Apricot brandy

by Lynn Cesar

  No one appeared in the corridors, the Haitian’s gleaming desk stood empty. She stepped out into the last light of the day and was glad, the hugeness of the city around her a balm. Glad to be above-ground, as if the city might erase that room from her mind, the growl of traffic replacing its awful silence. Standing down there in that room, death’s antechamber, confronting what she had confronted… after all, who would not have gone a little crazy?

  “Karen Fox,” she said with quiet determination, “is going to be all right.” But please dear Jesus— she started, still unsteady, across the parking lot— how could that be her last vision? Dad in his spectacular death, printed on her mind’s eye. His crime against her scorching her heart. If she did not find strength and defiance somewhere, she would come away even more broken, even more crippled.

  The door of a white pick-up opened as she passed, one of those new oversized brutes, and out stepped a tall, lean man in a deputy’s uniform. A clipboard and shades, even in the declining light. As he moved to intercept her, Karen had a qualm of premonition.

  He confronted her and took off his shades. “Hello, Karen.”

  “Marty Carver.” A gulf of years had just been bridged. Marty’s hair and his tufty eyebrows, like two vertical brush-strokes, were dulled to ginger from the red they’d been in high school. The plump mouth, still smug, was set in a chin a bit squarer now, somewhat pouchier underneath.

  “Are you on an official mission, Marty?” Karen noticed that his armpatch said Gravenstein County Sheriff. He would have stayed in their hometown and he would be a cop. “You’re a long way from home here.”

  “I’ve got some errands of my own, but I’m here for you too. This is kind of a personal gesture, Karen. I called to find out when you’d be here. You didn’t show yesterday, so I stayed over. I wanted to let you know personally about the Medical Examiner’s Report.”

  “You mean the autopsy findings?”

  “That’s right. It’s a sad thing of course, but I thought you’d be reassured to know that there was no foul play. Definitely a suicide. GSRs on his right hand.”

  “And those are?”

  “Gunshot residues.” He showed her some stapled sheets on his clipboard.

  She noticed the signature. “Dr. Harst filled this out?”

  “He’s been our County M.E. for fifteen years now.”

  “Of course. He called me about Mom, before.” Army buddy Harst, weeping on the phone three nights ago, had been a comrade-in-arms whose life Jack Fox had saved in combat. Marty was also Dad’s old friend, though a generation younger. As a teenager, Marty had, in some wordless way, idolized Dad. Dad’s tour in Viet Nam, and afterwards in Central America, seemed to have something to do with it. Marty had done a lot of hired work in the orchard throughout his and Karen’s high-school years, though at school he’d never pursued any personal acquaintance with her. But near the end of their senior year he’d begun making a big deal to Mom about wanting to take Karen to the prom. Poor Mom knew that no one else had asked her daughter, that her daughter was set on not going at all. In the end Karen accepted for Mom’s sake. She brought a flat of bourbon in her purse and got rowdy on the dance-floor. When Marty managed to get her out to the parking lot, she smashed the windshield of his car with her bottle.

  “Well, thank you, Marty. It was very thoughtful of you. But you know, there was never a doubt in my mind that he killed himself.”

  This made something flare in his eyes and Karen realized she’d meant it to. Did he guess her accusation of his hero? Had Marty maybe, even as a kid, sensed her father’s crime?

  “You know,” he said, “I wonder, Karen. After your Mom died, I made it a point to call and check in on your Dad every couple weeks. Did you ever call him once that whole three years? I didn’t get the feeling that you ever did. I got the feeling you were just too busy with your lesbo friends out in San Francisco to give a damn.”

  Karen smiled. For a couple years after leaving for the coast forever right after high school, Karen had now and then come back to visit Mom. Always at some diner in the county seat, Gravenstein, twenty miles from the orchard, but still within Mom’s driving range at her timid, invariable thirty-five miles an hour. Karen had brought an early lover on one visit. Both had more than a few drinks in them. Marty was there with some scared, docile girl. Karen had taken her lover to his table and introduced her at length.

  “Hey, Marty. You just don’t get it. I haven’t called, I haven’t talked to my old man for twenty years. Do you understand what I’m saying?” She had laid the ugly truth right there, just one question away from good old Marty, if he dared to ask it: Why not?

