Tomato Red by Daniel Woodrell Read Free Book Online

well as the local lovelorn. The name got to be Venus Holler, I’m told, precisely because a goddess is the very last dame you’d ever expect to find there—but if ever you did, for three bucks you could fuck her too.
    I followed directions, knocked at the door.
    The rain had rolled on and a freewheelin’ sun toured the sky. I looked around as I waited. The ridgeline makes this
holler mighty hard to gaze up out of. It keeps your vision on what’s held in the holler and shunts the eye from all else. This is the kind of address where the wives will know short-cuts to the welfare office and have a bail bondsman’s home phone number taped to the fridge.
    I heard footsteps and knocked again.
    If this house was meat you’d let the dog eat it.
    The footsteps arrived and the inside door jumped back. Someone was there, but the screen was between us.
    “You’re not on time,” this woman’s voice said. “You’ll have to have a seat. Come on in, hon—there’s beer in the kitchen.”
    She disappeared before I could see her, but her smell stayed behind to introduce her to me. The smell, I’d say, came from mimosa. A mimosa species of smell, anyhow.
    Inside, the place pulled itself together, stood up straight, showed some effort. Everything was passably clean, and the furniture had slipcovers with cheerful designs in cheerful colors.
    I decided not to be standoffish. I went into the kitchen, which was easy to find since there were only two ways to turn from the front room, and she hadn’t gone to the kitchen and her smell tracked to the left, to a bedroom, I now know. The fridge contents proved this was a gal’s fridge—a box of white wine, the kind with a spigot, yogurt all over the place, vegetable juice, and one li’l palm-sized minute steak. I wondered what Jason might eat, or did he eat the same. The beer was on the bottom shelf, in bottles, and it was your standard prominent St. Louis brand of beer.
    And that made it just fine.
    She called, “You’re not dressed how I expected. I think you spilled somethin’ on your shirtfront, there. But you
should be at your ease, hon—that’s the way things come out for the best.”
    I guzzled the first beer at the sink, there, just totally defeated that bottle in two fierce chugs. I grabbed another from the fridge, feeling a little bit goosed and hopeful, then drifted to the front room.
    A painting on the wall was wide and showed smudged flowers and smudged lily pads on a funny-colored pond. A decent-standing walnut display case was cut to fit into the corner, and it had been crammed with cocktail glasses that said where they were from: Brennan’s, Cal-Neva Lodge, The Vapors, Harold’s Club, Stan and Biggie’s, The Arlington, The Peabody, Old Absinthe House, Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge—and so on for maybe twenty mai tais more.
    “I need help. I had to change when I saw you. Which shoes do you favor, hon?”
    This woman stood there, blond, in jeans and a thin clingy pink blouse. She held a pair of shoes in each hand.
    I didn’t speak up, so she did.
    “I have these, my nice comfortable flats, or these , my tall fuck-me, fuck-me, fuck-me heels. Which do you favor?”
    “Well . . .”
    “Oh, why am I askin’ you? I know what you think—but the flats are so much more sensible for when we dance, hon.”
    The woman tossed the pair I would’ve chosen off somewhere, put the other on.
    She was one of those gals who look like they’ve patterned theirselves after a child’s doll. A Barbie who has gone to seed on roadhouse whiskey and panfried chicken. I’d put her age at plenty old enough, but not yet too old. Thirty-five, or maybe forty, but not much over that. She had a big smell, big hair, big smile.

    “It’s less awkward,” she said, and sidled close up to me, “if you present my gift to me now, and I’ll hide it away, and that will be all we’ll say about that.”
    “Might this gift be a cash gift?”
    That big smile stepped aside, then she snapped a