Death Puppet Read online

  “And—and—,” the trucker was trying to respond to Mordecai’s quip, “—and git paid for it!” He wheezed and slapped the counter with an open palm and Mattie jumped six inches.

  Mordecai’s face opened and his own peculiar laugh joined with Jake’s, giving the effect of a geriatric chihuahua with emphysema counting the mice. There was the difference that there will always be, between the laughter of a man who is working and the laughter of a man who is not, but this difference is often superseded by the laughter shared between two men willing to believe that what they’re laughing at is funny. Jake and Mordecai believed. A solid foundation of rumors heard often in the cafe formed the basis of this credulity, that in return for little or no or ridiculous or redundant work performed on the huge, ongoing project at Moses Lake, there was much payroll to be had. Stories were told of dozens of men driving huge and expensive pieces of equipment around and around in circles for days, for no reason at all that anybody could see, at tremendous expense to somebody—to, likely, the frequent and inevitable butt of similarly deliberate inefficiency, the hapless taxpayer, depending on whom you listened to.

  But these guys would laugh at a puking buzzard. They hid their feelings behind their laughter, as do we all, but these two took it a mountain too far. The day after the Challenger IX vehicle exploded on takeoff, killing all seven astronauts aboard, while the whole world sat in shock, watching reruns of the disaster, Jake had come into the cafe looking just like the cat who has swallowed the canary.

  “Hey, Mattie,” he said, even before she’d said hello to him, “what’s in a astronaut cocktail?”

  She’d had her back turned to him, pouring his coffee, and she saw Mordecai’s spatula pause expectantly over the home fries and onions. She sighed with resignation. “I don’t know, Jake. What?”

  Jake was laughing before he got the whole answer out, his jowls quivering like a pair of fenders on a badly timed Buick. “S-S-Seven-Up and a s-s-shot of Teacher’s!”

  It wasn’t funny at all, but Mordecai couldn’t cook for laughing for the next ten minutes. Which was just as well. Jake was laughing too hard to eat. Mattie was speechless. She’d almost quit. But, after so many years, these outrages to her sensibilities occurred at least once, if not thrice, daily, around the cafe. She was almost used to it.

  Besides, if she quit, how would she keep up with these interesting people? Mattie in fact genuinely liked people, but she once had made the mistake of mentioning this predilection in the presence of both Jake and Mordecai. Once was enough.

  “People are like dogs, Mattie,” Mordecai occasionally observed ever since, “they’re good to keep around.” Pause. “If things ever get really rough, you can always eat them!”

  Mice and chihuahuas.

  Working in the cafe was just about the only way there was to regularly see new or even familiar people around Dip. Familiar people, a certain type of them, you could see at church—if you could stand church. But rarely a stranger. Strangers were on view only in the cafe.

  Not to mention how badly she needed the job. She was one of the five or six wage-earning women in Dip, Washington.

  Now, behind her, Mordecai flattened the palm of his hand against the plunger in the little service bell on the shelf of the pass-through, several times, while he laughed. It rang impatiently, a sure sign of his amusement.

  Grateful for the respite in the discussion of her health, Mattie steadied herself against the edge of the counter and waited for the hilarity to subside. Outside on the highway a large dusty green John Deere combine drove by, leaving a trail of noise and wheat stalks and more dust to settle on the diner’s roadside windows. Mattie sighed. A machine like that would cost about $42,000, brand new, and most of the working ranches around here had at least two of them. The ranches were good places to find work, this time of year. She’d tried it several times, cooking for the harvest crews at different ranches, and liked it. But the work was seasonal; and sooner or later there was either too much intimacy or too much boredom involved. Either the family was too curious about her personal life, or it was too polite and even formal around the table at home—or around the tailgate of the truck in the field—leading to long, taciturn meals during which the only sounds were those of chewing, and maybe of the Aeromotor out in the yard, swiveling to face the wind, Christ, and a big grasshopper snapping its bright yellow wings past the screen door in the afternoon heat.… She thought about this for a moment. Once in Idaho in the Payette she’d noticed the grasshoppers there had bright scarlet under their wings. She’d even caught one and looked at it closely. It looked like the same grasshopper as hopped grass around Dip, except where the Dip grasshoppers had a kind of bright greenish-yellow, a pale chartreuse almost, Payette hoppers had a bright, deep scarlet. Sonofabitch, life’s a scandal, in all its multifariousness.

