Spider’s Cage

by Jim Nisbet

  ALSO BY JIM NISBET

  —NOVELS—

  The Damned Don’t Die

  (AKA THE GOURMET)

  Lethal Injection

  Death Puppet

  The Price of the Ticket

  Prelude to a Scream

  The Syracuse Codex

  Dark Companion

  The Octopus On My Head

  Windward Passage

  A Moment of Doubt

  Old and Cold

  —POETRY—

  Poems for a Lady

  Gnachos for Bishop Berkeley

  Morpho

  (with Alastair Johnston)

  Small Apt

  (with photos by Shelly Vogel)

  Across the Tasman Sea

  —NONFICTION—

  Laminating the Conic Frustum

  —RECORDINGS—

  The Visitor

  For more information, as well as MP3s of

  “The Visitor” and “The Golden Gate Bridge,” visit

  NoirConeVille.com

  Copyright

  This edition first published in the United States in 2012 by

  The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

  www.overlookpress.com

  For bulk and special sales, please contact sales@overlookny.com

  First published as Le Chien d’Ulysse by Rivages/Noir Inedit, Paris

  Lyrics for C’est La Vie by Jack White and Jack Stark © Universal Music

  Publishing Group, EMI Music Publishing

  Copyright © 1993, 2012 by Jim Nisbet

  The author extends his hearty thanks to the editors of Pangolin Papers

  wherein the first chapter of this novel first appeared in English, under the

  title Ulysses’ Dog, and to the readers of that magazine, who awarded it

  the magazine’s very first Annual Fiction Prize.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

  transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

  including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval

  system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the

  publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection

  with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  ISBN 978-1-4683-0506-7

  CONTENTS

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thireen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter One

  THE INDIGO THATCH OF STARS AND SPACE CONTAINED the desert night, the desert night contained a solitary building. Night and building evolved and moved imperceptibly, one about the other, cool and smooth like a pillow over a gun.

  The moonlight that filled the open door of the shack threw a bright nacre path from the threshold to the foot of a calico armchair. This pearly rectangle floated beneath an ochre gloom cast by a kerosene lantern that stood on a small table next to the chair.

  A tarantula stood beneath the table.

  It was a big tarantula, grey and silent, just inside the edge of the tongue of light. Its two forelegs stroked the little red flowers on the green cloth, one two, one two one. Outside in the desert night a coyote lifted its nose and howled.

  In the ensuing silence, the spider began its climb. The second pair of legs followed the first, bringing after them the third pair, and the fourth, bearing between them the tripartite body, the whole mechanism contriving without apparent effort to scale the nearly vertical pleats in the calico skirt.

  The kerosene lamp guttered softly. By the time the tarantula attained the underside of the swelling that defined the chair’s broad arm the lantern was flickering regularly. It emitted the thick sounds of a liquid hastily poured, and its inconstant light caused shadows to jump erratically on the walls and ceiling.

  These sensations did not deter the spider from its progress, no more than had the transit from light to dark at the edge of the doorway’s shadow, nor the howl of the coyote; but the protruding leaves of a book, opened face down over the top of the chairarm, now occluded its ascent. The big spider paused for a moment to patiently explore above itself with the two forelegs. Their tarsal claws scratched noiselessly about the upper edge of the book’s cloth cover, but could make no purchase by which to farther advance their attendant parts. Accordingly the spider surveyed beneath the overhang, first taking a step toward the back of the chair and then several toward the front, whereby this latter course at last it circumambulated the book, and came to stand on top of the scarred walnut finial that comprised the forward corner of the calico chair’s right arm. Here the tarantula paused again.

  High in the hills behind the cabin a coyote yipped three times into a howl that descended through a long and plaintive yodel into a modulating silence.

  The spider moved. The chair arm was sufficiently wide to cause the open book to lie almost flat upon it, and the eight legs rowed easily astride the cased spine and the faded symbols embossed there, hesitating only when, halfway along the binding, they encountered the first finely boned finger.

  It was the longest of four extending parallel the book’s title, three on one side of the spine, one, with a thumb, on the other.

  Just a slight hesitation, an adjustment to the change in the grade, preceded the starboard legs mounting the length of this finger. They passed over the arc of a gold ring, in which the lamplight gleamed like a cautionary roadsign. And soon all eight legs, rising in pairs, passed over the ridge of knuckles and into the fine white hair on the back of the hand, to the cuff of the shirt that met the hand at its wrist. Here again the spider paused over the occurrence of fabric, its two forelegs tested the cuff’s surface, very like the cotton calico draping the chair. One of its curious vanguard touched the first of the three silver-encircled mother of pearl buttons set along the slit of the cuff, one two, and withdrew.

  From without, a draft gently filled the room, and caused the kerosene flame to flare and deliquesce. The black cameo of an immense tarantula poised on the edge of a shapeless ridge swelled along the floor and up the bookcase against the wall beyond the side of the chair opposite the lamp, and receded. As if spurred by the temperature of this breeze drawn from the hills by the cooling valley floor, perhaps startled by it, the tarantula leapt halfway up the forearm, then scrambled past the elbow and rapidly ascended the upper arm before it paused, lifted the two forelegs, and scuttled along the shoulder to the point of the collar and the open vee of the shirt, and the throat exposed there.

