Death Puppet

by Jim Nisbet

  Christian Brothers, the devil sneered.

  I drink it religiously, Tucker grimaced.

  Avanti, the devil hissed, unamused.

  Tucker put down the glass and splashed water from the aquarium over his face.

  In the kitchen he rolled three sheets off a paper towel dispenser over the sink and found a felt-tip pen in a drawer among screwdrivers, sewing needles, thread, a hammer, pinking shears, and clean dish towels. In another drawer he found the cutlery. Most of it was useless, either dull or too small or both. There was a cleaver he liked, a broad thing with Chinese ideograms stamped on the blade, normally used for chopping vegetables and meat. He tried it for weight and tested the blade. The metal was cheap and wouldn’t hold an edge if you could get it to take one. He patted his cheek with the flat of the blade. Good for spanking her, maybe. Mmmm…

  Stall not.

  He replaced the cleaver in the drawer.

  Before he sat down to write he took a look in the refrigerator and shook his head. There had been a time when such a morning-after refrigerator might have had a beer or two in it, good for a hangover, but if not, it would have been because they’d all been consumed already, and the empties would be all over the house. These days, it was because there never had been any beers in the house, and probably never would be. Other times, other houses, apartments, really, rented rooms, bungalows in Topanga canyon. He closed the refrigerator door. On the counter stood a bottle of Japanese rice vinegar, and he took a swig. Then he stood for a minute, feeling—hearing, really, a sound like distant summer thunder—which was his stomach, adjusting its pH. Maybe he still had a few Rainiers in the cooler.

  Them changes, smirked the little devil, quite pleased with Tucker. The little devil treated Tucker like a certain type of owner treats his Porsche. Everywhere he goes, he drives the car flat out. He flogs the car through corners mercilessly. He red-lines the engine through every gear change, cold or hot. It doesn’t matter to this type of owner that he’s taking years off the life of the car: Rather, he takes pride in how much punishment the machine is able to withstand. When it breaks, he leaves the key in the switch and walks away.

  And such owners will tell anyone who has the misfortune to ask that such cars like such treatment; that’s what they’re built for.

  And one or two of these owners will turn around and say to the car, isn’t that right, champ?

  Tucker sat down at the little table beneath the kitchen’s single window. He could not yet discern the outlines of the distant North Cascades in the predawn gloom to the west. He wanted to drive about thirty miles in that direction before sunup, and he doubted he had that much time left. He smiled grimly. The work of a drummer, a traveling salesman, was never done.

  Inside his head he could hear the distinctive popping clicks of the keys of a computer keyboard. You find that poem yet?

  Man, muttered the devil, for a guy who can only remember revenge scenarios in any detail at will, and maybe his own phone number, you got a lot of stuff in here that ought to be accessed and straightened out, or at least indexed and partitioned.

  Memory’s a mystery, Tucker said absently. He knew perfectly well why his memory was so limited. There was only so much stuff he needed to know, and receivables and payables were an important part of it. Let me know when you find it.

  What you want, the devil asked, his hideous tiny face illuminated by the green glow of the screen in front of him, Clair de Lune?

  You’re the one who mentioned Debussy, said Tucker, even more absently. He was diverting more and more of his conscious attention to the events likely to fill the upcoming day. I like that part where the fountains sob with ecstasy, he added, vaguely.

  Slender fountains, the devil remembered.

  Yeah.

  Tucker stared straight ahead of him. Outside, the landscape began to take shape in the morning light. Inside, Tucker didn’t move, he barely breathed. His head slowly, gradually tilted a little to one side, as he stared at the wall over the stove in front of him. His face had become utterly vacant, his jaw slack. If a fly had flown into his open mouth he might not have reacted. As it was, a droplet of saliva formed in the downhill corner of his mouth and slowly began to make its way over the dark stubble of beard on his chin, glistening in spite of the weak light.

  Here it is, said the devil.

  Tucker began to write on the paper towel. His expression hardly changed at all, as he took dictation from the little devil within him.

