Give Us a Kiss: A Novel (6 page)

When the confab broke up and the whispering trio returned, they were intent on business. They stood over me, executives lined together as a united front, the kitchen light behind them casting their forms in ominous relief.

Smoke said, “We need to know if you’re in or you’re out.”

“In or out of what?”

They all copped squats then around the table. They took turns talking, a microdemocracy at work, but Smoke’s words and Niagra’s presence heaved the most weight. The long and the short of it was pretty much what I’d imagined it might be: wacky backy croppin’. Smoke knew I’d had some considerable truck with that product in years past, moved a bit of herb in the vicinity of various campuses, and also worked harvest two seasons when I was in grad school at Iowa and strapped for mad money.

Eventually I asked, “What might my share be?”

“You’re comin’ in late,” Smoke said. “But we need extra security now.”

“Why is that?”

“Some Dollys have been sniffin’ around,” Big Annie said. Dollys sniffing around is about the worst news a person could get in the Howl County area. They are a legendary clan for thievery and nasty shenanigans, legion in number, taking over three columns in the West Table phone book. “A bunch that runs with an awful man named Springer, who might be a Dolly by intermarriage.”

“They’re not as far advanced beyond the caveman as most of us are,” Niagra said. “Rip artists. Not nice.”

“Springer,” Smoke said, “is a bad, bad man—he’d be good research for you to know.”

I lit a Lucky.

“This would all be good research,” I said.

“We act friendly to them,” Niagra said, “but we’re not.”

“They’ll burn you on a deal,” Smoke said, “then dare you to come on and kill them.”

“I reckon I’d snub a bunch like that,” I said. I was thinking that this might be
too much
research of first-hand quality, though the quest for verisimilitude had previously provided me with an artistic alibi for many vices and scandalous companions. “Keep my distance.”

“Springer’ll shoot quick, too,” Smoke said. “I’m pretty sure he killed a dude down in Viola there, across the Arkansas line. And I saw him shoot Bond Collins in the leg outside The Inca Club.”

“Well,” I said, “
him
I’ve just got to know.”

“And your share,” Niagra said, “should be right at fifteen thousand dollars, tax free.”

“Assuming I live to cash in.”

Fifteen K is more than my agent had ever managed to get me for an entire novel, including paperback and foreign rights, after his big bite of the capital was factored in. And this would resemble a lump-sum payment for a book I wouldn’t even have to create, not write a lick. It amounted to a literary grant I could get without having to shtup three of the five judges.

I smoked for a moment, posed thoughtfully, as if in deep and detailed consideration of the proposal. The peacocks were up in the tall limbs to roost, not letting out much with the cackles and screams that are so ghostly when coming from high up in a dark tree, quietly on the alert for
night-stalking owls that might swoop by and snatch their heads off. Damned Spot was on the deck, belly to the stars, shimmying her back against the cedarwood, harassing her fleas. The wind chimes tinkled as air puffed by, sounding like spare change rattling in the pockets of fleeing suspects. I wanted to salve my good sense by acting reluctant to accede to my genetic and family-of-origin inevitabilities. The matter of sheer personal choice intrudes and weighs in kind of heavy, too, I suppose, but to cop to personal choice would undermine my sense of deterministic doom.

I believed a message was coming in for Imaru at this moment, but it faded and instead I had a memory of or intuition about our daddy, General Jo, and his brother Bill. They were adults when the Redmond land was lost because of Panda’s weak management of his emotions. Dad was named General Jo after General Jo Shelby of the Missouri Confederate Cavalry. Shelby was the only general in all the Confederate states who never did surrender. He and his Missouri boys buried their battle flag in the mud of the Rio Grande and rode into Mexico in the last days of the war, hoping to found a new empire of Southernness with a Spanish lilt, over on the Pacific Coast. Anything was preferable to the humiliation of surrender, even when surrender made all kinds of sense, and this is the sort of thought process that afflicts us Redmonds to this day.

The new empire, called Carlotta, never took, didn’t work out, and eventually those unsurrendered Missouri boys who lived through all the extra killing this empire scheme had required, straggled back home and became hotheaded democrats and occasional outlaws.

