by Jim Nisbet
It was odd, too, how Mattie acted in church. She went through the motions and everything. Stood when you’re supposed to stand, sat when you’re supposed to sit; but she wouldn’t say anything. No prayers, nor even hello. Wouldn’t sing, either. Just went through the motions.
But nobody complained about Mattie’s waitressing. She was as good a waitress as Mordecai had ever had in that cafe. Always ready with more coffee, always right there, as soon as you sat down, with the menu and a glass of ice water. Got the food right to the table, as soon as it came off the grill, so that it was still good and hot, no matter how crowded the place was. And she never got her orders confused, or hardly ever. She acted like she was really grateful for her job and your patronage, that one. You couldn’t fault her.
She didn’t say much, though. And pretty as she was in spite of her age, she kept to herself. A funny thing, too. No real call for it. Why, you’d hardly notice that scar on her cheek if she talked it up some, showed a little of her old spunk, maybe wore a little makeup.
A few weeks after Mattie went back to work, somebody drove up Jed’s road looking for permission to hunt deer, and discovered the big mess at the Cloverleaf. There was quite a scandal about it. Later someone came forward and said they’d seen the glow from the fire that night, but said they’d assumed it had been on the reservation, since it was up that way, and thought no more about it. There was a big investigation. They came to Mattie, and she was in shock about it, but the Lord gave her strength and she was adamant. Jed Dowd had stood her up and she hadn’t seen him since. Mordecai backed her story, he’d watched her wait around the cafe for two hours that night, and no Jed, and he hadn’t seen him since either. It was the talk of the county for weeks, but nobody ever figured out what had happened. The only body that was intact enough to identify was Scott’s, the one with the automatic weapon next to it, a harness with a live hand grenade, the blood-soaked paisley shirt. Any identification would have to come from dental records, and nobody had any idea where to look for those. Everybody was real surprised it wasn’t Jed’s body. Then they decided that the body in the front room must have been Jed, but since it was burned totally beyond recognition, the heat so intense it had all but melted the fillings out of the teeth in the skull, they had no way of being absolutely sure.
Lize had long since been back up there, to forestall Mattie doing it herself, to confirm that the box of letters had burned with the rest of the place. They had. She found only a three-inch piece of the brass inlay of the chest unmelted, and brought it back to show Mattie, as proof that the letters had been reduced to ashes and blown away by the wind. Then she drove to Spokane and got a brand new set of used tires put on the jeep. Didn’t mention the trip to anybody.
Then there was a third body, found just about where the doorway to the kitchen from the living room must have been when the house was standing. In fact it was among the blackened hulks of Jed’s few kitchen appliances, mainly the stove and refrigerator. This one they couldn’t identify either, at first, because it too was burned beyond all recognition. Mattie knew that that body had to be Tucker Harris’, because they said the bones had been mixed up with melted-down plastic and metal, and was pretty well splintered up from all the ammunition exploding underneath it, from the intense heat. But still, until much later they had no lead, no way to identify the body, because they didn’t know where to look for dental charts. They only managed to decide, somehow, it wasn’t Jed.
Meanwhile, less than three weeks after Mattie had gone back to work, and a week before she got her cast cut off, winter came hard and early. For two days it got colder and colder, the clouds built up over the Cascades, the wind stopped. Then, the night of the third day, about an hour before they closed up the cafe, the snow came. Little icy flurries, at first, that spiraled down. Then it got thicker, and it took Mattie almost an hour to get home. Next morning, about two feet of snow covered the ground, and though snow fell but infrequently afterward, it never cleared off entirely for the rest of the winter.
So, it wasn’t until next spring that two cowboys, riding over to Jed’s range from the Two Bar, the next spread east, found a whole bunch of bones and clothes the coyotes and other varmints had scattered in and around Jed’s summer range shack. These would have been the remains of Uriah and Melvin, the two hands Jed had hired especially for the Rendezvous, and the first two men Tucker Harris had killed that night. Since he’d done it with a piece of piano wire, nobody could tell how they’d been killed, and it was only sheer speculation that connected them at all to the grisly fire on the Cloverleaf, nearly nine months before. And, since Jed had hired these two men from parts unknown, once again, no identification was forthcoming.
Jed had been killed out on the range, Harris had dumped the body in a ravine, and it was never found.
Next they found Harris’ truck, parked in an arroyo quite a way from the line shack and Jed’s ranch house. It had been thoroughly vandalized. All the tools, the Benzedrine, the exotic weapons, even the wheels and tires and the beer cooler, were gone. The plates had been stolen off another vehicle in San Diego nearly two years before. So that lead went nowhere.
Nobody ever did figure out what the hell all the shooting had been about, because any evidence of a dope deal had gone up in smoke in the barn fire.
