Death Puppet

by Jim Nisbet

  “Seems to me,” Lize said dryly, “Gandhi was an exception.”

  Maybe he was looking for a pencil, Mattie thought. That must be it. She decapitated the grouse. He was looking for a pen or a pencil to write me that note, and he just misplaced this cleaver doing it.

  “Like jacklighting deer?” Eddie asked brightly.

  “Yeah,” Lize agreed sourly. “Like jacklightin’ deer.”

  Chapter Seven

  THE GRAND COULEE DAM IRRIGATES A LOT OF WHEAT COUNTRY between Dip and the town of Grand Coulee. But the signs of the desert the land once was and is forever threatening to become again are everywhere. The land is high and dry. In geological terms, a coulee is a flow of molten lava or a sheet of lava solidified, but in this part of the world the word coulee has come to denote the sudden, deep canyons that fissure the basalt surface of the land. These configurations are all volcanic. Geologists figure the whole region was on fire for about ten million years, a phenomenon they call vulcanism. Then things cooled off for a time, so much so that after a few million years the glaciers came. They plowed the whole place up, pushing and grinding the surface of Canada before them as they moved south. When they’d receded, they left behind them a deep, finely ground topsoil called loess, a nutritious material famous for its ability to retain moisture, and, subsequently, for its ability to grow wheat. Of course, there is precious little moisture to be had, in the rain shadow of the North Cascades; most of the rain coming from the Pacific falls in the north and the west. The east side of the Cascades is a desert, and a rugged one, hot in the summer, and cold in the winter. Without irrigation it would have remained a desert, but the presence of the Columbia River made the thought of irrigation possible, and the erection of the Grand Coulee Dam made it a fact. There are vast wheat farms, mostly to the east of Grand Coulee, whose existence is utterly dependent on water raised from the dammed river. There the land is high, flat and covered in loess. But to the west of the dam, and of the Columbia, it’s another story.

  From the little cluster of communities created and nurtured by the presence of the dam—Grand Coulee, Electric City, Elmer City—to the small town of Bridgeport, a reach of about fifty miles, the land changes drastically. Here stretches a high desert interrupted only occasionally by the ruins of an ambitious homestead, its roof collapsed by snow and wind, its fences lying down, its cottonwoods blasted by lightning, tumbleweeds huddled on the threshold of the shattered front door. There are a few large ranches—very large ranches—and these run mostly cattle, because here, in spite of the near proximity of the potential of irrigation, the land is simply too rough and too wild to farm. The landscape is a weird, lonely vastness of sagebrush and dust, where the wind never stops; but the single overriding feature of this country consists of the spooky, gnarled outcrops of pure basalt that stand up out of the land with the startling dereliction of an abandoned freighter listing over the dory of yourself. These rough, reddish brown and black formations are a little bigger than human scale, a little smaller than human ambition, unyielding, inexplicable. In appearance they’re much like the limestone tufas exposed over the centuries by the receding brine of California’s Mono Lake. Some look like large haystacks hacked out of solid cement. Some are ragged cubes as big as a house and shaped much like one. Others are jagged cylinders with domed tops like small grain silos. All of them represent the remains of the violent geological past of this area, and, some say, as such, they are icons perfectly suited for the speculation and awe due to those epochs. Others, of a different church, shoot at them for no reason at all. When you do find a wheat farm in this country, and there are a few, you’ll see neatly furrowed fields that sweep up to, around and past these basalt intransigencies, much like the rocks deliberately placed at random in a meditation garden. Nobody can afford to move the bigger formations, nor even to so much as blow them up, even if it were possible. Basalt is hard stuff. The frequency of distribution of these outcrops is not dense; on the contrary, it’s not unusual to see only a few of them from any vantage point. That is to say, to the casual observer, it doesn’t appear that the landscape is made up entirely of these basalt monuments: By their relative scarcity they seem anomalies. But, in fact, they dominate the terrain, and stem from the very bedrock of the entire region.

  On the open range, the basalt formations come in all sizes, and it is common, at dusk, to mistake them for other things altogether. This lends an additional ghostliness to a country already known for the whispers and screams carried along by the ever-restless wind, and the interminable loneliness which is the inescapable lot of anyone who tries to settle there. It is a wont of the human imagination to ascribe purpose and reason to inexplicable sounds and shapes imperfectly heard and seen, and the entire race might be considered as two children huddled in their tent, trying to identify the night sounds emanating from the wilderness in terms of their—mostly imaginary—experience. The basalt formations of Douglas County are just such stimuli to the active nerves, and the lore of the region is rife with tales of the supernatural, inexplicable events, UFO sightings, and mysterious disappearances.