General Jo and Uncle Bill took the loss of the Redmond land, land that would have eventually been theirs, about the same way those other rebels took the loss of the Confederacy. General Jo and Uncle Bill had dreams of buying back their vast acres, and they applied for an unsecured loan of sorts on payroll day at The Sunnyside Dairy near Lebanon. They made their applications with shotguns in hand and stockings over their faces. They managed a clean getaway, and all was well for about two weeks, until Uncle Bill’s wife caught him having at it with a car hop from the Dog’N Suds. In her instant miff, she went overboard, ratted them both out to the law. General Jo and Uncle Bill were in the Missouri pen from just before I was born, and I didn’t really know General Jo until he came home when I was seven, and I have still never called him “Dad” to his face. General Jo has never done serious time again, just a few overnights in the drunk tank. Uncle Bill, a recidivist fuckup, stayed free less than two years before catching life for a straight-razor fandango he instigated at The Inca Club with his ex-wife’s new husband.

I ofttimes feel that my genes have me cornered.

Because, hand to heart, ever since that round of golf at which I’d triumphed by virtue of a single, perfectly lucky stroke that smacked the cow-pattie stack, I’d smelled that smell. That smell of the not too savory but awfully attractive that seemed always to perfume the times Smoke and me spent together. The stink of self-expressive and unapologetic wrongness, a stink I’d whiffed young, been weaned on in fact, found intoxicating, and had come to miss.

My answer reflected my needs.

8

SKID MARKS

CUPID WAS A silent partner in this criminal conspiracy, or maybe it was that gnat-ball destiny, as Niagra got tagged to break me in, show me the layout of the money garden. Big Annie kept a little Toyota pickup in the barn, and Niagra brought it up to the house, around the side where the hose hooked up. An old water-bed husk lay in the bed of the truck, and she brought the hose out and made the connection.

“This takes a while,” Niagra said. “We never go water ’til way after full dark. You don’t ever know who might see the water bed in the truck and leap to the right conclusion.”

Her champagne blond hair seemed like a lightbulb in the moonlight. “Incandescent” would fit. I just enjoyed it so to watch her move in any manner: tiny head shakes, hand brushing her hair, the stances she took. My loins, a region I’d been neglectful of for a spell, gave those tiny tingles, that loose feeling of want. I hadn’t been in a sexual scene that didn’t feature my right hand as ingenue since California.

“So, Niagra,” I said, trying to dredge forth some sort of swain charm, “uh, what’s your major?”

“Boy howdy,” she said, and a slow smile showed her white
teeth in the moonglow, “you’re wantin’ at my booty so bad you can’t hardly speak.”

“I can speak, shit.”

“No, look,” she said, “it’s charming. I know I’m hot.” She looked to the water mattress, only slowly filling. “And my major is theater arts, but I’m never goin’ to graduate.”

“Sure you will.”

“No. You don’t get it. I’m takin’ my share of all this and goin’ out to actin’ school in Hollywood.”

“You might just make it,” I said.

“Really?” she said, and for that instant she fairly bloomed with wild hope. “I’m ecstatic with that. That’s mighty good to hear, comin’ from an artist like you, Doyle.” She did a sort of curtsy that made her chest-puppies frisky behind that T-shirt. “Molto grazie.”

“Prego,” I said.

“Parle italiano?”

“No.”

“Good,” she said. “Me neither. I can only say one sentence, and it’s not one that’ll take me far.”

“What is it?”

“Il gatto è grande.”

I lit a Lucky, then laughed.

“I see the problem with that,” I said. “It might function as an icebreaker at somebody’s house who has cats. Other’n that, I don’t see the future in it.”

She leaned over the truck, patted the water mattress. There were two inches of road dust caked on the bumpers, and she tried not to lean on the dirty parts.

“You know,” she said, over her shoulder, “if you shaved those crappy goatee whiskers off, you wouldn’t look half bad.”

“Not half bad, huh.”

“Cute,” she said. “You’re not that young, but without those whiskers I wouldn’t see you so much as not that young. More as just cute, period.”

“I reckon I’ll run in and shave this minute.”

That got her to laugh, and laughter is the opening wedge to carnal tomfoolery, so my lower parts actually experienced one or two anticipatory throbs.

“Come on now, Doyle. We’ve got work to do.”

She said it like she meant it, and she did.

