Apricot brandy

by Lynn Cesar

  “My friend is dead.”

  “What?”

  “My friend Susan is dead. She was killed two nights ago in a crash.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  Her eyes were running over. She wiped them on her sleeve. “Look. That asshole doesn’t bother me. I trust you. And I’m going to take his advice. I’m gonna pick that fruit. Lot less work this way, actually.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Just cut those fuckers down, Kyle. Every one that falls makes me glad.”

  She brought stacks of flats and dividers from the big shed and began to harvest fruit from the branches heaped in the trim-pile, stacking the filled flats in the cool north shadow of the house. This was better than leaving the fruit rot, as she’d thought to do. Better to convert Dad’s darlings to dollars. Transmute them and squander them. All hers, now.

  Wolf returned and the trees continued to fall, shed their limbs, be bucked into rollers, split, and loaded— but the majority of the actual work was Kyle’s. It was fascinating, tracking Wolf from the corner of her eye as she picked. His most important product was Attitude. Anything served for a pretext. She watched him manufacture ten solid minutes of attitude from a cigarette he bummed from Kyle. He commented on the crumpled condition of the cigarette. He expounded on its smell and feel. He bummed Kyle’s lighter, then went on about its sorry condition and low fuel level. At last he lit the cigarette, with a flourish, and the doubtful air of a connoisseur. He smoked two puffs, with infinite skepticism, and crushed it out, pronouncing it unsmokable, expounding for a further three minutes on its sorry taste, and the superiority of other brands. Through it all, Kyle worked steadily, tossing cigarette, and then lighter, with a practiced smoothness that didn’t break his stride, and smiling a bit, maybe, at the performance. Kyle was a graduate in this game, after all, and recognized it as the entertainment cons offered each other, stand-up comedy manufactured from nothing

  Wolf was a live exhibit of the brutal barrenness of prison, that null environment where all talk must be improvised from emptiness, while silence meant madness. This poor asshole was in prison. He lived in an utterly unfurnished mind.

  At the same time, there was a choreography in the two men’s movements. For all Wolf’s arm wavings and postures, he never once got in the way of Kyle’s unrelenting labor and whenever Kyle came to some two-man phase of the work— moving the splitter, for instance— Wolf was always, somehow, right there at hand to help. Here was the reflex of mutual accommodation, effortless for men who had lived years in small boxes together.

  The lopped branches they heaped up surrendered their fruit to Karen’s hands. When she’d totally plundered them, she’d burn the pile right here on the lawn, spray it with diesel, and leave a black scar in the grass beside the stumps.

  She could burn this whole place down, though, and still be in prison here among the ashes. Would still have nowhere else to go, but into the black pit of Dad. She’d let Susan face it for her and somehow Dad had killed her. If Karen failed to face the same herself, her shame would kill her just as surely, though more slow… . Shouldn’t she, after all, sit down to that desk in the dead of night, as Susan had done? Pick up the thread of Susan’s life just where and when it had ended… ?

  She looked at the stack of flats she had filled. She felt ridiculously tired by this slight work, she who could frame for ten hours straight and strike every sinker true. Karen Fox, butch babe extraordinaire. Not much left of her now.

  Back into the kitchen, walking through it, her eyes refusing the glossy black-and-whites still spread on the polished tabletop. Out to the fireplace, the cannon, and her glass… . Mellower, Karen decided on the comfort of the two men’s company without the contact: from the window of Mom’s sewing room. She took her refilled glass up the stairs.

  Entering— as she’d always done when young— she ran her hand along the smooth curve of the sewing machine’s case. Everything in here was so neatly shelved and shut away. When she was six or so, this was a universe of magical little drawers, glittery treasure in each one. She sat at Mom’s desk by the window overlooking the yard and again found comfort in watching the pair work. Kyle there implacable, Wolf dancing his attitudes, their isolation seemed to offer her strength to face her own. You could almost forgive Wolf his stupidity, you could see the man dancing around inside invisible walls. In Kyle’s relentlessness she sensed self-constructed walls, a careful channeling of himself… toward what? Some bitter, private form of justice?

