Of course I thought about kicking his ass. My mammy dropped me in the Ozarks and I’m an Ozarker wherever life takes me. I thought about kicking his ass, but, one, he was a big ol’ hoss, and, two, he came from the sort of bluebloods who consider kidnapping a real possibility, so they’d probably made the butler shuttle him to kung fu classes from the age of six or so. One and two put together added up to a weapon. I’d need a weapon, maybe a Corona bottle with a lime wedge in the bottom, to take him down hard. And a weapon certainly meant that a warrant on a felony assault beef would be chasing me after I swept the cobwebs from that suitcase in the garage and launched myself into the California night.
Truly, though, my main feeling was a horrible sense that I owed this man, should thank him, for hammering a simple point home to me: I plain ol’ did not belong in or around the academic world, nor with a woman who did. Ever since Lizbeth bought herself a yellow Volvo I knew our dream of surviving solely as writers was entirely defunct, as Volvo ownership functions in practically the same way as a union card for junior faculty at liberal arts colleges. It was a sign of commitment to tenure tracks and seminars and Napa Valley wine. All she’d need now was an Irish setter named Genet or Woolf. Lizbeth would never even let me drive the Volvo, either, as I have this destructive, love-hate relationship with automobiles.
Maybe Chamberlin Post was the final shred of proof that it was truly time to roll my white-trash self back to the low-rent world that spawned me and find some raw subject matter.
I left my beer bottle on the TV set and made my way to the exit. Somebody from among the nervous faculty gave me a pat on the back as I went out the door and onto the lawn. The music followed me—more happy Motown from our childhood. The grass was dry and a little long, and huge eucalyptus and fir trees loomed at the edge of the yard, making this seem like a mystical forest clearing on a Celestial Seasonings box.
The night weather was balmy, no Northern California fog in sight. A fir tree, bigger than the rest, lured me to lay beneath it, so I did.
I knew she’d seen me leave.
I knew she’d want to say some words over us if I laid out on the ground and closed my eyes and waited.
I don’t know why I didn’t feel worse about everything.
We’d met at a party, too, only it was a very large and nasty party, lots of fun. That had been in Iowa City (Fuck City in that era), Iowa, grad-school days. The party took place in an old sagging Victorian, a former bordello of many rooms, on Clinton Street next to the railroad tracks. One of the rooms had been mine. Over two hundred people were partying in the house, and I’d been tracking Lizbeth for quite a while before I edged through the crowd and got next to her. She was in the poetry workshop, I knew that, and she made the saliva sizzle on my tongue. I got next to her finally up against a wall in the formal dining room, a huge open space crammed with dancers who made the windows rattle. Lizbeth held a pint of the Glenlivet and stared at one of the faculty honchos who was trying to wrangle a dance with a girl poet who didn’t like boys, and he was quite comical, charging his boyish charm relentlessly into the stone wall of her sexual preference.
Lizbeth eventually took her eyes from him, looked at me briefly, a mere glance, then said, “You think I have to fuck him to get a fellowship?”
Those first words really broke the ice. The faculty poet was an imperious li’l tub in his late forties who jiggled when he walked and had a huge messy beard that was supposed to indicate he was too far gone into meaningful thoughts to bother with bourgeois grooming. He specialized in tiny odes about playing Wiffle ball with his daddy as the Pittsburgh sky grew gloomy, epiphanies he’d had while dieting, and baseball as a metaphor for something I forget. He was unaccountably popular and heavily clapped over in the quarterlies.
“I think if you fuck him you might get a fellowship, but you’ll damn sure get some sexual memories that’ll make you jerk awake in bed, sweating, for the rest of your life.”
“Hmm, there might be a good poem in that,” she said. She had a bold swig from the bottle of scotch, then gave her eyes over to me. “I’ve been seeing you everywhere,” she said. “The Shamrock, George’s, The Foxhead.”
“I’ve seen you, too.”
“Yeah, I noticed that. You’re Doyle Redmond, the shitkicker from the sticks, and you’ve got a shitkicker story in Prairie Schooner.”
