Malus Domestica

by Hunt, S. A.

  On her right, a double-wide by itself, with a hand-built porch and naked wooden trellis, chintzy aluminum birds with their pinwheel wings, a deteriorating VOTE ROMNEY sign by the culvert. A wooden-slatted swing dangled by one chain from a rusty frame, the end jammed into the dirt.

  Next door, looming on the other side of a stretch of grass, was the monolithic 1168.

  “Slow down,” Robin blurted.

  The Chevy downshifted and the neighborhood lingered around them. The engine protested. Materializing from the deep night like the hull of some sunken ship was the gingerbread Victorian farmhouse she’d grown up in, her childhood home.

  All the lights were off, but the security lamp on a nearby power pole threw a pallid greenish cast across the front so that the black windows were more like eyes in a dead face.

  “This was my house,” she said, as if in a dream.

  Familiarity wreathed the window-frames and eaves of the house in mistlike echoes as she studied it from afar. Her memories were stale, and far from her groping mental hands. The house was a different color (she knew it as green, the pale green of dinner mints, with John Deere trim), but it was her house. She could feel the splintery porch railing in her hands, the words her mother had carved deep in the windowsills and that her father had painted over.

  “Nice place,” said Kenway. “Looks like somebody else lives there now. Or they’re about to move out.” A U-Haul truck and a blue car sat in the driveway, the car tinted black by the watery light. She didn’t recognize them.

  Something drew Robin’s eyes back to the trailer park across the street, and she traced the long gravel drive snaking along the east hip of the park to the old mission-style manor lurking on top of the hill. The Lazenbury House cut a tombstone silhouette against the Milky Way. All of the lights were off except for one window on the topmost floor. She’d never been up there, but she knew the rest of the house. She knew the blood-red walls, the piano, the Japanese-style front garden with its fish-pond. The sprawling, Eden-like garden out back. She knew the dirt-floored cellar, with its fire-blackened casks of wine and cramped dumbwaiter-style elevator.

  She’d practically grown up in that house. She remembered stories her mother had told her when she was a teenager, losing sight of little two-year-old Robin and searching the house for her, only to discover that she’d wandered over to Granny Mariloo’s house for cookies and apple juice. A few times, she’d cried for hours, banging on the door of an empty house. Robin had vague memories of her mother Annie marching resolutely up that long gravel drive barefoot, the wind pulling at her dress, to come fetch her daughter.

  Those were the days when her father had been his worst, and her parents had fought with each other the hardest. Disturbed by the shouting, Baby Robin would creep out and seek solace with sweet, maternal Marilyn.

  But she’d never been allowed on the top floor. Did the Lazenbury have an attic? She wasn’t sure.

  A shadow moved behind the window’s lacy curtain.

  “Okay,” she said, startled out of her reverie, and Kenway took that as an indication to keep on trucking.

  The forest swallowed them up again, and they followed their headlights down a long, winding two-lane under oppressive branches. Whenever there was a break in the trees, farmhouses sailed past in the cool twilight, surrounded by empty gray pastures tied to the earth with barbed wire and driftwood stakes.

  Underwood came out at a lonely T-junction watched by a grove of birches, where a single cabin peered through the trees with one yellow eye. Kenway pulled left without his turn signal and the Chevy roared north. A few minutes later, the headlights scraped across the belly of the interstate overpass and a little beyond, in the crook of a long, shallow curve, was Miguel’s Pizzeria, a single security lamp standing vigil by the shower building.

  Kenway pulled up onto the gravel drive, weeble-wobbling across the jagged ground. The bicycle in the back thumped in time with the truck’s creaking suspension.

  “That’s me.” Robin pointed at the plumber van.

  Kenway erupted into laughter. “Aha ha ha, Joel wasn’t kidding. That is truly sketch.” He must have seen the look on her face, because he immediately stopped grinning. “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—I mean…shit. I wasn’t trying to hurt your feelings. I’m sorry.”

  She waved him off. Cool indignity rested in her belly like a stone. “It’s okay. I know how it looks.”

  “If…if you don’t mind me asking, why are you living in an old panel van?”