  Nor is all of this lore purely imaginary. The United States armed forces conduct a great number of experiments and maneuvers in the American Northwest, simply because very few people live there. To anyone living in the West, secret military bases, areas the size of Rhode Island closed to automotive traffic, compounded by forbidden airspace into huge volumes of the atmosphere occluded to air traffic, single, double, triple, quadruple sonic booms, mysterious and tremendous distant explosions, lurid flashes coloring the horizon in the middle of the night, luminous tracings of fluorescent dust spiraling upward toward the Big Dipper as if an entire quadrant of the sky were enwrapped in the uncoiling entrails of a phantom serpent, strange traveling dots of red or green light darting across the sky between the dark humps of two distant mesas, an ominous, searing roar traveling north to south, east to west, horizon to horizon, with no apparent source; delta-winged, armament-laden, flat black molybdenum-alloy arrowheads winging down a long desert valley for a hundred miles, 250 feet off the ground at Mach 2 and making no sound whatsoever…

  When exotic military hardware screeches over the “wet side,” beyond the western slope of the Cascades along the Puget Sound, people wait until they can make themselves heard again to tell their children, “Hear that, short stuff? That’s the Sound of Freedom.” This remark refers to a weathered sign that hangs over the entrance to the air force base on San Juan Island. There’s a picture of a smiling fighter pilot, in helmet with dangling oxygen mask, jerking his thumb toward an F-100 in the background, with a logo that reads: “Pardon our Noise, but that’s the Sound of Freedom!”

  On the “dry side,” the eastern slope of the Cascades, the term “dry” doesn’t refer to a sense of humor, or the relative availability of alcoholic beverages (universal), it refers to a state of the throat, the land and the mind. Though she’d seen plenty of fierce looking, low-flying aircraft in her time, practicing the land-hugging aerobatics of radar avoidance, Mattie Brooke had never heard anyone dourly mouth the expression, “Sound of Freedom,” until she’d done her one year of college at Everett, near Seattle. But ironically the air force doesn’t practice nearly as many low-altitude maneuvers on the wet side, either, as on the dry side. The first time you deliberately steer your truck off the road in a panicky effort to avoid a headlong collision with a couple of frisky supersonic Phantoms, you don’t laugh. You get your truck fixed. Or you spend a few days rounding up the cattle scattered by the hopeless bovine panic induced by the same maneuvers, shooting the ones who ran blindly off the rim of a coulee and survived, bawling weakly at the bottom with three shattered legs, and maybe spend the rest of your natural life trying to get the government to buy you a few replacements. But you don’t laugh. The country is too hard, at times like this. You can laugh when a feisty horse brushes your partner off against a fence. You can laugh when the air conditioner mysteriously starts to function again in the cab of your combine
on the first day of frost. You can laugh when the radio in the cab of the combine mysteriously begins to receive E.G. Marshall’s “Mystery Theater” at dusk, loud and clear, and you’ve got 700 acres of wheat to follow, yard by yard in the headlights.

  But, much of the time, you curse, marvel, and tremble at the harsh unfathomable nature of the wilderness surrounding you.

  A recent example is the Big Divot.

  In 1984 a couple of cowboys were investigating a remote and generally ignored section of a farm on the Colville Indian Reservation, west of Nespelem. In a small bowl, where it was extremely unlikely five people had set foot since the land had been surveyed by the railroad in the nineteenth century, they discovered what subsequently became known as the Big Divot. At first, they thought it was just a car-sized basalt outcrop. Then they saw that it had somehow managed to accrue soil, bunchgrass and sagebrush on top of itself. And then they noticed that the corners, where the sides met the top and bottom, were almost perfectly square. And when they’d gotten that close the horses didn’t like it, as if it smelled of bear or cougar.

  Curious, they rode their reluctant animals around this thing a couple of times and, to all appearances, this lump of dirt looked as if it had been levered up out of the ground by a giant, square-pointed shovel, and gently laid down, intact.