  Then she blushed. Last night had been a real scandal. Still was. She could still feel it, and it was a scandal how good it felt. In all its multifariousness. Not a furrow left untilled. A small smile flitted over the slightly cross expression she’d shown up to work with. Were there people out there, in the world, who practiced such sexuality as a matter of course? On a regular basis? Every night? The focus of her eyes withdrew from the flat gray dusty side of the concrete grain elevator across Highway 174, and refocused on the squinting, shaking, red face of Jake Macbee, sitting on a stool across the counter in front of her, in the last throes of his laughter. His eyes were slits in his round, meaty face, they looked like knife wounds in a side of ham. No, she thought, no way, impossible, it can’t be. Yet Jake, she knew, had been married for thirty years and had five kids. Did he have an aquarium? She shook her head slightly, back and forth, in disbelief.

  “No cherry?”

  Mattie blushed from her throat to the roots of her hair.

  “Durn!” Jake slapped the counter with his hand. “What you got, then?”

  Mattie frowned and looked at him.

  “Hey, Mattie!”

  Mattie looked over her shoulder at Mordecai.

  Without looking up from what he was cooking, Mordecai gestured through a column of steam with a spatula. “We’re but one slice short of having a whole pie there!”

  She looked at the pie case, to the right of the pass-through next to the cash register. In the mirror above the second shelf she could plainly see a wedge missing from a fat, golden brown pie, its missing triangle defined on two sides by bright, blood red cherries and syrupy pectin. She thought again of the wings of those Payette grasshoppers. She turned back to Jake. His face had brightened.

  “Cherry?” he asked.

  “C-π,” she wrote on the green pad. “Ice cream?”

  “Titanium.”

  Mordecai barked and rang the bell.

  She scowled and wrote “Titanium,” fiercely on the pad, snapping the tip of the pencil lead. While Jake crushed mice and Mordecai yapped south of the border, she turned and clipped the order on the daisy wheel in the pass-through and spun it, hard. Mordecai handed under it a thick plate covered with steaming eggs, bacon, toast, potatoes, and onions. Instant breakfast. No need even to write it down, except to tell the IRS about it. Jake’s breakfast varied only according to how often the cherry pie was unavailable, which was damn seldom. As she turned with the plate the smell of fried albumen caught her full in the face. Her stomach convulsed, bile filled her throat. She turned and landed the plate on the counter. It slid into the silverware on the napkin in front of Jake as Mattie bolted for the bathroom, just beyond the end of the counter, her hands cupped to her face.

  Mordecai stuck his chef’s hat out the pass-through, looked after her, exchanged glances with Jake, then withdrew his hat back into the kitchen. “Durn, Mattie,” he said loudly. He looked up to confirm the order she’d written. “You all right?”

  She knew what they were thinking, as she vomited three cups of coffee into the bowl. They were thinking this was morning sickness. And though it was probably for the best, all things considered, she was very emb
arrassed. Having them think she was pregnant by someone they thought they knew was a notch up, on the social scale, from having them find out she was sick to her stomach from having drunk half a bottle of brandy on top of three beers and then stayed up all night getting fucked eight ways from Sunday by someone nobody knew, not even she. So disgrace is relative, she realized, on her knees gasping over the bowl with the last strand of the contents of her stomach dripping out of her nose. You learn something every day.

  A couple more contractions brought up nothing but tears to her eyes, then the nausea subsided. She slid farther down and lay resting a few moments, her forehead pressed against the cool porcelain of the bowl. After awhile the smell drove her to her feet.

  She sagged against the wall, her eyes closed. Breathe deeply, that’s it. A pang shot through her diaphragm, but her stomach didn’t convulse. She pressed her abdomen with the palms of both hands and opened her eyes.

  There wasn’t much graffiti on the wall, but one line was prominent at eye level.

  An hour of NAUSEA is a Victory over DEATH

  She frowned. She was in the men’s room.

