Give Us a Kiss: A Novel

by Daniel Woodrell

  I grabbed the bottle out of the car and headed across the yard to the side porch, and Panda heard me and looked over. He dropped the butt of the BB rifle to the floor and worked his cigar over with his lips. His first words were: “Nice ponytail—reminds me of Liz Taylor in National Velvet.”

  “Don’t start off on me that way, Panda.”

  “It’s the truth. Yours is maybe even nicer’n hers—more girly.”

  I held the bagged bottle up and said, “Got some Johnnie Red here.”

  Panda wore a white sleeveless T-shirt and khaki pants. He made a show of holding the door open for me.

  “You’re always welcome, Doyle,” he said. His accent is deeper than mine, lush and basso, almost Delta-sounding. “Not as welcome as Johnnie Red, but more welcome than just any ol’ hippie off the street.”

  “Blood bein’ blood and all,” I said. His hippie comment is twenty years out of date, and it makes me wonder what kind of time-warp conversations he and Slager must have, the one stuck on the space-time continuum back where a “goaty” meant beatnik, the other still seeing hippie-pansy teenage rebellion agitatin’ behind the hairstyle of his thirty-five-year-old grandson. I just haven’t felt like a haircut for a while, there’s nothing else to my hairdo but that. Plus, nowadays every third Ozark timber-hauler has long hair and a beard, but Panda must see that as evidence that the ongoing Woodstock Revolution has him surrounded, I guess. He’s a clean-shaven, flattop man himself.

  I said, “Good to see you,” as I sat at the kitchen table, hoping that what I said would prove to be true.

  “Oh, sure—back at you,” he said. He rooted his knobby hands in the cupboard above the sink, then came over with a couple of dusty glasses. His walk was unsyncopated, that big limp throwing the rhythm of his steps out of time. “Need ice?”

  I’m trying to get along with him at this point, but I’m not sure there’s a right answer to that question. Then it comes to me that ice’ll be candy-assed in his lexicon of manly traits, so that’s what I said, just blurted it, the Redmond love of petty friction coming out in me, too. “A couple of cubes would be good.”

  “That’s how I take it,” he said, outflanking me. He popped the freezer door open and snatched a blue tray of ice, then sat at the table across from me. The kitchen was dark and shadowy like the whole downstairs of Panda’s house was—shades drawn against the eyes of neighbors, I suppose. All I could see of him, even at two feet, was his outline. He still made a stout, burly outline for a man with eight decades plus under his belt. His outline sat still for a bit, then his voice came from it, “Well, crack the seal, boy.”

  I pulled the bottle and busted the seal and started pouring Johnnie Red over ice, and it wasn’t too many swallows before we were getting along just dandy, and I knew I loved the aged asshole inside that dark outline, no matter what.

  By all accounts Panda was a better man as an old man than he’d ever been when younger. I couldn’t’ve stood to know him, I don’t think, when he was twenty-two or thirty or even forty, blood relative or not. His temperament was given an outlet for some years when he took up boxing, and from what I’ve been told he was a country-fair heavyweight. This was back in the days when a one-hundred-ninety-pounder was a big bruiser. Panda was a corn-circuit heavyweight during the tail end of the twenties and into the thirties. He tussled with Indian Jack Roberts in Tulsa, Bearcat Lee in Memphis, Cowboy Hussel in Omaha, Willie Perroni in Hot Springs, and Johnny Risko in Kansas City. Those fights were highlights. Most of his scraps were at small-town smokers and county fairs in places like Sedalia and Mountain Home and Joplin. He fought with a funny, crouching, cross-armed style he still liked to demonstrate, a style that by its odd tilt dictated he pretty much lived or died by the great left hook. In an era when white fighters tended to duck good black fighters, Panda didn’t. He took on whoever wanted to tangle, but he generally spoke of this fact in a way that tended to strip the shine from his democratic gesture, “I always would fight a nigger in a minute.” His actual record remains unknown, though he once told me he had thirty-five fights, with twenty-five wins, a half-dozen losses, and some no-decisions. He said he’d knocked out quite a few fellas but he hadn’t counted them up. What has always made me wonder is, his lifelong sidekick, Jimmy Ware, who’d been both Panda’s second and sparring partner, told me an odd thing I can’t jibe with Panda’s personality: this is, Panda’s real record was more like forty or forty-two wins against seven losses and six no-decisions, and his kayo tally was over thirty. Modesty about his accomplishments is something I could never associate with the Panda I knew, who was not exactly a fella who underappraised himself. I think I saw him fight in one of my past lives, but I dropped out of regression therapy without knowing if he’d kicked butt or been beat. My therapist was certain I’d bought a ringside ticket, at the very least. The truth of his record is there to be found, I suppose, in the yellowed sports pages of tank-town papers. I always planned to do the research and find out someday.

