Give Us a Kiss: A Novel by Daniel Woodrell

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 bowed 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 youopen 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