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

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 fornight-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