by Jim Nisbet
Now that was something she hadn’t known.
“So you read poetry.”
“Yeah,” he said disgustedly. “You read other people’s letters,” he cleared his throat loudly and spit out the side window, “and I read poetry.”
“Edward lives for the most part in the Universal Mind,” Scott noted, rather sententiously, “unsullied by postage.”
“Not so much social disease there,” Eddie said primly.
“Excepting the Universal Mind itself.”
“Man,” said Eddie testily, “you’re out of your depth.”
“And to think I left my boots in the milkhouse.”
Mattie scanned the table of contents. It was an en face edition, the French facing its English translation. And there it was, Clair de Lune, pages 52 to 53. She turned to it. The book was a cheaply bound paperback and several pages fell into her lap as she thumbed them.
“Oh! I’m sorry.”
“It’s O.K.,” Eddie reassured her acidly, “it’s just Art, a little too cheaply promulgated.”
“Another social disease,” Scott said. “Promul… promulg…”
“Promulgation,” Eddie agreed. “Now you’re on to something. Have we talked about this before?”
She read the poem. Even to her relatively unschooled eye, the translation was utterly mawkish, it read like cowboy poetry with big words and no horses. But the last stanza was the one Tucker Harris had said to look out for.
the lovely melancholy light that sets
the little birds to dreaming in the trees
and among the statues makes the jets
of slender fountains sob with ecstasy.
Transmigration of the sensibilities, via the inner stereoscope.
Dim the bright daylight to the smooth bluish glow of the aquarium reflected on the pale flesh of two spectators; change the little birds in the dreaming trees to two Siamese Betas, dueling their genetically encoded death-dreams in the tank; the sounds of the rubber tires rebounding among rocks and deep dust become those of the bubbles from the aerator, discovering the surface of the water; realize that it doesn’t take much to figure out how the “slender fountains sob with ecstasy,” although one fountain would do—did do—had done. Given these small metamorphoses—aided by her vivid memory of the night before, or rather, of today’s earliest hours, augmented by Tucker Harris’ farewell letter, now translated—facile and instant, Mattie quickly found herself lost in delicious psychoerotic reverie. Gone were the dust, the bottomed-out shocks, and the clanking of the loosening bumpers, the lost job, the caginess, the hangover jolted beyond aspirin. The heat, however, fit right in, she kept the heat. Jedediah Dowd faded to a mere speck inhabiting a small ranch beyond a curve in a distant horizon. The desultory banter exchanged between Eddie and Scott, seated on either side of her, dimmed to inarticulate muttering. The Chinese have a word for it, that inchoate palaver, denoting the distant sounds of humanity as heard through a hedge.
That was one sexy dude…
Not until she heard the distinctive sound of a hubcap rolling beyond them and into a ditch, and the Chevrolet rocked to a halt so Eddie could retrieve the hubcap, the side door open, did Mattie shake herself back to the present with a sigh.
The car filled with dust.
In a mere instant, really, she had reviewed nearly an hour of the time she’d spent with Tucker.
She smiled, closed the book, and fanned the dusty air past her face with it. Goodness, gracious. Dreamily, she read the back cover. “Delicious, right down to the last page.” “Kept me up and breathless all night!” “Hottest poet in the Vth Arrondissement,” etc. She frowned. The dashboard and the rest of reality reasserted itself. What in the hell were two people with any idea of this man’s writings doing within five hundred miles of each other on the same day in the vicinity of Dip, Washington—talking to me, Mattie Brooke, yet, already?
Through the dusty windshield she watched Eddie stoop gingerly into the ditch to retrieve the detached hubcap. Coincidence was out of the question, and a chill suffused her. So these two, whom she knew not at all, had some connection with Tucker Harris, a man she could say she barely knew, maybe. All she really knew about Tucker was that he claimed to be a salesman, who passed through this part of Washington but once a year. He seemed to know his way around. He was aware, at least, of the ordinances peculiar to several southern counties of Washington specifically forbidding the solicitation normally associated with traveling salesmen. Moreover, he had good sexual imagination, was a thorough man in a tryst. And that was all she knew. Apparently, there was more to be learned. She wished not to know it.
