Read Online Give Us a Kiss: A Novel by Daniel Woodrell - Free Book Online Page B

cemetery to confer the total powers on her, bare butt against an infidel’s tombstone, but he’s gotten up in age and acquired too many hexes of his own and is impotent.
    Falls is distraught, even surly.
    Then the goomer doctor says he knows of a young buck goomer doctor of considerable powers over by Bull Shoals Lake, and that’s where the pages ran out.
    Niagra watched me finish and she just stood there, in a red cotton dress, barefoot, awaiting my critique.
    “A good read,” I said finally. “The format is wrong, and most movies have quite a bit more dialogue.”
    “Film is a visual medium,” she said. “So I went with lots of visual.”
    “There’s only about fifty lines of dialogue, though.”
    “Yep,” she said. “I favor montage.”
    I stalled. I lit up. I swished the beer can about.
    “The goomer stuff is good,” I said.
    “I’m way into that,” she said. She was still standing over me in that red dress and I didn’t want to foul my chances of ever getting such a garment off her. “I’ve studied goomer doctorin’ a good deal. There’s a lot to it, you know.”
    “Well, sure.”
    “That’s my big ace,” she said. “When I get to Hollywood, why, I’ll cast a goomer down Sunset Boulevard, then I’ll do one toward Burbank for TV work.” She sort of laughed, a bit self-consciously. “If you’d shave, I’d cast a goomer or more for you, too, Doyle. You could stand havin’ a good goomer or two on your side, boostin’ you along.”
    Niagra, so full of scrumptious hope, is looking at me, there, afraid I won’t share her vision. She’s afraid I’ll tell her that the world won’t let her have her dreams realized quite so easily, and probably not at all. That her dream is just a thread of fantasy to hang by for a while, but it’ll go limp one horrid night somewhere down life’s road and start coiling around her pretty neck. But I don’t want to tell her. I won’t do it. Because those young dream-years are by far the best years, when you have hardy faith and gallops of energy and go for it all, perhaps in a dumb fashion but with gusto, right up ’til the night the dream goes limp and starts that coil.
    “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “That could be my next future.”

10
    BOOGERDOG
    YOU’RE CUTE,” NIAGRA said. That compliment was a reward for shedding my whiskers into the sink. “You look three and a half years younger, too.”
    “Grazie.”
    We were on the blind stretch of the dry creek bed. There was a half moon and a slight odor of skunk in the night. Something nosy had gotten sprayed. Imaru was being paged, but not distinctly.
    Apropos of nothing, except perhaps my graphic telepathic memos, Niagra asked, “Do you go oral on women?”
    “Only when I can,” I said. “Otherwise, no.”
    “Huh. I figured as much.”
    At the money garden we ran the hose out and did the watering job. Neither of us spoke. She was in those shorts again, the ones that almost covered her butt, and those flame-lick boots and a blue halter.
    Eventually I spoke up.
    “Niagra, I’m only going to warn you this once. Don’t tease me, and don’t lead me on.”
    “I hear that.”
    After the water was all gurgled out, instead of getting in the Toyota, she slithered up right next to me and grabbed my hand.
    “I want to show you something,” she said. “Come along.”
    I trailed her like she was a glowing coyote. She’d swept me into her fairy tale. Her hand never left mine, and she led the way through the thick and spooky woods, over a hill and around a pond. Mosquitoes were biting that night and that was the only part of nature that went against the enchanted spell.
    I’d say it was fifteen minutes before Tararum came into view. The drumstick palace was lit up clear across the lower story, and citronella candles flickered all about the patio and pool area. You could see shadows moving around, and hear voices and an occasional splash.
    “Isn’t it beautiful?” Niagra said.
    “I guess.”
    “I see