  The spider touched the protruding adam’s apple, from which the neck curved straight up to the chin thrust toward the ceiling. It walked the throat, touching four times the jugular hollow, mounted the hinge of the stubbled jaw, and arrived at the mild swelling the cheek allows around the fissure of the mouth. Here it took a momentary interest in a fleck of spittle dried there, pivoting around it, testing it with the tips of the delicately crooked pair of legs, one two, one two one.

  Its body directly over the parted lips and the teeth exposed by them, the tarantula stopped. Its girth easily straddled the entire mouth—indeed, there were legs from the thin, silver hair on the high forehead to the point of the chin, and from e
ar to ear. Its body hung above the two nostrils, the underside of its abdomen grazed the tip of the hooked nose. Yet, not a line of the facial musculature so much as twitched; and though directly in the paths of the three passages designed for the movement of air, not a hair on the spider so much as fluttered. Perfectly groomed, quite undisturbed, the tarantula perched over the center of the upturned face.

  The coyote howled again.

  A moment later, as the spider discovered that the eyes, two one two, were open, one two, the kerosene lamp exhausted its fuel. The shadow on the bookcase limned the odd silhouette of the upturned chin, nose, and brow, and along this line a forest of lines that was the tarantula suspended between its legs, staggered along the line the facial features made between darkness and a further darkness, waxed and diminished and waxed again until the wall went black as the lamp extinguished itself.

  Outside the house little stirred in the moonlight. Thirty yards from the shack an oil pump, its electric motor and attendant machinery, made little noise. The bull wheel went around, the walking beam and pitman link nodded up and down in the unctuous whir of birthing lucre. When the breeze freshened, the chainlink fence surrounding the pump site soughed evocatively, much as a grove of cypress might. The pump was old, its venerable presence dated from the early thirties. The beam and wheel were of hewn douglas fir, deeply checked, the pitman of oak; only the bearings, brushes and the foot-valve, once, had ever required replacement as over the years, day and night, the pump nodded crude oil up from the deep, rich well in slow, uninterrupted strokes.

  The poise of the hunter and the stealth of the hunted endow the desert night with a kind of mild, impalpable suspense, belied by such a regular periodicity as a lone oil pump’s monotonous cycle, and the peaceful wheel of stars above. The barn owl, for example, whose shadow flicked briefly under the roof of the short porch, between the supporting post and the front door of the shack, was a nocturnal predator. Early in the evening, perhaps shortly before dark, its talons and wings might be heard scratching at the mouth of a hole chewed through the weathered siding under the ridge of the shack, as it exited its burrow for the night. This owl could make a meal of any kangaroo rat careless enough to expose itself on the wide, unprotected ribbon of paired ruts that led away from the yard in front of the shack—a seldom traversed, gullied track that wound up and down the hillocks and across the gravelled washes, making a road that zigzagged from oil pump to oil pump, and the occasional valve or tank or power pole, to the battered highway, thirteen miles away; and making not incidentally a fine site for predation.

  Tonight as yet, the barn owl remained hungry. From its customary perch atop the power pole next to the oil pump it had twice glided in absolutely silent pursuit of its supper, without success. Twice, kangaroo rats had avoided the efficient adios afforded by the beak and talons, springing like their marsupial namesake to safety with unerring agility, each forewarned by the jagged moonlit shadow preceding the owl’s arrival. In the first instance the alerted prey had escaped into a hole as handily as if it had completely memorized the dense network of tunnels and entrances that perforated the crust of the desert floor. Only the half-dormant rattlesnake, not quite dozed off this time of year, or yellow-eyed den of kitfox pups—discovered by a mistaken deadly slapstick in the frenzied dive for protection—and the rat’s own insatiable need to eat, spurring its forage, might induce the little creature to re-expose itself to the merciless eyes and beak set in the heart-shaped face of one of its most relentless fates.

  Nor would the barn owl have missed the second time, had not the target availed itself of the free zone beneath the dusty black 1959 Cadillac parked between the oil pump and the shack. While the owl scowled fiercely under the rocker panel, unable to maneuver beyond it, the kangaroo rat covered the ten feet between the car and the house in three hops and dove into a hole at the corner of the porch. The owl flapped aloft and circled the shack, passing under the narrow porch roof just to show it could still do its stuff, then glided up to the top of the power pole and settled there, arranging its wings, to watch the hole and wait. In spite of a nagging howl from a coyote not so far away, a competing consumer of kangaroo rats, the owl looked the very model of patience.

