by Jim Nisbet
“Huh,” said Jed thoughtfully. “That’s pretty good. If he sees he can get his mission accomplished in spite of fucking up, he might be docile as a lamb. He won’t have any reason to trash me or the scene that ousted him. It’ll be against his interests to so much as think about it.”
“That’s true. And you can rest easy about feeling obliged to kill him to shut his mouth. It’s practically guaranteed he’ll keep his mouth shut, just so he can get on with his business. Except, of course, he’s crazy.”
“Damn straight,” said Jed, screwing up his face and kicking dust.
“So finally,” said Eddie, running out of fingers to enumerate, “he’ll be only too happy to tell you who the two guys are he’s cosponsoring into the Rendezvous, so we can get on with business. He might even be happy to cool his heels until it’s all over. Take him a little complimentary reefer to help him through the night. Then you can give him the keys to his truck and all his guns back.…”
Jed frowned. “What guns? All he had was the saddle gun, a .30–.06.”
Eddie looked up from counting his fingers, wondering, he thinks Tucker Harris only has a lousy hunting rifle? How competent is this Dowd guy? He hesitated, let it pass, then looked back at his fingers. “Whatever,” he said. “Ask him if he knows a place where we can meet that’s at least a thousand miles from here, and more or less on the way to San Francisco. Like, say maybe, there’s a reservoir up in the hills just south of Elko, Nevada, with a campground and everything. Scott and I can meet him there in a few days, give him his score list, settle on the exact amount of the percentage, and be on our way.” Eddie thought about it. “Tell him ten percent.” He held up his hand. “Well,” he shrugged, “I’m out of fingers. What do you think?”
Jed took off his hat and scratched his head.
“We could even throw some of this your way,” Eddie suggested. “I wouldn’t have a qualm. Not a qualm.”
Jed stopped scratching his head. “I’m not allowed to do that,” he said quietly.
Eddie frowned. “What? You make a piece of everything that happens here, don’t you?”
“That’s right, Eddie, I do. But what you’re offering me don’t fall into that category.”
“For chrissakes!” Eddie said loudly, “it ain’t like it’s a bribe or something. This is a bunch of bullshit for you to have to go through. You should be compensated for it. It’s business, that’s all.…”
“Not allowed,” Jed said with finality, replacing the hat on his head. “I get mine off whatever you and Scott order for yourselves and for Harris. That’s enough for me.”
“O.K., O.K.,” Eddie said, holding up his hands.
“Thought you’d know the rules,” Jed said sullenly.
“I said O.K., man,” Eddie said in his most conciliatory voice. “I just got carried away, that’s all. What can I say? I like throwing money around, especially Harris’ money.”
“Well,” Jed said. “The rest of the idea’s O.K. In fact it’s good. I can see why Scott lets you keep a hand in.”
“Hey,” said Eddie, jerking a thumb toward his own chest and squinting at Jed, “how do you know it’s not me that’s letting him keep a hand in?”
Jed laughed. A short gruff snort that didn’t betray so much contempt for the pecking order in Scott and Eddie’s outfit as it did how little practice Jed had laughing. Eddie frowned impatiently. What the hell did a girl like Mattie see in this guy?
“How long will it take you to get to Harris?”
“Couple of hours, including round trip and conversation,” Jed answered. He held his hand up to shade his eyes and squinted at the sun. “Should be back by dark.” He turned and walked toward the corral.
“Couple of hours? Really?”
Jed nodded. “It’s just a horse ride away, and I need the exercise. Curly over there will be the man to relate to while I’m gone. Don’t underestimate him.”
Eddie followed Jed as far as the corral gate, where he leaned on the fence and watched Jed catch a horse, a big bay mare. “By the time I’m back,” Jed said, dropping a blanket on the animal’s back, “every one of these other people should be gone. In fact, when they find out something out of the ordinary is going on, and I’m bound to tell them about it, they’ll finish up and skeedaddle.” He coaxed the mare into taking the bit. “If Harris goes along, and I don’t see any way for him not to, if his devil is showing any sense—”
Eddie frowned. “His devil?”
“Hasn’t he ever told you about his devil?”
Eddie shook his head, slowly, faking it.