Those water beds take a long wait to fill. Damned Spot kept coming around, making herself available for petting, but I’d had a surfeit of dog interaction. I went into the house and fetched a can of Stag from Big Annie’s fridge. Smoke and Big Annie were in the front room, laughing hard at some show they’d pulled in off the satellite dish. It might’ve been
Arsenio Hall,
because Smoke said, “That brother’s jokes hit splat on my funny bone. More so than them white boys. I don’t know why.”

I left them to their beamed-in mirth, went back outside. I stood there, sipping beer, while Niagra sat in the truck with the door open. Over at the porch light a jamboree of june bugs and so forth were tapping out an insect jig against the light shade and the screen door. At one point, for some reason, Niagra told me she’d been named not for the honeymoon spot but for the movie of that title. I didn’t know the flick, but we chewed the fat that way for a bit, listening to water gurgle into the mattress.

At some likely moment I inquired as to why she didn’t have a fella.

“These fellas hereabouts are just too un-fuckin’-couth,” she said. She sidled over, took a sip of my beer. “Plus, I just look around at how folks here wind up, and alls I can say is, Thank God for Greyhound, you know? I see girls I know here and there, and now they got double-wide butts and bad hairdos and off-kilter kids they take government money for. The husbands all seem to not wash too often, but they’re tush-hog masters in their own trailer homes, you know, and don’t ever take
no guff
off their women. So you see the women at the IGA with jacked-up eyes and split lips ’cause they couldn’t wash the skid marks out of hubby’s rancid undershorts, more skid marks in there than you see at the Indy 500.” She took another sip of my beer, then sighed and fell back against the truck. “It just ain’t been heart-rendering for me to say and say and say, ‘I’m washin’ my hair tonight—I think I’ll pass.’ ”

I said, “That’s something I don’t ever have, skid marks in my undershorts.”

“That’s ’cause you don’t wear no undershorts.”

“How in the hell can you know that?” I asked, and I was sincere.

“Oh,” she said, “the way your pecker lays out against your leg, there. Plus, Smoke is the same way, so I recognize the look.” She smacked the water mattress then, and the smack made a deep sound. “That’s full enough,” she said. “Let’s do the job.”

9

CAST A GOOMER

THE MONEY GARDEN had been planted in an idyllic spot. Niagra showed the way, steering the lugging Toyota down the rock road a half mile at first, which was the part of the course where the chance of accidentally being spotted was highest. Then, at the slab bridge over a seasonal creek called Gum Creek, she steered down the bank and onto the dry bed. Gum Creek only runs on rainy days and was full of rocks, every different size short of huge. Niagra killed the headlights but knew the way blind. She kept the pace down and bounced us along in low gear.

I’m not sure how much distance we’d traveled before she turned up the low lip of the creek bank and took us in among the deep gloom of the tall trees. When she stopped, she flicked the headlights on, illuminating the money garden.

“There she is,” Niagra said.

The patch was planted beneath open spots in the tree limbs above, so as to receive good sunlight but be a little harder to spot from a chopper. It looked to be eighty or ninety green stalks of reddish-bud dope, spread out down a slope with southern exposure. The plants were mingled
among legal flora so as not to stand out. The crop looked to me to be close to harvest, standing five and a half feet tall or thereabouts. That red weed doesn’t tower, which is an advantage in concealing it.

Niagra doused the lights and said, “What do you think?”

“It’s close to harvest,” I said, and I was glad to have that ladystinger in my belt. “Rip artists would likely say it’s ready now.”

“It’s not, though. Ten more days should do it.”

“What strain is it?”

“The strain, that’s a sad story,” Niagra said. “Big Annie paid out quite a li’l bit of cash for a bottle of sinsemilla seeds, only it’s not sinsemilla. That’s a score to settle later. It’s just Razorback Red, that Afghan strain.”

“Razorback Red,” I said, “I like pretty well.”

“It’s fine enough,” she said. “Good enough everyday dope. But, man, that sinsemilla’d be worth double, at least.”

The Ozarks are rampant with dope patches. An article in the
West Table Scroll
had said that the average income for an Ozark family of four was right at twelve thousand dollars per annum, and with economics such as that shouting encouragement, all stripes of old and young in the hills had taken to dropping down those magic seeds that were worth a thousand bucks per plant, at minimum, when ripe. It’s crime, but it’s also tradition and common sense.