Death Puppet Read online

  “What do you think?” Mattie smiled, looking around the kitchen. Right there on the kitchen table was the Verlaine poem, vivid as only salacious literature written on paper towels in fat pen-strokes can be vivid. Without a moment’s hesitation she carefully folded the paper along its serrated line and placed it in a flat basket on top of the refrigerator with the Grange newsletter, the phone book, and the electric bill.

  Lize Gallagher was a no-nonsense rancher whose place bordered Mattie’s to the west, making them each other’s closest neighbor. In fact, her ranch was called the No Nonsense, although almost everybody including Lize shortened this to the Nonsense when referring to the place, and a lot of the local men shortened it to No. She had a rough-handed, avuncular affection for Mattie, but Lize’s critical assessment of the entire race otherwise quickly curtailed her relations with other humans of either sexual persuasion.

  “That one’s got a tail on him longer than Buffalo Bill’s pony,” she muttered. “Kinda makes him stand out for one kind of fool or another.”

  Mattie smiled at her. Lize was a notoriously gruff woman, she had offended nearly everyone around Dip at one time or another, either just after they saw her coming or just after she opened her mouth. To merely lay eyes on her for the first time was to be intimidated. The woman was five foot eight, with broad shoulders and thick arms and hands chapped and brown like her face and neck from every kind of work and weather. Summer and winter she wore an ancient pair of leather waffle-soled hunting boots laced up the legs outside of her Levi’s nearly to the knees, a broad leather belt with a huge two-tongued buckle that would have done for a surcingle on a plow harness, the inevitable checked western shirt with a double yoke and pearl snaps, and a down-lined canvas fly-fishing vest that was so thin and worn-out it was hard to tell what color it was, except the seams of the game pocket in back were stained rusty brown. The many pockets of this vest had fascinated Mattie since she was a little girl—she’d known Lize that long, and as far as Mattie could tell, only Mattie had aged. Lize and the vest had remained the same. Somewhere in these pockets there was always a piece of her own jerked venison for whoever wanted it, usually Chief Joseph, the makings for cigarettes, three or four calibers of bullets, a half package of snelled hooks, one of those green shotgun shells, the keys to the gas and kerosene pumps at the Grange, one or two wire nuts, a screw, washers, taps, and always—always—a small ½"—" end wrench: the two sizes most commonly needing tightening on anything mechanical made in America (“With this wrench,” she’d told Mattie more than once, holding it up to the sun like an Olympic torch, “you could take apart the world.”); a single-edged razor blade for cutting calves, a couple of tags for tagging them, a box of aspirin, several kitchen matches, and the stub of a pencil.

  She kept her knife in her pants pocket.

  Mattie had spent a lot of little girl hours in Lize’s lap going through those pockets. Lize would just sit there and let her, telling stories or talking to Mother or Grandmother the whole time. If Mattie cut herself on the razor blade, or hooked herself on a tied fly, or came up with her hand full of fish guts, as once occurred, then that’s what happened, that was the way for her to learn that some things were sharp and others had guts. Mattie’s grandmother had been Lize’s best friend, probably her only friend.

  A grouse was laid out on the cutting board next to the sink.

  “Thought I’d leave a bird with you this morning,” Lize yelled. “Joe had the snot out of his nose and pointed up a pair.” As with most people who spend all their time outdoors, Lize’s voice was always very loud. She didn’t mention she’d shot both birds out of a single flush.

  Mattie touched the dead bird. It was still soft and limp, its neck stretched to its full length, its eyes closed. There was a spot of blood at the tip of its beak.

  “Besides,” Lize growled, “you must be gittin’ hungry.” She jerked a thumb toward the living room. “I seen you finally broke down and ate them two stinkin’ fish.”

  Mattie would have blushed considerably, if she hadn’t laughed aloud.

  Lize had never liked the idea of keeping live fish in the house. She thought there was something unclean about it.

  “Couldn’t a been more than a mouthful, though,” she continued pensively. “Were they any good?”

  “They were great,” Mattie said enthusiastically. “A little bony.” She immediately blushed even more, and regretted the smart remark.

