by Jim Nisbet
“You were driving, schmuck: Are they?”
Scott patted his pockets tentatively.
“They must be still in the switch,” he said hopefully, “at least, I don’t think I took them out.”
“Shit.” Eddie shook his head, sighed, and held out his hand. “Give me the change out of that pocket, there. It’ll give you away.”
“Good idea.” He scooped the change out of his pocket and dumped it in Eddie’s hand. A nickel fell to the floor, rolled until it hit the Navaho rug, then fell on its side.
Eddie started after the nickel, checked the impulse, then shook his head and stuffed the rest of the change into his jeans, muttering to himself.
“I can just see us making our getaway on that Poppin’ John, out there,” Scott said. He looked at Mattie. His eyes were a little glazed. “Is that what they call them up here, too?” he said stupidly, his tone curiously flat. “Poppin’ Johns?”
Mattie nodded. “I can drive it.”
“We always drove Internationals,” Scott said dully.
Eddie nodded his head a moment, yes, then began to shake it slowly, back and forth, looking at the floor. No. “We’ll try the Chevy first,” he said tightly. “See you there.”
“Five minutes,” Scott said.
Scott blended into the shadows of the kitchen. Eddie and Mattie stood listening for a moment, but they didn’t hear the door open or close.
“Hey,” said Eddie suddenly, “what are we doing? If we hear the door, then so can Curly.” He turned and went to the front. Then he turned around and went over to the woodstove and picked up the shotgun. He reached into the hatch to turn off the light, noticed the service .45 and hesitated. Then he shook his head and turned out the light under the rug. Another gun wasn’t going to help them.
“Hey, Curly,” he said loudly, deliberately letting his footsteps be heard. “Curly!”
“What?” came the distant response.
“What’s a man got to do around here to get hisself some smokin’ t’backy?”
Curly chuckled. Mattie heard the kitchen door creak.
“What’s so funny?”
“That’s the most cornpone country accent ever I heard in my entire life, that’s what.” Curly spit loudly. “Smokin’ t’backy, my ass. Sheeit.”
“Oh,” said Eddie, sounding hurt. “How about one a them thar cheroots, then, podner?” Mattie tiptoed up to the door and stood behind Eddie. Over his shoulder and under the eave of the porch she could see that a few stars had come out in the gloom to the west. Venus, and a few stars.
“How about it,” Curly said.
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“What’s a man got to do to get a cigarette?”
“Well I reckon a man’s got to ride into town and buy hisself one,” Curly said.
“Aw, come on, man,” Eddie whined pathetically, “my whole business career’s in the balance here and I don’t have any cigarettes to fret over it with. Jedediah doesn’t smoke?”
“Jedediah doesn’t smoke,” Curly said tiredly.
Eddie waited a minute.
Then he said, “Curly smokes. Didn’t I see him smoke?”
Curly said nothing.
Eddie let a little time go by. “Curly rolls his own.”
Curly said nothing.
Eddie let a little less time go by. “Goddammit, how about a cigarette, Curly?”
“After the boss gets back,” Curly said, patiently.
“Come on, Curly,” Eddie said, raising his voice, and pulling Mattie by the arm close to him. “We been cooped up in here over an hour, now.”
“Where’s the other two?”
“Fell asleep.”
“The feller and the girl?”
“Yeah.”
“Pretty nervy,” Curly said, with grudging respect.
“What’s to be nervy about? We’re dealing from the top to you guys.”
Curly grunted. “Remains to be seen.”
They waited around for awhile. Mattie noticed a funny noise, as if somebody were rubbing a balloon with the palm of their hand. She realized she was grinding her teeth.
Eddie rapidly whispered into Mattie’s ear, “Go. As soon as you get out the door, turn and fire that flare straight up over the back of the house, toward Curly, there, then hit the dirt. Go on.” As he pushed her away he said loudly, “You don’t believe us either?”
Curly was silent. They heard his boots scrape the car bumper.
“Curly?”
“Hush up,” Curly said shortly.
Eddie’s hand tightened on Mattie’s arm, and she stood still. After a moment she heard them, too. Hoofbeats. A horse cantering. They all heard it.
“He’s back,” Curly said, as if to himself.
“Shit,” Eddie said between his teeth, biting back the despair in his voice, “somebody’s back.”
