Death Puppet Read online

  ALSO BY JIM NISBET

  — NOVELS —

  The Damned Don’t Die

  (AKA THE GOURMET)

  The Spider's Cage

  (AKA ULYSSES' DOG)

  Lethal Injection

  The Octopus On My Head

  The Price of the Ticket

  The Syracuse Codex

  Dark Companion

  Windward Passage

  A Moment of Doubt

  Old and Cold

  Snitch World

  — POETRY —

  Poems for a Lady

  Gnachos for Bishop Berkeley

  Morpho

  (with Alastair Johnston)

  Small Apt

  (with photos by Shelly Vogel)

  Across the Tasman Sea

  — NONFICTION —

  Laminating the Conic Frustum

  — RECORDINGS —

  The Visitor

  For more information, as well as MP3s of

  “The Visitor” and “The Golden Gate Bridge,” visit

  NoirConeVille.com

  This edition first published in the United States in 2014 by

  The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

  www.overlookpress.com

  For bulk and special sales, please contact [email protected],

  or write us at the above address.

  Copyright © 1989 by Jim Nisbet

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  ISBN: 978-1-59020-197-8

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Acknowledgments

  The author would like to thank Blue Wind Press for kind permission to quote “Poem” in its entirety, from their Something Swims Out by Darrell Gray, copyright 1972 by Darrell Gray.

  Further grateful acknowledgment is due to the University of California Press, for their permission to quote from “Clair de Lune.” The complete text may be found in Selected Poems of Paul Verlaine, translated by C.F. MacIntyre, copyright 1948 by The Regents of the University of California.

  Although not quoted or cited directly, Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert, Penguin Books, copyright 1987 by Marc Reisner, proved an invaluable source of information about the construction of the Grand Coulee Dam. Any and all construencies thereof, however, to be found in the present volume are strictly the result of the author’s fictive enterprise.

  And to Jack Nisbet many thanks, for perpetual and generous access to his meticulous knowledge of the natural history of the Northwest, for his ongoing articles and books thereon, and particularly to his files concerning the Big Divot.