  Opening the door, she started to get out but something seemed to press her back into the cab of the truck. Reluctance? Robin slid to the edge of the bench-seat, the fabric of her jeans buzzing across the tweed upholstery, but she just sat there. To hell with it, she thought, her eyes fixed on the sign out in front, a picture of a cartoon Italian chef perched on a cliff face. I’D CLIMB A MOUNTAIN FOR MIGUEL’S PIZZA! Might as well go ahead and drop the bomb. It’s going to happen eventually, might as well wreck this before it really gets going.

  Instead of meeting his eyes when she turned to him, she fixed on his giant hand, wrapped around the steering wheel. “I bought it with the money that was in my mom’s bank account when I was released from Blackfield Psychiatric a few years ago.”

  Kenway nodded, slowly. “Ahh.”

  She winced a smile at him in gratitude. “Thank you for the ride home. Oh!” Reaching into her pocket, she pulled out a scant wad of cash and peeled off two twenties, thrusting them in his direction. “Gas money. As thanks.”

  His eyes landed on the money, his eyebrows jumped, and he twitched as if he were going to take it, but he said, “No, that’s—it’s all right, I’m good.”

  “No, really. Take it.”

  Kenway pointed at the dash dials. “I’m full anyway. I filled up on the way to Movie Night.”

  Folding the money into a tube, Robin stuck it in the tape deck so that it looked like the stereo was smoking a cigarette. “There.” She slid the rest of the way out of the truck and shut the door, walking through the glare of his dingy headlights.

  On the driver’s side, she stood in the dark hugging herself. “Drive safe,” she said, feeling awkward. “Thank you again for the ride home.”

  He didn’t leave. “You’re an odd duck, Robin.”

  Ice trickled into her belly. “Thanks.”

  “I like odd ducks.”

  “Quack quack,” she replied, perhaps a little too coldly.

  The two of them had a short staring contest, the girl standing behind her van, Kenway sitting in his idling truck.

  She was about to bid him adieu and climb into her party-wagon when he spoke up. “If you’re ashamed about the psychiatric thing, don’t be. Lord knows I’ve spent enough time talking to shrinks that I shouldn’t have any room to talk.” Drumming a bit on the windowsill, he added, “So…yeah. I don’t know what your story is, but you won’t find any judgement here.”

  Robin smiled. “Thanks.”

  “I don’t know how long you’re going to be in town, but I’ll be around. If you want a real bed to sleep on for a night, you’re welcome to crash at my place.” He crossed his fingers. “No creep stuff, scout’s honor. Just…you know, an offer. I guess. It’s there on the table.”

  “Okay.”

  She took hold of the rear door handle and started to open the door and climb in, but then had the idea to tell Kenway good night. When she turned to speak, he was already rolling the window up and putting the truck in gear. Robin stood there with one foot on her back bumper and watched the Chevy grumble around the parking area, crunching across the gravel and washing the pizzeria with its headlights. Kenway pulled up to the road, sat still for a moment, then lurched out and disappeared with a roar.

  She sighed and climbed into the back of the cold van.

  All of a sudden, her mobile candy-van nest didn’t look nearly as inviting as it had before. Robin stripped, kicked her fuzzy legs down into the sleeping bag, and lay down with a huff. “Shit,” she muttered to h
erself, regretfully wrenching a beanie down over her eyes.

  5

  “CASTLE ONE, THIS IS Castle two. Do you copy?” burped the radio in Delilah’s hands. The little girl crouched in the shadows by the corner of the building and gazed out at the night. The playground lights were a dazzling array of suns; white floodlights on the apartment block eaves made the jungle gym into a rib-cage of black shadow-bones.

  The day wasn’t done yet. Blackfield’s sky was a dark, watery indigo, and the sun was a hint of a bruise on the horizon. A giant silver dollar hovered in the dome of blue, the moon a translucent all-seeing face. A huge bunker of darkness loomed in the east, threatening rain.

  Delilah put the damp walkie-talkie against her chubby cheek and stage-whispered, “Yes, Castle!”

  The girl on the other end of the line sighed in exasperation. “That’s not how you say it, Lilah. That’s totally wrong. You say roger, Castle two, over. That’s how they say it in the armies.”