  “Mattie? You all right?”

  She leaned over the sink and looked in the mirror. Self-pity. She ran some water into the palms of her hands and rinsed her face. Then she smiled experimentally. I liked it, she telepathed to her reflection. She said it again, moving her lips this time, so she could see herself say it in the mirror. I’m savoring it, and this slight inconvenience is worth it. I wonder if everybody knows this about brandy. Beer and whiskey, mighty risky—what’s the rest of it? Beer and brandy, mighty randy? Ah, the search through sin for innocence and bad rhymes, old as prostitution, politics, slavery, and procrastination itself. And the pleasant weariness that comes from the strange prelude, caught between dancing and wrestling, to and of sexual fulfillment, no less thorough than temporary, suffused her being. She stood to her full height before the mirror, legs apart, and piled her hair on top of her head with both hands. Even in her waitress uniform, pushing thirty-five, pale and hung over, she was very pretty. Sassy, even. Not soured, yet. Pre-curdled, maybe. Honey-tinged goat yogurt. The sardonic entered the smile. Besides, she thought, I’ve got the rest of my life to get over this. A moment of bitterness followed, and she studied it. A woman like Mattie, in a town like Dip, might never masturbate in front of a handsome masturbating cowboy, as her two fighting Siamese fish tore each other to pieces between them.

  Well, she thought haughtily. He might just as well have been a cowboy.

  She wondered if Tucker Harris had that much fun on a regular basis. He seemed to have a certain knack. But then, relying on the presumed scarcity of Siamese Beta fighting fish in central Washington, she began to doubt it. Besides, there weren’t any other girls like Mattie, locally. They’d either married years ago, and each by now had several children, or were long gone, never to be heard from again. The prettier they were, the earlier it happened. Mattie was the exception, and the reasons were straightforward, if brutal. An only child, her parents had been killed in a car crash when she was nine. Her grandmother had raised her in the house Mattie still lived in. The old lady had passed away when Mattie was twenty-five. They’d both lived off Grandfather’s life insurance, Grandmother’s social security, some acreage they leased to grazing; and to this day Mattie received a hundred dollars every month from an auto insurance company in Connecticut. She came home after her first year in college to take care of her grandmother, her mother’s mother, her only living relative, and before she died, six years later, Grandmother had long since reverted to calling Mattie by her mother’s name. She died slowly, though painlessly. Her illness ate up all the money. But by then Mattie had grown used to the house, its library, the loneliness, the wind, even her job.

  The job…

  Jake had worked his way though the better part of his breakfast and was sucking on his third cup of black coffee. Bent over the counter, a cigarette in the tray in front of him and his lips pursed over the rim of his cup, he raised his eyebrows at her and nodded, cup and all.

  “Here,” Mordecai said gruffly from the kitchen. He slid a large Styrofoam coffee cup over the shelf of the pass-through. “Sip on this awhile, do you some good.”

  There was foam below the rim. A beer. Hair-of-the-dog-you-might-have-to-eat-some day. She exchanged glances with Mordecai. Mordecai was what they call a Jack–Mormon, a man who had lost his faith, or didn’t care, or had been exiled from the church—no one really knew. Though he’d been in Dip for twenty-five years he hadn’t been raised in Dip, and therefore his story wasn’t written in stone—yet. But everybody in Dip knew Mordecai liked to sip beer all day, slowly, not so much as it would interfere with his cooking, but enough so that at the end of the day, he’d be hitting on just enough cylinders to remember to lock the door, before he drove out to his little postwar Airstream trailer, parked up under a thousand-foot south-facing bluff at the mouth of a narrow wash twelve miles from town, and pass out.

  On the other hand, she thought, looking into the cup suspiciously, beer had gotten her into this. Why should she drink more of it?

  “Good for ya,” Mordecai said gruffly, anticipating her question. “Settle the stomach.” There was an awkward pause. “Well,” he said, “go on, and when you can manage it, Mr. Jake there would like his pie à la mode, with ice cream.” He winked at her, and made a fist of his right hand. She heard the distinctive crumbling of aluminum, and saw the remains of a Rainier can twirl out of sight toward the kitchen freezer, where the garbage cans stood. It ricocheted off the aluminum door and disposed of itself.