Eddie got back in the car and tossed the hubcap on top of one of the duffel bags in the back seat. About these two characters, she realized, she knew even less. Except that they somehow knew Jedediah. Except that they were packing Verlaine around the Northwest—
A nasty synthesis: Did that mean Tucker knew Jedediah?
While she was trying to quell her panic at this possibility, and dismiss its consequences as merely funny, she caught Scott’s eye in the rearview mirror. He smiled and looked away, but she knew he’d been watching her. She folded the book between her hands, folded her hands between her knees, slouched below the line of sight of the mirror, and tried to make herself a little smaller on the seat between Scott and Eddie. Oh, my, she thought. What have I gotten myself into now? Her mind suddenly flared into the worst sort of fantasies. This is the road to Jed’s, right? I’ll be perfectly safe with him, won’t I? She forced herself to think calmly. Mordecai, she recalled, Mordecai might have noticed I left town with these guys, whoever they are. First the story will be how I went off my rocker and sided with them, in the fight in the cafe. Then the story will be how I left town with these two following me, heading toward my house. Lize, what about Lize? She left my place before we did, but at least she saw them there. If she doesn’t hear from me in a couple of weeks she’ll start asking around, she’ll find the truck in the yard and the dead fish in the tank and the Verlaine poem written in blurred black ink on a beige paper towel on top of the refrigerator and the dressed-out grouse rotting in the meat drawer and they’ll start looking for me, but by then it’ll have been a month or so already and I’ll be fine, it’ll be too late, my molecules will be protein and calcium in the milk flowing from the teat of some coyote bitch into the mouth of one of her suckling pups, who’s otherwise tugging at the just recognizable shreds of this plaid cowgirl shirt in their filthy den while their mamma’s out hunting up something else as good as the memory of my liver.…
She caught herself worrying a pearl snap on the rolled cuff of her plaid cowgirl shirtsleeve.
Tarnation, she thought, at least I’ll be doing somebody some good. But this isn’t funny. I like being useless, at least for the moment, and it’s my right to decide how and when I’ll do something in this world besides sling hash and go home with strange men I only see once a year—this isn’t fair, I haven’t even cracked open my severance beer yet.
Her emotions wheeled on her and began to work up a righteous fit of indignation. If she’d known Scott a little better she might have whacked him on the side of his head with the paperback book for no reason discernible to himself whatsoever. But hey, if this guy Scott is some kind of flesh-eating geek, a sure way to find out would be to piss him off. Whoa there, Mattie, calm yourself. No sense in precipitating a climax before its time. After all, you’ve got no reason to think these guys aren’t anything other than what they say they are. Plus, they know Jed. At least, they know his name. And besides, she stole a glance at Scott, then at Eddie: These guys aren’t geeks. She frowned. What’s a geek?
“Hey, goddamn,” Scott said in apparent exasperation, “is that it?”
Ahead to the right on a little rise the slack barbed-wire fence following the road ended at a high post off which hinged a tall metal stock gate. The fence continued north from a post on the other side of the gate. A pole with the bark still on it sagged between the tops of the t
wo high posts and below it hung a sign too weathered to read. A hawk perched atop the far pole turned its head to watch the approaching car.
Mattie could not restrain a loud sigh. To her companions it must have sounded like relief that the long ride was over. But to her Scott’s interest in the turn confirmed that maybe these two dudes weren’t going to take her to the river and drown her in a sack with astrological insigniae carved into the flesh of her nether parts. “That’s it,” she said eagerly. “That’s the turnoff.” Indeed, she was now annoyed at how relieved she was when the car actually slowed to begin the turn off the road.
