Death Puppet Page 5

  “Well I’ll be gaaahhhhhhdamned,” said Jake loudly, taking the toothpick out of his mouth and pointing with it. “If it ain’t a couple a certain-teed hippies.”

  Mattie looked at Jake over her shoulder.

  “The gen-you-whine article, in two sizes,” Jake continued. He held up a pair of fingers and winked at Mattie. Then he spun a quarter turn on his stool in order to get a better look at the two strangers. There was a big, nasty grin on his face.

  “Redneck,” the man with the curly hair muttered, still looking at his book. “Redneck at two o’clock.”

  “Don’t be judgmental,” the blond said, still studying his water glass.

  “Not much mental about it,” replied his companion.

  “Hey you, hippie, with the long blond hair,” said Jake, savoring the syllables. “C’mere a minute.”

  Nobody said anything. Something sizzled quietly on the griddle beyond the pass-through. A fly lifted off the front windowsill and landed abruptly, upside down on the ceiling.

  “C’mere,” Jake said teasingly, as if calling a puppy he planned to drown, “C’mere.” He whistled between his teeth and waggled his fingers.

  “Hey, Jake…,” Mattie began uncertainly.

  “I’m talking to you, hippie,” Jake said shortly, his smile frozen to his face.

  “That guy up there at the counter?” the curly-headed one, Eddie, said, turning a page in his book without looking up.

  “Yeah?” the blond said, putting down the glass.

  Eddie folded his arm over the lower margin of the pages in front of him, and lowered his head, as if he were settling in to give serious consideration to what was printed on them. “Wants a word with you,” he said.

  The blond turned around and looked at Jake. “He’s speaking English?”

  “Psst,” Jake hissed, loud enough to be mistaken for a punctured tire, “c’mere.”

  “You talking to me, mister?”

  “Listen at it,” Jake said nastily, “it might be a man.”

  Mattie turned and looked again through the pass-through. No doubt about it, Mordecai had disappeared. She turned back to the silent cafe. She’d always thought Jake was stupid, but she never would have believed he had the nerve to be this rude.

  “Well?” said the blond, staring at Jake.

  “Come here a minute, hippie,” Jake said, staring back. “I got something to tell you.”

  The blond hesitated.

  “Something you need to know,” Jake added.

  The blond sighed and looked at Eddie. Eddie looked up from his book and studied Jake.

  The blond turned to Jake. “Something I need to know?” he said, pointing a finger at his own chest. “Something you can tell me?”

  Jake’s upper lip curled slightly. “C’mere.”

  The blond stood up.

  “That’s O.K., sir,” Mattie said hastily, gesturing toward the blond man, “I’ll bring your coffee to your table for you.” She turned and busied herself assembling a cup and saucer and spoon from under the counter and pouring the coffee. But when she turned around, the blond was nearly next to Jake, directly across the counter from her. She stood stock-still, the cup and saucer in one hand, the coffeepot in the other.

  “Well?” the blond said, crossing his arms and rocking back on his heels. Mattie noticed that he was not quite within Jake’s reach.

  Jake squinted. “Why I do believe it ain’t a he,” he said, with undeniable disdain, “it’s a she.”

  The blond man leveled his eyes at Jake and smiled slightly. “The woman inside me’s been telling me that for years,” he said. “I try not to let her show.” He shrugged and winked and lowered his voice. “You know how women are.” Mattie drew a sharp breath. That wink and the whole act were downright salacious.

  It was not wasted. Jake’s grizzled face went red and he stood suddenly to his feet. He put his face within inches of the blond man’s face. “Lemme tell you somethin’, you goddamn hermor-fodite,” he hissed. “If my own son growed his hair like that, I’d twist his arm off and beat him to death with the stump of it.” He moved his nose until the toothpick was nearly touching the other man’s chin, tilting his head slowly, as if it were a valve wheel on a gas main. “Jist to save somebody else the trouble.”

  “Jesus Christ” Eddie said disgustedly from the other side of the room, “I’ve heard better than that at the garden club about the slug problem.”

  “Jake,” Mattie heard herself saying, angrily, “Jake, don’t…”

  But Jake didn’t blink and he wasn’t finished. “. . . Then I’d set my dogs on the corpse…”

  “Jake, please…”

  “. . . and let ’em feed on it till they puked hair.”

  Eddie smiled. “Hup,” he said.

  “Jake Macbee—!”