“Has he ever paused in conversation, like he was listening to something you couldn’t hear?”
Eddie nodded, slowly, faking it.
Jed nodded, too. “He’s getting messages from a devil lives inside his head.” He tapped the side of his head with his forefinger.
“You’re jiving me.”
“Ask Scott, you don’t believe me.”
Eddie nodded. “I’ll do that. This devil, does he have good business sense?”
Jed shrugged. “If he’s showing it, and he oughta’, when I come back I’ll give you and Scott two hours in the barn before I strike it.”
“You close it down immediately?”
“Yesterday, if I could. All that shit in there makes me nervous.” He patted the mare’s neck. It was obvious to Eddie that Jed would rather fool with any number of horses than one Tucker Harris. “The things a man’s gotta do to make a living.”
Eddie peered at Jed. “You smoke yourself?”
“No way. Stuff made me crazy in Nam, scared the daylights out of me. I almost blew away two of my own men, one night. I hated it. After that I never messed with it again.”
“Huh,” said Eddie. “I know it makes some people paranoid.”
“They tell me it makes some people happy, too.”
Eddie smiled. “Happy as the monkey in the monkey tree.”
“Suit yourself.”
“Thanks. I will.”
“It’s the money, makes me happy.”
“Suit yourself.”
“Thanks,” Jed said dryly, not smiling.
He had the saddle on the horse. The rig included a scabbard with the well-worn butt of a rifle sticking out of it.
“That one of those Winchesters?” Eddie asked.
“Gun that won the west,” Jed said, “one of them anyway.” He punched the horse in her ribs and tightened the cinch. “If there was any west left in 1894.”
“Damn,” Eddie said after a moment, “she’s a good-looking animal.”
“She’ll do,” Jed said, patting the mare’s rump as he passed behind her. “O.K., Mr. Mertz. Take yourself up to the house and stay there. Don’t come out until I come back. Curly’s in charge if you need anything. And remember. This courtesy’s on Scott’s account. Don’t fuck around.”
He led the horse out of the corral and looked toward the barn. Curly was still asleep in the lawn chair with the rifle in his lap. “Curly! Wake up, goddammit.” Curly dropped a boot off his knee onto the ground and pushed the brim of his hat above his hairline with the muzzle of his rifle. He was a gaunt, hook-nosed man with red eyes and he needed a shave. To Eddie he looked like the quintessential cowpuncher: grizzled, unwashed, bowlegged, weathered, broke.
Jed turned back to Eddie. “I like your idea, Mertz,” he said. “While I’m gone you might like to work on the one detail we all ain’t took into consideration.”
“What’s that, Jed?”
“Mattie.” There was no trace of emotion in his face. “What we gonna do about Mattie?”
“You don’t trust her?”
“It’s not a question of trust.”
“Aw,” Eddie said uneasily, “she’ll be all right.”
Jed stepped into the stirrup and threw a leg over the saddle. “Uh-huh, she will,” he said. “One way or another.”
Chapter Twelve
MEANWHILE, SCOTT MICHAELS AND MATTIE BROOKE WERE just a couple of buttons and an an
ecdote away from becoming lovers.
The ranch house was cool and shady inside. He’d helped her to the couch in the front parlor and gently stretched her out on it. Moral turpitude being an indifferent subject to her, Mattie was feeling decidedly ill regarding what she had begun to perceive as its most immediate consequence, a bad confrontation. Moreover, the true nature of the business of the Cloverleaf ranch had profoundly shocked her, not only for its obvious illegality, and not only because Jed had managed to keep it a secret from her, but also for the enormous economic implications the scope of such an operation must surely entail. Up until today she’d maintained the blithe assumption that like everybody else around here, Jed had been able to more or less comfortably continue along on government subsidies, which was not only legal but potentially lucrative. The government subsidized the water, the land, and the crops raised by and on them. They subsidized the transportation and storage of certain crops, paid people not to grow still others, and frequently paid them to destroy what they did grow. On a big enough spread, the ins and outs of such meddling could amount to a substantial piece of change. But an annual marijuana supermarket? Representing, what had he said, fifty or sixty growers? A “small” commission on thirty million dollars? How small is small? If Jed received, say, a tenth of a cent per dollar, i.e., a commission of one tenth of one percent, on thirty million dollars worth of sales, for a week’s work his cut would be…
“Thirty thousand dollars?” she said aloud to the ceiling.