  The thing that fits with Panda is, he didn’t need to fight, he just enjoyed it so. When Panda came up, the Redmonds were still well-to-do, at least by Howl County standards. There are several pictures of Panda from that era, and he was always dressed more like a Kansas City boulevardier than a traveling country jake, which is what he was. He drove a new Ford to all his bouts, Jimmy Ware alongside him to fix his cuts and hold the spit bucket. I like to think of them back there in the heydays, tooling from town to town in a fresh-smelling Ford, nipping bootleg from a hip flask, two Ozark tuffies out in the world, having tumultuous adventures.

  Panda’s dad, Manfred, handed over the Redmond land to Panda a few years after he’d hung up the gloves and started staying put. The Redmond land in those times took a lot of minding, being over seventeen hundred acres of Ozark meadow and forest, acres that had been very profitable Redmond land since the year after the Civil War ground to a finish. Our land then began where the house still is, ran across what has become the newer part of the cemetery, clear over until it hit a little mud river called The Howl that marked the eastern border of all the fine land that was ours.

  That land was ours right up until Panda lost his mind for a critical few seconds and shot some sorry wretch on the West Table town square. He did this shooting during a Saturday livestock sale, so there weren’t more than seven or eight hundred eyewitnesses. This silly killing happened in 1950, not all that many years before I was born, and I think it has shaped my life, and General Jo’s and Smoke’s, too, in all kinds of ways that can’t be proven but are sensed, felt, maybe only imagined. What would our lives have been like if we’d still been well-to-do instead of broke down to white trash and bristly about it?

  The man Panda shot, three times, even once after the man was down and begging, was named Logan Dolly, and nobody says the man was anything other than a worthless piece of shit, but, still, that second and third shot were seen by all. When the sheriff, Carl Tucker in those days, hustled over to Panda, he said, “That first shot might’ve made you a hero—but you’ll have to go down for the second and the third.”

  Panda’s mom was still alive, and she couldn’t tolerate the idea of her only surviving son doing life up in Jefferson City. She knew people. The Redmonds and all the kin hereabouts knew people, so the land, our land, and all our hogs and cattle and implements, were sold for less than they were worth, and the cash was ladled out to grease the wheels of justice. The money went to two lawyers, two judges, a state representative, a congressman, Sheriff Tucker, various key witnesses, and the family of the dead Dolly, who I imagine figured they’d gotten a damned fine price for Logan. Several weeks after the killing it was ruled self-defense, and Panda walked scot-free, and from then on wherever he walked people let him walk with plenty of elbow room.

  I’ve never been told why he did it. No one, not even Mom or General Jo, would answer my questions on the topic. I suspect that if the facts were let out, Panda’s vicious act would look awful sorry, probably inexcusable.

 
; But our whole legacy, a Redmond legacy that had taken generations to build, was burned up in bribes because of three finger jerks Panda couldn’t control.

