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

thousand lightning bugs were flickering away across the countryside. The dog loped by, into the barn, and Niagra shuffled out. She draped her arms around me from behind, rested her head on my shoulder. We stood like that, together, trembling, trying to reach out for our composure.
    “It’s down to the nut cuttin’, now,” I said.
    “I know,” she said. “You ain’t a false alarm, are you?”
    “I wonder.”
    Back in the barn, Damned Spot, her tail swishing, wasjumping back and forth over the man in black, who had dragged his wrecked self out of the truck to the dirt and had begun crawling. That broken bone wiggled as he crawled, and he bellowed.
    “Damn,” I said.
    The man kept crawling, and a scarifying question hit me. Are all Dollys as dead game as this one?
    Niagra stepped up, put her boot to the man in black and rolled him over onto his back. The roll earned a scream.
    “I don’t know his name,” the girl said, “but he’s one of the ringleader Dollys.”
    The man spit at her and she jerked backward, out of spittin’ range.
    Those boiled onion eyes stared up, alive with fierce agony. His left hand pawed at his beltline.
    “I can’t stand this,” Niagra said. “We need to extend mercy to this man.”
    “Mercy?”
    “Uh-huh. A hole in the head that ends his misery.”
    “I don’t know if I can be like this.”
    “Let me enhance upon my point,” Niagra said. “He’s a Dolly out here scoutin’ us for a rip-off, so we can’t let him go.”
    “But, just killin’ him, I don’t know.”
    The ladystinger is in my pocket. Niagra takes it.
    “You figure we could nurse him back to health like a sick bunny or somethin’? Then release him back to the woods?”
    “Hold your mud,” I said. Then, what could I do except look down at the Dolly, and the Dolly’s boiled onion eyeswere terrible, full of hurt but committed to ruin. “Shit, he’s got a pistol.”
    The Dolly made a feeble try to raise a revolver, a thirty-eight, with his left hand, but his thumb appeared broken or sprung. He was making slow progress. His eyes fixed on me, his selected target, and this intense attention caused me to freeze. The writer’s disease, that of preferring acute observation to action, had seized me up. I’d gone still in a trance of observations, noting the way the Dolly’s mouth tugged to the right, a tuft of whiskers below the nose the razor had missed and were gray, while the head hair was black, only a few lines of gray, and the black T-shirt the man had on featured a St. Louis Cardinals emblem, red, in the heart zone, and he’d gotten purchase on that revolver, finally, and raised it above his belt buckle, a buckle that sported a horse head in profile inside a horseshoe, and I, the writer, just stood there, frozen, trying to get a prose poem, a conte, out of this event that might well climax with my being shot.
    Niagra crouched forward with the ladystinger and let off a round. She scored the downed Dolly in the belly, then moaned and dropped the ladystinger and it did a short cartwheel before resting in the dust.
    The dog fled about here.
    The gunshot had gotten the Dolly to drop his pistol, but he wasn’t dead.
    I picked the ladystinger from the dust, and the girl just bellowed about mercy, and the Dolly kept trying to crawl across the straw and dirt of the barn floor.
    I believe I said, “Tonight ain’t exactly my first rodeo—but I’ve never done anything like this before. Me’n Smokepulled a couple of things where we showed our guns, but never used them. Once, when I was at KU, gettin’ my bachelor’s in English, a rock’n roll fella, a drummer, had shorted me on a jar of speed and I shoved a pistol in his ear, but that boy saw the light.”
    “Cut!” Niagra screamed. “Cut!”
    The crawling man in black hadn’t gotten very far, his miserable passage charted by a blood trail in the dirt.
    “Aw, Imaru,” I said. Then I sighted in on the Dolly and emptied the ladystinger into his back,