  “Two points,” Jake crowed.

  She toasted him and sipped it.

  Fifteen minutes later Jake was on his toothpick and her stomach was fine. The Styrofoam cup was nearly empty, and she was thinking it might be judicious to have another one, when a dusty, late-sixties Chevrolet swung off the highway onto the graveled apron in front of the diner. Two men got out of it. They stretched as if they’d been confined in the car for a long time, and blinked against the sun, the wind, and the dust.

  Chapter Four

  THEY WERE OLD HIPPIES. EACH WORE HIS HAIR LONG, ONE’S blond, straight, and neatly combed back into a pony-tail, the other’s very curly, brownish-black, and bushy, so thick and unkempt it looked like a bird’s nest with a face in it. The blond was thin and the brunet was fat. They both wore jeans, the blond’s bell-bottomed and blue over well-worn cowboy boots, the other’s black and straight down to high-top black sneakers. The blond wore a paisley shirt, the brunet wore a pink sweatshirt with its sleeves cut off and a turquoise headband. The black-headed one also had a bad, pale complexion, the number 13 tattooed on his right arm, and a tattered paperback book sticking out of his back pocket. The blond had a golden tan and moved like a cat.

  They took the corner table to the left of the window. Number 13 dropped his book onto the tabletop and hitched his pants up before he sat down. The blond slid lithely into a chair across from him.

  It had been a long time since Mattie had seen a genuine hippie, or even a stereotype, much less a grown man dressed like one. And it hadn’t been all that many years before that that she’d never seen one. Dip was an out-of-the-way place with the kind of reputation that could put people off; that is to say, Dip had no reputation at all. But in any case, the fad—or cultural phenomenon, as you will—had come to Dip late and left early. She was mildly curious, mildly revulsed by what essentially appeared to her as cross-dressing, but other than that, she had no opinions. On the contrary, it was nice to see something out of the ordinary come in off the road. And the can of beer she’d just consumed left her feeling generally well disposed.

  Jake had a different line of thought. He ostentatiously choked on his coffee, noisily put his cup down on the saucer, and stared at the two new arrivals.

  Mattie took two glasses of water and two menus over to the table.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Howdy,” said the blond. He had bright
blue eyes and a steady gaze.

  “Yeah,” said his friend, holding his book open with the side of one hand as he read it, while he curled and uncurled a strand of his black hair around a finger of the other.

  “Coffee?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” he said, not looking up from his book, and in the same tone as before.

  “Do you have…,” the blond asked, pinching the fingers of one hand together, “fresh orange juice?”

  “Fresh from the can, sir,” Mattie replied.

  “Gross,” the blond said.

  “When in Rome,” his friend muttered, again without looking up, “you can eat pasta. Could I have cream or milk with that coffee?”

  The blond had crow’s-feet around his eyes, presumably from the sun, and a strand of gray on the top of his head. He wasn’t young. Early forties. But he looked good.

  “There’s creamer right there on the table, sir.” Between the pepper and salt shakers and in front of the napkin dispenser was a bowl full of little white and pink envelopes. The curly-headed one looked at them.

  “Stuff’ll kill you, Eddie,” said the blond.

  Eddie grunted. “And a glass of milk,” he added, returning to his reading.

  “What exactly do you have to eat here?” asked the blond.

  “Well, sir,” Mattie began, “there’re fresh homemade pies, today’s special is chicken-fried steak and, well, here, take a look at the menu while I go get your coffees.”

  “Coffee,” the blond corrected, holding his glass of water up to the light and scrutinizing it.

  “Just one milk and one coffee, then?”

  “I’ll have a cheeseburger, fries, and a slice of the pie most recently out of the oven,” the curly-headed one said, still reading, “and a chocolate shake.”

  “Retro,” said the blond, turning the water glass between his thumb and one finger.

  Mattie wrote all this down as she retreated behind the counter. Mordecai was nowhere to be seen. She clipped the receipt to the lazy Susan and spun it. “Mordecai!” she said sharply. She stuck her head through the pass-through. “Mordecai?” She rang the bell.