Apricot brandy

by Lynn Cesar

  * * * *

  Sitting on the couch by a fire built high and hot, Kyle wrapped her hand and forearm, splinting them with a scrolled magazine, making a sling from bandanas. He cleaned her scrapes and cuts and smeared them with antiseptic ointment, brought her water and a prescription bottle of Mom’s old Vicodins, relics of her months of dying.

  For all the gentleness of his ministrations, it was like being flayed. It stripped her down to her pains and under the pain was the cold. Her exhaustion was absolute. The intoxication of justice had left her. At the center of her mind was terror— of the corpse she had made and the prison bars to come from it.

  She sat sweating and trembling as Kyle disappeared for a while. He came back with Wolf’s clothes in his arms and spread them carefully, piece by piece on the flames. The shirt and jeans were sprayed with the blow-back of tissue and blood that had geysered from the slug’s entry— all the gore was stark-lit for an instant before it blackened and shriveled.

  “Karen… Karen?… Listen… . He’s wrapped in the tarp. I’m going to be down there a while— doing a wipe down and full scrubbing with rags. We’ll fine-tune it later… . You hear me?… . Listen… . When those are ash, lay more wood and put his boots on top, will you do that? Keep stirring it, burn everything down. We’ll bury the ashes tomorrow.”

  * * * *

  Kyle steered his pickup into the back yard, parked by the kitchen door, and switched off the engine. They sat in the dark a moment. “We’ve got about four hours to sunrise,” he said. “I wish I didn’t need your help.”

  Karen just shook her head. Her body seemed mere mass, as void of movement as a stone. “Karen, I don’t really know you. A few things, maybe, I know. Important things, but not what I— not what we need to know right now. So I have to ask, and you have to be sure of your answer, because the rest of our lives depend on it.”

  “Yes. Okay.”

  “Are you your own woman? Can you bury your own dead and keep silence? Can you carry the knowledge of that secret grave for the rest of your life?”

  Karen looked once more down the corridor of her alternate life, should she turn away from this black rite before them: the arrest for murder by Marty Carver was a given. If Marty suppressed evidence, she might never get out of prison. If he merely obstructed and dragged his heels, she would be years at the toil of proving her innocence— would grow older and dimmer and drunker, a caged animal in that pompous circus of the law. All this, while justice was hers. She had been justice.

  “I can keep silence.”

  He touched her arm and nodded— slipped out of the cab and went in through the kitchen door. And came out with the long tarped bundle folded over his shoulder. When he dropped its weight into the truck bed, Karen flashed back on the childhood sensation of sitting in Dad’s truck and feeling it sag when he climbed aboard. She looked at the heap of lopped branches that Kyle, and the corpse in back, had left from Dad’s brandy trees, and her hand remembered what it had found dangling from one of those branches a lifetime ago, three hours ago. It struck her that this orchard was the arch-Gothic setting. If she was the heroine, as she had jested the day she first came back, then this, Dad’s Manse, was the ultimate Dark Castle, where dwelt the male energy at its most murderous…

  Down the lanes they drove, the tools rattling in the truck bed, Wolf’s shifting weight slithery in its tarp. The plum trees were startled green beasts in the headlights, surprised in their deep communion with the night, bristling like spiders at the intruders.

  They arrived at Wolf’s tomb. They stared at it, the compost heap’s black, tire-studded bulk lost in the darkness to either side of the headlights’ white splash. Unfed for three years now, the great worm’s plastic sheath was shriveling like old skin. The offering they’d brought it was so small, a mere morsel to its hugeness… .

  “We spread the plastic at that seam, then fold it back. I’ll toss the tires down— can you carry them out of the way? The less we drag up the dirt here, the better.”

  “I can carry them.”

  Pulling the truck tight alongside the heap, Kyle climbed onto the roof of the cab. The tires he couldn’t reach he pushed aside with a branch prop they’d brought. He pried up the edge of the sheeting and Karen peeled it back. The wall of rot exposed— black as the plastic— steamed in the night air.