“You’ve seen it?”
“Yeah,” she said. Her light brown hair was long, sensually unbrushed, and her frame would have to be called willowy, I guess. “They say you’re the workshop writer most likely to become a prison novelist.”
“People here just think I’m dangerous because I didn’t go to Antioch or Stanford, or like that.”
“You deal dope, don’t you?”
“Well,” I said, “I’m a writer, and I’ve been paying my own way a long time now. I live here, in this house.”
“Let’s go to your room. I want to see how a shitkicker like you lives.”
There were strangers screwing in my bed so she didn’t get to see how I lived. They were really layin’ down some hair, and I only had one sheet, but never mind. I led her onto a side porch that faced the railroad tracks and we sat on a three-legged couch that smelled of mildew. The air was chilly and no one else was out there, and it was one of those times when no preamble of chat seemed required, the lust was running that high, and in under a minute I was finger-bangin’ her while she sucked on my ear. Snaps, buttons, buckles, and flaps flew wide, our chemistry being so instant. The music pounded, the walls shook from dancers’ feet, and our breath left trails in the air. Two or three times the door opened and there were steps on the porch and laughter or snickers were emitted within a foot of us, but we ignored them, they didn’t exist, and we strove after one another on that side porch until the party went quiet near dawn.
Lizbeth Seden, of Pepper Pike, Ohio, and Carleton College, moved her gear into my room just before supper, and we were a mighty strange couple for the next six-plus years, until the night I laid under a California sky, waiting for the last rites to be uttered.
When she sat beside me under that fir tree, she shook my boot toe.
“You’re not psyching yourself up to go and be a brute, are you, Doyle?”
“I’m not a brute,” I said, not yet opening my eyes.
“You sure can be.”
“Why does everybody say that?”
“Because of certain incidents everybody knows about.”
I sat up, crossed my legs beneath me.
“When I’m dead they’ll say I was ‘passionate and ruggedly self-reliant,’ ” I claimed.
“Oh, Doyle.” Lizbeth’s lips had that puffy, tender look lips get from deep kissing someone new. “They’re not going to talk about you when you’re dead.”
That sealed the end. That comment. This was the sorest spot she could gouge at, my life’s work to this point being four published novels nobody much had read, let alone bought or reviewed prominently. This sore spot of mine had yet to quit oozing since the last book had been met with a great, vicious silence, and for her to stick me there meant it was over for sure.
“Well,” I said, “I’d rather disappear into history without even a footprint behind me than fuck Chamberlin Post.”
“You never do get it, do you?”
“I think this time I do. You’re fuckin’ that old sot for your art, right? It’s a sign of commitment to your craft and career rather than a betrayal of me.”
“That,” she said, “is the adult light I would hope you’d see things in.”
I felt myself evolving into a poem. A poem being composed as we sat there, the party music in the background, the lover at the party, the huge tree above us, the dry grass, and the marriage that had come to a head. She was entombing me in blank verse while her eyes never left my face, and I hoped to God and the devil I wouldn’t ever let myself read it.
“I’ll tell you a story,” she said. “I think you’ll understand it.” She put her hands on my leg and b
owed her head, her skirt spread wide on the grass. “There comes a boring night, more boring than other boring nights, and with nothing else to do you open your handbag. You find old receipts for things you’d forgotten you owned, come across a stiff stick of gum, a brand they only sell in Mexico, and finally you open your coin purse. You open your coin purse and dump the pennies in your lap, like when you were a girl looking for special pennies that were worth a nickel each to daddy because of their old dates. The older the dates the better, so long as they were older than his little angel. Only on this night you’re not a girl anymore, and the game is cruel, like a punch in the tummy, because all the pennies are dated younger than you are now. Not one is from a time before your birth. The girl and the pennies have switched ages, and it comes over you, if you’re me and thirty-two on your next birthday, that those young pennies should tell you something. And they do. They tell me it’s time to get truly serious about the serious things in life, when a girl finds out she’s older than all her fucking pennies.”
Big Name stood at the door looking out at us, coughed, then turned away.