  Real anger now in his yellow-brown eyes. But he didn’t dare. Put his shades back on. “Your life, your choice.”

  “My life, my orchard.” She was furious now, enraged he’d backed away, hadn’t let her spit it out, and she grabbed the handiest thing, remembering how Marty had always loved the orchard. “You know, I think I’m gonna have some fun with that orchard. I think I might just burn it down tree by tree.”

  He didn’t even nod. She’d got to him though, she could tell by the way he almost slammed his truck door closing it.

  As he drove off, and she stood there waving after him ironically, it hit her. If Dad, with half his face, were not to out-face her, and drive her down into fear and pain for the rest of her life, she had to go into the house after all. Had to go back home and face it all again, till she had faced that bastard down and, once and for all, thrust him and his crime down into the earth, and finally set her spirit to mending.

  * * * *

  After meeting Karen, Marty killed some time in the city till Dr. Harst should arrive. A uniform meant something whatever jurisdiction you were in, and he drove like it. Smooth, peremptory, decisively claiming his space.

  He liked the city’s decayed old core. Lots of heavily-grilled mom-and-pops, run by ragheads and slopes. He liked immigrants— they kept their heads down and worked. They were usually easy arrests, too, and too poor for anything but Public Defenders, so they kept his production level high at the Gravenstein County Correctional Facility.

  Why did winos like to camp behind dumpsters so much? Because they knew they were trash, Marty guessed. He could’ve gotten a ninety-day bit for public disturbance out of every one of these people. The city had too much real crime and the police, no doubt, had a harder time beefing their budget out here than Marty did back in Gravenstein. People in rural county seats knew each other and how things ought to be run. They worked together.

  Marty wished he’d worn his civvies when he passed the porn shops. He’d had a good piece of Helen this morning, after the boy left for school, but you could never get it just right with Helen. If you tied the ropes too tight she’d start to whine and nag and break the mood. He was forced just to accept with his wife the more fictional degree of bondage and make the best of it. When he returned to the mortuary, it was dark. Among the four or five vehicles left in the lot, Dr. Harst’s old dirty, battered, olive-drab station wagon had arrived. The doctor’s big baggy profile was visible behind the wheel. His head was slightly cocked, as if he were watching something very distant.

  The old man had gotten distinctly dreamy, since Jack Fox shed his mantle with a Last Supper of double-ought. Harst and Jack Fox went way back, to those jungles in Nam and Central America. My God, wouldn’t that have been something! Marty honored them both for it, honored them still, but this was no time for dreaming. He and Harst had an appointment, a life-and-death matter.

  “Hi, Doctor. How was your drive down?” Looking down through the window at him, watching, behind the thick glasses, those pouchy old eyes, yellowish like tarnished cue-balls, coming back from far away… .

  “Hello, Marty. The drive was fine.” Such a bleak little smile, saying that. The old man looked like a cartoon vulture; with his weak jaw, the puckers of his face flowed right down into those of his neck. A man who’d aged a lot more severely than his lifelong friend Jack Fox had done
before his death. But Harst straightened and flashed a sharper smile. “It’s time to join our friend.”

  They walked together toward the mortuary, Marty slowing his pace to match Harst’s limp so that their advance was measured, almost ceremonial. This difference in their gaits made Marty realize what a crossroads this was for both of them. With Jack Fox in the earth now, the relationship between him and the doctor was going to change.

  They pushed open the great front door and Marty slipped his shades back on: it felt right. Funereal. The wide carpeted spaces were deserted. Beside the reception desk, a gurney gleamed, supporting a bulky blackness— a thermal body bag. They stood in the silence beside this plastic sarcophagus till Dr. Harst said, roguishly, addressing the body bag, “We’ll have to haul ass on this, won’t we, Jack? Have to get you back while the frost is still on the pumpkin, so to speak?” And laughed. Marty resented the old man’s impiety with this powerful corpse. Envied it too. Harst, so much closer to him, could get away with it.

  It was strange to wheel Jack Fox out under the big-city night. Rolling him across the asphalt, the body bag seemed like Jack’s spacesuit for crossing an alien wasteland, on his voyage to reach the dark earth and deep roots that were to be his new mansion.