The hawk dropped off the post into a low glide that took it twenty fence posts north, where it lit again, its back to them. When Eddie got out to open the gate Mattie got out to stretch. The Chevy rattled over the cattle guard. Mattie stood by the road and looked after it. One of the peculiarities of the breeze incessantly pushing at her cheeks and the vast space it traversed was the strange way it made distances deceiving. Though the car stood idling just a few feet beyond the arc of the stock gate, which creaked on its hinges as Eddie swung it closed, the noises she heard might have been coming from a hundred yards away. The dessicated sagebrush crackled to pieces beneath her boots and the dry ground rang hollow with every step. Every sound was possessed of a lost, distinct melancholy, an intimacy all its own, that went straight from her ears to her heart, and seemed only incidentally to drop off a message to that part of her brain that would tell her reason what meaning the sound bore. Disintegrating sagebrush, perhaps; galvanized pipe gridded into a cattle guard, maybe; rush of hot dry Indian summer air through her hair, possibly: lost heart in a hopeless land, likely. And yet, the inescapable irony of this hard country was and always will be that it is uncompromisingly, terrifyingly beautiful. Indeed, as Mattie had learned long before, it was with interior landscapes, of other horrors or other beauties altogether, that this land most often clashed; and the petty battles fought by little men with monstrous machines—not the wind or drought or erosion—that most often defaced it.
Mattie suddenly found herself very annoyed by the silly and confusing circumstances the day had yielded up to her. There were doings afoot among these men whose meanings she didn’t yet understand. She’d always entrusted her fate to its own vaguely benign historical course in such circumstances, and she exercised something of a mental shrug in deference to this spirit now. But then she veered close to the specter of despair that had raised its setaceous muzzle a little while ago, that she was mucking about with things beyond her grasp, and that if she didn’t get a hold of herself along with them, this land and perhaps some darker force would master her, swallow her up in an instant of mischief with a chortle, and leave no trace of her passage upon the earth. These things bothered her. It was, she believed, much as she’d shouted at Mordecai, the petty angst of a pathetic existence.
She climbed back into the Chevrolet between Scott and Eddie, and brooded the last two miles to Jedediah’s house. The atmosphere was strangely tense inside the car. Scott seemed to have a grim expression fixed on his face, and Eddie had begun humming to himself.
“Hey,” he said abruptly, reaching for the volume knob on the radio, “how about some music?”
Scott said nothing, and neither did Mattie. Seated back in the car she and Scott found their shoulders touching, and neither moved to break the contact. In the heat she could smell him. A natural scent, compended of dust, sweat, tedium, the road, and beneath it all the distinct odor of inquisitive pheromones; bearing with them, like pornographers beneath raincoats their magazines, their clues to maleness. The scent was, in a subliminal way barely intelligible to her, as sweet and complex as the smell of cotton candy in a slaughterhouse in July. Cheap, but available.
The radio wheezed, squealed, and popped as he spun the red needle across the black dial and back. Halfheartedly, he tried again. All the way up and all the way back down the numbered frequencies. Nothing but static. For a long moment, Eddie stopped scanning the airwaves and listened to the white noise, leaning toward the speaker in the dash, his hand still on the knob. Then he turned it up and sat back in his seat. The car rocked forward through dust so thick it muffled the sounds of their passage.
Eddie looked out the passenger window and watched the silent procession of sage, Russian thistle, bitterbrush, tumbleweeds and the occasional basalt formation. “Jeez,” he said quietly, as if to himself. “There’s nothing out here… nothing at all.”
It was the plaint of a man abandoned by Fate.
“The antenna’s broken, you idiot,” said Scott gruffly. “Turn that goddamn thing off.”
Eddie and Mattie both eyed the right fender. Sure enough, only a twisted stub of the aerial tube remained. Nobody moved.
Scott reached for the knob. His arm brushed Mattie’s breast and stopped, Scott’s arm hesitated. Had her life depended on it, Mattie could not have denied the charge that passed between them. She shivered, and thought, Nice. I’m a slut.
“Christ, I’m trying to drive,” Scott said, retrieving his arm to wrestle the wheel. The car bucked violently.
Eddie turned the radio off. “Well shit,” he said sulkily, leaning back and gazing out the passenger window again. “It looks like there’s nothing out there.…”
“Right,” grumbled Scott. “You mean like, no Hunan, no Mexican restaurants, no massage parlors…”
“Hey,” Eddie whined, “I’d settle for Thai food and a copy of Watchtower.”
“Hey yourself,” Mattie said suspiciously, “How long’s that aerial been gone?”
