by Jim Nisbet
By this time Scott’s finger had been joined by one of its companions, and together they were making a journey of exploration. They had traced the shape of Mattie’s chin, down along the smooth curve of her throat, where they paused, to feel the pulse racing there. Then they shaped the curve of her throat up behind her jaw to behind the ear, where the thumb joined them momentarily, to tug at her earlobe in much the same fashion as they habitually tugged at Scott’s own. Her ear had been pierced only once, he noticed; as had his own left one. Then they traced down, and back up, and down again, until his whole hand was shaping her jaw, and she moved her head against its palm, and the fine tracery of the explorer had become the caress of the adventurer; it descended to her breast, which rose to meet it; and thence considered the tempestuous antipodal latitudes.
“I grabbed him by the scruff and hollered at him,” Scott continued sadly. “He shook loose and spun around and raked me with the milking harness, I fell against a cow, which kicked the shit out of me, and away we went. We tore the whole damn milk house apart. It was horrible. Daddy would jump on us and try to separate us and get himself thrown up against a wall. Momma came out from the kitchen to see what all the noise was about and commenced beating on us with a spatula, until it broke. After Tyler went after me with a pitchfork I got him by the throat and nearly drowned him in the bulk tank. He only got out alive because by that time the Berkeley Farms tanker had showed up for the milk, and between the driver and Momma and Daddy they pulled me off him.
“Well, Tyler looked pretty funny standing there covered in milk and cowshit, even if it did cost us that morning’s delivery, and even if I had nearly choked him to death. I started laughing, and then the driver did, too. Even Daddy chuckled, as the shock of the fight wore off. But Tyler didn’t think it was funny, and Momma didn’t either. She saw right then, I guess, that Tyler was a whole lot further along than any of us had thought he was. Maybe she’d known for a while, even then…
“Anyway, Tyler left in a rage. I never saw him again. A year later the L.A. coroner called, and I had to go down to claim the body.”
By now Mattie had pressed herself full length against Scott, and was shaping the muscles in his back below his shoulders with her hands. Scott reciprocated the pressure, pressing her to him, even as he told the story into her raven hair.
“When I left Vietnam, I thought I’d had done with human corpses, but I was wrong. He’d lost even more weight, but it was heroin that killed him. He’d been a full-time junkie just about from the day we’d last seen him. There were no personal effects. None. The coroner told me Tyler’s friends had cleaned out his tiny room before someone phoned in the death. He said that kind of behavior was pretty standard, when the overdose happened with other scum around.…”
They rolled off the sofa and fell to the rug on the floor. Mattie moaned softly and pressed her mouth to his, squirming beneath him with purpose and abandon.
“I’ve been a narc ever since.…,” Scott said into their kiss.
Chapter Thirteen
EDDIE STOOD IN THE DOORWAY TO THE RANCH HOUSE. NOT TEN feet away Mattie and Scott writhed on the floor in the middle of the living room, tangled in a Navaho rug and struggling with the paradoxical ethos of tight denim. “Am I interrupting anything?” he said loudly.
Scott’s reply was muffled. “I’m telling her my life story.” The writhing did not stop.
Eddie cleared his throat loudly. “Look, my hetero friends, she’s going to be telling it to the angels if we don’t commence getting organized.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Dowd isn’t kidding about his idea of a solution to this problem, and we have less than two hours to avoid it.” Even as Eddie spoke, one of the Samurais started up in the yard and began the slow grind down to the access road. Curly stood in front of the barn with his rifle crooked over one arm, talking to two or three other men. One of them looked toward the house. Eddie waggled his fingers at him and turned back to look at Scott and Mattie. They hadn’t stopped groping each other. Time’s awasting. “Life story, eh?” he said. “Did he tell you about his wife and children?”
Mattie turned her face aside to avoid Scott’s ardent kisses and pushed against his chest with both hands.
“Children! Goddamn you, get off me! Married with children!”
“Aw c’mon, honey, jes another li’l kiss,” Scott said, puckering his lips at her.
