Give Us a Kiss: A Novel (8 page)

The gazebo was painted bright white, and with the moon and all, vision wasn’t too bad, not exactly in focus but like a gauzy art film. Niagra let go of me, and went to the rail, and stared toward Tararum.

“This is my secret spot,” she said.

She had her hands on the rail and stretched her body, and those shorts rode way high on her ass; then she went taller on the toes of those flame-lick boots and those shorts slipped clear up and in like a thong bikini.

I fell to my knees and went right after it.

I encircled her waist from behind and undid the shorts and gave a yank, yanking them down to her knees. She had on white cotton schoolgirl panties, and I just slid those aside, got my nose to her butt and my tongue in her bush. I pushed her forward some for cleaner licking, and after about six tongue flicks her knees sagged and she moaned, then said, “I’m virgin.”

My response was, “Mmph.”

“I’ve got to lay down, Doyle, my legs are gone.”

I jerked her down to the floor of the gazebo and she shoved her shorts and panties to her knees, and I dove straight in under the tangle of garments and went hungry, hungry, hungry after her virgin muff.

I felt inspired. She was as so much nectar, divine honey, a potion. She was
that
song. My tongue employed the strokes of a Picasso, li’l light flicks on the clit, the lips, then traced tiny, gentle circles around the pleasure button, then up and down. I had both hands under her butt, roaming and squeezing and raising for deep tonguing. Those flamelick boots were beating against the wooden floor, sounding like a jungle drum, and somebody was beating a piano at Tararum.

“Oh, sin me up,” Niagra said. “Sin me up good’n evil.”

Suckin’ that split, I felt transported, enlightened, only with a huge boner. Those boots kept drumming to the strumming, and when she busted her kicks she fairly screamed an orgasmic hallelujah.

I crawled back, then sat up, breathing hard.

Niagra laid there, looking gorgeous, raunchy, and magical, her eyes closed, her fingertips tweaking at her nipples through her shirt.

“Goodness,” she said. “That was weird. I liked it a lot.”

I snatched back my wind, and snap, like that, my own nature required reciprocity. I stood, posed in the moonglow so bright in the white gazebo, and unbuckled. My bird dog stood out, on a hard point toward her brunette bush.

Niagra looked up, then baffled me.

“What’re you doin’?” she asked. Immediately, instinctively, she began to scurry. She jumped up and jumped up her garb and buttoned it. “What’re you thinkin’, Doyle?”

“I don’t get your confusion, here.”

“I ain’t ready for that,” she said. “That’s the whole hog.” She took baby steps backward. “It’s important I stay virgin.”

“I hope that’s the punch line,” I said. “ ’Cause this best be a joke.”

She bit her lip. She lowered her face. She tossed her mane.

“I’ve got to lose my cherry accordin’ to the bylaws,” she said. “I’m serious about my goomerin’, Doyle. It’s got to be in a cemetery at midnight.”

“Didn’t I warn you about this?”

“Well, yeah, listen, though. I have to say the Lord’s Prayer backwards at the tombstone of an infidel, and fire seven silver bullets, then…”

I lunged and she scampered, high-booting down the steps and across the mowed grass, toward the deep woods. She glowed away into the dark thicket.

Niagra left me there, in the shadows and the pits, in a molten state of thwarted desire, on the brink of a major testosterone tantrum.

Four Luckies later I arrived at the truck. I was in a blue-balled snit. I told her to shove her silly ass over and let me drive. She didn’t argue. She shoved over and I saw her hand was on the latch, ready to flee.

I punished the Toyota, running her mean down the creek bed blind, four or five times as fast as Niagra drove. We were in rich dark made by the tunnel of trees that sagged over the creek bed and leaned against one another in the middle. I kept staring at her as I drove, rocks thumping against the undergut and fenders, the truck bouncing high and wild, but she stayed against the far door, clinging, eyes shifty.

“How could you do me like that?” I asked. She wouldn’t meet my eyes. “Look at me, would you?”

Niagra turned her head toward me, her expression a clotted frown, then she looked out the windshield and her mouth dropped. Her hand came up to aim through the glass in alarm, but before her message reached me there was a weighty thump and something skidded wet and heavy across the hood and over the windshield.

“What on earth was that?” I asked.

“Boogerdog!” she screamed.

“Deer, maybe.”

“Boogerdog!” she said. “Boogerdogs are always around, provokin’ fiendish events.”

“Will you shut the fuck up with your goomers and your boogerdogs and shit! Please!”