  2

  THAT BULLHEAD LOOKS TASTY

  THE BOTTLE OF Johnnie Red had gone a good ways south, and the sun was starting to slip down toward the rim of the world. I’d opened a few shades to let in some light, and Panda was standing by the sink, his feet rooted, but his upper body and arms were feinting and crouching and snapping short geriatric hooks at a badass phantom battler who’d had Panda’s number back in the heydays. In regression therapy, which I fell into to appease my wife, it appeared for a while that in a former life I might actually have fought Panda, but then the veiled memories began to focus on a ticket in my former hand. Otherwise, this might’ve been me Panda dreamed of licking. He had gotten a good, sweaty octogenarian lather up. A chewy cigar chunk stuck out of his mouth like an on-off knob.

  Suddenly he stops whipping up on the phantom who isn’t me, and turns his drunk blue eyes my way.

  “What kind of trouble you in?’

  “No trouble at all.”

  “No trouble?”

  “Not really, I don’t think.”

  Panda assessed my comments for a minute, that stogie stub twitching rhythmically. Then he said, “That shit ain’t goin’ to flush, boy.”

  I sort of enjoyed being called boy. It made me feel like I had one hundred percent of my head hair again, and there was a long, rich life stretching before me instead of a promising future moldering behind me.

  “That’s my story,” I said.

  “You still married?”

  “Legally,” I said. “That’s off-limits, Panda.”

  He put his hands up alongside his mouth and pressed his cheeks together to create a comic, woeful facial expression.

  “Ohhh, l’amour, l’amour,” he moaned in his notion of a pitiful Frenchman, then switched to what I imagine was an Italian immigrant, going, “Where da fore arta dou whanna I wanta you so a bad.”

  I rattled my glass of ice cubes and said, “Something along those lines.”

  Panda came to the table and dropped heavily to his chair.

  “It’s always along those lines,” he said. He looked at the bottle and the ashtray full of Lucky butts. “We should be thinkin’ about eatin’,” he said, “and I know just what I want to fry.”

  “Okay. So tell me.”

  “Sweet, fat catfish.”

  “From the IGA, you mean?”

  “Why, hell no. Sweet, fat catfish noodled fresh from The Howl, over here a ways.”

  “Boy howdy,” I said, and laughed. “I saw this fish noodlin’ trip comin’ ever since you first said, ‘Crack the seal, boy.’ ”

  Panda couldn’t walk it, so I had to drive. He sat in the passenger’s seat, blackthorn cane between his legs, and shot scolding glances my way at any slight jostle, as if I was taking every bump in the road all wrong. If Panda’s face was carved on the prow of a seagoing vessel, it’d be a vessel that didn’t get fucked with much. He’s got the nose job common among leather pushers, a honker carelessly crafted into a memorable, intimidating lump by six hundred stiff jabs he didn’t slip. There’s a little swayback an inch above the nostrils that rules out the strict usage of “flattened” as a description. Jimmy Ware did the best he could on the plentiful splits in Panda’s skin, especially around the eyes, but his brows are yet cleaved by hairless puckers, and odd-shaped gashes have aged even odder on his cheeks and lips. He has the face of a man who early in life discovered pain and slow disfigurement as special delights, and never met the agony he didn’t seek more of. But it’s the overall glow of personality that gives his face that back-off-sucker sheen, as his smartness shows in his bright blue eyes, and along with the smarts obvious in those orbs, you can see the unabashedly mean and dauntless spirit of the man.

  That is, he’s a wonderful figure for a grandpa, by Redmond standards.

  I took the route through the new wing of the cemetery, the dead laid out in democratic rows across a hillock and a swale where our hogs used to wallow. Then I pulled onto Jewel Road for a couple hundred yards until we came to the private drive of the newest owner of most of our land. He’d fenced everything in with pretty crisscrossed white lumber, and the only way to get to The Howl from this angle would be up the drive, then plow the Volvo across his immaculate grounds.

  The house is a mansion built by drumsticks. It’s a huge, impressive piece of architecture, even though Panda considered it just a boogered-up squatter’s hovel. The notorious owner, Sam T. Byrum, sucked beaucoup lucre into his pockets when the red-meat scare came in the seventies and his poultry interests boomed. Byrum, or maybe his wife, Helene, had a deep-rooted fixation on Gone With the Wind, because this house is held up by the aristocratic white columns of the ol’ Tara place the Yankees did wrong to in that flick. The power of film has resulted in this place, I guessed, and despite my atavistic allegiance to the land it sits on, the joint impressed me. There are white-bricked walls on either side of the drive, and though the gate was open I could see it carried brass-plated scrollwork that read TARARUM, a lazy mix of “Byrum” and “Tara.”