“No!” she was laughing. “Goddamm untrustworthy sonsabitches all of you!” she yelled in disgust. “Children!”
Scott propped himself up at arm’s length from the floor.
“I’ll bet you call your wife ‘Mommy,’” she said, looking up at him, “and she does your laundry for you.” To Scott she was ravishing, coming on in pictures and retreating in words, taunting and tantalizing as she said No. With her glossy black hair fanned around her head against a blue and an orange in the Navaho rug she looked like sunset on a vacation planet, his idea of a down-time vista.
“That’s just Eddie’s way of confusing you,” he said, aggressively covering her hips with his own. “You know, like, ‘Good Cop, Bad Cop’?”
Eddie crossed the living room and began a systematic search of the house. “Look,” he said, opening the thin door of a broom closet, “I like to watch, really, my therapist says you can always learn something, but, Scott, what’s this about cops, you know they make me nervous.” He was opening and closing cupboards. “Even to talk about them… What’s this?”
Scott hovered at arm’s length above the floor, his hips on hers, staring into her eyes, she staring back. Only one button on Mattie’s blouse remained snapped, none on his own shirt. They were both breathing heavily. “She knows, Eddie, I told her,” Scott said.
“Knows what?”
“She knows we’re cops.”
After a moment of silence, Eddie said, “Have you lost your mind?”
“Just my heart.”
“Your ass is next.”
Scott nuzzled Mattie’s chin with a knuckle. “Trust me. Besides, she’s in this with us no matter what wool you managed to pull over Dowd’s eyes.”
“That’s just dandy,” Eddie said, “but it doesn’t compute. Maybe now she’ll tell the boyfriend all about us when he gets back, and get herself off the hook with him. After all, if she fingers a couple of cops for him, he’ll have to think she won’t mind him middling a few million dollars worth of marijuana deals every fall, to make ends meet, build up their nest egg for little Johnny’s college fund.”
Scott continued staring at her. Mattie stared back. “She saw that look he gave me when he first found out she had come along with us.”
“So did I.” Eddie was opening and closing cabinet doors rapidly in the kitchen, like he couldn’t find his colander and guests were coming any moment. “And I think you’re right. She won’t tell. Dowd wouldn’t listen to her if she did. He’s too sexist. There’s no way she’s in on it, that much is clear. Knowing that, we owe it to her to get her out of here in one piece, since we got her in here.”
Mattie pulled Scott’s ponytail. Gee Haw. Was Eddie right? There would be no mercy on her behalf forthcoming from Jedediah Dowd. Scott let his mouth down slowly until it covered hers. What is this guy trying to prove? she wondered. He’s the world’s greatest kisser? She hadn’t yet realized that deep down inside some mechanism was telling Scott to kiss, kiss, kiss all he could, it might be his last… Well, of course it won’t be, but just in case… This caveat infused a kiss of mundane opportunism with an extraordinary tincture of urgency, and Mattie was not immune to it. Impassive at first, she’d begun to return the kiss when he pushed himself up.
“Hey…,” she said huskily.
“Hey hey,” Eddie said from the kitchen.
Scott stood and smiled grimly. “Now who’s teasing?” He began to distractedly button his shirt, as if the process were unfamiliar to him. When he’d finished he held out his hands to her and pulled her up. “We’ll talk about adultery later,” he whispered insincerely, kissing her.<
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Mattie, misunderstanding the insincerity, turned her face away from the kiss and it landed on her cheek.
Scott looked even grimmer.
“Scotty,” Eddie said, reappearing in the living room. “You remember how to operate one of these?”
Mattie had turned away from Eddie to straighten her clothes. She looked over her shoulder, and saw that Eddie was holding an AR-15. She hadn’t known Jed possessed it, and she’d cooked many a meal in that kitchen. She didn’t know it was an AR-15, either. She just knew that it was an unusual gun and a damn ugly one.
“Eddie, baby,” Scott said appreciatively, kneeling on the couch and taking the weapon. “They aren’t taking us very seriously around here.” He hefted the gun knowingly, feeling its weight, eyeing its length.