  “I’ve cleared the back of my wagon— ” Dr. Harst began.

  Marty’s nostrils flared at the sight of that old wreck. “My truck bed’s better, Doc— we can secure him better there.” The doctor was so dreamy-clingy about Jack Fox’s mortal remain… and might have thought so himself… for he acquiesced at once. They bungied Jack Fox snugly in Marty’s truck bed.

  * * * *

  All the way back out to Gravenstein County, Dr. Harst’s eyes clung to the only love of his long life, a cocoon in a truck bed that was dancing through traffic ahead of him. More than once those red-rimmed eyes leaked tears. Oh Jack. How long we have shared the same world! It was everything, for me.

  The doctor’s grief at the loss that lay wrapped in that bundle filled his heart. He was in mourning. But in another part of Dr. Harst’s mind there was calculation and the ant-like first tickles of fear. Now that Jack had moved on, was the doctor’s own term near?

  But, as always, Harst forgot calculation and came back to his tears. Forty-five years of almost hopeless love. At least there had been their friendship, unfaltering friendship.

  Dr. Harst had seen Marty’s distaste for this old station wagon. He’d never know the reason the doctor still drove it. It was because Jack, with the power upon him, had taken him into the back of this old wagon— pulled off on a dark country road— and sodomized him there, for the last glorious time in Dr. Harst’s life. Again, his tears flowed.

  IV

  The motel room offered one towel, one micro-bar of soap, one plastic glass, one blanket, one dim TV that got three channels, and one picture on the wall above the TV— a trite sad-clown print, very dusty. Except for the tiny nook of the bathroom, this room was very near as bare and square as Dad’s room this afternoon.

  She hadn’t chosen the motel with this penance in mind, but instead for the liquor store one block away. A brisk walk down a boulevard of sleepless traffic, a brisk walk back, the crisp fracture of a half-pint’s seal as you twisted its head off… and then solace.

  Karen lay and sipped and watched the news with the sound off, the blow-dries making their pretty faces— how long now? Soon it would be too late to call Susan. She had to call Susan, but sipped again from her spiked Seven-Up and put it off. From time to time she glanced up at the clown print. When it hung too long at the periphery of her vision, the vague smeared face hinted at a more dreadful one. And as she watched, her fingertips traced her wrist. She should not be drinking. Not ever again. Because her wrist which had been gripped… was sore now to her touch. Her wrist which she must have gripped. Her wrist which she had gripped… though she so clearly remembered both her hands resting on the chrome rail of the gurney when that cold clench had had melted every nerve in her body.

  Except, of course, an alcoholic “clearly remembering” was an oxymoron. She should not be drinking. Not ever again.

  The thing was, there was still tomorrow, and the orchard, and the house to go into, and what she had faced in the mortuary had settled nothing, had laid no ghosts. The thought of going into that house was as frightening as it had ever been, going in and staying there. And she had to stay there without drinking, facing everything and beating it cold, if she was to free herself at last and forever. So she should flush this bourbon and start not drinking here and now.

  But she took another pull of bourbon and wryly thought that perhaps the real reason for her drinking was, if she ever got totally sober, she would finally realize she could never quit drinking… .

  Must call Susan or drive herself crazy. She dialed. It was picked up so quickly, Susan must also be in bed, snatching the receiver from the nightstand, “Karen?”

  “Yeah, hon, it’s me. Calling from the land of the dead and the dead-tired.” Trying to take the edge off things, sound amused about her mission.

  “You saw him, huh?”

  “I saw him. He— ” a giggle rose up in her “— he’s a lot shorter than I remembered him.”

  She could hear Susan trying to join her laughter, but not really succeeding. Susan would be waiting to get past the bravado and closer to her lover’s pain. It irritated Karen. She didn’t want Susan to get closer to her pain.

  So she added, abruptly, “I know I mentioned it before and said I wasn’t going to, but I think I do have to go back to the place, deal with it face to face. A couple days, maybe, is all I’ll need… but I have to. I’m sorry.”

  “Hon,” Susan began, striking a note that gently urged they get to the heart of their feelings. This was a flashpoint between them. How angry Karen had let it make her in their earlier days. But Karen had learned since then how wrong an angry answer was. “You’ve got to forgive me, Karen. I’ve got to say this. Will you let me?”

