Give Us a Kiss: A Novel (7 page)

We got out and Niagra ran a hose from the water mattress into the garden. She gave that hose a long suck I coveted to start the water flowing. She then connected our hose to a nozzle that peeked out of the dirt. This was the irrigation
system: hoses lightly buried and running among the cash plants. Then she said, “This’ll make a crop. All the males were choked off early, before they mingled with the gal weeds and weakened ’em.”

About then, my brain charted the geography involved and I knew where we were.

“This is our land,” I said. “Our old land.”

“Byrum land now,” Niagra said. Then she repeated the first rule of wacky backy croppin’. “Always grow on somebody else. We thought, Who is least likely to have his acres tromped all up and down by the snoopy law?”

“Choppers might still fly over.”

“We’ll just have to roll the dice on that.”

The hose gurgled into the garden. We moved it now and then, to other nozzles, as the purpose was only to heal the dried cracks in the ground, not drown the patch.

Niagra was a lovely vision, even in the dark. Not long before the watering was done she said, “If a married fella was to go for me, I couldn’t blame him. I don’t never dish out guilt. Guilt ain’t on my menu.” She sighed at the folly of her fellow man, who succumbs to guilt, or I guess that’s what it was, then said, “Guilt, what is it, anyhow?”

“Consciousness of doin’ wrong,” I said. “Assumin’ you feel badly about doin’ wrong.”

“I don’t consider what I ever do as ever wrong. I operate in the full range of my spirit. That can’t be wrong.”

There is nothing like youth for uttering reckless, absolutist pronunziamentos. How I longed to share a pure belief in them.

I didn’t want to say something too experienced and inappropriate, so I merely smoked and listened. Later, as she rolled up the hose, I said, “It’s hard to be good.”

“Bein’ good ain’t ever good enough,” she said. “Bein’
bad
doesn’t necessarily even get the job done. Good or bad, whatever your dream is, it’s gotta catch fire somehow.” I could tell she was looking right at me when she spoke. “You should understand that, Doyle. Your books are as good as any I know, but you never had a hit, have you?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“That’s ’cause you need to catch fire somehow.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said, and man, did I. “I need a hook. A publicity hook. ‘Doyle Redmond is the true voice of the ABC Generation,’ or whatever. ‘A kingfish poet who channels tales of yesteryear’s fragrant underbelly.’ Something that’ll get some key profiles written. Something that’ll get the public imagination keen on me. I really need that hook.”

In the truck a while after, driving blind on the creek bed, she said, “Could be you’ve met your hook, Doyle. Hold on to your hat.”

The gang decided to bunk me in the spare mobile home alongside the deck. There was a bed in what should’ve been the kitchen that had a few lumps in it but would do well enough. That was it as to furnishings, as the trailer basically was a storage bin, crammed with boxes and furniture that had no usefulness until somebody got around to doing a mass of repair jobs.

I liked it okay.

My move-in was swift. I had only the blue pillowcase of my traveling clothes and one box of books in the Volvo trunk. I immediately displayed the books on the kitchen counter, as these books I never left behind and made any crap hole I landed in home to me. There were a couple of Elizabeth Bowen novels, a quartet by Edward Lewis Wallant, one volume of Pierce Egan’s
Boxiana, The Williamsburg Trilogy
by Daniel Fuchs, Carson McCullers’s oeuvre, a stack of Twain, a batch of Erskine Caldwell’s thin li’l wonders, some Liam O’Flaherty and John McGahern and Grace Paley and Faulkner, all of Chandler, and a copy of Jim Harrison’s
A Good Day to Die
. Also, a jumbo volume of Robinson Jeffers poetry, and various guide-works to flora and fauna. Dictionary and thesaurus, of course, and my boot-camp yearbook from Platoon 3039, which would’ve been my junior year in high school. Plus, copies of my own output.

In about seven minutes I had relocated and settled in cozy.

The next few days were a joy to be in, a series of simple pleasures and funky interludes.

Big Annie expressed concern about my eternal spirit and went about trying to buff it up to full health. She hung a dream catcher over my bed. The bed one night was strangely painful, and I flipped on the light and found crystals under the pillow and mattress. I left them there, and when I thanked Big Annie for the supernal aids she’d planted near me, she said, “You’ve got an old soul, Doyle. Many lives.”

My ears felt hot, hearing that, but I said a lie. “I don’t buy into that bullshit.”

