Death Puppet Read online

  Her mouth paused over this idea, its lips pursed between one decision and another, about this suggestion, about this man. As she hesitated the wind, a force rarely absent from this part of the country, pressed against the exterior of the wooden house, like an asthmatic crone squeezing market fruit, and made it creak. They both heard it. There are few more evocative, introspective, lonesome sound effects in nature’s quiver. A mere mortal hearing it easily recognizes, if subconsciously, that, though generations of humans may come and go in this land, this wind will always blow over it. The swing creaked on its rusted chains on the front porch. The leaves in a cottonwood rustled beyond. The power line swayed at its anchor below the peak of the west gable, as if belayed to a tramp steamer anxious to depart with the tide. Live, fool, this wind whispers, because you’re going to die.

  She smiled at mortality, and the intimacy of the room resumed. Tucker thought that, at this moment, Mattie looked very much the way he’d always imagined a woman should look. Her blue eyes shone intensely in her sparsely freckled face, and the face shone warmly against her dark hair, like the welcome glow of a distant town in a desert night. There was blood in her lips. She asked him frankly, “What kind of game, cowboy?” Revealing by her tone she would at least consider the idea of a game, perhaps any game at all.

  Tucker chewed his lip and let the palms of his hands slide down the bodice of her dress to her hips. He always liked this moment, the moment at which he saw a chance to go too far. “Far” was the only place Tucker Harris ever considered worth going. As things stood, if he left them to their natural course, he and Mattie would sleep together. But, if it would be in nearly any self-aware psyche to think up perverse extenuations, it was not in Tucker’s to ignore them. To Tucker Mattie’s excitement was contagious, palpable, and a blank check on a deep account. He surveyed the room. Behind her a couch stood against the parlor wall. This he pulled as close to the aquarium as he could, saying, “Have you ever read Elizabethan drama? Any Shakespeare, for example?”

  She nodded, restraining a sneer but half smiling as if bewildered, nonplussed but thinking, what does this yahoo know about Elizabethan anything? Is American education that pervasive? He extinguished the lamp and returned with the bottle of Christian Brothers and two glasses. These he half filled and handed one to her.

  “Cheers,” he said, touching her glass with his.

  “Cheers,” she replied, almost automatically. She took a dainty sip. Tucker threw his drink to the back of his throat. Then he turned and dipped half a glass of water out of the fish tank.

  “Do you have on any underthings?” he asked, draining his chaser at a gulp.

  “Of course!” she stammered, doubly astonished. “You thirsty son of a…”

  Again Tucker thought her change in coloration very lovely. He tossed his glass into the fireplace, where it landed with a thump on a bed of ashes. He did a double take. The glass was to have shattered dramatically. She laughed in spite of herself. The glass was one of a set of six. She suddenly threw her glass, still full of brandy. It found its mate and both disintegrated in the ashes. Tucker smiled and modulated his voice to an intimate whisper. “Can you get them off while keeping the dress on?”

  Now he’s talking. She flushed and smiled, excited now, and not waiting to be asked twice, modestly did so. She was removing her cowgirl boots as well when he said, “No, no. Leave the boots on.”

  Watching her, Tucker Harris pulled his shirttails in opposite directions, so that the pearl snaps above them rhythmically separated, waist to throat. Unable to resist, she drove her fingernails through the hair on his chest. She suspected he lived a precarious life, nutritionally speaking, but he still had some of that physique peculiar to men immunized primarily by their youth and their nerves against obesity, infirmity, or self-abuse of almost any kind. There was a long ridge of scar tissue across his rib cage beneath his right arm. She traced it with a sharp fingernail. A shiver oscillated between them. She, to him, felt as soft and warm as the amniotic dream he cherished and fruitlessly sought, when he could sleep.