Mattie realized that even if it was Jed on that horse, things were going to go badly. But then she realized that if Jed weren’t sitting that horse, it meant that Jedediah Dowd was probably dead. That was when she realized how far ahead of her thinking everybody else’s thinking was around here, and she got really scared.
The hoofbeats became louder and louder, impossibly loud, considering how far away they must have been. The parched and dusty earth rang hollow beneath the iron shoes. Mattie and Eddie strained to see the horse and rider, but by now it was completely dark. Mattie could barely make out the Chevy against the Winnebago, the Winnebago against the barn, and she couldn’t make out the barn against the butte or the sky beyond. Eddie looked toward the back of the house, then toward Curly, then in the direction from which it now appeared the horse was approaching. Mattie could hear Eddie breathing short, rasping gulps of air, and now a faint, intermittent clicking sound as his finger worked the safety on the shotgun, which he had been holding against the door jamb to conceal it. Then the tapping stopped. The safety was off. He’d made his decision.
“Shit, at last,” Eddie said loudly, in a final burst of bravado, “now maybe I can get a cigarette and conduct some goddamn business.” He turned to Mattie, whispering, “We got no choice, we have to go through with the plan. It’s just that there’s two of them now. Go on! Fire as soon as soon as you think the rider is close enough to the Chevy for them to be the same target. Hurry!” He pushed her away. Then he yelled, as if back into the house, “Hey, Scotty! Wake up! Jed’s back! Wake up, man, nothing’s changed!”
Mattie hurried across the living room and ran directly into the couch again. Pain shot up her leg and brought tears to her eyes. She stopped and it was only when she went to grab the twice-abused thigh muscle that she realized she had pistols in both hands. The horse’s hooves rang louder in her ears. She mastered the pain and sidestepping the couch ran as quickly and as quietly as she could through the kitchen to the back door, where she stopped. Scott had left the wood door open, but there was a screen door. The horse sounded as if it were right outside the door and had no intention of stopping its canter until it was in the corral. Gritting her teeth she pushed tentatively on the screen door. It yielded immediately to her touch. Scott had unhooked the spring. Then she was outside. Darkness. Sagebrush. Jedediah’s tractor shed and shop were about thirty yards away, more sagebrush and darkness beyond. She slipped sideways to her left through the opening and gently eased the door back to its jamb. There was no sign of Scott. The air had cooled out here, but a bead of sweat trickled from her armpit down along her ribs under her shirt. She looked up. Above her towered the edge of the galaxy, the Milky Way, cantilevered through an infinity of stars. There was no moon. Beyond the corner of the house she could make out the fence rails of the corral, the dark slab of the big barn forming its far side, the large mesa of basalt blacking out the constellations low to the northern horizon beyond. She could see the gleam of the old bathtub watering trough, and thought she could make out the shape of a horse standing over it. Another horse stood with its head expectantly over the fence, looking out beyond whe
re Curly waited on the hood of the Chevrolet. But the corner of the house prevented Mattie from seeing that far. She dipped low for a moment and gently set the .44 on the stoop.
Then she heard the sheet metal in the hood of the Chevrolet buckle as Curly shifted around on it, and his boot heels on the bumper.
“Hey, Jed,” Curly hollered, “over here.”
Mattie didn’t want to risk looking around the side of the house to make sure of their position, but she realized that if they were close enough to speak to each other, it was time to fire the flare.
“Or leastways your horse is back,” Curly joked, and as if to confirm this conclusion another horse in the corral nickered an appreciative welcome to its corral mate. But Jed didn’t return the greeting and the horse did not slow down, and it was only as Mattie turned away from the house, holding up the flare gun with both hands, closing her eyes as she pulled the trigger, that she realized she was a little late with her part of this military action.
The flare gun coughed as she’d supposed it might, the kick wasn’t too bad, and the flare hissed aloft. She opened her eyes in time to see a smoky trail arch over the house and disappear. Almost simultaneously Mattie realized that she was hearing a horse reining in to keep from running into the corral gate, sliding to a stop in front of it, and looked to her right. About a hundred yards above the house the flare ignited and illuminated the entire area, the front yard, the corral, the barn, the shop, and the house, with an intensely bright, white, flickering light that forced shadows to flee wildly before it as it slowly fell, burning. Mattie stood in one of these lengthening shadows, behind the house. But the rider turned and saw her, and she saw him. Or, as she thought until much later, she saw it.