  Clair de Lune

  Votre âme est un paysage choisi

  Que vont charmants masques et bergamasques

  Jouant du luth et—

  Hey, Duluth, I like it, what a town, what a town, said Tucker to himself. Minnie-soda. A little coke. Snarf.

  Puns really are beneath a man of your quality, said the little devil testily, and this line noise endangers our communications. I’m getting bad sectors in the error-checking, here. Be quiet. Onward.

  —et dansant et quasi

  Tristes sous leurs déguisements fantasques

  A little frown crossed Tucker’s blank features as he wrote. I didn’t tell her anything last night, did I? I mean, did I slip up, in the ecstasy?

  Naw, said the devil, fiendishly watching his screen. His thick eyebrows glowed like green scimitars in its light. The screen was always aimed away from Tucker’s point of view; unless its image was deliberately dumped to his brain he never saw it, and Tucker had often wondered how and what it was the little devil could nearly always conjure up, there. When he wasn’t revulsed or marveling at it, that is. When it came to the contents of Tucker’s brain, the devil was a real hacker.

  Good, said Tucker, his trancelike gaze straying for a moment toward the door to Mattie’s bedroom. It’d be a shame to… have a breach of security.…

  I suppose, the devil sighed. Although, personally, I’ve always been of the opinion that one entity’s shame is another’s triumph. Anyway, I’d have told you. Don’t I always let you know when you fuck up? He hit the RETURN button with final authority. There. It’s all in the spooler, now. Whew. He rubbed his little red eyes with his little cloven hooves. For a moment—just a moment—he looked almost cute, in a lurid way, Bambi in drag. You finish up here. I’m going to get some shut-eye.

  A tear started to Tucker’s eye, but he managed to say, check.

  The devil smiled. ’Night, boss, or rather, bonjour.

  B-b…, Tucker stuttered.

  Watch the transmission.

  Tucker sniffled, without interrupting the words flowing from his fingertips although, truth be told, they might as well have been in Hottentot, for all he could read them.

  Tout en chantant sur le mode mineur

  L’amour vainqueur et la vie opportune,

  Ils n’ont pas l’air de croire à leur bonheur

  Et leur chanson se mêle au clair de lune.

  Ah, the famous hook. He could read that much French—or rather, remember the title to the poem he’d written down only moments before. But in fact this was not true. He wasn’t remembering it from having written it only moments before. He was remembering Clair de Lune from the time of Angelique, years before. Angelique of Hoc Bhui… He could hear the poetry in her voice, and he could hear the music. She’d actually had a tape of Debussy himself, playing his own composition, duplicated off a wax cylinder her grandfather had carried with him out to the colony, in 1912.… Tucker had always wanted to ask her what she saw in an oaf like himself, but the sad fatalism in her eyes forbade the question. Besides, he knew the answer: He was the perfect soldier.… The times called for perfect soldiers.… One felt safer with them.… For all intents and purposes, sentient and otherwise, if there had been a scorpion on the tip of his nose within the last few minutes, he would not now be able to recall it. But Angelique…

  But he had to concentrate. The third verse of the poem had been loaded into the RAM spooler, which meant that it was volatile, it could be superseded by another load of information dumped into it from memory
, or fed by the senses, and could therefore be lost. That in turn would mean he’d have to wake up the devil to retrieve it for him, or abandon the transcription, unfinished. Neither alternative was suitable. Though by now he could hardly go to the bathroom without him, Tucker was very relieved to see the devil off to bed, the devil’s presence was a source of no little stress to him. He scratched the top of one boot with the pointed toe of the other. In fact, he suspected that the eczema that had been bothering him lately might be attributed to the devil’s persistent pestering—not to say pestiferous, please, peahead—presence in his mind.

  Au calme clair de lune triste et beau,

  Qui fait rêver les oiseaux dans les arbres

  Et sangloter d’extase les jets d’eau,

  Les grands jets d’eau svelte parmi les marbres.

