Free Give Us a Kiss: A Novel by Daniel Woodrell Page A

Doyle. It’s got to be in a cemetery at midnight.”
    “Didn’t I warn you about this?”
    “Well, yeah, listen, though. I have to say the Lord’s Prayer backwards at the tombstone of an infidel, and fire seven silver bullets, then…”
    I lunged and she scampered, high-booting down the steps and across the mowed grass, toward the deep woods. She glowed away into the dark thicket.
    Niagra left me there, in the shadows and the pits, in a molten state of thwarted desire, on the brink of a major testosterone tantrum.
    Four Luckies later I arrived at the truck. I was in a blue-balled snit. I told her to shove her silly ass over and let me drive. She didn’t argue. She shoved over and I saw her hand was on the latch, ready to flee.
    I punished the Toyota, running her mean down the creek bed blind, four or five times as fast as Niagra drove. We were in rich dark made by the tunnel of trees that sagged over the creek bed and leaned against one another in the middle. I kept staring at her as I drove, rocks thumping against the undergut and fenders, the truck bouncing high and wild, but she stayed against the far door, clinging, eyes shifty.
    “How could you do me like that?” I asked. She wouldn’t meet my eyes. “Look at me, would you?”
    Niagra turned her head toward me, her expression a clotted frown, then she looked out the windshield and her mouth dropped. Her hand came up to aim through the glass in alarm, but before her message reached me there was a weighty thump and something skidded wet and heavy across the hood and over the windshield.
    “What on earth was that?” I asked.
    “Boogerdog!” she screamed.
    “Deer, maybe.”
    “Boogerdog!” she said. “Boogerdogs are always around, provokin’ fiendish events.”
    “Will you shut the fuck up with your goomers and your boogerdogs and shit! Please!”
    She spoke more quietly next time.
    “Boogerdog. I saw its paw scrape across the windshield.”

11
    BOILED ONION EYES
    I HAVE A SENSE I’m living in more than one world at a time and they’re all out to get me. Wicked worlds. Vindictive. Parallel and relentless worlds bullying me now for whatever bad acts I pulled when I was other people in other epochs.
    That’s just the sense I have. It’s a sense of being haunted full-time that makes for a certain amount of midnight anguish and round-the-clock creeps.
    The scene in the barn after the boogerdog encounter was one where I felt stuck in a cusp, hung between various worlds, I guess, and I saw everything happen as from an aerie, a cold distance, for I was there, but then again, I wasn’t.
    I left the headlights on when I slammed the truck inside the barn. The light beams played off the grayed wood and gave a glow to the interior. I got out, went to the Toyota hood to check for damage, or a raccoon tail in the grill, maybe, or a tuft of deer hide.
    Some words passed my lips, something like, “There’s no special damage.”
    Then Niagra screamed. She was still sitting in the cab but looking out the rear window to the truck bed, and her scream got mixed with oaths and moans coming from behind her.
    I hustled over, gave a look, and felt sick.
    In the truck bed there was a man in black. One leg was busted above the ankle and white bone protruded, and the below-the-ankle part of the leg seemed to be stepping in the wrong direction. Plenty of blood. And the man’s face was rising like bread dough, swelling big from the cheeks to the hairline, only purple in hue. The man didn’t seem too large, nor too young, but all wrecked, and his eyes were of that blue type, with extra white, filmy around the blue. Boiled onion eyes.
    Niagra shouted, “That’s a Dolly! That’s a fuckin’ Dolly!”
    The man in black had a problem in the shoulder area; his right arm just flopped there, limp. There was a pale tattoo of a huge spider between the thumb and forefinger on the hand that went with that arm.
    I stalked out of the barn, into the night. Then I stood there, and ten