  “Stay out of it, Mattie,” said a new voice.

  Mattie turned around and saw Mordecai standing in the doorway of the kitchen. A shotgun lay across the crook of his elbow. He still had on his filthy apron and the chef’s hat. Come to think of it, she looked down, she still had a cup of coffee in one hand and a coffeepot in the other.

  Jake didn’t turn around at all. From Mattie’s point of view he looked like an unshaven bulldog at the end of a chain, more like the hood ornament on his own truck than a male human. For that matter, Jake looked ready to drive out of Dip with this total stranger’s head on the hood of his truck, blond hair flowing: a diesel hyperbole of xenophobia triumphant.

  She had no doubt of the outcome of a physical altercation. Even if, as he seemed to claim, the blond man had a woman inside him, Jake outweighed them both by at least a hundred pounds. To his credit, however, it looked as if the blond hippie was going to go to his grave without batting an eye. He did look a trifle concerned, at least.

  Then she heard a chuckle. “Pretty good,” Eddie chuckled again. “Let’s see you get out of this one.”

  Was he crazy? “Mister…,” she began.

  “Mattie!” Mordecai said sternly, a little boozily. “Remember your condition!”

  Mattie turned. Mordecai had shifted his gun somewhat, and his hand played nervously about the trigger guard, like a butterfly tentatively investigating a flower. “My condition?” she said in a puzzled voice. Then she remembered. “My condition?” she screamed. “You dough-faced son of a bitch, what in the hell do you know about my condition!” And she threw the coffeepot at Mordecai.

  Though completely surprised and not a little slow to react, Mordecai ducked, fortunately for his face, as the coffeepot exploded against the bathroom door, missing his head by at least a foot, but raining scalding hot coffee and pieces of glass on his back. Mattie hadn’t really wanted it to hit him, and no sooner had the pot departed her grasp than she was consumed by remorse. She watched with trepidation as the pot hurtled toward him, as if in slow motion, and before it was two-thirds of the way to the wall she was relieved to see it would miss him.

  Unfortunately, both barrels of the shotgun discharged over Mordecai’s arm as he ducked, and blasted the plate-glass window next to the front door. Mattie recoiled in horror as the arch of letters in the center of the window, spelling DIP CAFE, red with black shadowing, and the red neon tubes of the RAINIER sign above it, disintegrated into a loud shower of shattered glass. The nucleus of the shot shed a spindrift of glass dust onto the hood and windshield of the parked Chevrolet as it passed over it, and thence scattered curious little geysers of dust as it fell in front of the gray grain elevator across the highway. To someone standing over there, the spent shot would have sounded and descended upon them as harmlessly as the first hesitant patters of a false summer rain.

  Hearing the twelve gauge go off behind him, Jake screamed and dove sideways for the floor, convinced he’d been killed.

  The blond hippie had unfolded his arms from his chest and relaxed them to his sides. Only Mattie saw the feint of the man’s hand toward the middle of his back, and its subsequent retraction. He knew Mordecai’s gun was empty, and
merely stood where he was. But before Mattie could give it a thought, Mordecai was at her.

  “Whose side you on anyway, Mattie?” he shouted, in the loudest voice she’d ever heard him use. “Damn stupid woman like to burnt me naked with that pot a hot coffee!”

  A large brown stain descended the wall behind Mordecai, steaming, like his soaked kitchen shirt, even as he shouted.

  “Who you calling stupid, you jackass Mormon,” Mattie shouted back, “pulling a gun on two perfect goddamn strangers?”

  The two long-haired men exchanged a glance. The blond one turned toward Mattie and, raising a finger, said, “Ahm, miss—?”

  Mattie turned on him. “You keep out of this!” she yelled. She pointed at Jake, curled up on the floor with his hands and arms covering his head like an atomic attack poster. “That bastard’s been boring me to death for ten years!” She turned toward Mordecai. “Ten years!” her voice raising an octave. “He was completely in the wrong! Absolutely in the wrong—and you backed him up!” Now she was screaming. “As usual!”

  Mordecai’s jaw sagged, his mouth opened.

  “That bigoted, prejudiced, stupid, hog-jowled, potbellied pin-headed pie-eating son of a—”

  “Mattie…,” Mordecai began, in a conciliatory tone.

  “Astronaut cocktail—my ass!”

  They all looked at her blankly. Mattie was quivering with rage. Mordecai was dumbfounded. “What—?”