  And the fountains weep with ecstasy.… Where is that? In what park, garden, cemetery, does marble weep? What’s the French for aquarium…? And the slender tank shrieks with tender carnage.… Not so good. Best leave things poetic to Paul Verlaine, and things carnal unarticulated, if enacted. But anyway, transcription finished. Now he could think. He regarded the work. Only two or three words crossed out, and more or less legible. What had that woman who analyzes handwriting in that bar in Venice said about the loops of his p’s? Not loops: bowls, the bowls of his p’s. Whatever, it’s kind of trumpeted in that word opportune, for those in the know. Maybe it was the bowls of the b’s. Bowels. Bowling. Skip it. On to the personal touch.

  He licked the tip of the ballpoint pen, ignoring the foul taste of the ink on his tongue, and when he could get it to leave a mark again, he wrote:

  Verlaine, remember? I can’t believe I can think of anything else after last night, but strangely, I remembered this poem. Hangovers are like that. The last lines, in particular, are very horny, and I hope they will remind you of our time together always. Especially from your point of view, hah.

  He thought about it, crossed out the “hah,” then, after a moment, he put it in again.

  That is, hah. Sorry about the fish, but I personally think they were worth it. You can have fun trying to find someone discreet and with enough French to translate this for you in Dip, Washington. Maybe even before I see you again. That will be no later than this time next year, by the way, no kidding. That’s a promise. I kept my promise this year, didn’t I? So. Until then, Here Tucker hesitated. Until then, what? The likelihood of his surviving until September of next year was no more secure than it had been last September. He thought of his personal little devil and shuddered. Drive it til the fenders shake. At least Mattie, he supposed, was going to survive until next year, whether he, Tucker, did not. He chewed his lip. Mattie was a nice girl.

  Until then, think of us in terms of the promise in our first chance encounter, one year ago, and how it was finally, gloriously

  He crossed out “gloriously.”

  beautifully realized last night, one year later.

  Since he’d only used two sheets of the paper towel, he tore off the third, crumpled it up, and put it back in the drawer with the pen. Then he arranged the length of paper towel on the kitchen table so that the title of the poem began just under the window-sill and proceeded in its stately fashion toward the bedroom door. She’d find it easily. Now he hesitated for the last time. Then he wrote “Yours,” at the bottom of the note, and stopped. Best not to sign his name. There’d be the devil to pay. Instead, he wrote a single capital T beneath the salutation.

  She’ll know who it was.

  He stepped out the kitchen door into the dusty yard, carefully easing the screen door closed. His truck was parked against a fence under a single cottonwood tree, headed out as was his habit. He stood a moment and let the grand silence of this country assail him. It was so silent he could hear the high-frequency whine in his right ear, but the wind, though barely extant, was there; the wind put its gentlest pressure against his ears, and he thought again of that old woman, the toothless crone, selecting fruit in a grocery, pinching the avocado of his brain between two wrinkled fingers. He could hear the wind without quite feeling it. Then he heard the leaves in the cottonwood trees, turning softly against the slight breeze, and a tuft of bunchgrass flickered in the dust at his feet. It never really stopped pushing over this country, the wind.

  I wonder, he thought as he crossed the yard, fishing his keys out of the front pocket of his jeans. He unlocked the black pickup—he was a city boy, after all, security conscious—and, climbing into the driver’s seat, checked the loads on the .30–.06 slung across the gun rack, a city boy with country pretensions—or, rather, a country disguise. The gun was loaded, with a shell in the breach, and its hammer one click back, the safety position. There was, in fact, a tattered copy of The Selected Poems of Paul Verlaine on the seat, which he pitched onto the dash. Then he found one of the bottles in the glove compartment and shook four aspirin into the palm of his hand, and two Benzedrine, which he clapped into his mouth. There were three beers standing in warm water in the cooler and he opened one, letting it foam onto the floor. A long, deep pull transferred four ounces of tepid rinse from the can to his guts. His stomach convulsed but the beer stayed down. Looking into the rearview mirror, he pulled down the lower lid of his left eye by its lashes and watched it twitch above his fingertips. He popped two more Benzedrine. If he chewed them they’d work faster. Then he laced his fingers around the beer can and draped it over the top of the steering wheel, staring out through the annular crescent swept through the dust on the windshield. Four small tombstones stood in a neat, well-groomed row in a square plot beneath another cottonwood, fenced off by a barbed-wire square that jutted into the rest of the pasture. I wonder, he speculated, tapping a forefinger on the beer can as he absently chewed the bitter, chalky pills. I wonder if she’ll ever realize she spent a night with the Devil?