“Well,” Mattie pointed out, “Jedediah thinks you’re his friend, doesn’t he?”
Scott sighted along the length of the barrel and grinned. It was a big, toothy grin. “Yeah,” Scott said, “he does.”
His look chilled her. His words betrayed him. Why, you fucking power-tripper, Mattie thought to herself, nearly but not quite aloud. Having me on the floor is one thing, but having a gun in your hand is another kind of triumph, and having someone so foolish as to trust you is something else. And then once again, she felt the pull of a horrible undertow she didn’t understand. Until today she’d never known that such a thing could exist; treacherous waters, now deep, now shallow, now clear, now cloudy, where nothing was as it seemed at first, nor remained the same for long; and ugly, jagged rocks loomed up from the depths.
A vehicle started up in the yard, and led another down the road and around the basalt hump and out of sight. And Mattie thought, the cafe would be closing up about now. Rabbit the swamper would be getting his mops and bucket ready in the back, waiting for Mordecai to turn the red and white OPEN sign around to read CLOSED. Were she there, Mattie would be sitting at the counter sorting change, bills, and odd toothpicks out of the coffee can marked TIPS, kept next to the cash register. But much as she might wish it to be the case—and she was suddenly overwhelmed by a wave of nostalgia for the humdrum affairs of the cafe, a vertiginous yearn for them—she wasn’t in the Dip Cafe, she was here, in a pickle. Who was to be trusted? She’d spent the night with a guy all his friends claimed to be psycho, and she’d spent the last half hour flirting with a married man who claimed to be a cop. She stared at Scott, watching him check out the action of the gun. How much of the story he’d just told her could be true? Had he ever had a little brother in the first place? She’d already noticed the fluidity with which Scott and Eddie slid on a membrane of improvisation from one crisis to the next: Was either Scott or Eddie really a cop at all? Were there even dairy farms in West Marin?
No, no, Mordecai, she pled silently, let me clean all that nasty grease out from under the griddle tonight. Sit down and have yourself a beer. It’s O.K. Open one for me. I don’t mind. Really. Watch me. Where’re those goddamn rubber gloves? It’ll shine…
“. . . Clips,” Scott was saying. He’d slid the bolt back and was eyeing the breach. He could see the floor through it. “We’ll need clips.”
“Mattie.” Eddie had been watching her.
Mattie backed a couple of steps toward the open front door and stopped there, holding onto its knob with her two hands behind her. “Eddie…?” she breathed. Two car doors slammed in the yard behind her and the fancy Porsche roared to life. Someone yelled good-bye and the car crept very slowly, very carefully, through a full turn in the barnyard. A chicken zigzagged in front of it, always managing to stay in the way. The car had Colorado license plates.
“Don’t pay any attention to him,” Eddie said, nodding his head at Scott, who was adjusting a strap on the AR-15. “He’s just going pro, that’s all. Later you’ll be glad he knew what he was doing. We’re in a fix here, and so are you. Scott told you the truth. We’re cops. We brought you here with the idea that there was no way you weren’t in on Jed’s operation, your presence would make things that much easier for us, and we’d nab you into the bargain. We were wrong. I know it’s tough but you’ve got to believe me: We’ve gotten you into very, very bad trouble, and its name is Jedediah Dowd. And if not Dowd…”
Mattie swayed back and forth with the door, much as a child might. It was a carefree gesture indicative of a strong desire to escape, to be free, much as Scott’s ardent kiss had been. And like it, entirely ineffectual, even for the moment. What was to stop her, after all, from just walking out of here, right through this door?
Eddie sensed this whim and lowered his voice. “Don’t mess with Curly, out there. Stick with us. It’s a fantastic stroke of luck there’s a weapon in here, because when Jedediah gets back, our goose is going to be cooked. I spun him a story to get him out of here, but as soon as he talks to Harris he’s going to come back here with enough help to rewrite it for me.”
“But why?” Mattie said. “What’s…”
“Because he doesn’t have any choice,” Scott said.