“I hear that,” I said. “Fuck it.”
I kissed her once on her lips so puffy from ambitious kisses, and off she went, gone inside, leaving me there on the lawn, a fresh poem in her wake.
The suitcase in the garage proved impossible to find, but I found a blue pillowcase, and the keys to Lizbeth’s prize Volvo.
“That story, it’s sad, but it makes me so happy,” Niagra said. “That girl has a dream she wants to catch fire, and I can dig that, and root for her. But I’m happy she misdeeded you in her own way, since it shoved you back here for me. I believe we got the makings of a dream that’ll burn mighty hot, Doyle, you’n me.”
15
MINGLED GREASE BUCKET
PANDA’S HOUSE FUNCTIONED as a museum of who we once were as a family. Or maybe more of a tomb. I wondered if the seeds of all to come wasn’t maintained there in relic form. The house was two-story, nice enough in its day, though its day had passed circa WWII. The wallpaper and drapes are still redolent of a VJ-Day home-decorating sale or something similar. Inherited pieces of furniture are on display and in use throughout, old marble-top dressers, walnut tables, and rocking chairs that have felt the fingers and butts of my people on back to the fin de siècle or even earlier, and have come to know the very same parts of me. There’s a closet under the stairs containing firearms, long and short, that have never been let out of the family, though some haven’t been fired in my lifetime. The walls in the front and dining rooms are coated with family photographs, the ancestral eyes from a variety of eras always watching, beckoning it seems to me, as if those long-gone hillbilly forebears had a few deep, ugly secrets or harsh, ruinous criticisms they’d love to pass on if I’d stand close enough for whispers.
Imaru felt funny stirrings inside these walls.
The gang had wanted to go shopping, or the distaff wing of the gang anyhow, so I’d dropped the ladies at the square and me and Smoke went to visit Panda.
Panda was out somewhere in the noon heat, on foot and cane, putting his old body in peril. The heat had gotten up to where the cows had all dove into ponds. A man Panda’s age should’ve been hunkered on the shade porch drinking iced tea, but he wasn’t.
Smoke, his dreadlocks freshly braided, one of Panda’s beers in his hand, studied the wall of our dead. He’d spent more years in this house than I had, and was tied to it by more actual memories than me, though I believe I felt the pull of the blood-kin legends harder.
“Shoo-wee,” he said. “There’s some nasty motherfuckers in our family tree—know it?”
“I know it.”
In the photos there are quite a few fellas in overalls and women in calico. The men wear hats and the women have their hair in severe buns. Redmonds have come always from dirt, worked hard on dirt as a bloodline since probably the days of knights and trolls and wizards and all, long before the U.S.A. even opened for business, so they are all sturdy in appearance. Pinched expressions abound, or happier ones that have a strong hint of predatory gloat to them, often with a nine-point buck at their feet. The ensemble photos were posed so that kids are on one side and the elders on the other, to form a generational fenceline around those in their unbridled prime. There once had been so many Redmonds that quite a few of the faces stumped us as to names. Local Redmonds had since gotten narrowed down by exposure to the outside world. Mostly they’d started migrating on the hillbilly highway to the auto works of Detroit, the oil fields of Texas, or the shipyards of Long Beach back in the thirties, when word reached the hills a man could earn five bucks or more a day in those far-off places.
Our line hereabouts had thinned and thinned, down now to just Panda, and, I guess, us.
“I remember him,” Smoke said, jabbing a finger at a rough cob with an eye patch. “One-eyed Garland. The roustabout.”
“He used to give us quarters for peggin’ rocks at his empty beer bottles.”
“That’s right,” Smoke said, “A quarter if we hit ’em. It was his wife, wasn’t it? Over in Oklahoma?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Twelve gauge. I think he had it comin’.”
“Maybe. He was good to us.”