Scott’s face loomed over her. In his hand he held a damp washcloth, which he folded three times lengthwise and laid across her forehead.
He sat on the edge of the couch, one hand on the back of it, his other adjusting the washcloth.
“What are you figuring,” he asked, “Jed’s commission?”
She frowned slightly. “How did you know?”
“That happens to be about what he’ll make this week, if he gets away with it.”
She met his gaze. He was a handsome man, and from where she lay she couldn’t see the ponytail. Take away that paisley shirt and put something decent on him, a nice plaid cowboy shirt with pearl snaps, say, and you’d have yourself a good-looking fellow. Even if he wasn’t so young. Like Jed, Scott was in his early forties. And like Jed, Scott had retained his youthful looks. Tucker Harris, on the other hand, drank a little too much a little too regularly, and it showed in the puffiness of his face and the little potbelly beginning to grow on him. If Tucker weren’t such a nervous and restless man, if he ate regularly, he’d long since have run to the mild fat of middle age. Jed stayed young riding the range, although she might have to revise that opinion. She wondered how Scott kept active.
“Why shouldn’t he get away with it?” she asked him.
Scott caught a bit of his lower lip between his teeth and sighed, avoiding her eyes. “He’s in a pretty tight spot, Mattie. He’s looking at about a three-way crossfire.”
“Three ways?”
“I guess.” He looked away. “Are those letters here somewhere?”
“Yeah, they are.” Mattie put a hand on his arm. “Are you saying I’m a problem?”
Scott nodded.
“What about this guy whatshisname, Zucker Farris?” She blushed at this transparent subterfuge, but Scott didn’t notice.
“Tucker Harris,” he corrected her. “Not a good hombre, no matter where you might find him.”
I beg to differ, she thought, but she said, “Tell me something about him. Why is he such a problem?”
Scott gave her a brief version of what at that moment Jedediah was outside telling Eddie. It was all more bad news for Mattie.
“Of course, we were all killers, in Vietnam,” Scott said.
“But that was then,” Mattie hastened to point out, anxious to justify what increasingly seemed to be a very bad piece of judgment on her part. “This is now. Nobody’s killing anybody, now.”
Scott started to speak, then stopped.
“Right?” she asked again, nervously squeezing his arm.
He looked at her again. There was something becoming about the dampness on her forehead, left by the washcloth. Her eyes were a little enlarged, bluer, waiting for the answer to her question, their lashes naturally long. Due to all the daylight hours she spent in the restaurant, her skin was uncommonly pale, yet clear, though it had begun its transition from the tautness of youth into the softness of maturity, exposing as it did so the lines traced by care and emotion, weather and experience, of which the face can be the medium, the messenger, and the message. Mattie didn’t pluck her eyebrows, nor had she ever shaved the very slight shadow of downy fuzz just above each corner of her upper lip. Both lips were very full, and, in their rest position, pouted just slightly, alluding to a petulance that didn’t exist, rather a natural inquisitiveness, and to a sensuality early discovered, seldom exploited. Her two front teeth had had a slight half-moon chipped out of them by a rock, thrown by a schoolmate in fourth grade, but, unexpectedly, this flaw like her others only added to the allure Scott discovered there, of a mature woman.
Mattie had immediately noticed her effect on this man, and, in spite of her recent and thorough encounter with Harris, in spite of the intimidating proximity of the less transitory if more boring Dowd, she now began to reciprocate the attentions of Mr. Michaels. Now, beneath his gaze, the slightest movement of her body bore sexual connotation. He was staring at her, even as she placed one hand gently on his chest and repeated, “Right?”
“Ahm,” Scott said, blinking his eyes, yet not removing their gaze from hers, “I’ve forgotten the question.”
“I said,” she said softly, “nobody’s killing anybody now, are they?”
Scott was in trouble. “You’re killing me,” he said, removing the washcloth. He stroked the damp black hair back from her forehead. “You’re a very beautiful woman, Mattie.”