After awhile, the opacity of the event began to remind people of the Big Divot, and any conversation that began with the Clover-leaf mystery would inevitably wind up comparing its inexplicable points to those of the Big Divot.
Finally, however, the authorities did get around to identifying the jawbone full of bad teeth they’d dug out of the charred and melted helmet found in the kitchen of the ranch house.
It was a year later, almost to the day of the fire: In fact, it was a year to the day before the fire, that two men came into the Dip Cafe.
Mattie was working, as usual, and, as she’d been ever since she’d fallen off a horse and been dragged a little bit by it, as everyone around Dip assumed, she was being very quiet. Sometimes you would catch her whispering to herself. But she was very quiet.
It was hot again. The two men were driving an unremarkable late model navy blue Ford, covered in dust. Both had on innocuous slacks and sport jackets, a little unusual around these parts. One had a tie, loosened, and the other wore a white shirt without a tie. He had a trimmed mustache, too, and longish hair, but looked pretty well groomed. The other had very thin sandy hair, and a receding hairline, like he wouldn’t be keeping his hair for very much longer. Neither one of them could have been thirty-five.
Jake Macbee was there, on a stool next to the cash register. It was a Tuesday, and he’d come up his route a day early, bitching about running empty. The two men took him in along with the rest of the place, but addressed themselves to Mattie. Mordecai was messing around with the garbage cans out back.
“Ma’am,” one of them nodded.
Mattie smiled the little distracted half-smile she’d taken to using since the accident, looking neither of the strangers in the eye. They immediately saw that she was a little “off,” and too skittish or shy to be of much use to them, and they exchanged looks to that effect. The one with the mustache shrugged and chewed his gum while he scanned the place, hands in pockets, without much interest. He’d met lots of people, in this part of the country, a little “off.” He was getting used to it.
“Coffee?” Mattie said.
The sandy-haired one pulled out a little thin wallet and showed a badge.
“We’re from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, miss,” he said, observing she wore no wedding band. In fact, she wore no jewelry at all, except for a small brooch that seemed to be a schematic of a fish. Another Christian. Another “off” Christian. He cleared his throat as he held the badge in front of Mattie. “No coffee, thanks. We’re looking for a man we think passed through this country, and we’d like to talk to anyone who thinks they might have seen him?”
Jake stopped his coffee cup in mid-arc between the saucer and h
is mouth, and cocked an ear.
“Oh,” said Mattie. She’d never met anyone from the FBI before, but she was not really interested in what these men were doing, just as she was not really interested in what anybody was doing. All the same, she called on a little interior celestial music to calm her.
The man with the sandy hair dropped two photographs on the counter.
Mattie stared at the two pictures with dull eyes. She remembered the face. But at this point she’d become so introverted, so withdrawn from any demonstrative behavior other than tacit complicity, that, seeing this face she knew, she simply smiled and opened her hands, as if to say, what’s this? Yet another stupid request? If I’ve told one person, I’ve told a thousand. Only on Fridays. We serve fish only on Fridays. Whereas, indeed, invisibly, she was traversing a much deeper field of thought, along the lines of, I’m safe in His hands or, if this is it, who cares. But her gesture accompanying either of these thoughts would read, to nearly anyone, as exactly identical.
“What’s he done?” Jake said, leaning over for a look.
The man with the sandy hair looked at Jake. “Seen him?”
Jake squinted and thought. “Naw,” he said, scratching his two days’ growth, “naw, I…” He frowned.
The man with the mustache was looking at Mattie. “Miss?”
Mattie said tonelessly, watching the pictures, “Yeah, he was in here last year, about this time.…”
The two men exchanged a glance. “You remember him,” the sandy-haired one asked, “from a year ago?”
“Uh-huh,” Mattie nodded, “he… he made a pass at me.”
Mattie looked at Jake. “Remember, Jake? You were here.” Her eyes were dull, almost glassy.
Jake frowned and shook his head uncertainly. No, he didn’t remember any such thing.
The man with the mustache studied the scar on Mattie’s cheek for a moment, then exchanged a glance with his partner.
The FBI man looked back at her and chewed his gum. “A pass, huh?”
Jake indicated the photographs. “What is he? He looks mean.”
Mattie turned to replace the coffeepot on the burner.
The man with the mustache looked at Jake and laughed a short, mirthless laugh. “He is, guy,” the man said, chewing his gum so that it snapped loudly. “He’s real mean. The meanest and the best.”
“Zero tolerance,” said the other. “Long before they thought up the category.” He slid the two photos off the counter, onto the palm of his hand, and replaced them in his jacket pocket.
Jake watched the pictures disappear. “The best? Best what?”
“Best agent,” the man with the mustache said.
“Hey,” said the sandy-haired one.
“What the fuck, Tyson,” the mustache said, “I mean, he ain’t checked in in a goddamn year.”