  Chapter One

  TUCKER HARRIS STARTED AWAKE. FOR A MOMENT HE DIDN’T know where he was. Then two moments, then three. Very bad. But years of practice allowed him to remain motionless, alert without panic, his eyes pinned wide open, absorbing like twin black holes all the information around them until he figured it out. Maybe a little adrenaline would help. Alcohol already factored in there, and speed, there was some speed left. His heart was beating much too fast to be in the chest of a man who’d stayed up after dark just long enough to listen to the weather report, then genteelly retired with a back number of Reader’s Digest, and it wasn’t. At least he was in a bed. He should be grateful he’d made it to a bed at all. There is a hangover. He could feel his nerves readying themselves for it, as if they’d lain awake all night fingering strings of worn wooden beads expectantly, impatient to be taken out at dawn and shot, for something they didn’t do but were tired of thinking about. In the last couple of years his left cheek developed a nervous tic whenever he drank too much, a sort of pilot fish to be followed by the rest of his body—short breath, arthritic joints, puffed features in the mirror, a right brain that throbbed like an overinflated basketball with a truck parked on it; he had to squint his right eye against the ache, while his left bugged like a calf’s in a slaughterhouse, and his left brain freewheeled through tinier and tinier colored figure eights, and a gamey stomach that responded with increasing reluctance to applications of vinegar or milk, and would barely tolerate aspirin, not to mention Benzedrine, as it assimilated and dealt with the scouring ravage of alcohol. Nineteenth-century poets addicted to absinthe had sported such nervous disorders with pride, what had they called them? Tic douloureux, the little literate devil in him answered promptly, with that disconcerting clarity peculiar to the derangement of the rest of his senses—although all was not smooth, its voice sounded like a closet full of wound-up toys. They were badges of craftsmanship, of endeavor, the devil continued. When you go to hire a carpenter, you look at his hands. If they’re thick and calloused, you know at least that he’s been doing something with them. Right? Right, Tucker agreed, allowing himself to close his eyes for a long moment. Oh, for just a little more sleep, the difference between psychosis and dreaming is the difference between insomnia and sleep; measurable, strobed, by REMs in the latter, and jactitations in the former. Tic douloureux, the devil corrected. Two sides of the same coin. He wanted to feel sorry for himself. Don’t. If they’re thick and calloused… What. Which. The hands. So in the nineteenth century, if you were to be hiring a poet… Why in the hell would I want to hire a poet, Tucker asked angrily, actually moving his lips to silently form several syllables in the question. Why, the devil promptly rejoined, suppose you were in the armed forces, and illiterate, unschooled—not on account of any lack of native intelligence, he added with a reassuring sneer, but on account you were born disadvantaged and impoverished, the son of a tanner and a dairy maid. (Remember that great Joyce line? They lowed about her whom they knew, dewsilky cattle. That’s about your matter, laddie, glottal stop and all: that’s byoo-ti-ful.) (Mather? Cotton?) (Matter. M-O-T-H-E-R Irish. Cotton?) My mother, Tucker scowled, half sitting up, as if to physically avoid the topic, and that’s when he remembered the woman. There’d been a woman in this room when last he’d been conscious. Why so there was, squealed the little devil, who now began to tune the surface of Tucker’s cortex, stretching its surface like the skin of a kettledrum, by means of hidden software turnbuckles, to raise its pitch, which was the voice of the devil itself, and testing it with a pair of crusty mallets, unspeakably atrophied shrunken heads mounted on the tibia of Cesare Borgia. Thrrum da dum. Tucker winced painfully. Her name is Madelaine, thought Tucker. Brooke. Very good, said the devil, his voice flanging most queerly, as if he’d jumped out the door of an airplane with a kazoo in his mouth, Madelaine Brooke. At last! Tucker thought impetuously, at last, a nice girl. Well, squeaked the devil with contempt, competent. But to return to the matter of hiring a poet—suppose you wanted to, thrrum da dum—what poet? The one you need, stupid, to help
you bring your obdurately sluggish wit up to the speed of illiterate seventeen-year-old cannon fodder libido, and plagiarize a letter to your girlfriend for you, ya see? Speed, thought Tucker. But he could barely understand the voice glinting along the surface of his cortex, like the lid of a peanut can skipping over the foetid surface of a submarine neural class reunion, although, truth be told, the little devil frequently came up with marvelous suggestions, and knew a great deal more about a vast scope of things than Tucker himself could manage; and, not incidentally, was also a passably competent businesswoman, whom Tucker frequently consulted concerning his financial affairs, and who was worth listening to. She had actually, in some guise or other, actually attended Harvard. Had her MBA. And one a them little keys. Same devil, but a different voice altogether: calm, diffident, cool, with a state-of-the-art portable personal computer, crisply pressed double-breasted navy suit—all the bulletholes in the back—patent leather pumps, a platinum American Express card, and a gold ankle chain with tiny links clasped by the surprised silver skull of a poleaxed Brahma bull, with that little Phi Beta Kappa key on a ring in its nose… Tucker squeezed his eyes closed. The devil’s prattle diminished until it was indistinguishable from a high-pitched whine in his right ear, like a distant car alarm at four a.m. Sharp yellow sparks darted before his eyes, and the tic migrated from his cheek to the eyelid above it. He opened the eye but the tic caused the lid to flutter, and he squeezed it closed again. His stomach undulated like a cellophane bag full of boilermakers rolling off the first lip of a steep water slide. He inhaled deeply, from the diaphragm, quietly, then exhaled shakily. She was beside him, naked as he was. He remembered the fish.

  “Siamese Betas,” she said, staring at them from the other side of the aquarium. “They’re cannibals from Cambodia.”

  He looked puzzled. “That makes sense.”

  She smiled indulgently, patronizing. “West of Seattle.”