  Sure enough. Seventy-three feet from the block of turf, they found the hole.

  The sides of the hole were vertical, its bottom was flat. It measured about ten feet on two sides, seven on the other two, and about two feet deep. These dimensions matched those of the nearby lump of earth exactly, and there could be no doubt about the congruity. Someone, or some thing, had levered the block of earth out of the surface of the butte they were standing on with some giant tool or machine—perhaps something like a giant hoe-dad, the square-edged tool used by tree planters. In this case, the hoedad would have had to measure eight or ten feet across the edge of the blade, which would mean that a conservative estimate by hoedad standards would put the length of the tool at seventeen or eighteen feet, and the cork boot to operate it only a little bigger than the foot inside, about the size of the Dip Cafe.

  The two cowpunchers could find no trace of Caterpillar tracks, spilt diesel fuel, tractor tracks, frayed strands of wire rope, old tires, bullet-riddled beer cans, scorched earth, metal tooth grooves, or any other sign of human or mechanical complicity. All the evidence—or rather, lack of evidence—suggested an immaculate or—more, or less strange?—a spontaneous phenomenon. Had the object and its corresponding hole been discovered in Central Park in New York City, it would quickly have been dismissed or even admired as minimalist sculpture, and accorded its merit. But in Douglas County, word of the discovery spread fast, and Mattie, for one, heard speculation on the origins of the Big Divot for weeks, months, and years afterwards. Hundreds of people made the pilgrimage to the sight. And quickly, all potential evidence of the Big Divot’s conception was quickly effaced by the passage of the hooves of the cattle that graze there, of horses and four-wheel-drive vehicles that came to see, and blown to the ends of the county by the helicopters that came from as far away as Spokane and Seattle to hover and expose video footage above the phenomenon.

  As with the basalt outcroppings that dot the range, it was the scale of the object that threw everybody off. The thing was just a little bit too small to be disbelieved, by far too large and ominous, in spite of being dwarfed by the landscape in which it occurred, and the big sky above, to be dismissed entirely. Three tons. There it was. No one disputed that it was of mysterious, perhaps ominous, but certainly inexplicable origin. The only real questions were, what in the galactic quadrant would a UFO want with three tons of loess and sagebrush? And furthermore, having demonstrated the technical finesse necessary to neatly extract the sample, how come the aliens dropped it? Maybe they were just practicing? Perhaps they were scared away? If so, somebody must have seen them. But if somebody had seen them, the aliens couldn’t take the chance of leaving witnesses. So maybe they took the witnesses along with them. Wouldn’t a human specimen be lots more interesting to aliens than the Big Divot? So who had disappeared lately? More potentially interesting, who had reappeared? Well, sure enough, here’s a fellow over to Omack claims to be just our man. They took him to Mars and kept him there until he’d shown them everything they could learn about the game of poker. Said they had three hands and two brains, so they could play a kind of poker solitaire, and still have an honest dealer. No, the man said they weren’t interested in national defense. Just poker. And so forth.

  Another school of thought immediately attributed the Big Divot to the presence of a secret new military weapon, deemed it necessary to national defense, therefore good, and taxed their imaginations no more about it.

  But it wasn’t men from Mars or the armed forces who gave rise to these bizarre speculations, it was the landscape. A landscape that could swallow men, livestock, machinery, and gigantic cooperative efforts without a trace, leaving behind inscrutable semaphores like the Big Divot, or only the most bleakly sentimental remnant of their cherished endeavors, the caved-in, roofless, skeletal, dust-covered, wind-blown homestead, once the fulcrum of hope, now the haunted symbol of defeat.

  It was into this high, unirrigated desert country, west of Grand Coulee, that Jedediah Dowd had retreated, after he came home from Vietnam. He’d bought a modest ranch at a bank auction for next to nothing. The place had a large barn in fairly good condition, a spacious if run-down house, a number of broken-down farm implements, outbuildings, and electricity. But to Jedediah’s mind, the main advantage of the place was its remote location. The nearest towns were Bridgeport, Dip, and a place called Mansfield, all equally distant from his ranch, about thirty miles each. He was very close to the Columbia, which, along with electrifying and irrigating most of the entire Northwest, here formed the southern boundary of the Colville Indian Reservation, about twenty miles north of the Cloverleaf. He’d named it the Cloverleaf not so much in irony, for little other than sagebrush grew on his 640 acres, and certainly he’d never raise any clover, but out of respect for the sheer luck that had enabled him to survive a tour of Vietnam in 1970–71. After wandering nearly ten years in post-combat insomnia, about which he’d told Mattie next to nothing, Jedediah returned to Washington, took a look around, and decided to settle down near where he grew up. Nobody had seen him for almost twenty years, and so many young people had left the area that Mattie and Lize were among the few people who remembered him.

