Give Us a Kiss: A Novel by Daniel Woodrell

li’l plumes of blood splashing up in the kind of li’l splashes pennies make when tossed into a wishing well. “There’s your mercy, girl.”

12
    PEACE IN THE VALLEY
    IT COULD WELL be that you’ve shouldered a drunk boyfriend up the front steps a time or two on pay night, or swooped your lady love from the kitchen to the boudoir, but the dead weigh different. There are no helpful staggers or neck hugs for balance. Even the smallish dead, I learned, have this obstinate, lumpish heft to them.
    Carrying the corpse into the woods fell to me, as either an earned right or a punishment or a spiritual duty, I’m not certain, but the decision was silently made and mutual. I did the fireman carry, which is easier, but I felt Dolly blood running down my back and could hear creepy interior gurgles and poot noises from the corpse so near to my ear.
    Smoke led the way, carrying a small flashlight and a hogleg magnum on the chance there might be more Dollys lurking about. Big Annie, showing a shading of her personality not exactly in the hippie groove, swung a twelve-gauge pump and seemed fairly expert in its usage. Niagra brought the shovel, and she had a quiet case of the mumbles. She was uttering whispered nonsense, likely, probably grandiose goomers, but her step was light.
    We were not on a trail, as trails attracted walkers, but were cutting through tangled forest, and this made me work hard, tugging the Dolly through briar traps and low limbs and across the uneven earth. I enjoyed the physical expense, the effort, as it calmed me as Doyle, but I was enveloped by an embrace of spiritual certainty that Imaru was not unfamiliar with such occasions.
    The shots had still been singing in my ears when Smoke and Big Annie came rushing into the barn. They took in the scene quickly, came to the correct conclusions without speaking, and Smoke hugged my neck while Big Annie did likewise on her daughter.
    Niagra ran down the chain of events to the rest of the gang, in amazingly cool and precise sentences, with concrete details, while I wavered between worlds, experiencing a druggy kind of confusion as to which century I currently haunted. I had just absorbed raw and terrible insight about Imaru, who I realized was an eternal misfit and hothead set loose in time, and his/her problems with every world he/she passed through. This fresh self-awareness ironed out any hopeful doubts about the future.
    I hoped my next-life penance could be as a dog, a pampered, coveted breed, who could chase a pastry wrapper from Zabar’s out an Upper West Side window or something, and set things straight with the spirit world by splattering on an exclusive sidewalk.
    “The spider, there,” Smoke said. He hunkered down and raised the right hand of the dead man. “That spider is famous. It belongs to a mean Dolly they all call Bunk. I think this is Bunk, anyhow.”
    “It’s him,” Big Annie said. “That face sort of looks like him.”
    “Sort of looks like him if he’d been hit by a truck, at least.”
    At this point Smoke laughed, and it was not a comforting laugh in tone or volume. Smoke’s laughter seemed to belittle the deceased somewhat, and then he explained the famous spider inked on the dead man’s hand.
    Bunk Dolly was a remainder of one of the several Dolly tribal units that had squatted on National Forest land in the thirties, over by the Twin Forks River, just off BB Highway, and had been allowed to stay permanently when the process of evicting them all turned out to be far more perilous than was worthwhile. These BB Dollys are revered by some and resented by others, as their penchant for arson and ambush had resulted in such a sweet real estate deal, to their sole benefit. They’ve been there ever since, raiding their neighbors’ barns and hog pens from prime forest acres they’d never put a penny down on in payment.
    Bunk must’ve been about forty-three, and he’d followed the Dolly career track in an exemplary fashion. He climbed