  Delilah sniffed. The evening dew on the grass was getting her socks wet. She hated wet socks.

  The droning of the cicadas made it hard to hear Ginny without having the radio turned all the way up, and didn’t that defeat the purpose of being ninjas? You weren’t supposed to hear ninjas. Though, she supposed, the cicadas made it easy to be sneaky. That monotonous wheeling buzz covered you like a blanket.

  “You didn’t say over,” she said into the walkie. She took a deep breath of that sharp cut-grass smell and coughed. “Are you sure ninjas use walkie-talkies?”

  “Yes. . . . Over.”

  “Ninjas don’t walk or talk. They hide in trees and jump over stuff and throw stars. I know. My dad lets me watch ninja movies with him. We have all the best ones.”

  “Well,” said Ginny. “The ninjas in this army use walkie-talkies. I got them for my birthday so the ninjas can use them. Over.”

  “Over.”

  “You didn’t say anything!” squealed Ginny.

  “You didn’t say over again!”

  “Over over over!”

  Delilah shrilled, “Over over over over over!” into the mike and it became a battle of who could blast the other off the radio saying “Over” the loudest, then fell apart into the high cackling of little girls.

  “I’m sorry I missed your birthday,” said Delilah. “I had to go to practice. My mom makes me. How old are you now? Seventy kabillion?”

  “Noooooo. I turned seven today.”

  “Good,” Delilah said into the radio. “Now we’re even. Oh! I’m really close to the base.”

  “How close?”

  Delilah looked up at the jungle gym and its birdcage shadow. “I’m like, really close,” she said, and then a shape peeled itself away from the darkness under the security lights.

  Ginny was making a break for it. The girl ran smack into the metal bars, catching herself with her hands and throwing her chubby legs up into the tangle of piping. She sat down and kicked her feet in satisfaction, peering around the complex like a hawk on the lookout for field mice.

  Delilah turned and crept alongside the base of the apartment building, loping around the corner, and then broke into a sprint down the sidewalk, past a row of identical front porches.

  Everybody else was holed up in their cookie cutter apartments, living room lamps lighting up windows with a honeyed glow. The detritus of a dozen childhoods lay scattered across the tiny front lawns: tricycles, various pieces of Fisher-Price playsets, plastic ray-guns, action figures.

  The parking lot flush with the sidewalk was populated with two-dozen vehicles of various makes, models, and conditions; one of them was her father Billy’s rattletrap pickup, a modest brown machine with OY painted on the tailgate, the T and OTA having faded away years ago.

  “Where are you?” Ginny said.

  Delilah keyed her mike. “You’ll never know if you don’t come looking! You can’t sit on the base, I can’t get near it. You’re cheating!”

  “Nuh-uh! . . . over.”

  “Yuh-huh! Over!”

  “Okay, okay. I’ll come look. But you better be in a really good hiding place. I’ll give you thirty-five seconds.”

  A big blue Dumpster loomed at the end of the parking lot. She briefly considered hiding there, but then remembered how bad it smelled the last time she’d been out that way to take out the garbage.

  Hmm. She wasn’t crawling into one of the culverts by the street frontage, no way. That only left the vehicles.

  She tested her father’s truck, but the doors were locked. Delilah thought about lying down in the back, but scrapped that as an easily-foiled plan. All Ginny had to do was walk up and look over the tailgate.

  She climbed into the back anyway and tried to pry the rear cab window open, but it was latched shut.

  Climbing back out again, the girl got on her knees and looked underneath the truck, hoping there was space to crawl under, but there was a patch of oil Delilah didn’t want to wallow around in. For a kid, she could be surprisingly meticulous—her stepmother Janele was always saying how proud she was that her baby always picked up after herself. Delilah didn’t do it out of some moral rectitude, she just hated being in a dirty house. Hated having crumbs on her bare feet, hated dipping her elbow in ketchup congealing on the kitchen table.

  Delilah’s biological mother was quite the opposite. In her stale, dark house lived six skinny cats, two big stupid dogs, and a Plexiglas aquarium that allegedly held a hamster that Delilah had never seen.

  She hated the cats. They were the worst.