  “Forget it!” While she’d been screaming, Jake had figured out he hadn’t been cut in two by the shotgun. He unwrapped his arms from around his head and began to pick himself up off the floor, getting a second wind, saying as he did so, “Why you swivel-hipped gelding piece a Communist dogshit…”

  Eddie, still in his seat at the table in the corner, his book opened in front of him, raised an eyebrow. “Now we’re mouthing proper invective. Dude sounds just like Jesse Helms,” he observed thoughtfully. “Why, I remember when he owned that TV station—down in Raleigh, North Carolina?—and that sonofa—”

  But Mattie had long since interrupted him. “You!” she screamed at Jake over the counter. Her shrill attitude had come from way behind to dominate the room, and there wasn’t a man in the place thinking of anything but ways to calm her down. Even the blond fellow, having withstood Jake’s irrational menace so coolly, now stepped back a pace, in deference to Mattie’s feral outrage as she dumped the saucer, spoon and cup with its half pint of steaming coffee onto Jake’s hapless head.

  “Sweet Joseph Smith!” Jake howled, as the crockery and hot fluid descended upon him, and he tried, after the fact, to roll out of its way.

  “There’s a guy didn’t need a TV station,” Eddie muttered, nodding his head.

  The blond hippie laughed.

  “Goddamnit, Mattie,” Mordecai shouted, suddenly resurfacing in the occasion, pointing. “That’s Jake Macbee down there. He’s our best customer!”

  Mattie whirled and faced him. “And I’m your best waitress, Mordecai Sturm,” she hollered. She pointed at Jake, writhing on the floor and jerked her other thumb at her own throat. “Take your pick!”

  Silence suddenly filled the room. Nobody quite understood how things had managed to come to such a pass. Jake slowly crunched to a stop among the shards of glass against the wall, below the large hole in the front window. He stared dumbly from the mess on the floor to Mattie to Mordecai to the mess again, glowering from under his eyebrows at the blond man like a kicked dog. Incredibly, the toothpick was sideways across his lower lip.

  The blond man cleared his throat. “Ahm, ma’am,” he began quickly, “we can just mosey on outta here—the way we came?—and, uh, we’ll let you get on about your career. We, uh, we didn’t mean—”

  Now Mattie rounded on him, too. “What are you? Spineless?” she shouted, knowing full well that he had beyond a doubt proven otherwise. “Mosey! Go on, mosey!”

  “He’s right,” the other man, Eddie, piped up. Mattie glared at him. Eddie stood up from his chair in the corner. He turned down a corner of a page and stuffed the book into a back pocket of his jeans, using both hands. “We can just be going on about our business. It wasn’t her fault this happened,” he continued, addressing himself to Mordecai, “any more than it’s ours.” He joined his friend at the counter, looking from Mordecai to Jake to Mattie and back, smiling hopefully. “Right?”

  Mattie saw she was about to be abandoned. The two strangers had realized they were going to walk out of the cafe with an unemployed waitress on their hands, unless they fixed things with her boss. They wanted no part of her. She looked at each of them and thought, to hell with them both. To hell with them all. She turned to Mordecai, defiant.

  “Mattie Brooke,” Mordecai said, his jowls quivering, “you’re fired.”

  “I’ll save you the trouble, Mordecai,” she said thickly, barely able to overcome her rage, surprised herself how angry she’d become, “I’ll just goddamn save you the trouble.” She began pulling ineffectually at the apron strings knotted against the small of her back. “I quit.”

  Mordecai shook his head. “You’re fired.”

  Chapter Five

  MATTIE TORE OFF HER APRON AND THREW IT ON THE COUNTER. “Well that just suits the hell out of me, Mordecai Sturm. I don’t need to be associating with the likes of you and your shiftless customers any damn how; it’s too demoralizing. It’s too demeaning. It narrows my scope.”

  Mordecai wasn’t listening to her. He was staring guardedly at the blond man with the ponytail. With both barrels expended, Mordecai was an unarmed man. Since he’d thrown down on the stranger first, he was now facing his future with a bit of uncertainty. By the Code of the West, the stranger could now coolly extract a .44 from his sleeve and blow Mordecai to his reward with impunity. To his credit, more or less, Mordecai’s expression seemed to say, all right, I’ve fired the girl: Now do your durndest. But in fact, he was wishing he’d been to church a little more recently than twenty-five years ago. But perhaps then a remnant shred of his abjured faith came back to him; for somebody, he knew, would go to the baptismal font in his stead, as his proxy. It was the Mormon way. The blond man looked at Mordecai a moment and shook his head. “Don’t worry,” he said sourly. “No harm done. But you ought not to fire this lady on our account.”