  Lize pursed her lips, her unflinching black eyes gazing at Mattie’s back. “That so.”

  To hide her embarrassment Mattie ducked into the living room. The tank was still lit and the aerator bubbled happily, but there were no fish in the cloudy water. As she reached to pull the plug a piece of a fish surfaced in the bubbles and bobbed there.

  “They got at each other,” she said loudly, pulling the plug. The aquarium went dark and silent. “You should have seen it.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Lize.

  “I was cleaning the tank.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “They were all fins and teeth.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It was over before I could even think to lay a hand on the dip net.”

  Mattie heard the creak of the spring on the screen door.

  “Morning,” Scott said.

  “Hi,” said Eddie.

  Lize was silent.

  “Lize,” Mattie said, after a moment, “say hello to Scott and Eddie.” As she spoke she was scanning the living room for evidence of Tucker Harris’ passage. Then she saw the nearly empty bottle of Christian Brothers, still uncapped. There was an empty glass next to it and another with brandy still in it on the aquarium table. The furniture was obviously out of place, one rug had been pushed up in between the legs of the sofa and the base of the aquarium table. Mattie shook her head in despair over the two cushions three feet apart on the couch, each dimpled where so recently had squirmed her anxious boot heels. But alongside the couch, on the base of the floor lamp, was the most damaging evidence of all, a soiled athletic sock, white with a dirty heel and two red stripes circling the open end. Obviously a man’s sock. Thanks, Harris. Dress to disappear, why don’t you. The room was in fact quite disordered, and with a sinking feeling she realized that Lize would have had no trouble figuring out what had been going on, more or less. Not precisely what had been going on, thank God, just the more or less. Nobody would believe the simple facts of what had been going on, she hoped to herself lamely, least of all Lize—would she? She hates men so much she must never have realized their utility so far as I did last night… mustn’t she have?

  It wasn’t that Lize was a snoop. She wasn’t. It was just that she wasn’t blind.

  Then she realized that either Scott or Eddie or both of them would undoubtedly be shaping up as the culpable party or parties in Lize’s eyes.

  “Lize,” she said, gritting her teeth as she pushed the sofa back against the wall, “that’s Scott and Eddie. They just came by the cafe this morning looking for Jedediah. Old friends from San Francisco. I’m taking them out to his place.” She flipped the sock under the couch with the toe of her boot.

  “Hm,” she heard Lize say gruffly, “seems like there’s enough menfolk in this country. Place is overrun with ’em like it is.”

  “Oh, Lize,” she said, straightening the rug. “Have a seat there in the kitchen, boys. I’ll just be a minute. You want some coffee?”

  “No thanks,” Scott said. Mattie heard the movement of chairs. An awkward silence followed.

  Lize changed the subject. “Company’ll do that boy some good,” she allowed. “He keeps too much to himself.”

  “Not like anybody else we know,” Mattie said. She thoughtfully plumped the dimples out of the pillows and placed them at opposite ends of the couch. But for propriety she might have left the disarray a little longer as a reminder, a memento—kind of like keeping the box long after the candy’s been eaten.

  “He’s too young for it. It’s not good for him.”

&n
bsp; “Jed keeps to himself?” Scott asked.

  “Pretty much,” Mattie said. She had the brandy bottle in her hand but she couldn’t find the top.

  “Totally much,” Lize said. “He hasn’t come to call since…”

  “You’re a friend of his, too?” Scott asked pleasantly.

  “I knew his daddy,” Lize answered unpleasantly.

  “Oh,” Scott replied uncertainly.

  The top seemed to be long gone. “She’s not sounding like that because of you,” Mattie said. She gave up looking for it and gingerly set the bottle under a copy of Horse and Rider in a wicker trash basket beside the bedroom door. As she did so she caught a whiff of the little bit of brandy that remained and her stomach adjusted itself, like a jar tilts to eject its last bubble of air before it sinks into a greasy creek. Saliva flooded her mouth. She swallowed it and took a deep breath. “Are you, Lize?”

  “He was about as low-down a man as you could find,” Lize said with finality. “I swear that boy spent the first five years of his life on a saddle blanket in the floorboards of a pickup parked in front of every tavern between Missoula and Vancouver.”