Some considerable concern was expressed about the safety of the money garden, and Smoke said, “They’re too lazy to rip before the harvest, Springer an’ those Dollys. If I’m right, they’ll let us harvest and square up the pounds, then we gotta worry.”

But as a rule, Smoke and me iced down beer in a cooler and played golf close to daybreak to escape the heat. The contests on the cow-pattie links became serious, as competitions between brothers most always do. We belted the balls around that white pasture, acquiring local knowledge of the course, and soon we both broke one forty. The day after, one thirty looked possible. Smoke was the better athlete, but I’d actually played real golf quite a bit with a fellow writer in California, a perfectly mannered societal reject from Palo Alto with a trust fund and several private memberships, so I won every round.

Smoke thought it was unfair, once I let slip about my level of experience.

“But you designed the course,” I said. “Nobody designs their own golf course lookin’ to be beat on it, either.”

“I might just design it over,” he said. Then he snatched onto me and lifted me above his head and twirled me, and I had this ghastly Ginger-Rogers-in-distress sensation. Not too many men can do me that way, but I had the great misfortune to have one who can as a brother. He was reminding me of the law of the jungle, which was that he could snap my neck any time the notion seemed agreeable to him. “Make it a combination game,” he said, spinning me, “a li’l bit golf, a li’l bit wrestling.”

I started to laugh, dizzy, and Smoke did, too. He set me down and I had to squat to get my bearings.

I said, “If you’re within six strokes of me tomorrow, it’ll be because I took pity on your clumsy ass.”

Smoke cocked his head, then grinned.

“That’s why I love you, Doyle. You’re too fuckin’ dumb to know when to quit.” He nodded four or five times. “A fella like that might just get something big done, someday.”

Niagra slung the hash every evening, but it was never hash. One evening her hillbillyette surprise was pappardelle con il ragu di fegatini, which is a tongue-twister name for broad, homemade noodles with a fabulous chicken-liver gravy. Another night it was coq au vin, which I love anytime. Then she doubled back on my gustatory expectations and eschewed the continental cuisine in favor of navy beans with ham over cornbread, and collard greens and stewed turnips on the side. Real good redneck chow.

She always watched me eat, and it was never a hardship to eat plenty.

After one evening meal, the redneck one, a dusty Chevy sedan passed by on the dirt lane, and Big Annie said, “I bet you anything that’s a carload of Dollys, out scoutin’ us.”

It was an afternoon I was languishing in when I got hit by the kind of impromptu horror that writers fear. That is, Niagra fell by my trailer with a copy of her screenplay. It was hot and I couldn’t lie fast enough to get out of it. I took a seat on the deck, muttered something about loving to read it.

She fetched me beers as I turned pages. She only had sixty-some pages written, but I was only on the second beer when the other thing writers fear came true; that is, a total fuckin’ amateur you’ve had your eyes on sticks you with a piece of work close to her heart, and you, despite your years of study and experience, don’t know a thing you can do to improve it, or ever make it salable, but you have to come up with some sweet horseshit that can make her smile and be chummy instead of becoming an instant enemy. She’d titled it
Goomer Doctor,
and it was about a girl named Falls who was hippie spawn and lived in the woods with her mother, Large Lucy. Falls was always being shooshed out of the house when Large Lucy had gentlemen callers, so the little girl would climb to the fork of a big tree I could see in the side yard there and fantasize whilst listening to Large Lucy pleasure her company. The little girl’s fantasies featured bizarre, companionable forms of wildlife, until the evening she trailed a glowing coyote into the deep woods and the glowing coyote led her to the cave where a male goomer doctor lived. “Goomer doctor” is an ancient hillbilly term for a witch, basically, though they are of any sex. The goomer doctor takes Falls in hand and starts apprenticing her to the dark arts. Only a goomer doctor of the opposite sex can truly bring a new one into the fold. Eventually they must be joined in sexual intercourse to realize the full mojo. Falls is only eleven, and goomer doctor doesn’t mean pervert, so there are some years of schoolin’ to come before her doctorate of goomers can be realized.

