car’s perspective.
We were down past the barn, under a thickness of trees that I could see broke open shortly and gave way to a pasture gone white in the heat.
“Stop there,” Niagra said. She had her boots on the dash to brace herself. “Whoa, Nelly.”
We got out and stood in the heavy shade, and it took a bit for my eyes to adjust before I saw Smoke’s hideout. A fifteen-foot trailer had been shoved up cozy against a couple of trees and rested on tires gone flat. It was cellhouse gray in color, a color that I personally shun. A couple of metal chairs, the kind that rock, sat on the bare dirt in front of the trailer. Rust had attacked them pretty thoroughly. Busch beer cans were scattered around like strange blue blooms. The door was screened, and cordwood was stacked low around the gap between trailer and earth.
“Nice,” I said.
“Well, hard to find,” Niagra said.
When you’re a boy you think someday you want to live like this. A little hole in the woods, your living space like a cave or a fort. The woods right up to your bedroom window, a rifle by the door in case supper strolls along and is standing in the yard when you wake. Women housed separately, nearby but up the road. Smoke’s hideout would’ve met the standards of Thoreau, I imagine, if Thoreau had drunk a lot of canned beer and laid off of the heavy reading and philosophical inquiries in favor of ruttin’ with Big Annie of a mornin’.
Smoke came walking in from the woods behind the trailer, a roll of shit paper in one hand. We saw each other simultaneously. He let out a big, throaty bellow and charged toward me. He wore blue-jean shorts and white tennies.
I knew what was coming. I braced for the assault of genuine masculine affection.
“Doyle, my baby bro,” he said, and flung the shit paper toward the door. Then I was in the huge embrace, the rough hugs of my big brother, who squeezed me up off my feet and thumped my back with big fists of love. I did some back, with less effect.
He still had me in that big, rib-shakin’ hug, when I said, “Smoke, man, what you been up to?”
He let go of me then, smiling hugely.
“Let’s see, Doyle. I wrestled the devil down and fucked him in the ass. Other’n that, the same ol’ same ol’.”
I hadn’t seen him in three years. Life on the lam seemed toagree with him. He’s always been monster big, but up in K.C. he’d gone to fat for a while, but now, living in hard communion with nature, he was firm and fit and mud brown. He stood about six five, and I’d guess he didn’t weigh over two forty or two fifty. Sleek. Smoke had spent his entire lifetime in mad pursuit of the elementary pleasures and his face showed it, with laugh crinkles all around his hungry brown eyes and a slanting pool-cue scar on his forehead he’d acquired from a husband who didn’t appreciate Smoke’s joie de vivre. Smoke always was the breed of boy and man who after he’d opened a bottle of whisky would throw the cap away. His hair was shoulder length, laced with gray, and somebody, Big Annie I found, had attended to his locks. They were braided in thin ropy strands, sort of hillbilly dreadlocks. His beard was perfectly groomed and streaked with gray, like tines in a pitchfork.
“You’re lookin’ good,” I said.
“You too, baby,” he said, then grabbed my ponytail and said, “Yee-hah!”
“Whatever,” I said.
He let go, looked fondly at Niagra, and said to her, “You’re gonna like Doyle—he’s overeducated and starry-eyed, too.”
She shrugged, considering it.
“It could happen,” she said. “I’ve been known to like people now and then.” She started walking off toward the house. “I’ll let you brothers be with your re-union. But don’t draw blood out of happiness or anything.”
I dropped into a rusty chair and watched Niagra walk. Smoke did likewise. It was a walk worth watching. Therewas a slithery élan to Niagra’s movements, as in the old blues phrase, “Like her back