by Jim Nisbet
Mattie pushed away a proffered slice of tomato and began to cry. “Oh, Lize,” she said, wiping tears with the corner of the bedsheet, noticing the gauze on her face again. If she looked down out of her left eye she could see an out-of-focus corner of white cotton padding on her cheek. “Lize, who were those awful people?”
Lize sighed, looked away, looked back. She looked at the slice of tomato in her hand and dropped it back onto the plate. “Honey,” she said, “they was your friends.”
“Thank you for speaking of them in the past tense.”
Lize nodded grimly. “You can say that again. Mebbe you kept some pitchers. They’re strowed all over Jed’s place like calves after a three-day blizzard.”
A calf bleated beyond the window.
Lize smoothed the hair back from Mattie’s forehead. Mattie had the slight fever Dr. Tumely had expected. “Course, they was all men,” she added tenderly. “It coulda been worse.”
Mattie shook her head hopelessly, unable to look at Lize directly, unable to lie still, tears falling on the bedsheet. “Oh, Lize, I’m so ashamed.…”
Lize stroked her hair. “Ashamed?” she said mildly, “Ashamed of what? You didn’t do anything. You didn’t even shoot anybody.” She waved her hand. “You just fell in with a rough crowd, that’s all.” Her voice softened. “A rough crowd.”
“How do you know? Could you tell?”
Lize looked at her. “Know what? That they was rough?” She shrugged and held up her hands. “It all kinda came to me in a flash,” she said dryly. “It looked kinda to me like a grizzly catching up with a salmon he’s just slapped up on the bank, or a sheep dog going bad on his first lamb, or, or…,” she dropped her hands, “. . . like a parakeet with a broken wing tryin’ to limp away from a tomcat. That dude, that thing, that varmint out there was fixin’ to skin you alive, and there’s no two ways about it.” She snapped her fingers. “No two ways about it. Don’t you remember?”
Mattie pulled the covers up to her chin and shook her head. This almost upset the food tray. “You were there?” she asked in a tiny voice.
Lize steadied the tray. “He had his knife out an’ everything. I’m not shittin’ you, if you’d a been a rabbit with your legs blowed out from under you, he’d a took you by your ankles and bashed your brains out on a post, then he’d a skint you. And that looked to me like just what he was fixin’ to do.”
Mattie stared at her. Opera. She was hearing whathisname begging Mimi not to die.
Lize skimmed a bit of food off the top of a molar in the back of her mouth with her pinky and studied it. Then she flicked it off the end of her finger toward the fireplace. “You know the feller?”
Mattie stared at Lize.
Lize looked at Mattie.
Mattie moved her head to one side, a kind of No.
Lize made a face and watched Chief Joseph nod in the sun. “Just as well.”
They were silent. She could see cottonwood leaves falling past the window. Chief Joseph put his head down and sighed. Another knot popped in the fire. After a while she found her voice.
“What stopped him?” she asked softly.
Lize cleared her throat. “Spencer .56,” she said matter-of-factly, still watching Chief Joseph. Mattie looked at the gun, hung over the mantelpiece. “Louie Lammer’s favorite gun, seems like,” Lize reminded her. “Sonofabitch knows what he’s about, seems like.” She’d always pronounced L’Amour’s name “Lammer,” and Mattie had long since given up trying to correct her. “It’s a straight shootin’ sonofabitch. Goddamn,” she ducked her head and clicked her tongue. “Packs a wallop, too.” She turned and looked at Mattie. Her weathered brown, wrinkled face showed no emotion. She turned again to watch the dog dozing. “You couldn’t get all the water out from behind the Grand Coulee Dam with a atom bomb,” she said with grim satisfaction, “faster’n that gun there emptied that man’s head.”
Mattie stared at her. “Emptied…” She couldn’t repeat it.
Lize nodded and looked at Chief Joseph. “Done him a favor; him and you and the world all three. Not a minute too soon, neither.” She indicated the food on the tray, barely touched. “You finished?”
Mattie said nothing.
Lize took the tray into the kitchen and began to wash up.