  I had the car stopped outside the drive, and, by golly, Panda’s eyes had gotten misty.

  “Go on in,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Go on in, I told you.” He stabbed that blackthorn cane on the floorboards a couple of times. “Drive on to The Howl.”

  This was the sort of moment, a key instance in fact, when Redmonds drift wide of the dully acceptable. The Volvo, I knew, didn’t exactly belong to me, and was probably reported stolen, and there’s an open bottle of Johnnie Red on the dash, and the blue pillowcase with a ladystinger in it is on the backseat, and this land hasn’t been technically ours for near forty years. But we Redmonds haven’t accrued our pungent family history by meekly toeing the mark the world has laid down, as we have our own Redmond world stuck between our ears by cherished myths and lies, facts and memories and inherited animosities.

  Cut to: me naked in the Howl River, the brown water warm as spit. Panda had squatted on the hood of the Volvo to direct me, a novice noodler, on how to hand fish. There was an obvious wheel rut running from Tararum, past the swimming pool and the flower beds and the sexy statues, clean to where the Volvo sat.

  “Don’t be such a sissy,” Panda said. “Run your hand up under the bank, into those mud holes. The cats sit in there when it’s hotted up like today.”

  This mode of fishing, noodling, is a crime. The fine is around five hundred dollars, but Panda had a love for it as it was a skill country men of his age excelled at. I did not excel. I did not even enjoy it, running hands blind under logs and into mud holes—I am cursed by a bounty of imagination. Vivid possibilities rushed my brain while my hands slid into holes, such as creatures neither fish nor snake, but toothy and scaly carnivores that had lived for eons in mud holes and would soon snack on my succulent digits. All kinds of folktales about noodlers pulled under! by serpent-sized catfish and drowned (some of these stories are actually documented) or sliced like bacon by sharp fins, went boo! in my brain.

  I’d gotten a two-pound bullhead by accident right quick, and I kept looking at it on the grassy bank, flopping at Panda’s feet, thinking, That’ll fry up to feed two.

  “You’re sloshin’,” Panda yelled. “You won’t get none that way, boy.”

  “I am not sloshin’.”

  “You been citified. You ain’t worth a damn noodlin’.”

  He wanted a jumbo catfish, but, truly, I was happy with that bullhead. The sun was about to fade out, but there was a tangle of blowdown crushed against the bank I hadn’t yet tried. So I slid that way, my feet sinking in mud. Just as I got there something came flitting out at thigh level, and brushed me like a cat in a dark room, but slimy and big, and all I could think of was a horrible thought about my privates dangling there like dough balls of bait, and I dove toward the middle and swam, thrashing hard.

  As
I clawed up the slick bank I said, “That bullhead is plenty.”

  Then I saw the sheriff, on foot, following our wheel ruts, with Mrs. Byrum behind him, standing back by the pool. Helene Byrum was a smashing blond lady, probably forty plus, but rich and sleek and distant. She was dressed in white finery, a wafer-thin and snug dress, very comely and chic, but her body language was clearly shouting, Get the fuck off my land, you white-trash goobers!

  The sheriff was a tall, slender bullwhip of a fella, only a few grades older than me. He sported a big handlebar mustache he apparently doted on, pampered, as it was nigh perfect, and showed he was not only a handy fella with the tiny clippers and Butch Wax, but also fancied himself to be linked to the famously mustachioed frontier lawmen who had stood tall and firm and backshot so many white-trash bad boys and mixed-breed chicken snatchers while serving the public. That big official pistol slapped at his side as he came downhill. His name was Terence (never Terry) Lilley, and he was a butthole cousin to the Redmonds.