  “They should hear about this over in Grand Coulee,” Tucker said, pulling her hips against his. “They could put meters on us and bill Seattle by the hour.” He rounded her buttocks. “Wouldn’t have to work no more…” He slid the palms of his hands up her back to her shoulder blades. “Unless you call this work.” And in fact, wired to his eyelids on speed and beer and brandy as he was, a light mist of what otherwise might have passed as wage-earning perspiration sprang to the surface of his forehead. He gently slipped the other of the two thin straps of her dress down her shoulder, then both over her elbows—her forearms were lovely, the light hair on them like wheat laid down by rain—and helped her shrug her breasts free of the bodice. The top of the dress bunched above its elastic, around her waist. “You’re very beautiful,” he whispered, leaning to kiss, then to lick, each nipple, and nip them between his teeth. She was about to clasp her arms about his head when he sternly said, “Wait,” and backed her to the couch. She supplely complied, eager to feel his weight upon her. But to her surprise he helped her step up on the couch, then to turn and sit on the back of it. He guided her boot heels to a couple of cushions on the seat to her right and left, so that she was facing Tucker and the aquarium with its two hovering Siamese Betas.

  “Elizabethans couldn’t be frank like us Americans,” Tucker announced pedantically. “They used words like ‘die’ and ‘death’ when they wanted to politely discuss fucking and coming; ‘to die’ meant ‘to have an orgasm’ to them, without anybody getting,” he smiled, “shocked.” He toasted her again with the bottle and took a healthy pull. She merely awkwardly sipped from it, thinking, so that’s what he knows about Shakespeare: exactly what everybody else knows about him. Mattie’s course through life had been guided—or misguided—by the fact that she was smarter than nearly every man she let get close to her; she needed that edge, if it was an edge, and therefore just that frequently she lost patience and ultimately failed with them. Thus the Shakespeare scholar, here. A strapping doofus, nonetheless… and definitely on the road to somewhere else. Perfect in that. He gestured toward the aquarium. “Does the glass partition just slip up out of the top?” He took the bottle from her and set it next to the tank.

  She nodded, the bemusement in her features giving way to fascination. There’s education and there’s education.…

  “Good.” He circled to the other side of the tank, loosening his iguana belt as he went, let his jeans slide to his knees when he got there, and turned to face her.

  The top of the tank came only midway up Tucker’s thighs. Mattie revised her broodings with delight and anticipation at the sight above it. “Look,” she whispered, “Si Foo and Eight Treasures: the Male Principle, your flag and standard.”

  Tucker smiled his distracted smile over the tank at her. The left corner of his mouth twitched. Her eyes flitted briefly, uncertainly to his. As if his eyelid had caught a twitch pitched by his mouth, he winked. Then he gingerly pinched the edge of the glass partition, protruding about an inch above the surface of the water in the glowing tank, between the knuckles of two fingers. The tank was the only source of light in the room.

  Mattie drew the hem of her skirt over her knees and along her thighs to her hips, draped the excess material behind her, over the back of the couch. She was catching on. “I’ve had Si Foo and Eight Treasures for almost two years,” she said huskily. “They’ve been eating me out of house and home.” She leaned slowly back until she could support herself with one hand on the windowsill, a foot or two behind the couch, and opened her legs until her knees touched the back cushions of the couch on either side of her.

  Tucker touched the corner of his mouth with the tip of his tongue, she was a sight, then glanced at the tank below his hand. “Let’s see if we can all die together,” he said, in a barely audible voice. “Ready?”

  “Adios, Si Foo and Eight Treasures,” Mattie whispered, tossing her head, so that her hair swirled about h
er shoulders.

  “Be good to yourself,” he whispered, as he extracted the sheet of glass. “Tell me how it feels.…”

  The water churned in the tank.

  Chapter Two

  A GLOW FROM THE ROOM BEYOND THE DOOR REMINDED HIM that he’d pass the aquarium on the way out. Like a jellyfish adjusting its depth, his libido stirred at the memory. Centuries of genetic pugnacity, sacrificed on the altar of pleasure, now floated piecemeal in that tank. The regular breathing beneath the pillows next to him betrayed Mattie’s presence. He gently raised the bedclothes and looked at her sleeping form in the gloom. She was naked and facing away from him, breathing softly, evenly, innocent, satiate, obtaining in a few hours a degree of rest it would take Harris a month to snatch out of the heartworm snarl of his own nerves. He drew the edge of his hand along the kerf of her behind, a karate caress from the triangle at the top of her thighs to the base of her spine, not touching the flesh but achieving an electromagnetic relationship with it. If his hand had been a magnet, little iron filings would have redrawn just what he saw there as it passed. She sighed in her sleep. He let the blankets cover the sight again. A nice girl, Mattie, a nice girl with healthy appetites trapped in a one-elevator town, whose natural charms would have attracted anyone she pleased, who could find no one, who had the web of pride of spirit and intellect and attachment to place that could easily doom her to spend the rest of her life behind a cafe counter: unmarried, bitter, her jowls sagging a bit, her legs still good despite her vocation, her heart empty, her mind an unapproachably bitter, sharp little thing, twirling dangerously through the desolation of this little town like one of them Ninja throwing stars.