The sandy hair hesitated. “Yeah, but—”
“Right?” the mustache insisted. “Right?”
The sandy hair said nothing.
“So,” said the mustache, rolling his eyes back to Mattie, then Jake.
Jake frowned and passed the palm of his hand over his white whiskers. “Agent?”
“Drug Enforcement Agent. DEA.”
Jake pointed at the pocket with the two pictures. “That mean lookin’ so-and-so is a cop?”
The mustache was nonchalant. “Last time we saw him, he was.”
“Sort of a cop, anyway,” the other interjected. “We’d like to find him and talk to him about it.”
“Why?” Jake asked dumbly. “Is he lost?”
The mustache wasn’t amused. “We haven’t seen him lately,” he said thinly. He’d obviously tired of giving out a lot more answers than he’d been receiving. “Let’s go,” he said to the sandy-haired man.
“Hey,” Jake said. “What’s his name?”
“Tucker Harris,” the mustache said impatiently, even as Mattie matter-of-factly thought it. Jake nodded blankly. You could practically see the two nouns dart into Jake’s near ear and float out the other, forgotten.
The mustache opened the door, letting the sandy-haired man walk out ahead of him.
“Hey,” Jake said eagerly, “if I see him should I tell him you’re lookin’ for him? Or should I keep quiet until I can call you guys?”
“Either way, fella,” said the mustache, leaving.
“Did you leave them a card?” said his partner from outside.
“I only got two left,” was the response. The door closed behind them.
“Jeez,” said Jake, turning back to the counter, “can you beat that?”
“What?” said Mordecai, reappearing in the pass-through window with a stack of frozen hamburger patties. Mattie was looking right at him, and couldn’t help but notice that Mordecai looked very relieved about something. Parking tickets in a sordid past? quipped the voice distantly. The music had faded. Mattie smiled one of the quick inscrutable grimmaces Mordecai had learned to ignore.
Mordecai smiled guiltily. “Beer?” he asked, though he knew better.
Mattie shook her head. She didn’t drink anymore.
Jake hunched over the counter and caught the rim of his cup between his lips. “A lost cop,” he chuckled. He took a loud sip of coffee.
Mattie poured herself a cup of coffee. She took it to the booth farthest away from Jake and sat down, facing away from him. She had taken up smoking lately, and now she lit a cigarette. She inhaled deeply and blew smoke at the window. Beyond, the innocuous navy blue Ford pulled onto the highway, heading north. For just a moment the fog lifted from her mind and she fidgeted. She thought, for perhaps the one-thousandth time, that she should have gotten those letters away from Jedediah Dowd when she first laid eyes on them—when? Two years ago? Three? Whenever. When she’d had the chance. When she first met him. When she’d first read them. When she realized what they were. The second or third or tenth time she realized what they were. In any case, she hadn’t acted in time. And as a result of her negligence two things had been destroyed. Something beautiful, and her main chance. It really ate at her, that those letters had gotten away. The knowledge polluted her life.
“Cheer up,” the voice said. “You’ve got Me, now.”
Ten thousand voices lifted in song.
ALSO BY JIM NISBET
AVAILABLE FROM THE OVERLOOK PRESS
WINDWARD PASSAGE
978-1-59020-194-7
Hardcover • $25.95
THE OCTOPUS ON MY HEAD
978-1-4683-0710-8
Paperback • $15.95
“Sure, Nisbet breaks all the rules, but that’s really the whole point. His novels are the literary equivalent of road trips, and a good road trip follows no map.”
—BOOKLIST
“Jim Nisbet is a lot more than just good… powerful, provocative… remains in the mind long after the novel is finished. Nisbet’s style has overtones of Walker Percy’s smooth southern satin, but his characters—losers, grifters, con men—hark back to the days of James M. Cain’s twisted images of morality.”
—THE GLOBE AND MAIL
THE OVERLOOK PRESS
New York
www.overlookpress.com
ALSO BY JIM NISBET
AVAILABLE FROM THE OVERLOOK PRESS
LETHAL INJECTION
978-1-59020-195-4
$12.95 paperback
DARK COMPANION
978-1-59020-202-9
$13.95 paperback
THE DAMNED DON’T DIE
978-1-59020-196-1
$13.95 paperback
OLD AND COLD
978-1-59020-915-8
$13.95 paperback
THE SPIDER’S CAGE
978-1-59020-198-5
$14.00 paperback
PRELUDE TO A SCREAM
978-1-59020-199-2
$16.95 paperback
“Sure, Nisbet breaks all the rules, but that’s really the whole point. His novels are the literary equivalent of road trips, and a good road trip follows no map.” —BOOKLIS
T
ALSO AVAILABLE AS E-BOOKS
THE OVERLOOK PRESS
New York
www.overlookpress.com