Panda’s directions. The drive would not be long, but it would take me into the countryside of our home territory, which is the same as going to church for me.