“Long as we’ve had the car,” Scott said. “Eddie’s just got something on his mind. Like curried lamb on a bed of mint leaves.”
Mattie looked at Scott. And Siamese Betas? Then at Eddie. “Like anything else?” she demanded.
Eddie turned to look at her for a moment. He threw a glance past her at Scott, shrugged, and turned back to his window.
“Like fountains sob with ecstasy?” he said.
Verlaine again. Mattie was plunged into despair. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” she shouted.
Eddie turned and gave her a long look. She gave it back. Then he shot a glance at Scott. Mattie’s furious stare went with it. Eddie took up gazing through the passenger window again.
“All the time, all the time,” Scott hastened to reassure her. “He’s got something on his mind all the time.”
Riddles, riddles, these guys are jive. Exasperated and afraid, Mattie folded her arms, sat back against the seat, and stared straight ahead.
“Like a fountain,” Scott added soothingly.
She didn’t believe a word of it. This day just seemed determined to turn out inscrutably wrong.
Chapter Nine
EDDIE WAS QUICKLY PROVED WRONG, ABOUT NOTHING BEING out there, though how wrong none of them could have guessed.
The road wound up a mild grade and onto the mesa, the central promontory of the Cloverleaf. As they rounded a giant basalt outcrop the ranch buildings came into view; the rambling house Jedediah had been fixing up for years; a couple of outlying sheds, an Aeromotor that pulled up his groundwater; several feedlots, corrals and a loading chute in various states of disrepair, most of them built out of brown, weathered sticks, cupped boards, thirty-penny spikes, and barbed wire. The fence posts hardly deserved the name, which connotes sturdiness, and every fifty or sixty yards, as with all the fencing on the place, a nest of these thin sticks triangulated around a cairn of basalt rocks, to hold the wire more or less taut, to keep the fence more or less erect.
There was a barn too, a big one, in fairly decent repair, with only a few lengths of tin curling up off it and waving in the wind. Two stories high, nearly two hundred feet long, and at least sixty feet wide, the structure towered against a big thunderhead to the east and the bright cerulean sky beyond, it dwarfed the other buildings. The Cloverleaf had been part of a big working ranch, once. There had been stock pens, feedlots, a small dairy herd, many head of beeves and quit
e a few horses. One of the corrals closest to the barn was plenty big enough to break a horse in, or to isolate a large number of cattle from the herd, or to park all the hired help’s horses for the night. For now there were three or four saddle horses in it loafing over an old bathtub in the shade next to the barn, and they were the extent of Jedediah’s riding stock. One of them had its head over the back fence and was pulling a long tuft of alfalfa hay out of a pile of bales stacked beyond. Several chickens picked among the horses’ hooves.
Ranch tableau normal. What was unusual was that there were easily ten cars and trucks parked around the place, beyond the five or six vehicles Jedediah tried to keep running. Most of them were distinguishable from Jed’s rigs by the fact that they looked road-worthy. Jed had two vehicles he could trust to the highway, an old Datsun pickup, one of the first in this county two owners before Jed, and an “unrestored” 1953 four-hole chocolate-under-the-dust-brown Buick Roadmaster, his pride and joy, which ran like a top if and when he chanced to drive it, but was uninsured and unregistered, so he didn’t drive it much. There were also a faded 1949 flathead Ford flatbed truck heaped high with junk, a John Deere tractor of about the same vintage, a smaller Ford tractor, ditto, and a combine.
But parked around the barn today were two Suzuki Samurais, a Land Rover, a Dodge Power Wagon, two brand new Japanese pickups with camper shells, a Cadillac, a vintage Toronado, a completely tricked out new Ford pickup, and a Porsche 928, which costs about $65,000—about the price of the ranch—and a giant Winnebago motor home.
“Paydirt,” Scott said softly.
“What the hell,” Mattie said angrily. “Jed’s having a party and didn’t ask me to come?”
Eddie shot her a stern glance, hesitated, then looked forward again. “I guess so,” he muttered. “Excuse me,” and he abruptly took back his book.
“That’s some nice iron parked around the yard,” Scott said approvingly. “I wonder how in the hell they got that Porsche up this road?”