  And then a tarantula glided over the threshold of the shack’s front door, and over the cupped boards of the porch to the open ground beyond. In the moonlight between the shack and the first atroplex of the encroaching desert, a matter of some forty or fifty feet, the spider appeared as an animate shadow against the blue dust. Halfway across the yard the owl hit it with a thump. The dust swirled as the wings moved down to contain their prey. But the talons, expecting the firmer resistance of meat and tiny ribs, completely crushed the minimal substance of the invertebrate. The tarantula became a shapeless pulp, with a few bent legs twisting up out of the dust, still trying to walk, the wings closing down on them.

  Turning the owl’s distraction to its own advantage, the true meal appeared from under the pump fence and hopped across the ten open yards between the pump and the Cadillac, stopping for an atroplex seed along the way. The kangaroo rat stood in the shadows under the Cadillac eating the seed, and watching with big eyes as the beak stripped the talons of their evaporated prey.

  Chapter Two

  THE HAND TOOLED, HAND STITCHED AND SOFT, RUBBED labial soft, four hundred fifty dollar, El Paso commemorative, kangaroo hide cowboy boots, with engraved silver caps protecting the not too pointed, but pointed, points, the cream yellow-white stitching on the outer flank of each ruby boot portraying a gushing oil well, stepped carefully up the worn wooden treads of the creaking staircase in the front stairwell of the Scarf Building. Each step was taken so that the 2-1/2” heel of the boot landed just in front of the nose of the stair tread but not touching it, because the sole of the boot completely used up the ten inches of tread available to the purpose, the silver tips not allowed to bruise against the next riser.

  As they ascended the staircase, the boots were accompanied by a country-western melody, sung in the undertones and out of tune, basso profundo.

  Let’s go to Luckenback, Texas

  Willie an’ Waylon an’ the boys…

  At the second floor landing a rat, thinking that, as usual, it had the building to itself on Sunday morning, found itself cornered. It stood up on its hind legs and hissed at the intruder.

  Without breaking stride, one of the silver tips caught the rat in the abdomen and kicked it into the wall at the rear of the landing, breaking its back.

  This successful life we’re livin’

  Got us feudin’ like the Hatfields and McCoys…

  A quarter of the way down the front hall on the second floor the melody ceased to be audible, though its phrases continued fitfully under the singer’s breath. Halfway down the hall, the boots paused before a peeling wooden door with a frosted glass panel in its top half, upon which a sign painter had lettered

  Windrow

  PRIVATE

  The stranger turned the knob and pushed the door open, but did not enter.

  Martin Windrow saw the dude dressed up like a dry cleaning ad for western wear immediately, because, although it was eight o’clock on a Sunday morning, he was awake and walking across his office in front of the desk toward the convertible sofa. He noticed the silver tipped boots only after he’d registered an unusually large bulge under the cowperson’s jacket in the area of the left armpit, which, though the other two were more modest, gave the cowperson three bulges and made it likely that the cowperson was a cowwoman: about five foot six, one hundred seventy-five pounds, wearing an off-white western leisure suit, a red bandana knotted at the throat, a short brim stetson, red boots, and carrying a large gun in a shoulder holster.

  What the cowwoman saw was a naked man with an erection, very pale amidst brown office furniture, holding in his right hand a small jar of Vaseline. She assessed and appreciated the naked man as being fully alert to her presence, perhaps even alert to the location of her pistol. The cut of her leisure suit, th
e cut of her hair, her weight and the way she carried it, could fool a lot of people, she knew: but not this guy, with his careful eyes and his Vaseline.

  Still, the cowperson seemed to have the advantage, and smiled accordingly, thinly. The woman on the fold out couch, however, had not had time to arrange her expression. Nude and belly down, a twisted sheet wrapped around one of her legs, her cheek resting on one arm and facing the door, her half-opened eyes and wet, slightly parted lips betrayed a lingering allegiance to a different set of circumstances. Her expression had yet to begin to slip toward confusion, recognition, and disappointment.

  For a moment, the intruder said nothing. The office was silent enough to discern the hum of the refrigerator behind the door. When she stepped into the room, Windrow, expecting no trouble, nevertheless, found himself contemplating the employment of Vaseline as a weapon for self-defense.

  The woman on the foldout bed turned her face to the wall, making no effort to cover herself. “Go away Sal,” she said.

  “Get into some clothes, honey,” the cowwoman said evenly.

  “I just took them off Sal.”

  “I said get dressed.”

  Windrow, following this exchange with his eyes, thought he might say something.

  “Stay out of this Windrow,” the cowwoman suggested, “or I’ll grab you by that little pecker of yours and bat you around it like a pinwheel in March.”

  Windrow thought about that, and the phone rang behind him on the desk. He looked at the cowwoman called Sal. The phone rang again. Sal shrugged. Windrow answered it.

  “Help,” he said into it.

  “Wh—,” the other voice at the other end said. “Ahem. Good morning brother Windrow, and God Bless. This is Elder Osmond speaking, and I’d like to ask what you know about the Mormon Church?”

  Windrow held the phone out toward Sal. “For you,” he said.

  Sal didn’t move, but stared coldly at Windrow. Her eyes narrowed. They were grey. Windrow recognized an undisguised hatred for himself in this woman’s eyes, though he’d never seen her before.