There was Jed’s horse, no doubt about that. The big, well built bay. But the rider could not have been Jed, or, if it was, Jed was unrecognizable. The rider wore a black jumpsuit, black sneaker-soled nylon combat boots, and black fingerless gloves. The jumpsuit had a lot of compartments and zippers on it, all black, but the rider also wore a couple of belts or bandoliers or some kind of harness, not unlike the one Scott had last been seen wearing. His chest was festooned with clips, flares, and what could only have been hand grenades, there was a knife sheathed in the boot on Mattie’s side of the horse, and a stubby, riflelike weapon of extreme combat modernity slung over his back, muzzle down. It had the same purposeful ugliness of Scott’s AR-15, but this was a different weapon, and, like everything else the rider was wearing, also black. Finally, the rider wore some kind of helmet. At first Mattie had thought it was a motorcycle helmet, black like the rest of his gear, but when the rider turned to face her, she saw that there was no face framed by the helmet, not even a bubbled visor over a face. Rather, it seemed to have some kind of binoculars embedded in the front of it, like stubby opera glasses, with a louvered breathing apparatus beneath it like the lower half of a gas mask.
The horse stopped and dipped its head twice, breathing hard. She heard the clink of the snaffle bit. The rider held the reins and the helmet turned, the binoculars rotated into view. They looked like a pair of 35-millimeter camera lenses. They settled on Mattie, half crouched in the shadow of the house with an empty flare gun in her hands. Clearly, the technology had located her. And, as she and the intelligence behind those lenses both knew, firing that flare had joined her irrevocably to one side of the struggle.
For a petrified moment, all was tableau in the stroboscopic brightness of the magnesium flare. Mattie could not be sure that this warlike apparition was entirely human, but she had no doubt that it intended to do no good, here on the Cloverleaf, no matter what it was. Had she time, she might have screamed.
But she didn’t have any time at all, and in fact her acute observation of this startling anthropoid on a horse lasted a mere second. For as soon as the flare ignited, Scott bellowed from the darkness, somewhere beyond the front of the house, “Freeze, you motherfuckers! Police!” even as Curly was saying, “Shit, Jed, what the hell you got—” And long before the flare went out the rider was unshouldering his weapon and half off the other side of the horse, even as Curly was halfway into roaring back at Scott, “The hell you say, you dry, gulchin’ sonsabitch—” But Curly didn’t get out the whole of his last imprecation.
Curly was a good man with a penchant for touchy work but he never had a chance with this crowd. Scott had a bead on him with the AR-15, less than eighty yards away. Eddie was prepared to blast him with the shotgun, even though at fifty yards he was a little too far away to do more than dust Curly’s hat off for him, or maybe get some bird-shot in his eyes. But it was the rider on Jed’s horse, festooned with weaponry, who had rolled the hand grenade under the Chevy as he’d approached it, and only he had any idea it was there at all until it exploded, taking the gas tank and the police ammo in the trunk with it, and blew Curly, the Chevy, and everybody’s hopes of earthly salvation higher than the roof of the barn, just before the flare went out.
Chapter Fifteen
THE OVERWHELMING SILENCE OF THE DESERT NIGHT REALLY emphasized the squealing in his right ear, how bad it had become. It wasn’t as loud as the horse’s hoofbeats, or the snorting and flatulence of the beast, but nearly as loud as the creaking of the saddle, the jingling of the tack, and Tucker Harris was so distracted by the resultant inner musings, conversations, and calculations that he barely noticed the yaps and howls of a whole pack of coyotes, running or narrowing in on a kill or whatever it was that coyotes did, not far away. He realized, with a start, that they were there, the sounds a bunch of coyotes make can be quite chilling, even to a man fairly confident that, sitting a horse, he’s taller than even a tall coyote, and therefore somehow superior.
Clop clip clop clop, a few long-legged paces more, and Tucker Harris decided that it might easily be the corpse of Jedediah Dowd the coyotes were howling over.
Hey, turn it up, man, the little devil said testily, adding, wanna sing a Te Deum while they eat him from the toes up, like the Donner Party?