We gave ourselves over to the photos, photos that trailed back to the last century. Before a single beer had been drunk we’d identified seven faces related to us on that wall that we knew for a fact had shot or cut men to death (not counting me), and four that had been on the wrong end of the carnage. Panda’s older brother Jeb, for whom Smoke is actually named, had been gutshot near the Jacks Fork in about 1936, never solved. General Jo’s favorite first cousin, Doyle, my namesake, had been found in a ditch on the other side of Egypt Grove in 1947. He’d survived the war in the Pacific with the Marines only to get murdered by a sixteen-year-old girl whose heart he’d fiddled with.
I finally turned away from the wall of dead, went to the porch.
It’s not always wonderful to ponder the gene pool you squirted from. In a way it’s wonderful, I mean, but in six or seven other ways it can make one nervous concerning tragic consistency, ancestral expectations, and that horrible bloodstream urge to go on and do the questionable deeds that might make those dead faces nod in grim approval.
The porch was sideways to the kitchen, the very kitchen in which Smoke had wanted that bacon. General Jo bunked with the state in Jeff City, and we’d lived here with Panda until a few months after his release. Grandma had passed in 1944 and Panda seemed to enjoy us living there. In my mind I could see that hot grease spilling, burning down Smoke’s young body, though it might’ve been legend rather than memory.
“I’m gettin’ about to be hungry,” Smoke said. He, too, seemed subdued by this house, these walls, the clabbered history. “How ’bout you?”
“Let’s wait for Panda.”
“Okay. Whatever.” Smoke brushed his hand at his dreadlocks. “I reckon I’ll take a dump in peace, then.”
I dropped to the porch steps and had a cigarette. The brand, Lucky Strikes, took me back to the Marines, as that’s where I met the brand and took up the vice. The wall of dead had me thinking, remembering, seeing connections.
I was in boot camp the week I turned seventeen. The folks had moved to K.C., with all its boulevards and fancy strangers and different rules of conduct, and I couldn’t stand it; the Corps and possible war exerted more appeal. One evening when I was not yet eighteen and a Lance Corporal Jarhead on Guam, I fell in love with a sweet drink called the Sloe Gin Fizz at The Star Bar on Agana Drive. I overdrank like a puppy will overeat. On the walk outside of the bar, it’s midnight or so, and I’m nine thousand miles from the West Table square, and there’s an ocean out across the way and palm trees chanting in the breeze. A splendid setting for adventure. Near as I can figure it, from memory and Captain’s Mast testimony, this sailor, a total stranger, said a slander about my Jade East aftershave smelling like young pussy, and this ignited some sloe gin fantasy in me about interservice scuffling,
fun-loving mayhem, and I apparently took all those thoughts for real and clubbed that Squid down with my fists, then kicked him ’til his ribs caved. It seems I felt I had done something notable and terrific, because I stood over him laughing until the Shore Patrol scooped me up. The man I had tore down in my fantasy turned out to be a Seabee, and something of a war hero. I did my brig time in a strange mood, no longer a lance corporal, sad I’d whipped a hero but sort of proud for jackin’ a Seabee, who I considered to be, man for man, the best brawlers in the service of our nation.
This was the sort of incident that repeated itself a few times in life, and got known, and blackballed me from teaching jobs. It was the type of raw act, though, I felt might get that wall of dead to nod in approval.
I didn’t want to see it if they did.
Imaru would know.
When Panda showed, he was grinning a big youthful grin, looking like a severely battered but joyful seven-year-old troll. He came clambering up from the cemetery, using his BB rifle as a cane, carrying two red squirrels by their bushy tails.
Looking at him I thought it must be true that the mighty old can turn suddenly childlike again, as when an odometer on a car turns over and it’s back to the first mile once more. Except now it’s a decrepit vehicle.
At the porch he lifted the squirrels high and said, “Lunch, boys. You clean, I’ll cook.”
Panda patted me on the shoulder, a buddy gesture, but wrapped his arms around Smoke and they hugged hard. There’s a bond of a special nature between them that’s not there between us. Smoke has always been the big delight of Panda’s granddaddyhood. He’s clearly the brag dog from our litter. There’s not even any shit slung about Smoke’s hair.
Give Us a Kiss: A Novel Page 8