  Tucker’s lip curled, but he kept his eyes on the drifting fish. They were silver, sharp-finned, thin fish with dorsals like wheat scythes and sharp protruding teeth. No. Their sides were streaked bright cobalt blue as if by brush strokes, and the edges of the sickle tail fins were tinged Chinese red. No. They were indigo males, and their extremities undulated like so much languid testosterone in primeval borscht. O.K., confirmed. Fish. They were fish, all right. The pale blue eyes watching from the other side of the aquarium. Damn, he thought, she’s got freckles and everything; and he remembered an expression commonly used around this part of the country, cute as a specked pulp, speckled pup, and she was. The latter. He told her so. She blushed. The coloration traveled up her throat to the roots of her hair and across and down her shoulders to the beginnings of her breasts, much as alpen-glow watercolors high, west-facing slopes. This effect was something to behold. The chick is a pushover.

  When he’d recovered from this pleasant realization, he asked their names.

  Si Foo and Eight Treasures, she said, indicating with her eyes one fish, then the other.

  Tucker Harris frowned at the two creatures. Each kept to its own circle, but occasionally one would feint toward the other and retreat. He watched this behavior with increasing curiosity, until he realized that a transparent barrier in the water segregated Si Foo from Eight Treasures. This annoyed him. That he hadn’t noticed it earlier made him feel stupid.

  “Why are they separated?” he asked suspiciously.

  Madelaine said nothing. She leaned over to watch the fish, her palms on her knees beneath her cotton dress. She was still flushed from avoiding his feet during their long night of dancing at the Stirrup in Wilbur, and swaying from the effects of the beer and brandy they’d been drinking. She was so absorbed in the constant motion of the two fish that her hands twice slipped off her kneecaps, and finally she hitched up the front of the dress so she could grab her unstockinged legs with each hand, just above the knees, so that her face was just below the level of the surface of the water in the tank, as if floating beyond it, illuminated only by the light beneath the lid. The gesture was so ingenuous that Tucker was utterly charmed by it. Insofar as charm assuages psychosis, his truculence nearly vanished. Through the fish, the water of the tank, past the pinkish cream fan of marine flora and bits of turquoise coral above a bed of charcoal black sand, he could see the beginnings of her aureoles exposed by the top of the calico dress. But for the bubbling of the aerator in the tank, all was silent.

  “Mattie.” She flicked the whites of her eyes over the top of the tank at him. Lit from below, her face had a ghostly, floating quality. “Why are they separated?” He had to know.

  “They’re fighting fish,” she said softly, her gaze returning to the two pets. “The species is cannibalistic. If they weren’t kept separated they would tear each other to pieces.”

  This information cheered him, and he almost smiled. “Do tell,” he said, his voice softening thoughtfully. His eyes lingered over the slightly disheveled hair on the top of her head, followed a lock as it descended along her cheek and thence to the spectacle of her breasts beyond the two enemies within the glass walls of the tank. He sipped his brandy, as if coolly. “Have you ever let them fight?”

  She shook her head, distracted by the sweeping turns of the two potential combatants, their thinnest extremities furling and unfurling like exotic, infinitely malleable fabric in a slow-motion wind, like chivalric banners circling above opposite ends of the lists. She tapped the glass gently with an unvarnished fingernail. “They wouldn’t be here if I had.”

  “They always fight to the death?”

  “Always.”

  “Well, hell, doesn’t one of them win out over the other one, and survive?”

  “Sometimes.” She pointed into the darkness of the room to her right. “There’s a book about them on the shelf over there. Betas, Siamese. Right between Austen, Jane, and Brontë, Emily.”

  Tucker didn’t move. “What did you call them?”

  “Siamese Betas.”

  He looked troubled. “Vietnam?”

  She nodded. “Close—Cambodia.” She didn’t notice the slight change in his expression at the mention of this country.

