Give Us a Kiss: A Novel by Daniel Woodrell Read Free Book Online

orange golf ball, and we watched it fly across the deep white rough toward the stack of dried cow patties he called The Ninth Hole. He landed the ball pattie-high but left, not nearly in the turd. “Not rich rich,” he went on, “but rich enough to sit down and whip out any book you want and not give a fuck if the public buys it.”
    There was a bottle of ordinary scotch, King’s Deluxe or something, set on the ground to mark the tee-off spot. Igripped my nine iron and took my stance. I wanted to win, you know. I hunched down, then straightened up, shuffled my feet for the perfect alignment.
    “You mean a grant?” I asked.
    “I mean a hillbilly endowment toward the support of artsy bullshit. Only without the bureaucracy and red tape.”
    I had my swing grooved, and let her rip. I took a mean divot but the ball really soared, way high, the kind that makes a soft landing.
    “Who do I have to kill?” I asked.
    The ball flew directly on line, but came up short of the turd stack and sank from sight in the white rough.
    “Maybe nobody,” Smoke said. He crouched to the bottle of King’s Deluxe, had a gulp. “Course, you never do know.”
    Listen, here’s the deal with me. I’ve got just one true love, and that’s the art of following my fantasies out and scribblin’ them down. I tell stories, yarns, tiny snickering contes, big wet whoppers; only eventually, nearly against my will, they shade toward truth.
    My imagination is always skulking about in a wrong place, a bad neighborhood of fantasy. Everything in there takes place on Twelfth Street, U.S.A., and of course there are joints and dives called The Pink Pussycat, The Aces High, or Joe’s, and fellas named Buster or Jake or Gyp the Blood agitate the area, and rain murmurs along in the gutter, clogged with trash but reflecting the neon lights. Who hasn’t been there? The hero I chronicle is not much of a hero, but he’s given up four books to me. He’s a little bit of a sleaze, really, but he hangs in there and pays his own way. He’s calledmerely The Hyena, no other name required, and that’s because he always gets a bite of the meat. What he does is float around Twelfth Street, U.S.A., where the interesting vices and poorly plotted crimes tend to be centered, and sniffs out deals going down. He stalks, trails, sniffs, watches. After a deal is done and the folks with the Twelfth Street, U.S.A., names and attitudes have culled out a carcass of ill-gotten gains, why The Hyena moves in to rip them off and eat all the pie himself. The Hyena is not too noble, but he’s robust and goal-oriented and thinks of his deeds as butthole cousins to justice.
    My books sound like I’m someone else, someone of much more age who hails from a time zone that’s gone out of business. The Hyena talks like an old fart Panda’s age might’ve talked if he’d been a rough cob in the city when the Big Crash came. The Hyena’s approach could’ve been in favor among the Populists in 1932 or along in there. He’s always describing people as “gunsel” or “jackroller” or “thrush,” and he lips off to anybody with over three bucks to his name or a badge.
    I always get called a crime writer, though to me they are slice-of-life dramas. They remind me of my family and friends, actually. I hate to think I’ve led a “genre” life, but that seems to be the category I’m boxed in.
    It’s hard not to like The Hyena, or anyway, I do.
    “Hey, bro,” Smoke said, giving me a shove. “Find your ball, huh?”
    “I saw it land,” I said, but I wondered if the dead voices from past lives were ever-so-faintly trying to hector me toward sound judgments, or taunt me toward bold action.
    I didn’t ask Smoke just how I might get this hillbilly endowment for artsy bullshit, steered clear of the leading question, and he let the subject drop while we got in our sweaty eighteen holes of golf.
    The score was close, one forty-seven to one forty-five, not bad scores given the conditions