She spoke more quietly next time.

“Boogerdog. I saw its paw scrape across the windshield.”

11

BOILED ONION EYES

I HAVE A SENSE I’m living in more than one world at a time and they’re all out to get me. Wicked worlds. Vindictive. Parallel and relentless worlds bullying me now for whatever bad acts I pulled when I was other people in other epochs.

That’s just the sense I have. It’s a sense of being haunted full-time that makes for a certain amount of midnight anguish and round-the-clock creeps.

The scene in the barn after the boogerdog encounter was one where I felt stuck in a cusp, hung between various worlds, I guess, and I saw everything happen as from an aerie, a cold distance, for I was there, but then again, I wasn’t.

I left the headlights on when I slammed the truck inside the barn. The light beams played off the grayed wood and gave a glow to the interior. I got out, went to the Toyota hood to check for damage, or a raccoon tail in the grill, maybe, or a tuft of deer hide.

Some words passed my lips, something like, “There’s no special damage.”

Then Niagra screamed. She was still sitting in the cab but looking out the rear window to the truck bed, and her scream got mixed with oaths and moans coming from behind her.

I hustled over, gave a look, and felt sick.

In the truck bed there was a man in black. One leg was busted above the ankle and white bone protruded, and the below-the-ankle part of the leg seemed to be stepping in the wrong direction. Plenty of blood. And the man’s face was rising like bread dough, swelling big from the cheeks to the hairline, only purple in hue. The man didn’t seem too large, nor too young, but all wrecked, and his eyes were of that blue type, with extra white, filmy around the blue. Boiled onion eyes.

Niagra shouted, “That’s a Dolly! That’s a fuckin’ Dolly!”

The man in black had a problem in the shoulder area; his right arm just flopped there, limp. There was a pale tattoo of a huge spider between the thumb and forefinger on the hand that went with that arm.

I stalked out of the barn, into the night. Then I stood there, and ten thousand lightning bugs were flickering away across the countryside. The dog loped by, into the barn, and Niagra shuffled out. She draped her arms around me from behind, rested her head on my shoulder. We stood like that, together, trembling, trying to reach out for our composure.

“It’s down to the nut cuttin’, now,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “You ain’t a false alarm, are you?”

“I wonder.”

Back in the barn, Damned Spot, her tail swishing, was
jumping back and forth over the man in black, who had dragged his wrecked self out of the truck to the dirt and had begun crawling. That broken bone wiggled as he crawled, and he bellowed.

“Damn,” I said.

The man kept crawling, and a scarifying question hit me. Are all Dollys as dead game as this one?

Niagra stepped up, put her boot to the man in black and rolled him over onto his back. The roll earned a scream.

“I don’t know his name,” the girl said, “but he’s one of the ringleader Dollys.”

The man spit at her and she jerked backward, out of spittin’ range.

Those boiled onion eyes stared up, alive with fierce agony. His left hand pawed at his beltline.

“I can’t stand this,” Niagra said. “We need to extend mercy to this man.”

“Mercy?”

“Uh-huh. A hole in the head that ends his misery.”

“I don’t know if I can be like this.”

“Let me enhance upon my point,” Niagra said. “He’s a Dolly out here scoutin’ us for a rip-off, so we can’t let him go.”

“But, just killin’ him, I don’t know.”

The ladystinger is in my pocket. Niagra takes it.

“You figure we could nurse him back to health like a sick bunny or somethin’? Then release him back to the woods?”

“Hold your mud,” I said. Then, what could I do except look down at the Dolly, and the Dolly’s boiled onion eyes
were terrible, full of hurt but committed to ruin. “Shit, he’s got a pistol.”

The Dolly made a feeble try to raise a revolver, a thirty-eight, with his left hand, but his thumb appeared broken or sprung. He was making slow progress. His eyes fixed on me, his selected target, and this intense attention caused me to freeze. The writer’s disease, that of preferring acute observation to action, had seized me up. I’d gone still in a trance of observations, noting the way the Dolly’s mouth tugged to the right, a tuft of whiskers below the nose the razor had missed and were gray, while the head hair was black, only a few lines of gray, and the black T-shirt the man had on featured a St. Louis Cardinals emblem, red, in the heart zone, and he’d gotten purchase on that revolver, finally, and raised it above his belt buckle, a buckle that sported a horse head in profile inside a horseshoe, and I, the writer, just stood there, frozen, trying to get a prose poem, a conte, out of this event that might well climax with my being shot.