Mattie shook her head. “I can’t believe this. Jedediah…”
Eddie and Scott exchanged a glance.
“Believe it, Mattie,” Scott said, deadly serious.
Mattie flushed with anger. “Why should I believe anything you say, Scott Michaels, if that’s even your real name! Everybody’s telling me everybody else around here is a lifetime criminal. Eddie says Jed is psychotic and deadly. Scott and Jed say Tucker Harris is psychotic and deadly…”
Eddie shook his head. “Everybody agrees on Tucker Harris, Mattie—”
“I say you’re all crazy! What does Tucker Harris have to say about you three?”
Eddie and Scott stared at her. “I don’t know, Mattie,” Eddie said softly, curious. “What would he have to say about us three?”
A revelation was dawning in Eddie’s face, and his mouth slowly opened as he understood its meaning.
Mattie’s eyes pleaded with Eddie’s. Don’t, they said, please don’t…
But Eddie was an intellectual, and he followed the idea out to its logical conclusion, with no regard to the consequences, like a fascinated scientist at Los Alamos in 1944. “We already know,” he said thoughtfully, “we already know what Tucker Harris has to say about you, don’t we?”
Scott looked from Mattie to Eddie with a puzzled expression on his face. Please…, her eyes begged, Please Eddie, don’t do it to me, just because you can.…
Unaccountably, Eddie gave no voice to further supposition. He continued to stare at Mattie for a moment. She knew he could put all the pieces together, perhaps already had, and she was close to awe at his perspicacity. Then he said, “Mattie, isn’t that enough to know about him?”
Eddie still had respect for her. Incredible.
Scott looked from Eddie to Mattie. Mattie could see that he hadn’t quite caught on, or that he wasn’t sure what she and Eddie understood, but he was always ready to let Eddie handle things his own way. They were very good, these two.
And Eddie kept her secret.
Now she trusted him completely.
She closed her eyes and nodded. She’d never felt so ashamed in her life; she’d never really been ashamed at all, until now.
More cars were leaving. The sun dropped behind the Cascades and their long shadows began their ineluctable advance toward the Cloverleaf Ranch. The grinding of the automobiles faded into the encompassing silence, and even the ever-present breeze fell off. She could hear two people exchanging words in the yard. As the land cooled the sage began to breathe, and its pungence now found its way to Mattie’s nostrils as she stood in the door.
She opened her eyes. Eddie and Scott waited.
“Come away from the door,” Eddie said gently.
She didn’t move.
“Come, come.”
She approached the sofa, feeling like a little girl who’d realized she was going to have to go along with whatever inscrutable excursion the grown-ups had thought up for her.
“We’ll get you
out of this,” Eddie said. “We have to, because we’re going to get ourselves out of it, and you’re with us. Now tell me. That rosewood or whatever it is box in the bedroom, is that where Jed keeps his mother’s letters?”
She nodded. She’d completely forgotten the letters. Normally she never paid a visit to Jed’s house without checking on them.
“Is there anything else in the box? Weapons, like?”
She shook her head, no.
“Do you have any idea where Jed keeps ammunition for this thing here?” He pointed at the AR-15.
She shook her head. Then she nodded. “Wait,” she said. She led them to the bedroom. Behind the bureau next to the bed she showed them a shotgun, a Browning sixteen-gauge automatic. In the top drawer of the bureau behind three piles of neatly folded plaid shirts were two boxes of shells for it, and a long-barreled Colt .44, with a white Styrofoam pallet of bullets.
“O.K.,” Eddie said, as Scott rapidly and efficiently checked the weapons. “That’s pretty good.” There was an edge to his voice. There were no clips for an automatic weapon, and he was disappointed about the .44 cartridges. “Not hollow-points,” he grumbled.
Mattie frowned. What was this, Cambodia? Orange County?
“You might as well know,” Eddie said. “If it’s just Jed and Curly out there, we have a chance, maybe an even chance. That’s the minimum opposition we can expect. And I don’t know how many other guys Jed has watching over Harris. Maybe he could spare one or two of them to work on us.”