Give Us a Kiss: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

all dewy and slick and stuff,” she said. “You got a wife, don’t you?”
    “Legally,” I said. “Not so’s you’d notice.”
    “Hmm,” she went, making a purr of it. “Another beer?”
    “I might could drink another,” I said.
    She fetched it, I drank it, and she and me and the dog waited for my brother and her mama to be done rutting somewhere out there in the slick mornin’ dew.

4
    SPIT STORM
    IT WAS EDGING toward noon, I imagine, before Big Annie came walking up from behind the barn. She was almost dressed. That is, she had a cotton print skirt on, the kind you wrap around and tie, but she carried her shirt in her hand. I had expected someone named Big Annie to possibly be a chunkette type, extra-weighted and all, but no. She stood pretty tall and had thick dark hair, but no way around it, she was called Big Annie because of those sizable tits, big melon tits that pulled down heavy on her chest.
    When she saw me on the deck she turned her back and slid into her shirt. The shirt proclaimed that she preferred Dukakis in the upcoming presidential pissin’ match. Then she came on up.
    Niagra said, “Big Annie, this fella is Doyle, Smoke’s brother.”
    “Welcome,” she said, and by the outstretching of her arms I knew she wanted me up for a hug, an instant fellowship embrace. I am not by nature the instant fellowship sort, ready with a cheek kiss for strangers or the hearty unearned hug. But this time I went along with it, and Big Annie’s hugwas powerful. She must’ve stood five nine and her arms were hard. “I’m Big Annie,” she said.
    “I see that,” I said. “I’m Smoke’s baby brother.”
    “We know,” Niagra said. “The baby brother that jumped grades in school and went to several colleges and won’t work for The Man, ever.”
    Big Annie slid into one of the wicker chairs. She looked hard rode and put-up wet, but she had a smile, a blissful expression. I came to learn that blissful was her norm, and she had an in-tune-with-nature-and-the-cosmos sort of constant sunbeam of personality. She’d been formed by the hippie era and never found cause to remodel her outlook or ways.
    For me, I suppose it was the few beers I’d now had, or the imminent reunion with Smoke, or the mention of college, but I started flashing heavy on a robbery me and Smoke had pulled when I was almost nineteen and only freshly booted out of the Marines. It was one of the times when the extreme measure seems like a lovely solution. I was up in Kansas City, crashing with a sullen bunch of our nation’s naughty and wrongheaded young near Forty-first and Campbell, more or less in Westport. This bunch had developed crushes on needle drugs, but so far, despite my susceptibility to varieties of self-abuse, I hadn’t took to the spike, though it came out of the shoe box and made the rounds more and more. For the most part we were just postponing the workaday phase of our lives from ever starting. This bunch was about to pull me along into some fatalistic mischief when Smoke tracked me down.
    Smoke fell by the pad with a plan. He’d had a union job at Kenworth Trucks, but they’d been out on strike for five months and, in fact, he was never recalled.
    “Buy you lunch,” he said, and we went to Mario’s Deli and laid waste to some meatball sandwiches and marinated tomato salads.
    After the meal, a delight to me since I’d been eating out of cans for a while, as none of the bunch I stayed with were into, like, cooking, we went down the street to Kelly’s, where my being underage never came up, and dipped into a few bourbons with beer backs.
    “I’ve got an extra pistol,” Smoke said. In those days he wore his hair real neat, clipped short, and paid a lot of attention to his sporty attire. “And a plan.”
    His plan was pretty thin, on a simple level, and really all it amounted to was he knew who we should rob. Smoke had scouted the Git’N Quik convenience stores and discovered there was just this one cash