  Scott surmised, “His father drank?”

  “Like a radiator with a hole in it in July. Jed run away as soon as he learned how to run. Pretty near every family in the county took him in at one time or another, me more than the rest of ’em. Mattie first laid eyes on him at my place, didn’t you, Mattie?”

  Mattie took a last look around the living room. Now the place was respectable, at least. She’d do something about the fish tank later. Maybe drive to Seattle and get two more Betas for next September? That was a thought. A long trip to Seattle. A long way to next September. She would have the time for it, now, if not the money. But, more likely, the water would go where it would do the most good, into the rose bed, and the tank would go into the shed, and that would be the end of it.

  Of course, the note said that Tucker would be back next year.

  Fat chance.

  On the other hand, he’d reappeared a year after the last time he said he’d be back.…

  She pinched the two glasses between her fingers and went into the kitchen. The two men sat across from each other, Eddie with his nose in his book. Lize was sitting on the wood stove.

  “I used to think he kept coming back because he liked my cooking,” Lize was saying. She winked nastily at Scott. “But since Mattie’s growed up I ain’t so sure.”

  Lize, Mattie thought, placing the two glasses in the sink. She’s not for a minute buying that bit about these two guys showing up only a little while ago this morning. It would just suit her down to the ground if she could get a little rise out of Scott.

  But Scott just winked back and looked at Mattie. “She is pretty,” he agreed.

  “Jesus Christ,” Mattie said.

  Lize’s face darkened a shade. Mattie kept herself turned to the sink so Lize wouldn’t see her smile. “You fellows that much in a hurry,” she said, “or do I have time to dress this bird?”

  Scott shook his head. “No rush.”

  “I could ice some tea?”

  “Sure. Eddie?”

  “Huh?” Eddie said, not looking up from the book.

  “Iced tea. Want some?”

  “Sure, iced tea, O.K.”

  “Lize?”

  “No whiskey?”

  “Fresh out. Beer neither.”

  “Believe I would.”

  “Actually, it’s sun tea,” Mattie said.

  Scott frowned. “Sun tea? Does that mean it’s hot?”

  “Damn,” scowled Lize, expressing genuine interest. “Where you from?”

  “San Francisco,” Scott said. “We don’t have any sun there.”

  “Hmph,” Lize grumbled. “Hear tell there’s everythin’ else, though.”

  “What a town, what a town,” said Eddie, not looking up from his book.

  “Like he said,” Scott agreed. “So what is sun tea?”

  “Simple,” said Mattie, extracting a gallon jar half full of tea from the refrigerator. “You put teabags and lemongrass and mint or whatever into a jar of water, and set it out in the sun, like on the roof of your truck. A couple hours later, presto, sun tea.”

  “Huh,” said Scott, thoughtfully. “It’s true. We really couldn’t make that sun tea in San Francisco.”

  “What a town.”

  Lize was incredulous. “Why fer godzakes not?”

  “Easy: no sun. Too cold, most days. Maybe a few times a year…” They talked about the weather in San Francisco for a few minutes while Mattie pulled down some glasses from a shelf above the cutting board. Doing so she remembered that she now only had four matching glasses, and that two of them stood in the sink reeking of brandy. She would have liked to serve the tea in identical glasses, just to show a little style, but being self-conscious about the two brandy glasses she thought that taking the time to wash them would draw attention to them again. All of this added up to a moment’s hesitation in the preparation of the tea, which, in the end, she served in three different kinds of glasses, thinking, Jesus, as she tilted tea out of the big jar into the last glass, am I always going to act twelve years old around Lize?

  “. . . finally puked a pint of blood and whiskey against a privy wall and died,” Lize was saying, “in a tavern up to Republic. They said he said he was feelin’ poorly and even excused himself from his stool at the bar, real perlite, like. Everybody said he’d die in harness, but that was going it some. And they tried to read a lot into that last remark, but it’s a right smart to swaller that the last words out his mouth was calculated to apologize to the world for the sorry mess he was. A whole lot to swaller, if you was to ast me. More likely he was so stewed he thought he was steppin’ over folks in church to git to his reglar pew.” She snorted. “About goddamn time he got around to it, anyhow.”