Cut to: Falls at sixteen. She now chants, “Pully-bone
holy-ghost double-yolk! Pully-bone holy-ghost double-yolk!” and similar incantations. The right formula of words to cast goomers have been learned by her. She knows now how to conjure shape-shifting into swamp rabbits or crows, and toss off good charms and evil charms, but she has yet to consummate her doctorate, so her applications of black magic are still entirely theoretical. Then the goomer doctor takes her to the cemetery to confer the total powers on her, bare butt against an infidel’s tombstone, but he’s gotten up in age and acquired too many hexes of his own and is impotent.

Falls is distraught, even surly.

Then the goomer doctor says he knows of a young buck goomer doctor of considerable powers over by Bull Shoals Lake, and that’s where the pages ran out.

Niagra watched me finish and she just stood there, in a red cotton dress, barefoot, awaiting my critique.

“A good read,” I said finally. “The format is wrong, and most movies have quite a bit more dialogue.”

“Film is a visual medium,” she said. “So I went with lots of visual.”

“There’s only about fifty lines of dialogue, though.”

“Yep,” she said. “I favor montage.”

I stalled. I lit up. I swished the beer can about.

“The goomer stuff is good,” I said.

“I’m way into that,” she said. She was still standing over me in that red dress and I didn’t want to foul my chances of ever getting such a garment off her. “I’ve studied goomer doctorin’ a good deal. There’s a lot to it, you know.”

“Well, sure.”

“That’s my big ace,” she said. “When I get to Hollywood, why, I’ll cast a goomer down Sunset Boulevard, then I’ll do one toward Burbank for TV work.” She sort of laughed, a bit self-consciously. “If you’d shave, I’d cast a goomer or more for you, too, Doyle. You could stand havin’ a good goomer or two on your side, boostin’ you along.”

Niagra, so full of scrumptious hope, is looking at me, there, afraid I won’t share her vision. She’s afraid I’ll tell her that the world won’t let her have her dreams realized quite so easily, and probably not at all. That her dream is just a thread of fantasy to hang by for a while, but it’ll go limp one horrid night somewhere down life’s road and start coiling around her pretty neck. But I don’t want to tell her. I won’t do it. Because 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 and starts that coil.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “That could be my next future.”

10

BOOGERDOG

YOU’RE CUTE,” NIAGRA said. That compliment was a reward for shedding my whiskers into the sink. “You look three and a half years younger, too.”

“Grazie.”

We were on the blind stretch of the dry creek bed. There was a half moon and a slight odor of skunk in the night. Something nosy had gotten sprayed. Imaru was being paged, but not distinctly.

Apropos of nothing, except perhaps my graphic telepathic memos, Niagra asked, “Do you go oral on women?”

“Only when I can,” I said. “Otherwise, no.”

“Huh. I figured as much.”

At the money garden we ran the hose out and did the watering job. Neither of us spoke. She was in those shorts again, the ones that almost covered her butt, and those flame-lick boots and a blue halter.

Eventually I spoke up.

“Niagra, I’m only going to warn you this once. Don’t tease me, and don’t lead me on.”

“I hear that.”

After the water was all gurgled out, instead of getting in the Toyota, she slithered up right next to me and grabbed my hand.

“I want to show you something,” she said. “Come along.”

I trailed her like she was a glowing coyote. She’d swept me into her fairy tale. Her hand never left mine, and she led the way through the thick and spooky woods, over a hill and around a pond. Mosquitoes were biting that night and that was the only part of nature that went against the enchanted spell.

I’d say it was fifteen minutes before Tararum came into view. The drumstick palace was lit up clear across the lower story, and citronella candles flickered all about the patio and pool area. You could see shadows moving around, and hear voices and an occasional splash.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” Niagra said.

“I guess.”

“I see that,” she said, “and my whole soul just screams, I want! I want! I want!”

“I’ve seen better,” I said. “Out around Palo Alto and Pacific Heights and Carmel, in California. Mission Hills in K.C.”

Her hand squeezed mine excitedly.

“Oh, Doyle,” she said, “better’n Tararum would make me faint, I reckon, with all the want that’d be shootin’ through me.”

She led on again, not toward Tararum but parallel to it. Her hand steered me across an area of mowed grass, her blond hair shining. She led to a gazebo or cupola or whatever, about a hundred yards from Tararum, near The Howl.
It was over a slight ridge from where I’d noodled that bullhead, so I hadn’t seen it before, and there was a path from it going straight toward the big house. The gazebo was shaped like a bell, sort of, with a considerable amount of ornate lacework of lumber near the eaves. The floor was six steps from the ground, and up we went.