Niagra crouched forward with the ladystinger and let off a round. She scored the downed Dolly in the belly, then moaned and dropped the ladystinger and it did a short cartwheel before resting in the dust.

The dog fled about here.

The gunshot had gotten the Dolly to drop his pistol, but he wasn’t dead.

I picked the ladystinger from the dust, and the girl just bellowed about mercy, and the Dolly kept trying to crawl across the straw and dirt of the barn floor.

I believe I said, “Tonight ain’t exactly my first rodeo—but I’ve never done anything like this before. Me’n Smoke
pulled a couple of things where we showed our guns, but never used them. Once, when I was at KU, gettin’ my bachelor’s in English, a rock’n roll fella, a drummer, had shorted me on a jar of speed and I shoved a pistol in his ear, but that boy saw the light.”

“Cut!” Niagra screamed. “Cut!”

The crawling man in black hadn’t gotten very far, his miserable passage charted by a blood trail in the dirt.

“Aw, Imaru,” I said. Then I sighted in on the Dolly and emptied the ladystinger into his back, li’l plumes of blood splashing up in the kind of li’l splashes pennies make when tossed into a wishing well. “There’s your mercy, girl.”

12

PEACE IN THE VALLEY

IT COULD WELL be that you’ve shouldered a drunk boyfriend up the front steps a time or two on pay night, or swooped your lady love from the kitchen to the boudoir, but the dead weigh different. There are no helpful staggers or neck hugs for balance. Even the smallish dead, I learned, have this obstinate, lumpish heft to them.

Carrying the corpse into the woods fell to me, as either an earned right or a punishment or a spiritual duty, I’m not certain, but the decision was silently made and mutual. I did the fireman carry, which is easier, but I felt Dolly blood running down my back and could hear creepy interior gurgles and poot noises from the corpse so near to my ear.

Smoke led the way, carrying a small flashlight and a hogleg magnum on the chance there might be more Dollys lurking about. Big Annie, showing a shading of her personality not exactly in the hippie groove, swung a twelve-gauge pump and seemed fairly expert in its usage. Niagra brought the shovel, and she had a quiet case of the mumbles. She was uttering whispered nonsense, likely, probably grandiose goomers, but her step was light.

We were not on a trail, as trails attracted walkers, but were cutting through tangled forest, and this made me work hard, tugging the Dolly through briar traps and low limbs and across the uneven earth. I enjoyed the physical expense, the effort, as it calmed me as Doyle, but I was enveloped by an embrace of spiritual certainty that Imaru was not unfamiliar with such occasions.

The shots had still been singing in my ears when Smoke and Big Annie came rushing into the barn. They took in the scene quickly, came to the correct conclusions without speaking, and Smoke hugged my neck while Big Annie did likewise on her daughter.

Niagra ran down the chain of events to the rest of the gang, in amazingly cool and precise sentences, with concrete details, while I wavered between worlds, experiencing a druggy kind of confusion as to which century I currently haunted. I had just absorbed raw and terrible insight about Imaru, who I realized was an eternal misfit and hothead set loose in time, and his/her problems with every world he/she passed through. This fresh self-awareness ironed out any hopeful doubts about the future.

I hoped my next-life penance could be as a dog, a pampered, coveted breed, who could chase a pastry wrapper from Zabar’s out an Upper West Side window or something, and set things straight with the spirit world by splattering on an exclusive sidewalk.

“The spider, there,” Smoke said. He hunkered down and raised the right hand of the dead man. “That spider is famous. It belongs to a mean Dolly they all call Bunk. I think this is Bunk, anyhow.”

“It’s him,” Big Annie said. “That face sort of looks like him.”

“Sort of looks like him if he’d been hit by a truck, at least.”

At this point Smoke laughed, and it was not a comforting laugh in tone or volume. Smoke’s laughter seemed to belittle the deceased somewhat, and then he explained the famous spider inked on the dead man’s hand.

Bunk Dolly was a remainder of one of the several Dolly tribal units that had squatted on National Forest land in the thirties, over by the Twin Forks River, just off BB Highway, and had been allowed to stay permanently when the process of evicting them all turned out to be far more perilous than was worthwhile. These BB Dollys are revered by some and resented by others, as their penchant for arson and ambush had resulted in such a sweet real estate deal, to their sole benefit. They’ve been there ever since, raiding their neighbors’ barns and hog pens from prime forest acres they’d never put a penny down on in payment.