That reminded Harris that his feet, now shod in the envy of every shoeless Contra, the finest jungle combat boots available, had in fact been badly lacerated, torn to shreds by sharp basalt and spiny desert shrubs, as he’d stalked Jedediah.
Knapweed, the little devil pointed out, consulting a file marked Flora of the Dry Side, scourge of the Northwest, and vulcanized basalt, like walking on broken ashtrays.
Harris had borne this discomfort stoically, and not without a certain satisfaction. Enough pain and the tweedles and screeches that harassed any vestige of tranquillity were reduced to mere background radiation, leaving him free to think more or less clearly or, as he preferred, to study the pain. He liked to think of pain as an entity separate from his consciousness per se, which, tumefy as it might, he, Tucker, could stand aside and watch the cumulative nerve panic burgeon and grow into a tall, upended sausage. This sausage, swell and twist, distend and sweat, loom up out of sight beyond the umbrella of his waking awareness as it might, would remain, thanks to rigorous discipline, as a point of honor with him, a separate entity. Separate and, he liked to think, a challenge he enjoyed every time. Take over as many circuits as it needed, this protuberance of pain could never touch his real, inner self, which stood contiguous with it, like an ant next to the indigo nipple of a large, contusion-hued balloon. It was the initial flare of pain you had to stand away from, so as to not get caught up and carried away by it.
Something else had already gotten away with him.
You flatter me, the devil said, fiddling with the back of his computer. I always give you free rein in combat situations.
Bullshit, said Tucker, looking beyond the tumescence of his pain which, it seemed to him, loomed between himself and a portion of the night sky, blacking out Orion’s Belt. Even as you lie, you’re hooking up the Joystick.
That’s true, said the little devil, no longer bothering to be coy about the length of computer cable dangling behind his back. I can’t deny myself a little fun and, besides, you’re lik
ely to be outnumbered, back at the ranch.
Dowd is—was—no slouch, Tucker muttered, not without some satisfaction. But his pleasure was tempered by his respect for an old comrade in arms, Jedediah Dowd, who’d fought as best he knew how, and lost. He’d been pretty good. A little too human, like most of them. But, mainly, a little rusty in the martial arts.
At any rate, we pulled it off without the Joystick.
When was it you first noticed, my dear host organism, the little devil said, fingering the ports on the back of his machine, squinting to read the labels in the shadowy chamber, that the devil’s tail has an RS-232C plug on the end of it?
Tucker shuddered. It was a long time after I noticed the Joystick.
The devil shook his head and smiled, gently. An avuncular smile, suffused by empathy for the human condition. Ah, he said then, a little late.
Indeed, sighed Harris. But nobody wants to quit.
Oh, on the contrary, the devil smiled broadly, malevolently, many do just that. And for a lot fewer reasons than you have. He chuckled, and plugged his tail into the back of the computer. He’d once actually painted it gray, his tail, to gain a little more time, but that had been long ago, back before people had evinced their unsuspicious reverence for all things computorial. But on the other hand there was the small gratification of having anticipated a fad, and turned it, if only temporarily, to his own advantage. Only a few flecks of gray remained, now, and on the whole it looked pretty amateurish, peeling like the tail of a sunburned rat, as it snaked away from the port on the back of the computer, under the table and back around his ergonomic chair, and up into the base of his spine. The prehensile interface.
O.K., the devil said, as if to himself. He slid a hand away from his behind along the tail and whipped it out of his way as he came back around his work station. Now where’s that pornography.…
Harris rode uncertainly, stiff in the saddle. He really didn’t know all that much about horses, and the magnificent silence of the desert bugged the shit out of him, allowing as it did for the little devil to come in louder and clearer than at almost any other time in his career. At least in Nam there had been snakes and centipedes and scorpions and shit, hanging upside down on the bottomsides of banana leaves in the pitch black unique to a skyless night beneath the jungle canopy, inches from his face, to distract him. Have you ever lain on your back in the liquefied humus beneath utterly dark, sweating foliage, forbidden by the edict of certain failure from emanating the least wavelet of sound, and held the stinger of a scorpion between two fingers of one hand, while you crushed the life out of the creature—mandibles and head, four or six of its eight legs, and pincers too—in the fist of the other? It sounds just like eating a fresh tortilla chip, laden with guacamole. Feels that way… too.… Don’t… taste… so hot.…