  Kyle aimed the idling truck’s lights at their niche. Near the shed were flat-topped hand-carts for hauling picked fruit out of the lanes and they pulled these over. “We’ll pile all the spoil we can on these. We can hose ‘em off after. Let’s spread out that tarp for what has to go on the ground.”

  And so it began, axe and spade, axe and spade. Not all the sinew of twig and branch in the compost had quite dissolved. Kyle had to chop free a wedge before his spade could bite it out and heap it reeking on the carts. As he dug deeper, thick steam wrapped him till he seemed to be melting into the headlights’ radiance. He worked like a demon and mulch collected on the tarp to either side of him. The urgency of this work swept Karen up. It was like surgery on a giant worm, tissue to be removed and replaced at urgent speed, so that sunrise would find the giant whole and unscarred.

  She took up a shovel and unslung her left arm. Found she could use her left forearm for a fulcrum on the haft and socket the haft’s butt against her right shoulder for added shove. She shoveled the spoil onto the carts, ducking in and out of the rhythm of Kyle’s much more violent labor.

  When they were piled high she trundled the carts aside… positioned the emptie… . shoveled, shoveled, shoveled, with the scorching wet breath of the crypt drenching her. Kyle’s voice welled out of the steam. “Christ! It must be a hundred and twenty in here. It’s a sauna!”

  Two hours had passed before Kyle slit Wolf’s duct-taped sheath and unwrapped his nudity. So complete Wolf seemed to her in his nakedness, if she didn’t look at his head… All the detailed symmetries. It seemed she looked on an alien species, such was her sense of revelation. They carried him inside the smoking niche, Kyle with his shoulders, Karen with his knees. Between them he lay. The bullet had broken his neck and his head lolled. A dreamer, Wolf floated to his steaming bed.

  In a deep angle of muck, soft and hot as just-cooked pudding, they tucked him. A shaft of the headlights struck him there, as white as snow by contrast with the black rot. Kyle tucked his legs up and Karen remembered photos of Neolithic burials, knee bones tented against ribcages, bony toys put away after their brief dance millennia ago. They were hiding Wolf away in the distant future… .

  The filling-in went faster. Kyle made the muck fly into the hellmouth of mist. Karen shoveled in tandem, a sense of victory growing in her. She had never worked at such a sweating pitch and still felt so cold.

  She couldn’t help at the end, when Kyle had to toss it high enough to restore the compost’s upper curve, so no betraying sag showed in the plastic when it was scrolled back in place. Then he once more moved the truck, climbed on its roof and, with Karen’s help below, re-draped the black shroud. He replaced all the tires, used a rake to drag the higher ones back into position.

  Mucky tarps and tools back in the truck-bed, the carts hosed clean beyond the shed— Karen was no help at all now. She leaned against the truck, her consciousness ebbing and then returning with a shock. The east was just getting gray.

  She was back in the cab of the truck, rocking up the lanes towards the house. “Karen? Karen?”

  “What?”

  “We made it… . But you’re hypothermic, you’re almost in shock. I’ve got to undress you and get you in a tub of hot water. Trust me, please. I’ve got to get your temperature back up.”

  She nodded, or maybe only thought she did. She was gone.

  She was naked in Kyle’s arms and he held her like a lifted bride, his arms and chest all muscle, like knobbed and padded wood. She lay in the air on these strange supports, then was sinking, sinking into searing heat, unbearable heat… no… luscious heat, embracing warmth, salvation.

  * * * *<
br />
  Karen woke in her sleeping bag on the couch, morning light flooding the windows, smelled coffee and the fresh-soaped scent of her own body within the bag. Kyle was in the armchair. He smiled and gestured at the steaming cup on the table, toasted her with his own and sipped. His face looked battered in this light, scars on his cheekbone and brow she hadn’t noticed before. The one on his brow looked like a side-ways slash aimed at his eyes he’d ducked just in time.

