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

of the fairways and the tough course design, me nipping Smoke because of a tee-shot at the seventeenth cow pattie that actually hit the stack of turds, and busted them apart. I want to say they busted apart as do dried-up dreams, or public trust, but, truly, they flew apart exactly like yesterday’s shit.

7
    THAT SMELL
    SUPPER MATERIALIZED AND was a shocking and wonderful feedbag to strap on, but, by the time the classic hippie dessert of quartered raw apples and honey in a bowl came out, I felt there was a conspiracy afoot all around me. Smoke huddled with Big Annie, then Niagra, then all of them made trips inside the house and I could hear that they were whispering and so forth. I couldn’t pick up any words or phrases, but I didn’t need any hot flashes for Imaru to imagine the subject.
    We’d dined on the cedar deck at dusk. Finally the day had gotten cool enough to comfortably eat in. I’d napped in Smoke’s shady yard and come to feeling pretty sober and rested and mighty interested in food. The meal was Niagra’s creation. She’d cooked up the first of her hillbillyette surprises for me: pesto sauce over homemade pasta, with a lovely salad of garden tomatoes and cucumber slices in olive oil, with fresh basil seasoning and goat cheese slivers. This marked her as a bookworm, a trait I dig in anyone, for clearly Niagra had done a useful gob of reading in at least the cookbook section of the West Table Library, because the nearest placeto have learned this sort of culinary preparation by taste-testing it would’ve been Memphis, probably, or maybe Little Rock. The classic hippie dessert was served for the convenience of its preparation, I imagine, and was perfectly groovy, but by then, in my goggled state, I’d sort of been expecting tiramisu, maybe, or a scoop of spumoni.
    As full dark settled I was left alone at the table while another big confab occurred somewhere in the house. I lit a Lucky and sat there, petting the dog. The dog it turned out was a spayed bitch, the best kind of dog for a pet, I think, and was named Damned Spot because Niagra had played Lady Macbeth in high school and cherished the “Out, damned spot” speech. I was the new “big one” in her midst, and Damned Spot had decided to love me into the pack immediately. I smoked and rubbed her, and plucked a few fat ticks from behind her ears. I put the bulbous blood ticks on the table, belly up, and dispatched them with the hot end of the Lucky.
    In the dark, there, I started talking to Damned Spot. I slung all kinds of folderol her way, mostly about romance gone sour and along in that vein, and I was glad to have the dog there to say it to. A dog that listens is so handy to validate that, though you’re having a conversation with no human present, you are talking to a dog, which is next best and means you aren’t touched in the head. A person alone talking to a dog seems sort of cute, capable of tenderness and so forth, whereas if you sat there having the same exact conversation without a dog present to ameliorate the wackiness, people would quit making eye contact with you, call your mother suggesting mental health facilities. The dog makes all the difference.
    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