  It jarred Karen, though she’d been watching them pack up for the last quarter hour, to realize they were climbing into Kyle’s truck to leave for the day. The sun had westered, slanting in shafts of saffron and marigold across the stumps and trimmings of more than half Dad’s brandy trees.

  All around her now, the house began to reassert itself, the rooms seeping full of their individual emptinesses. The truck swung out onto the lane, out of view, and headed its long way out the drive… . Hello, walls. Hello, Mom. Did you never see anything from this window? Never any sign or clue?

  Realizing she was absently fingering a tier of drawers in the escritoire, finding the bottom drawer was open just a crack… she slid it out. And saw two thick letters inside it, their envelopes much handled and browning with age. She took out the topmost. Mrs. Emily Fox, at this address, typed with a worn ribbon. It was postmarked in Mexico City in December of 1980. An unknown someone in Mom’s youth?

  When she unfolded the sheaf of pages, the dense lines of Dad’s frighteningly legible handwriting hit her like a slap in the face.

  My Dearly Beloved Emily,

  A friend will mail this for me, probably from Mexico City. You must have the whole truth now, while I am still resolved to tell it.

  Something in this jungle has found me and entered me…

  She slammed the letter face-down. Here it was, in these pages right under her hand: Dad’s sickness. Here was what she’d come back to find, what had found her that first night (something has entered me) and had come within a hammer-stroke of killing her. It was what Susan had gone looking to destroy and what had crushed her. It had lived here in Mom’s drawer for more than half a century. Karen had reached out unthinkingly and, just like that, it had crawled up her hand and into her mind, a spider rushing out of its hole. Mom had known something then.

  Karen remembered the somber, private man from the platoon photo. You must have the truth while I am still resolved to tell it. Dad talked like that sometimes, that curious formality. How would a rising madness feel to a measured mind like his? What a terrible loneliness! No wonder, in these pages, he cried out to his Emily, his only companion. Oh Daddy… And Mom, alone up here— if not knowing, then at least fearing, fearing through all those years.

  Her eyes traveled around Mom’s sanctum… and froze. There was a yellow dress draped over the top of the sewing machine case. Surrounding the shock of its presence (she had stroked the bare wood of that case when she’d come in!) there was a halo of something else, something more frightening than the thing’s undetected advent while she sat here. It was familiarity. Because she knew this dress, this pale yellow dress with a border of blue sewn along the hem. The remembered feel of its fabric crept across her back, her breasts, and flirted with her knees. This was the dress she was wearing the first time Dad violated her. The one with the bloodstain on the back of the skirt, the one she had thrust down into the trash barrel in the big shed and told Mom she had thrown away because it had been bloodstained in a different way.

  This dress, exactly the same one. The fabric spoke to her fingertips across a quarter of a century, chaotic years half shrouded in darkness and full of drunken noise. Under here would be where the stain was… still was! Bright and wet! The blood still red… and sticky to her fingers.

  It was like that time a sleeper wave had seized her off Point Reyes. Karen had been peering solemnly into the tide pools when, suddenly, she heard a hiss behind her and felt the whelm of an advancing mass. Then, inside of an explos
ion, she was racing, tumbling out to sea within a huge foaming fist.

  Plunging down the stairs and towards the hall closet, she swept into and out of the closet, lifting the Remington twelve-gauge pump. Tucking the butt to her shoulder she hoisted the muzzle and blew a plaster-spraying crater in the ceiling beneath the sewing room. Her hearing gone, her shoulder stone-numb, with four more muzzle-blasts she harpooned the darkness of the bedroom hallway and punctured the living room’s walls.

  In the perfect silence of her deafness, the dress echoed in her mind’s eye. Its yellow paled, its fabric soft with launderings, draped there with that scary emptiness of yourself that dropped clothes sometimes had… Something has entered me. She threaded five new shells into the magazine. Pocketed more, fearing if she stood too still, her heart would go out like a blown candle. Something has entered me and it’s telling me I’m already dead, that I was destroyed thirty years ago. But here I am. I’m a drunk. I have the DTs. But here I am.