  Ahem, said the little devil from his library, looking up over the caustic of his medulla oblongata ricotta terracotta gotta lotta loose nerves firing vocabulary uselessly around here, and over a mound of parchment, books, and floppy disks that crepitated as loudly as a loose pile of roofing tin walked on by a goat, speaking of nineteenth-century poets and absinthe, in order to further the successful corruption of this nice small-town girl I think you should leave her some appropriately seductive fragment of Verlaine, to impress her and keep her on the hook, which with your schedule could last for years.

  Four years? I—

  For years, for years, preposition signifying duration, more than one, less than infinity, possibly cardinal four, but likely some fraction of your total lifespan, if you play your—

  —Cardinals: right?

  Oy vey! Your hangover is filling your mind with nonsense! Listen to me, me, me. Only I can get you into the kinds of trouble you really appreciate, the kinds that are worth the time it takes to experience. Wordplay is, it’s, it’s—

  Fatuous.

  Precisely! Now poetry, on the other hand, poetry…

  The slightest gray hint of dawn had appeared in the room as this inner dialogue progressed. Tucker had to go. Mattie was nice, the fun had been good, but he had clicks to go and a Rendezvous to keep. He stepped carefully out of the bedclothes, to avoid waking her. She turned in her sleep and smacked her lips softly in the pillows, waves of hair covered her face.

  Les roses étaient toutes rouges

  Et les lierres étaient tout noirs.…

  What the fuck is that stuff, Tucker demanded angrily, nearly aloud, because as he put the question to the little devil he half-remembered who, how, where.

  I congratulate you on consuming enough cheap brandy last night to scour the scar tissue off some of your most treasured wounds, boss: Angelique, the little devil pointed out primly, remember Angelique? Angelique, of Hoc Bhui?

  Tucker gruffly ignored this question, gritting his teeth as he pulled on his jeans.

  Chère, pour peu que te bouges,

  Renaissant tous mes désepoirs.…

  He couldn’t find his socks, he pulled his boots on anyway. Now for the shirt.

  Verlaine was her favorite. Angelique even taught you how to write it, and as a result turned you on to opium and Claude Debussy, before she found you out. Not to mention French. A step up from paregoric and the Vanilla Fudge. Remember, boss? And you pretended to go along with it. For weeks, you pretended to go along with it. And she pretended to go along with you pretending to go along with it, even that bit about tying her hands behind her back while she was naked, using that red handkerchief with the map of Hanoi printed on it.…

  Enough! Tucker nearly shouted, discovering his shirt beneath a copy of Vanity Fair, the magazine.

  Well, the devil said, blowing on one of his little hooves and buffing it on his mink waistcoat, primly logical, when was the last time you listened to Debussy?

  The shirt was inside out. He put it on anyway.

  Of course you remember. But only I remember the poem, and that’s only because last night while you waxed lascivious, I had access to memory banks normally locked out by the Big Programmer, hyuh, hyuh.

  That “hyuh hyuh” always differentiated the devil’s normal cackle, which usually sounded like ten fingernails raking the blackboard of his cortex, and it was always disconcerting to hear the basso “hyuh hyuh” of an idiot child discovering a copy of Playboy in his father’s bedside table, against the normal timbre of the little devil’s many voices, the closet full of windup transvestite toys gibbering over and over that on account one of them had a run in her stocking they would all be late for their electrolysis.

  Electrolysissies, Tucker thought, rather hopefully. Quixotically.