  Mordecai looked ugly. “I’m firing her on her own account.”

  The blond straightened his shirt, sighed, and looked at Mattie. “You need a lift somewhere or anything, ma’am?”

  Mattie’s lip was trembling and she was staring at the floor, thinking, well it’s still harvest time. Maybe I can get on with a ranch. The Johnsons, maybe, she thought halfheartedly. Mikey Johnson had been pestering her since high school. The euphemism then had been, “Come on, Mattie, let’s take a ride over to Grand Coulee and watch the sun set.” It was true he’d been cute. If only he’d said something poetic, like “. . . watch the kilowatts throb through the penstocks.” But no. He had to cliché her to death with sunsets. She’d refused him. Now, twenty years out of high school, Mikey was divorced, and it was, “Come on, sugar. Let’s you and me get a fifth of whiskey and a TV Guide and check into one a them honeymoon motels over to Lake Chelan.” Wink. “One that’s got the Playboy Channel.” Wink wink. Jesus. Everybody’s grown up—so far as they’re going to grow, apparently. She sighed bitterly and a tear rolled over her cheek.

  “Ma’am?” the blond man said again. She looked up at him as if she’d never seen him before. Seeing the tear, his expression softened. “Aw,” he said quietly, scuffing the toe of a cowboy boot against the floor, “it’s just a job, ma’am.”

  “Don’t you ma’am me, you long-haired son of a bitch.”

  In order to arrest his sudden smile the blond man pursed his lips and raised an eyebrow, but he didn’t speak. Eddie pulled his sleeve. “We’d better go.”

  Eddie left first. Glass crunched beneath his feet. The blond stepped over Jake’s legs, then turned at the door. A draft tugged at a lock of hair at his forehead. “S’long,”
he said, to no one but Mattie.

  Mattie ignored him.

  He left.

  There was a long moment of silence. Mordecai still stood against the door to the bathroom, the barrel of the shotgun in his hand, its butt on the floor. Jake was gingerly brushing shards of glass out of enough clear space to push himself up by his hands.

  “I’ll just get my stuff,” she said, and hurried into the kitchen. In a few minutes she’d changed into her jeans and boots. Though she’d been wearing boots all her life, she’d long since noticed that it was at times like these that cowgirl boots made her feel really stupid. She draped the uniform over the door of a small locker at the rear of the kitchen and left by the back door without even asking for her check, much less saying good-bye. Outside the midday heat was beginning to envelop the town, and a soft, hot breeze was blowing. She walked around the back, beneath a roaring compressor, to the other side of the lot. Her pickup was parked in the shade of a spindly, dusty cotton-wood tree that had sprung up beyond the fence that separated Mordecai’s cafe parking lot from the appliance store to the south of him. When she opened the door on the driver’s side she was assailed by a blistering wave of heat. She rolled the window down and walked over to the passenger side and opened that window, too. In such heat she might have left the windows open to keep the cab cooler, and security wasn’t really a problem in a place like Dip, but the toss-up wasn’t between heat and car thievery, it was between heat and dust. Ten hours in this lot with the windows open and the cab would have been thick with dust.

  Ten hours, she thought, slamming the passenger door and walking back around to the driver’s side. What am I going to do with an extra ten hours a day? Learn to yodel?

  She turned and looked across the street at the Lincoln County Wheat Growers’ Cooperative grain elevator. She’d read the fading sign so many times in her life that she usually didn’t even see it when she looked right at it. Getting fired seemed to put a new light on things, and as she thought this, she noticed for the first time a hint of elation in her spirits. Maybe getting fired wasn’t going to be so bad. At first she’d been humiliated. But, she realized, she wasn’t humiliated from being fired. She was humiliated from working for Mordecai Sturm. She’d been holding jobs since she was a young girl, but she’d never been fired from any of them. Getting fired was something that happened to drunks and incompetents, and Mattie was neither. But still, some time between the actual dismissal and just now she’d begun to feel good about it. She wiped a strand of hair out of her eye, and with it a tear. She held her face to the wind, closed her eyes, and smiled. Fired. I’m fired. Maybe I’ll get a six-pack and relax, for a change.…