  She remembered the taste of a steel muzzle in her mouth. You could not back away from what was inside you. You could only move to meet it. The brandy went down her throat like a wrestler throwing a hold on her. Come in. Come out. Show me.

  Karen patrolled the house with gun and bottle, the gun for dealing with apparitions, the bottle a far more familiar weapon. How many times had she shot herself in the mouth with one? How big would the exact number be? She went to every room, but not back upstairs. Went to the basement, the fruit cellar. Went outside to the big shed, the yard, the picking lanes, and back into the house. Into every room, but not back upstairs, not again tonight. Everywhere else she went, and stood, and dared him, or whoever was doing his work, to step forward. As the sun set and dark came on, she tried to call Dad up before her.

  When at last she felt her strength crumbling, her thoughts blurring, she went back down to the basement and sat on the floor, the shotgun across her lap, and leaned her head back against the wall.

  Once again, chainsaws woke her.

  She wasn’t quite sure she was awake until she had understood her surroundings, for she found herself lying on the floor of the basement and hugging the shotgun, curled against the wall near Dad’s workbench. The light slanting down from the ground-level window was late, near noon, she thought.

  She propped the shotgun against the wall and struggled to her feet. She held her right hand in the sunlight slanting on the workbench. Whorls of a dark stain, half worn away, etched the pads of her fingers. She put her tongue to them and they yielded the taste of her own blood.

  Outside the chainsaws insisted, insisted, the dogs of terror snarling at her, hounding her to take up a weapon.

  XIII

  Wolf asked Kyle, “Is that another saw?”

  Kyle held his own at idle. Yes. Another chainsaw roared beyond the house. Wolf looked a question, but Kyle just stared back at him. After a moment, they went back to work.

  Wolf kept listening. “I hear trees falling,” he said, giving Kyle a sly smile. The older man again returned his gaze without answering and they went back to work.

  Wolf got to look at last when he drove the new load out. The bitch was a wild sight. Hair in witchy strings, the muscles standing out in her neck as she back-cut a plum tree and toppled it with a frontal slice. She had a dozen trees down, the squashed clouds of their branches entangled with each other, the raw butts of their trunks red in the sun. She had started the slaughter right in the middle of the row— just plunged in and started dropping them. This dyke was hysterical…

  Karen turned in time to catch Wolf’s eyes as he drove past. She saw the excitement, the joy of chaos in them, and didn’t care. Just turned again and attacked the next tree in the line, working until she ran the chainsaw out of gas. Stood sweating, swaying on her feet, and knew the approaching footsteps were Kyle’s.

  “Karen?”

  “Hey, Kyle!” Watching this careful man trying to decide what he could say to her.

  “Are you okay?”

  The trite question brought tears to her eyes and made her laugh at the same time. “Am I okay?” She dragged her sleeve across her eyes and put on an expression of honest bafflement. “Why, what makes you ask that?”

  He smiled, almost a laugh. In her misery, it warmed her to find that this winter face, so shuttered against the cold, still knew how to laugh. “I’m worried about you, Karen. I think you’re a kind person, you’ve been kind to me. I… like you.”

  “You know I’m queer, right?” Karen, grinning, feeling friendly towards this guy, was surprised by the hostility she heard in her question. His eyes held hers, a little sad now.

  “I don’t see anything queer about anybody loving anybody. And… when I tell someone I like them, it’s not because I want something from them. It’s just because I like them. I only bring it up… in case there’s some way I might be able to help them.”

  “Help them,” echoed Karen, nodding, with a forced smile she meant as an apology. Looking back over her shoulder, she gazed up at the house, its windows blinded by the noon sun. In her life-long aloneness she had always lived there, had never for a moment lived elsewhere. She turned to see Kyle looking at it, too. Thought, maybe wishfully, that he felt what she did: that this house was a monster.

  “Kyle. Would you… come over for dinner?”

  He smiled. “I’d be pleased to. We could talk. I think you’re like me. Talking about the hardest things can seem pointless. But sometimes it loosens their grip.”

  “What time is good for you?” Already she felt helped. Another person would be with her when night fell. Another voice to listen to, instead of the squeaking of her own brain in its squirrel-wheel.