“Nobody’s…?” she whispered. “Who, me?” Mattie was in trouble too. Far away in the back of her mind, as if it had fallen off a cliff, a diminishing voice was screaming, no, no, not two men in one daaaaayyyy.… Then it came back, only to fall off again, lamenting, and straaaaaaanngers…
“You,” Scott whispered, bringing his lips to within inches of hers. “Me,” his eyes fixed on her mouth, and he touched her lower lip with his fingertip. “Me, I’m a cop.”
Mattie jumped like she’d found the short in a lamp cord. Scott observed her reaction with obvious amusement. “That’s why you have nothing to worry about,” he smiled.
“Learn something every day,” she said huskily, if non-committally. She’d never made it with a cop before. But her mind was racing. If the cops were here, forget throwing in with Jedediah. His goose was cooked.
But the revelation sealed the inevitable, with a twist. For the first time in her life, along with the thrill of slightly unusual sex, Mattie had an inkling of what it must be like to be a prostitute. No matter what happened from now on, her relationship with this man Michaels might affect her well-being for years to come. Mattie kissed the finger, then closed her lips around the first joint of it. Then she rocked her head back until the finger silently slipped out of her mouth. She watched his eyes watching his finger and her lips. “How’d that happen?” she asked quietly, and kissed the finger a gentle, tiny peck. She was thinking, this is amazing, this situation is weirder than last night with those goddamn fish. I’d never have thought it possible.
It was as if they’d already made love, and this were pillow talk. They were fused by familiarity, intimacy, dependency, circumstance. Yet none of the tension of the possibility of doing it “again” was lost between them; they orbited each other, each of them selling out to the gravity of the other’s potential.
“My little brother,” Scott said, watching his fingertip play about her mouth. “After I left for Vietnam, my little brother, who didn’t go, got into drugs. We grew up on a farm in West Marin, and were pretty close. Always doing the same stuff together, you know, because we were farm kids. We never
knew much about that age group stuff, even though we were five years apart.
“When I came back from the Nam, I was wounded. Not much of a wound, but it was enough to send me home without ruining me. Maybe you’ll see it later.”
“Yeah.”
“I felt a little guilty about that, and felt pretty weird about the war in general.…” His finger stopped moving and his eyes flicked to Mattie’s. “It was…”
The finger began to move again and his eyes watched it. The fine down on her upper lip reminded him of a newborn baby’s hair, lanuginous hair, there’s nothing softer or more ephemeral. He could smell the sun-dried cotton of her clothes and even detected a faint whiff of the leather of her boots, and somewhere in there the sweet smell of a soap she bathed with, and, of course, dust.
“I figured to go home to the farm and work around the place until I’d recovered and got my bearings. I’d only been gone a year but it was like I’d dropped out of one century and into another. Tyler had hair down to his ass and played the electric guitar and had got his arm broken by a nightstick during a riot in front of the Oakland Draft Board. He wasn’t even old enough to get drafted yet, still had a year to go, but he hated the war and anybody who had anything to do with it. I wasn’t too crazy about it myself, but I wanted to talk about it, I thought. But his talk was all pissed-off political, knee-jerk leftisms, and mine was all foot soldier. Whatever each of us said went right past the other, and we couldn’t agree on anything. It was terrible. My little brother was a total stranger to me, and me to him.
“One thing led to another and we finally fought. It was bad. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was supposed to be avoiding confrontations, so I wouldn’t kill somebody over a parking space or something. It happened about five a.m in the milk house. We hadn’t seen Tyler for a couple of weeks and then all of a sudden there he was, just showed up before daylight to milk the cows, just like that. Wouldn’t take no for an answer. Something else I didn’t know at the time was that Tyler had gotten into speed, and this particular morning he’d been three days without sleep. Around three o’clock that morning he’d gotten so paranoid that he drove out from some crash pad in San Francisco especially to milk the cows, just to do something real. He was fixated on milking those damn cows, and anybody else was just in the way. Everything would have worked out O.K., I guess. We hadn’t seen him more than three or four times in several months at that point, and when he showed up in striped bell-bottoms and beads and long hair, weighing about 125 pounds, shaking like a leaf, and just pitched in, nobody said anything. It would have been fine, just fine, we could have dealt with it, but then he pushed Daddy…”