Mattie stared at the gun over the fireplace. So they were all dead. Harris, Eddie, Scott, Jed, Curly, and who knew how many others wherever Jed had been holding Harris. And if Lize hadn’t gotten there when she had?
The minimum would still have been six. She could see the black, mechanical figure towering over her, the huge fire behind so infernal she could only make out occasional glints off the strange lenses in the mask over the apparition’s face. So certain had she been that it was death come for her that she’d not even protested, could make not so much as a cheep. She lay there waiting for it, like… a frog, watching its snake.
And she’d “slept” with the man, not forty-eight hours ago? A week?
“Hand me that glass, there.” She jumped. Lize was standing next to her, her hand out. Mattie looked wildly about her, saw the empty water glass and, reaching across with her good hand, passed it over to her.
“Tumely said you should take two a them goddamn codeine tablets when the hurt gets to be too much.”
Mattie looked at the bottle of pills.
Lize grunted and returned to the kitchen.
“Then git dressed,” she added over her shoulder. “We got to git you into town.”
Mattie was horrified. “What for?”
Lize stood in the doorway of the kitchen drying her hands on a white and red checkered cloth. “X-rays and a cast,” she said. “Lyle couldn’t do that stuff out here, even if he is a passable veterinarian.”
“I’m too sick.”
“That’s why we’re goin’.”
“You should just shoot me,” Mattie wailed.
“Yeah, yeah,” Lize said disgustedly. “I done enough shootin’ for one week.” She pulled the towel through the handle on the refrigerator door.
“What about the money? I can’t afford doctoring.”
Lize shook her head. “Git dressed.”
On the way into town Mattie asked Lize about the sheriff.
“What sheriff?” Lize said to the windshield.
Mattie stared at her. “Didn’t you call the sheriff?”
Lize continued to stare straight ahead.
“Lize? Didn’t you call the sheriff?”
“What for?” she said sullenly. “A buncha goddamn dope dealers?”
“What about the fire? Didn’t anybody see the fire?”
“Well, I saw the fire. But then, I was lookin’ for trouble.”
“What made you come out there, anyway?”
Lize shook her head, slowly. “Hunch.”
“What kind of hunch?”
“I dunno. I always kinda wondered how Jedediah was keepin’ that place going. I knew the Cloverleaf would soak up any kind of small money he managed to get his hands on, til it looked like he’d never had any money at all, not atall. Better ranchers than Jedediah Dowd have gone belly up tryin’ to keep that place going. What the hell did he ever know about livestock and grain crops? Shoot. Any money Jedediah got a hold of would disappear into that spread like a baby’s tear in a sponge bed.”
Lize drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. Mattie could see she was uncomfortable, which could only mean that she was trying to decipher human emotions. Lize could explain to a T what a cow was doing, or how a weasel would work a henhouse, or what an owl was waiting on a post for. But people mystified and annoyed her. “I mean,” she finally said, “I could accept he was scarred by, you know…” She gestured, looked out the window, looked forward again. “. . . By the war and all, by the way his father treated him, by never knowin’ his ma and all… but he never… after all them years, he never…” She didn’t finish, but Mattie understood. In spite of all Lize and Jed had been through, after everything she had done for him as a child, after she’d spent years ke
eping a home for him to run to, and defending the boy against his drunken father, after all that, when Jed had returned to Washington, he’d not once gone to visit Lize. The first Lize even knew of his reappearance here had been when she ran into him on one of his rare trips to the Grange, and even then she’d had to drag a hello out of him. Jedediah represented one of Lize’s few forays into human entanglement—Mattie being one of the others. When Jed acted as if they barely knew each other, Lize was hurt far more than she’d ever let on. She couldn’t see, as Mattie had, that Jed had been hurt so much in his life by the very people who were supposed to love him that he was likely never going to trust anybody with his love again. Not Lize, not Mattie, not anyone. But neither knowledge nor ignorance of this trauma would have protected Lize. She hadn’t even mentioned the Grange incident to Mattie, but, Dip being Dip, Mattie heard all the details soon enough. Failing to recognize in Jed behavior very typically her own, Lize chalked it up to ingratitude. And that terminal experience was all she needed to decide Jed had grown up into something that wasn’t worth spit.