  Chapter Three

  MATTIE STOOD UNCERTAINLY BEHIND THE LOW COUNTER. She’d forgotten what she’d been doing just a moment before. She was staring at two tiny semicircular words in blue ink on the skin between her thumb and forefinger, beneath the shaft of her ballpoint pen. RODEO SAFELY, they said, a bouncer had stamped them there last night after Tucker had paid their way into the dance. For that matter there was gold printing on the pen, too, compliments of a line of livestock feed: YOUR COWS HAD ANY LATELY? The pen was poised over the little green ruled pad with a red stenciled number, in the palm of her other hand. There was writing on it. 5 EZ DBL BAK OJ LRG BLK. Then the hum of the long fluorescent light running parallel to the counter on the ceiling over her head phased into and resonated with the nervous quiver of her stomach lining, and she thought she was going to puke straight into the trucker’s face beyond the receipt pad. But he spoke kindly to her anyway.

  “Mattie?” he’d said. “Mattie, are you O.K.?”

  “Who, me?” she said, smiling nervously “Sure, sure, I’m O.K., I’m just… looking… looking at you, that’s all.…”

  The trucker’s mouth twisted into a nasty grin. After all, it wasn’t any earlier for her than it was for him. He was an older man, in his fifties, an independent with his own rig who had been hauling hay up to the Okanogan and apples back down to Spokane every fall since before Mattie was born. She’d known him for ten years, but for the moment his name escaped her completely.

  “Look kindly peekid, ast me,” he said frankly.

  She frowned at him and wondered if he could read French.

  “It’s this heat,” she said irritably, irrationally.

  The trucker was nonplussed. Dip was a hot place at noon, no doubt about it. But folks in this country were generally grateful for the relatively cool hours just after dawn.

  “If you’re hot now,” he said, “you’re likely to dry up and blow plumb to Moses Lake before noon.”

  Behind her a barking guffaw came through the pass-through window connecting the dining room to the kitchen, and Mordecai’s voice added, “Fetch us a bucket a that tie-tanium sponge when you come back, Mattie.” The tru
cker smiled and wheezed, signifying amusement.

  At that time, a large factory had been built at Moses Lake to process titanium sponge. Nobody knew anything about what titanium sponge was good for, or even what it was, but news of construction of the plant to process it, and the people needed to run the plant, had been the foremost topic of conversation among the unemployed—about 28% of the population—for a hundred miles around for a couple of years now. Even in the Dip Cafe, some seventy-five miles and a dogleg away from Moses Lake, hardly a day passed when the titanium plant wasn’t mentioned.

  “Pie?” Mattie asked the trucker, managing a thin smile. Her spiritual revulsion at the idea of life in a titanium plant, let alone Moses Lake, nearly equaled her physical revulsion over having to come to work today. Too little sleep, too much brandy, a lot of exercise, and a woman’s sick. The electrical hum over her head flickered persistently through her nausea, like a fuse to a nickel firecracker in a bucket of menudo. She bit her tongue and considered the trucker’s remark. Jake, his name was Jake. His white hair was always a quarter of an inch long and he had no sideburns on jowls that looked like fenders on an old Buick. She wasn’t going to keep it down til noon.

  The trucker smiled and wheezed at Mordecai’s quip. Then he was showing bad teeth and his face turned red and his jowls shook while he made his unique laughing noise. It sounded just like someone crushing mice in a tortilla press.