  Not only that, you lummox, the devil continued, if you listen to me, instead of insulting me, and pay a compliment to this girl, you’ll always have a place to crash—not to mention hide out—and not incidentally someone to boff—in Dip, Washington. Where Nobody would ever think of looking for Anybody.

  Ohhhh, great, that’s great, thought Tucker. Boff? Boff? What about love?

  Schlemiel, I’m telling you!

  Tucker capitulated. O.K., O.K.

  Now find a pencil and a piece of paper.

  Manichaean fascist.

  You don’t know the meaning of either word, whelp, the devil sneered, and besides, the Tyranny of Absolute Good ain’t exactly ever been your problem. But watch it. That Manichaeus was a goddamn Aye-ranian, and you never know when you’re going to run into a Jesuitical red-blooded inerrantist American Mormon, these parts, and you’ll give yourself away.

  Right in front of God and everybody.

  Don’t mention that Dude.

  Tucker sighed and, walking on tiptoe, passed through the door into the living room, quietly pulling the bedroom door closed behind him. Just as the door met the jamb, he took a last look at the sleeping Mattie. Though the room was yet enveloped in shadow, it seemed to him he could make out every detail of her lovely body beneath the bedclothes, and, just for a moment, he thought of returning to instigate a reprise of its pleasures. The mere thought of their mutual masturbation, though mere prelude to the balance of the wee hours, made him quiver. Not to mention how the corruption of an innocent affected him.

  Tsk, tsk, clucked the little devil, you scribble all over her tabula rasa, you nasty man.

  Tucker twisted his lips sardonically and shook his head. Some people might still equate masturbation with guilt, but as far as he was concerned, both were matters for social anthropology. But he closed the door gently. Miles to go. Hectares to harvest. Time’s awasting. Outta here. Here, from now on, would be downhill domestic; seated before the cheery hearth, feet up on the toasty fender, one long yawn into the grave.

  Paper, said the devil.

  Fuck you, muttered Tucker, half aloud. One of these days I’m going to stake you out in the sun and run you over with the Popemobile.

  Hey, the devil retorted belligerently, tell it to Torquemada.

  Now that they were relatively alone, Tucker felt safe in resuming his normal relations with the little devil inside him. To any other observer, it would look as if Tucker were talking to himself. But, as Einstein taught, observation is relative. Although he was careful to maintain an o
utward appearance of propriety, Tucker knew better. There were two of them, Tucker and the devil, and the devil was right, as he almost always was: There was no benevolent fascism in sight. Unless you counted democracy. At any rate, communication helped him to keep tabs on the little devil, who, left to his own devices, could incite all kinds of psychic mischief, which in the past, before Tucker had gotten a grip on things, had caused him all manner of embarrassment, both public and private. That Grip had cost him plenty, too, more than a Louis Vuitton portmanteau. Long sessions at EST, forbidden to pee; weeks pickled in pansexual brine with jet-setting masseurs in the hot tubs at Esalen; days choking on salt gargle following whole nights of Primal Scream therapy; eyecup after eyecup of boric acid and Visine after staring fellow penitents in the eye for hours in LifeSpring sessions; months waiting out cocaine insomnia and alcoholic slumbers; years wandering psycho-floral Bardos; knee surgery resulting from aerobics and jogging; he’d probably spent about a hundred thousand dollars exorcising this little devil. Not to mention Time. And it had turned out that just discussing things with him seemed to be the clearest method of dealing with him. Diplomacy. What-ya-want-to-do-today, he thought to himself in a singsong voice, oh-I-dunno…

  Next to the aquarium he found one of his socks, beneath the Plexiglas divider he’d pulled from the tank. He picked up the sock and stuffed it into his back pocket. The aerator still bubbled, but the water looked like thin dirty milk with a pinkish tinge to it. There was no sign of life in the tank. As he watched, the corpse of the last survivor, who had died of his wounds not long after killing and devouring most of his opponent, rose to the top of the bubbles, hovered there for a moment, then sank into the foam. Mattie had thought Si Foo had won, but the winner was so mangled she couldn’t be sure, and with her breasts dipping into the tank, lasciviously distracted, it was hard to care.… There was brandy in one of the new glasses she’d brought out, and he sampled it. It burned all the way down and kept on burning.