  “Sure. It’s nice just hearing your voice.”

  “You shouldn’t do this alone! Move back in there alone! You don’t need to. Please let me be there with you and help you through it. You were defenseless when you lived it; now you have an ally.”

  Karen imagined it: she and Susan bedding down together in the dark of that house, Susan’s lovemaking voice singing out in the silence of those rooms, those halls.

  “Sue, if I can’t do this alone, it’s not facing him. Not by our rules. And he’ll never leave me then. He’ll just keep eating me hollow. But maybe, after just a little while, maybe things will look different… . “Thinking to herself that maybe even this was too much to be yielding and with half her heart whining Yes! Be with me. I can’t go in there alone!

  “Your rules? His and yours?”

  “Don’t ask me to make sense, Sue. It’s just that to face it I have to relive it and I lived it alone. Mom just refused to know.”

  “… You’ll call me tomorrow when you get there?”

  “Tomorrow afternoon, yes. Tomorrow afternoon or tomorrow night.” She might not be up to talking to Sue right away. She was damned sure going to arrive there in broad daylight, though.

  And she did. It was in the blaze of noon that her tires sizzled up the gravel drive again. And, amazingly to her, she was bone-sober. She took her foot from the gas and let the truck coast to a stop, confronting the house once more. Sitting bemused, Karen was amazed by what she had just accomplished. Waking before sunrise, she’d jumped out of bed, peed, washed, and changed, flung her things in the duffel, the duffel into the truck and roared onto the freeway.

  It was whoosh all the way. An off-ramp down to a liquor store just ahead? Whoosh. It sank behind in a blur. Pure onrush had kept her panic bottled. (You can’t go there sober! You can’t go in there with your mind naked!) But now here she was, sober in fact.

  What had she done? Had she lost her mind?

  Momentum. It was her only hope. She flung her door open and surged from the truck. Jumped up those s
teps (worn round-edged by the years) up into the Stonehenge shadow of the massive porch roof, her key already out. She stabbed it into the lock like a dagger, shouldered open the heavy-boned door, and plunged into the dimness where armchairs, armoires, tables, door-frames, crowded her eyes with their ancient, intimate anatomies, sending through her a ghostly rout of childhood days and nights.

  All urgency vanished. She stood there accepting what had dawned on her yesterday: that she had already been living here all along, had never lived anywhere else. All the fear and pain and ancient sweetness that breathed from every door and wall and chair around her now, had been the air she breathed every day of her life.

  Moving slowly, she began to engage the place. Downstairs first. She pulled back the curtains, opened all the blinds and windows. Checked the closets, meeting in the hall closet a twelve-gauge shotgun propped in one corner, not surprised that Dad would have more than one, as the police must have the one he’d used on himself.

  The kitchen, its sunny utility porch… . These were Mom’s domain and brought Karen warmer memories. Her big stainless steel sink was on the porch in her canning nook with its worktable and shelves of jars that breathed out an aura of luscious jams and jellies. And here by the pantry door was her chopping table, its whole top a heavy cutting board which whispered a breath of tomatoes and onions and beef, precursors of Mom’s stew.

  It was harder to go upstairs, to those bedrooms and closets. She did little more than look into Mom and Dad’s bedroom and her own, but in Mom’s sewing room she lingered. It echoed with all Mom’s years of patient— maybe desperate— labor, as if she sometimes had to work down her fear of what might be happening to her daughter, stitch that fear down tight and fold it away. She had to have feared, at least… whether or not she’d successfully avoided knowing? All the silence Mom had suffered here. Pity filled Karen’s eyes and she wiped them angrily with her knuckles.

  She went back downstairs. The dining room, the living room, the hallways— all had become Dad’s in the three years since Mom’s death. There were even more hand-guns and rifles showcased on the walls than she remembered. There were other beefy hand-guns in unexpected drawers, like that of the telephone table and the silverware drawer of the dining-room breakfront. And booze of course, even more booze than before. Bottles of quality whiskeys and brandies occupied every sideboard and end-table, occupied the mantel over the big field-stone fireplace.