  “When we’ve got our last load, I’ll take Wolf to get some cash and put him on the bus out of state. Then I’ve gotta drop the load, clean up. If we finish in another four hours, let’s say between eight and nine?”

  * * * *

  When Marty found Harst’s office empty at nine a.m., found his big swivel chair lying on its back and the drawer that had held the Kravnick woman open and empty, a terrible joy began tingling in him. That the woman’s body would be gone was not in itself remarkable. Over the last few years especially, Jack had required offerings which Marty and Harst had been deputed to provide.

  No. It was the toppled chair and the drawer left jutting open, that sent the prickling up along Marty’s spine. Some upheaval, some peremptory will had erupted here. Jack had required two offerings last night. How had Marty’s dark master executed his will? The Assistant Chief Deputy of Gravenstein County actually shuddered, just detectably, as he stood imagining the century-old basement below him, the fissure in its floor… imagining that what he had helped slip down into that fissure, might have the power to climb back out of it, in the dead of night.

  There was terror in this image, but there came an exaltation with it. He’d felt hyper-alive all morning. He’d come sharp awake in bed just at sunrise, sensing a conversation going on quite near him and found it was his body speaking within, a murmuring of joint and muscle, a rumor of change cadenced by a new authority in his heartbeat. He’d dressed, breakfasted, driven here— and all the while, this rumor of rising strength was running through him.

  Calling Harst’s house from the phone on his desk, after six rings he heard: Dr. Harst is either occupied or away. Please leave your message. As Marty listened, his heart began to gallop. It felt like a mighty engine he drove. A new gulf echoed around Harst’s canned voice. After the beep, he said, his words ringing like an epitaph, “I think you’re both occupied and away.” Smiled. “Can you get back to me?”

  In the morgue he slid the long drawer shut. Whatever had happened here last night, it had been a changing of the guard. Marty remembered Harst’s hands, hard as oak, hurling him across the floor. Those hands’ strength had now passed into Marty’s own, or was beginning to… .

  He went up to his office and patiently, all morning, he played Assistant Chief Deputy. The two morgue workers, Phil and Jed, came on-
shift at noon, and he went down to talk to them. Phil was young and plump, with evasive, intelligent eyes. Jed was fifty and plump, with a perfectly dead-pan face. Phil kept nodding as he listened, busy projecting conviction and comprehension. Jed just listened.

  “The doctor was working late and I stopped in,” Marty told them. “Just after he gave me the paperwork, we got the call. Transatlantic, from Paris. A hired van was already on the way out from the city. Got in at midnight and took her off. I guess the doctor is sleeping in today.” Babcock alone had brought Susan’s body in. Susan’s mother was as ignorant of her daughter’s death as she was of her whereabouts.

  Phil said, “Such a sad thing. A daughter, the mother so far away… .”

  Marty went into his office and emerged in boots, jeans, and a cowboy shirt. Told Contos, the day captain, that he was out on personal business the rest of the day. Fired up his pickup and headed out to the Spaith walnut orchard, twenty miles east of town.

  The trees were years untended, ragged and shaggy. A paving of walnut shells popped under his tires as he drove through the acres to the fieldworkers’ shanties, a web work of bleached barracks and battered sheds, all of them shedding a dandruff of shingles. The shanties were the only gainful enterprise left on Spaith’s acres— rental housing for migrant hands employed at other ranches and orchards. At mid-day in harvest season, the shabby complex was as empty as he had expected. He parked behind an outlying shed.

  A Mexican woman opened to his knock. She was somewhat stout, but her neatly muscled frame was equal to the weight of the big breasts that swelled her shirt. A face in its thirties, burnished by hard work, broad but still exotic, lips cushiony and curved, her sloping, thick-lashed eyes reminiscent of Central American bas-reliefs Marty had seen.

  He held up before her a packet of twenties and a pair of handcuffs.

  “Okay, but make hurry please, I don’ wan’… ” Any of her neighbors to know, of course, or at least to directly observe. She shut up quick at his glare, though. The wordlessness of this transaction, his implacable looks, her mute submission— all these were essential erotic elements, as he had taught her.