  “They bet on them there,” she said. “It’s like fighting cocks or pit bulls in other places. Except that in Cambodia fighting fish are legal as well as popular. They have these tapestried rooms, with velvet hangings, and Oriental carpets over grass mats around specially lit, sunken pools with bright, hand-beaten copper bottoms.” She traced ovals on the glass, from Si Foo’s side of the tank to Eight Treasures’ and back. “Elaborate ritual meals are served, lamb spiced with coriander and mint, shrimp basted with peanut sauce and red pepper and ginger; and black tobaccos blended with opium are smoked, warlike deities invoked, and there is learned conversation on the lineage and genealogy of Siamese Betas.” She flicked her eyes up again. Tucker met her gaze and held it. She wondered if he realized she was making this up. “They breed them there,” she whispered, with a special emphasis on the word “breed.” She smiled and ran the tip of her tongue back and forth along the edges of her two upper front teeth. Mattie was a pretty woman, with a very fresh, healthy kind of beauty, “outdoorsy” in spite of her inside job, but now there was just a touch of wantonness in her apparent innocence, and the combination thrilled Tucker. At the same time, he wondered if she knew he knew she was making this story up, about the fish rituals, because he had spent the last fifteen years forgetting more about Cambodia than she could ever learn. Although, he grudgingly admitted, he’d never heard of these fish.

  She returned her attention to the tank. “The spawn of a good one can make a lot of money, but a fish doesn’t last more than a few fights, and few owners would pit a good fighter in a weakened condition, even against an inferior opponent, no matter what the stakes. In the eighteenth century there was a very famous Siamese Beta who won seventeen battles, only to die in the clutches of—”

  “A Siamese cat,” Tucker interrupted her.

  She smiled, surprised. His mind wa
s faster over the fish tank than his feet over a dance floor. “The cat was prized by its owner, but not above the fish, and kitty paid for her gourmet meal with her life, in the most grisly fashion.”

  “A Siamese dog…,” Tucker surmised, leaning farther over the tank.

  She laughed.

  He kissed her.

  She stood and embraced him, awkwardly, so as not to interrupt their first kiss, the aquarium between them. She was thinking, he took his goddamn time about it, and, this will teach Jedediah Dowd to stand up Madelaine Brooke. If he ever finds out. One of the thin straps of her summer dress slipped over her shoulder. Come to think of it, he’ll kill me if he ever finds out about it. They continued to kiss as they sidled toward the end of the table. I’m not sure who’s going to tell him. Tucker kneaded the small of her back with the palm of his hand, pressing thereby her hips against his. Maybe I’ll tell him. For a few moments, nothing was to be heard in the room but the sounds of air bubbles making their way to the surface of the tank. Maybe I’ll just keep it my little secret.…

  Her lips were sweet, Tucker thought, and eager. Her teeth nipped playfully at his own lips, and her tongue darted over the gentle wounds. He was allowed to think these Gothic thoughts because the little devil had retired to his little room, to read Pleuret’s Book of Heresies. But the little devil did trouble himself to make a suggestion.

  “Let them fight,” he muttered, not looking up from the agony of Bruno.

  “Let them fight,” Tucker whispered.

  She pulled away and looked at him.

  He smiled. Tucker was a big, handsome, ravaged man, in his early forties, and he had a nice smile. A winning smile. He had to duck his head now and again to go through doorways, also to dodge imaginary shrapnel; he swaggered just a little when he walked, or staggered, and he had an air of bemused, slightly troubled distraction that came across as mysterious to her, as if he were mentally framing a movie or perhaps contemplating entering a seminary, even as he discussed matters profane. In high school he’d have been captain of the football team and then, as now, the kind of man for whom, despite her generally good taste in other things, Mattie had always had a weakness. Even as these specimens had peaked before they turned twenty, and gone to seed before they saw thirty, Mattie had peaked and gone to seed right with them—taking better care of herself the while, because, frankly, initially at least, she had less to lose than they did. “Let’s play a game,” he suggested, running one joint of his forefinger back and forth along the inside of the top hem of the front of her summer dress, “while they fight.”