Lize stuck out her lower lip. “And then that bastard killed him.…” The jeep hit a bump and jumped. The air was cool inside, even though Lize had put up the windshield and the hardtop was back on. Chief Joseph stood up and spread his legs, the better to deal with the jolts. His head pointed forward between Mattie and Lize, eagerly watching the road, patiently swaying. He liked to ride.
Mattie pressed her. “So you drove out there to look into Jed’s finances?”
Lize scratched her head under her hat. “Yeah, yeah. I didn’t like them two you was with. The little one was all right.”
“Eddie,” Mattie said, watching the windshield. The sky was overcast for the first time in months. “He was called… Eddie. Scott was all right, too. I like… liked… them both.…”
The dirt road ended at the highway, and they stopped to wait for a tractor and trailer highballing toward Spokane.
“I don’t know,” Lize said, after she’d wrestled the jeep up onto the highway and changed gears. “I was just driving around, at first. I got to thinking about things, and had just pretty much decided to drive out there and have it out with Jed, woman to man, about the way he…” She cleared her throat. “Anyway,” she continued, “he’d always liked guns. So I brought the .56 along, thinking we could ride out somewheres and shoot the thing for a while, and talk about it some. And I… I knew you was there, maybe to… to help some.…” She shook her head. “Ah, hell.” She pulled the gearshift into fourth and fell silent.
They rode for awhile.
“How long were you there?” Mattie asked.
Lize sighed. “Long enough to see I was outgunned. I was comin’ up the river road there when all these fancy vehicles passed me going the other way. I kept havin’ to pull over for ’em, ’cause none a them woulda made tryin’ it theirselves. Except them two Samurai things. I come up on them and they went right off the damn road, lickety-split. Showin’ off their four-wheel capabilities, I reckon. One of ’em even ran into the fence, to impress me.
“But it was all them license plates made me impressed. And suspicious. They were from all over the place. I noticed your San Francisco buddy’s Chevrolet wasn’t amongst them. Nor you nor Jed, neither. I stopped and thought about it. It really did look like I was gettin’ into somebody else’s business. So, I figured, what the hell. I’ll just have me a little walk. So I took up the Spencer and me and Chief Joseph took us a walk.
“There’s a butte hard by Jed’s place. You have to go around it to get up his road. It’s a pretty place, too. You can see for miles, from the top of it. Me and the Chief set up there awhile. Saw Jed ride north, toward the river. Saw a bunch more cars leave. Watched the sun set. Saw that feller settin’ on the hood a your friends’ Chevy with a rifle. Saw it get dark. Heard that shot. Heard that horse come back. It sounded like Jed’s horse. But the feller on it didn’t know how to ride, he was gittin’ throwed ever’ which way. He passed a hundred yards from me.
“Not long after all that war stuff started.
“I knew I was outgunned, and outgunned bad, too. So I set and watched. Waited to see how it threshed out. That burnin’ barn helped me to see everything, plain as day.”
Mattie had begun to brood over horrible memories.
“It was just luck,” Lize said after a minute.
“What’s that?” Mattie whispered.
“It was just luck that he kept you for last. Wouldn’t have done much good for me to go in there with all them fellers shootin’ them fancy guns like that. He was bound to go, though, if it makes you feel any better. He wasn’t goin’ to leave that place alive.”
Lize looked at her. “Who was he, anyway?”
Mattie shivered. In spite of the codeine her arm ached.
Lize grunted and turned back to her driving. “He killed Jed. I knew it when he come back with Jed’s horse. Jed would have been particular about his horse.” She reached to the dash to turn on the heater. Nothing happened. “Goddamn,” she said. “Fergot. Thing’s broken.”
The remark reminded Mattie of Scott and Eddie and the Chevy’s useless radio. The memory made her smile suddenly. Then her eyes misted with tears.
It was cold in the cab of the jeep. The wind buffeted the little vehicle fiercely. It did indeed feel like Douglas County was going to go straight from summer to winter, with no transition. Mattie tucked her broken wrist under the sheepskin coat. Chief Joseph dropped his head on her shoulder.
