Give Us a Kiss: A Novel (2 page)

On passing such homesteads I think, Hats off to your hardworking dead and living!

Right near Green Eye I stopped at a Country Boy’s and scooped a six of Busch and a couple packs of Lucky Strike straights. That helped a little. When I finally hit West Table,
Mo., our real home, twenty miles north of the Arkansas line in the bull’s-eye heart of the Ozarks, the sun had climbed way up past straight and was evil hot. It might’ve been a nice day in early August if the heat was knocked down to ninety or so. The old boys sitting on benches around the square had their hats in their hands, fanning their faces, telling jokes that were fresh back when Bing Crosby’s crooning made young girls wet their floursack panties. There was a kid with a stick stretching a softened wad of chewing gum off the curb, spinning a long gooey web around himself he wouldn’t soon be shed of. This town, where I was born, and Mom and General Jo were born, and all of us on back past the Civil War were born, is still that way. There is a town square with shops and stores that haven’t been strangled by Wal-Mart yet, with diagonal parking all the way around. The old kind of soda fountains still exist, two of them anyway, and everybody seems to know your face if not your name if you’re a local Ozarker.

On the far side of the square I braked for two ladies from the bank to cross the street, their cotton skirts all clung up in their butts, by sweat, I imagine. They seemed to know the fine picture they made when they caught me smiling wider than just friendly, because one pinched her fingers up there and shook her skirt loose and less interesting, while the other fluttered her fingers at me and didn’t bother. She smiled, too. I believe she was one of the McArdles, from three or four years behind me in school.

On past the square and down Grace Avenue I pulled in at Slager’s Liquor Store. I hoped I could get in and get out
without seeing anybody I’d have to jaw with. Everybody talks with everybody in West Table, and a ten-minute trip to the hardware store can yawn into an hour and a half of trading windy chat about hog prices, cousin Fannie’s gout acting up, places where the fish are biting, and places old codgers used to go where, believe me, sonny, those Memphis gals did
not
bite. This is the surface of life here, anyway. Back behind the smiles and homespun manners and classic American hokum there’s a whole nother side of life, a darker, semilawless, hillbilly side. The side of my homeland that has always attracted me, as it had all the Redmonds and Dawes from whom I spring, and held my respect.

Mr. Slager was behind the counter inside his booze store. He was a crisp little bantamweight fella, up in years, who affected neomilitary attire. His shirts always sported epaulettes, or else they were camouflage. You could get cheap thrills by sticking his spit-shined shoes under skirts and keeping your eyes on the toes. Slager was a decent old skin, yet he had a wistful air about him, standing in his store window in the uniform of the day, that gave me the feeling he thought he’d unfairly survived a patch of bad combat back on Pork Chop Hill or some battle of that vintage.

The store was air-conditioned down forty degrees from the outside, and it instantly chilled my sweat. As the heavy door shut behind me, Slager said, “Hiya.”

“How’re you, Mr. Slager?”

He didn’t seem to know me, since I’d been gone quite a while.

“No kick comin’,” he said, looking at me pretty close.
“Whatta ya—Hey, you’re one of ol’ Panda’s, uh, grandkids, right?”

“Right. Doyle Redmond.”

He leaned forward, as if to inspect my uniform, then snapped back to ramrod straight.

“My God,” he said. “It is you—that ponytail threw me. And those whiskers—that’s called a, what’s that now? Goaty, eh?”

“It’s sort of a goaty, sort of not,” I said. “What I need is a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red.”

“We got,” Slager said. He spun around and reached up for the bottle, then about-faced and set it on the counter. “Scotch,” he muttered. “Can’t stand it myself.”

“You have to work up to it,” I said. “Once you get the taste for it, there’s no goin’ back.”

“I’ve been told,” he said. “I know ol’ Panda prefers it—I didn’t know you beatniks did.”

I let that beatnik comment slide by, wondering if Slager had never bought a TV or anything, because that bongo-beatnik stuff was back about when I was born.

“What’s the damage, Mr. Slager?”

“It’s not cheap,” he said. “Scotch. Too something or other for my taste. Nineteen dollars.”

There was a poster behind the register that advertised beer while discouraging drunk driving, but it was the tall glass of beer that stood out, beckoned. A Bush-Quayle sticker was glued flat on the counter, and I put a twenty down on it out of the two hundred the folks had spotted me.

Slager scooped the bill, rang it up.

“Sellin’ more and more of the stuff, though,” he said.

“Now I’m back, keep it in stock.”

“I do that for Panda already.”

I picked up my change and the bag with the bottle in it, then headed toward the door.

“Take care.”

“Give my best to Panda.”

“I’ll do her,” I said, and by the time I was behind the wheel again Slager was staring off out the window, back on Pork Chop Hill or whatever, imagining himself dying gloriously with his heroic comrades instead of living on and on for no special reason except to feel semper fi and lonesome and guilty.

Panda’s house was at the edge of town, just a few more blocks along Grace Avenue from Slager’s, and it sat atop a steep nub of earth right up against the town cemetery, almost looming over the acres of dead. When I pulled into the pea-gravel drive I could see my grandpa the sportsman at the door of the side porch, a cigar in his mouth, a BB rifle in his hand. Since his knees went kaplooey this had gotten to be his hobby, hanging out the door, potshotting at the bevy of squirrels that run between the mighty, leafy oaks of the cemetery. The fact that there are plenty of squirrels still alive in there amongst the headstones gives testimony to how many years Panda has stacked behind him, because there was a time he didn’t miss what he shot at. Once in a while he’ll hit a car cutting through the cemetery and some poor sap’ll come to the door to complain and get deluged with one of
Panda’s spectacular gushers of bullshit that usually ends when the fella with the dinged car apologizes and offers to drop off some tomatoes fresh from his garden. Panda is a pisser of an old man, and he’s got a big mean streak and a big funny streak and fairly often they are the same streak. He delivers jokes that hurt and mean things that make you laugh, sometimes.

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.