  She got down and peeked under the next car. There was considerably less of a mess underneath, but the undercarriage was so low there was no hope of being able to squeeze into it. She stood up and that’s when she saw it. On the other side of the strip of parking-spaces, at the end of a row of empty slots, was a pickup truck.

  It was a Ford, a big one, old. Comparatively speaking, the red paint job was dull; it reflected the security lights about as well as an eggshell. A camper-shell covered the bed like a turtle, the same brick-red as the body.

  But what grabbed Delilah’s attention was the bright green snake spray-painted up the side of the bed wall.

  This was new. Surely she would have seen such a spectacular work of art around the complex before. This was without a doubt a new neighbor that she hoped her father would befriend in the near future, so she could see who would drive around town with this on his truck. And for certain, that person would have to be a man, because this emerald-skinned jungle dragon could only belong to a man.

  An undulating hose of diamond-shaped scales uncoiled from the tail-light to the driver’s-side door. Each scale shone with its own sharp shine, reflecting some source of light beyond the ken of the canvas. At the leading end of the dragonesque body was a great gawping mouth full of teeth and writhing bifurcated tongue, dominated by a pair of white fangs the size and shape of bananas.

  Honey-amber screwhead eyes gazed out at her, as big as fists and just as menacing. The eye seemed to be three-dimensional. Prying it out, she discovered that underneath was the gasoline receptacle. The gas cap was the snake’s eye! How clever.

  It was a bit of a ratty truck to have such a gloriously cheesy picture painted on it, but then when you thought about it, the medium fit the subject well. She wondered who it belonged to, and what he was like, as the girl reached up and put her hand on its swollen metal belly, still warm with the day’s beating.

  She imagined a man with a bushy brown mustache and a bald head, with a band of curly hair that started at one ear and went round the back of his head to the other. He would be wearing a stained white T-shirt and a pair of jeans that never quite managed to hide his butt-crack. He’d be covering his baldness with a ball cap, with some silly saying on it. “I Hunt Because My Wife Can’t Climb Trees” maybe, like what her father had hanging from the mounted buck-head in the apartment, along with his Duck Commander cap.

  She noticed that the snake’s tail extended past the tail-light on this side. Delilah went
around the back and found that the body stretched across the tailgate, went behind the passenger tail-light, and came out again on the passenger fender.

  After that it coiled twice and clinging tightly to the very tip was a barechested woman in Viking gear, her pendulous cone-shaped tits squeezed between her outstretched arms. The barbarian Barbie gripped the last slender inch of the snake’s tail as if it were a baseball bat and dug in with both heels. If Delilah were twenty years older, she probably would have read more into the image.

  She touched the hand-painted woman; her dusky arms and glowing lightning-god eyes stood out from the truck-body around it, a paint-depth bas relief. The winecork nipples stood out like Braille.

  “Time’s up!” said the radio.

  The sudden voice gave Delilah a jolt and she almost dropped it. Her heart leapt with a shot of adrenaline and she looked around for a place to stash herself. Running around the rear of the snake truck, she noticed that the camper-top’s door was open a bit. She cupped her hands against the milky glass and peered through the parentheses of her fingers, but couldn’t see inside.

  “I’m coming to find you!” Ginny called from somewhere to her distant right, shouting in a singsong voice.

  Delilah lifted the sash and climbed into the back of the truck, letting it sigh back down on pneumatic hinges. It closed with a hollow click.

  Inside the camper shell, it was stifling hot and the air seemed sapped of oxygen; grainy, almost, with the smell of earth and a murk of forest-smells. A dulled tang of pine. The side windows were painted over with the red of the body, coloring the faint light from the streetlamps a boudoir crimson. Crammed against the back of the cab was a fluffy black bale of pine needles. Many of the needles had slipped out and now coated the floor of the truckbed with a thin, crunchy carpet.

  To Delilah’s right as she climbed in was a burlap sack with Fertilizer stenciled across the front, an enormous sack big enough to drape from one end of the bed to the other. It was full of something large, bulbous, as big as the girl herself. Next to that was a Stihl weed-trimmer with a well-gnawed line, encrusted with mulched grass and reeking of gasoline.