“The letters…”
Lize looked at her.
“The letters!” Mattie repeated, shrugging the Chiefs head off her shoulder and sitting up. “Did you get the letters?”
Lize frowned. “What letters?”
“Jed’s mother’s letters. They’re in a box,” Mattie said urgently, “a rosewood box.”
“What box? Where?”
“In the house! In Jed’s house! Did you get them?”
Lize stared at her. “I remember them letters,” she said quietly. “I’d forgot Jed had them.”
“In his house! In a box especially for them.”
“In his house,” Lize said, subdued. “I remember. You told me about them; they was from his mother.”
“Yes! Yes!” Mattie, animated for the first time since she’d regained consciousness, put her good hand on Lize’s shoulder. “Turn around. We’ve got to go get those letters.”
Lize stared at her.
“What’s the matter?”
Lize said nothing.
“Lize. Lize!” Mattie shook her. “What is it?”
“Mattie,” Lize said sternly, “After I shot that, that…”
“I don’t care about him!” Mattie shouted fiercely. “Turn around!”
“You were out cold. I couldn’t get you to come to. You were covered with blood, some his, some yours. I couldn’t see how you were hurt or where. There was dead people all over the place. I didn’t know what was wrong with you. There was no phone there, the place was on fire…” Lize turned and looked at her. “I had to go get the jeep. To carry you out. It was about a two-mile round trip.…”
Mattie had a bad feeling, an overwhelming feeling of foreboding, a certainty that, in spite of everything that had happened, she hadn’t yet heard the worst of it. She sat back in her seat and stared straight ahead. Voices whispered imperceptibly in her head. Though she could see five miles down the highway, not another vehicle was in sight.
Lize steered the jeep off the roadbed and stopped. Dust billowed away to the southeast from under the wheels. The engine idled too fast. Lize pushed off the choke with a curse. Mattie continued to stare straight ahead.
Lize turned to her. “I carried you and that damn gun about a hundred yards from the house,” she said, “maybe more.”
Mattie nodded imperceptibly, as if her neck were made of expensive china and might break. A tumbleweed blew across the road fifty yards ahead of them. The wind was blowing so hard the tumbleweed wasn’t even tumbling, it was
airborne. The canvas snapped over their heads.
“I didn’t know if there was more of them out there or what,” Lize continued firmly, “so I had to hide you in the brush and leave Chief Joseph to watch after you, while I went and fetched the jeep.”
Mattie waited.
“When I came back I was in a hurry. I had you and the Chief loaded up and was turning around to head out…”
The canvas tugged at the frame overhead.
“The whole sky was lit up. It was awful bright. You could hear the timbers popping, and stuff caving in. There was smoke and flames pouring out of it.”
Now Mattie knew. Before Lize told her, she knew. She turned and looked at her friend. For the first time in her life, Mattie saw tears in Lize’s eyes. And fear. She was afraid of something. Of what? Of Mattie? No. Not of Mattie: for Mattie. She was afraid for her, for Mattie. For the first time in thirty-five years Mattie saw that Lize wanted Mattie to tell her, Lize, that it was all right. She could see it in Lize’s eyes. Tell me you’re all right. You know I done the right thing. Tell me you know it.
“The house burned down,” Mattie said. Then she made it a question, she asked it in a perfectly reasonable voice. “The house burned down?”
Lize shook her head, and for a moment, just for a wonderful, horrible moment, Mattie thought she’d guessed wrong.
But she wasn’t wrong. Lize was still shaking her head, but she said, “The roof had been burning the whole time, Mattie. All I thought was, it’s a damn good thing I dragged her this far. It was already way gone, it was catching up with the barn. If I’d left you behind the house, back of the kitchen…” She stared and shook her head at the memory.
“There’s no way there’s a damn thing left out there, Mattie. That fire was too hot, them damn paperback novels got that place goin’ as good as pouring gas on it, and all the rest was wood. The whole place went up. It was big, and it was hot. That fire melted down the nails in the walls and in those boys’ shoes. It melted the appliances in the kitchen, and the woodstove in the parlor. It melted the fillings in their teeth and the guns they was using, too.”