  Jed was the only child of a man who’d immigrated from Ireland in the thirties, and Seamus Dowd had gone straight from Ellis Island to the Grand Coulee Dam site. There he’d put his name on the list, and waited. After three months someone was killed and Seamus Dowd replaced him. He worked the construction crew until the dam was completed in 1940. Then he stayed on with the crews who performed the modifications and expansions required by the power demands of the war. In 1944, though he’d saved nearly every dime he made in eight years, he had barely enough to send home for a bride he more or less knew beforehand, as a child, with the gaps filled by letters written to him by a cousin over his mother’s signature. Maureen Dowd, born McCaffry, a timid, pretty, frail girl of seventeen, showed up in Grand Coulee in the spring of 1945 with a carpet bag and a slip of paper with Seamus’ name on it. Seamus took a half day, a Saturday, to get married. The honeymoon was on Sunday, during which they mostly tried to overcome their mutual shyness enough to speak to each other. After an hour or two of it, Seamus gave up and took her on a tour of the dam.

  They lived in a company cottage in Electric City. Seamus worked six ten-hour days a week, all year long. Though by now he was nearly thirty, marriage changed him. Formerly a sober, hard-working drudge, he became a Saturday night drunk. Then he became a Sunday drunk, and later a Monday morning drunk. After so many years on the dam he was liked well enough by his superiors in spite of his drinking; drinking was not a unique problem. But then the war ended. They let him go and that was it for Seam
us. The dam had become his life. After the dam, there was nothing but the bottle.

  Maureen Dowd kept house, ineffectually defended herself against her husband’s drunken brutishness on Saturday night, and pined for Ireland. In America, she’d discovered, there was no grass, no rain, no music. There were no seashores to wander, no leafy bowers to meditate in. On the contrary, the immensity of the sky and the barren country beneath it, along with the Egyptian audacity of the gargantuan endeavor going on all around her, swallowed every thought and gave nothing back. There was no structure in this part of America taller than one or two stories, except for the Grand Coulee Dam, which was about fifty-five stories. Neither were there harbors, ships, libraries, Jesuits, Blarney Stones, little two-wheeled donkey carts, fairy tales told in Gaelic, no king to despise, or the huge family who to a person had wept and waved to her until the ship that bore her to America had been swallowed by the mists of Dublin harbor. She wrote voluminous letters home to Ireland, kept a tidy house, struggled to maintain a garden in the harsh climate. She made curtains where there had been none before, dusted, cleaned, washed, painted, repaired, cooked, prayed, took long walks, borrowed horses to ride, was always home for her husband, and still she had about eight waking hours a day to fill. Accordingly, she read every book that came within miles of the Grand Coulee Dam, including the Apocrypha, various Bibles, the Book of Mormon, the Koran, all of Jane Austen, the Brontës, Hardy, George Eliot, Trollope. From home they sent her Yeats and Synge and even Oscar Wilde. When she finished with the English she read the Russians. When she finished these she moved into the French. By the time she’d read Les Liasons Dangereuses, Huysman’s À Rebours, and Georges Sand, she was more thoroughly a stranger to the people around her, especially her husband, than when she’d first arrived. Her strength of mind was exceeded in degree only by the frailty of her body, and when, after three years of avoiding the inevitable she conceived a child, she knew the end was near. Her letters to Dublin became even longer. The astringent environment wrung from her mind a lucidity no one, having visited her home, would have believed possible. Carefully she gave up her body to the nourishment of the stranger growing within it. The letters increased in frequency, sometimes approaching three and four a week, long beautiful letters that came to be pored over and shared by bewildered relatives who frequently could not bring themselves to respond to them at intervals of less than two months. Away from her environment and into these letters she poured everything from her mind and soul, much as she metabolized every particle of nutrition away from her own waning health and into the waxing fortitude of the being who was to be, she was sure, her only child.