  Mattie placed the gallon mayonnaise jar now one quarter full of tea on the Formica table between Scott’s elbows and Eddie’s book and went to dress out the grouse. Lize always told this story with some relish. It wasn’t that she had anything against drinking, far from it. She drank daily herself, although moderately. But she’d hated Seamus Dowd, and the sordid manner of his death was a source of some little satisfaction to her. Though now she didn’t bring it up, Lize had often told Mattie that she had finally resolved to shoot Seamus the next time he came to demand his boy from her, as he always did sooner or later, because the fear she saw in the boy’s eyes when his father’s truck pulled into the yard was more than she could stand to watch. She had even decided that the next time the boy came to her she would tell him about her decision and show him the gun, so he could relax and have something to look forward to. But it didn’t work out that way. Jedediah was locked in a small house trailer at the bottom of a scorching gulch about twenty miles from the tavern his father died in, when it happened. She never again laid eyes on the senior Dowd of course; it was over a year before she even heard of his death, and it was over twenty years before Lize saw Jed again. When she did, he was a complete stranger, because, in the interval, even worse had happened to him. She was very bitter about the whole deal.

  She used to say that at least the good Lord could have given her the satisfaction of killing the son of a bitch herself. Seamus was worthless and mean. She never mentioned that the greater satisfaction would have been to raise Jedediah as if he were her own son, but she didn’t try to hide that fact, either.

  “He was about twelve years old last time I saw him,” Lize was saying, “and the next time he was in his thirties.” Mattie could hear in her voice that all this talk was getting too personal. Lize was getting restless.

  After an awkward pause, Scott asked, “How’s he doing with his ranch?”

  “Shoot,” Lize allowed, “that boy’s all hat and no cattle.” A smile flicked over Eddie’s mouth, and he squinted up from his book. “My goodness,” he said appreciatively, “that’s a fine colloquialism. Most succinct.”

  Lize glared at
Eddie as if he were something unspeakable on the end of a stick.

  Scott turned his tea glass around on the table top. “When I first met him, in Danang, he was seventeen. He’d lied about his age to get himself out of Washington. But all it did was get him into Vietnam.” He shook his head. “I know he knew better. It must have been pretty rough for him, to want out that bad.”

  Lize’s eyes focused sharply on Scott. A new interest showed in them. “You’ve known Jedediah since he was seventeen?” She glanced toward Mattie, looked away, then looked at her again. “What’s the matter, Mattie?”

  “Yeah,” said Scott. “Is something wrong?”

  Mattie was staring silently down into a drawer she had pulled open. “Who?” she said, without turning around. “Wrong? No,” she shook her head. “No, nothing’s wrong.” But the cleaver was out of place, lying sideways over the plastic tray in the silverware drawer, obscuring most of the utensils, and altogether the wrong drawer. She hadn’t left it like that. She never left it like that.

  “Looks like you seen a snake in that drawer,” Lize said.

  “I don’t stare at snakes when I see them,” Mattie said pensively, pulling the cleaver out of the drawer as she pushed it closed with her hip. “I jump.”

  “No frog in you,” Lize allowed.

  Eddie looked from one woman to the other with a frown. “What the hell are you two talking about?” he said.

  Mattie tested the edge of the blade, thinking, why in the hell would Harris have needed this cleaver?

  “Greenhorn,” Lize said, evidently amused. “Since a frog can jump about ten or twenty feet when you tickle his tail and talk nice to him, you’d think he could make up a hunnert feet when he saw a snake. But he don’t. It just ain’t so. A frog just watches at a snake till it eats him. Makes no move to git away, let alone defend hisself, which would be ridiculous. But to escape, now, that makes sense, cause Mr. Frog must know all a snake wants to do is eat a frog, so he can lay around three, four days doin’ nothin’. But a frog just sits there and takes it, face first.”

  Eddie looked from Lize to Scott and back. “Like Gandhi or somebody?” Scott closed his eyes and shook his head.