  “You washed me,” she said.

  He looked embarrassed. “Not too thoroughly,” he said. It made her smile and him, too, after a moment. “You were— ”

  “Hypothermic. You saying that’s the last thing I remember… . Thank you, Kyle”

  “No! I brought this on you. Don’t thank me. Just forgive me.”

  He looked so desolate it made her danger dawn on her afresh: a corpse of her making hidden here. But she wanted to comfort him too, his guilt recalling her own for Susan. “There was death here… trouble here before you came. You walked into something, you didn’t just bring it.”

  His eyes were fixed on hers, seeing something of what she wasn’t daring to say. She had touched that dress and there had been black blood on her fingers the morning after… .

  “What are you remembering, Karen? What’s been happening here?”

  His eyes seemed way too close to hers though he sat across the table from her. How had he gotten so close to her thoughts? But, how could he not have?

  “Would you give me my pack? I need to get dressed.” He stood with his back to her while she pulled on jeans and sweatshirt, wincing with the work.

  Dizzy, she lay back down on the bag. “Okay,” she said.

  When he turned around, perhaps having sensed her pain, he handed her Mom’s phial of Vicodins. She swallowed one with the coffee, meeting his eyes as she did, his eyes still close, too close. “What’s happening here— ” she felt she was following her voice out over an abyss—”is either that I’m insane, or what’s happening here is insane.”

  He came around the coffee table, sat down on it. Then looked at her and held out his hand, palm up. After two heartbeats, she put her good hand in it. “You drink,” he said. “And you’re afraid you’ve gone past the point of no return.”

  “That’s the first possibility.”

  Very gently, he laid his other hand on top of hers, his eyes never wavering from hers. “You haven’t, Karen. I saw it last night. You’re all here, you’re whole. You couldn’t have done what you did if you weren’t.”

  Tears spilled out of her eyes and she blinked them away, still holding his gaze. If what he said was true, then she had been living a nightmare and not just having one. Susan was dead. Someone had killed her and vanished, and she knew damn well who that someone was. She pulled her hand free gently and wiped her eyes.

  “Maybe I can tell you what’s been happening. Maybe later… . “When she knew him better? The thought almost made her laugh. He touched her shoulder, got up and went back to his chair.

  “I’ll have all the time you need, Karen. But right now we have to talk about details. I’ve cleaned and put away all the tools and chain-dragged the ground down where we worked. All the dirty tarps are in my truck and I’ll drop ‘em in dumpsters on my way through town… because here’s the hitch. I’ve got a parole review, down in the state capital. I have to go, be gone today and half tomorrow. Everything should be all right, but there’s something you have to look into. When I left him at the bus station, Wolf had a gym bag with his gear in it. I haven’t found it, but it has to be around because I don’t think he planned to go back into Gravenstein from here.” A bit of a pause. “You’ve got to make sure it’s not here in the house someplace. He probably went from the station to some tavern, bought some drinks, chumming up the locals, and promoted himself a ride out here.”

  “And he was going to leave here… ?”

  “Wolf wasn’t the planning type. Now I see how little I knew him. I don’t think we can rule out that he meant to kill you, Karen, and drive off in your truck. Keep that in mind and you’ll find peace with what we’ve done.”

  “I am at peace with what we’ve done. I’m just not okay about the law, Marty Carver runs it, he hates me and he wants this place for himself.”

  “Okay. But Wolf came to town the day before we started here, stayed with me both those nights, ten to one Carver doesn’t even know he exists. Just make sure his stuff’s not somewhere around here. I found the slug and got it out of the wall— we were lucky there. I dug the blood out of the floor, re-raked the dirt and packed it, wiped down all the spray off the jars and shelves. I think I got it all, but if you’re up to it, take a rag and some ammonia and make sure.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Here, take this.” He handed her the .357. “I can’t risk having this on me, or I would ditch it. Get rid of it, far from here. I think you have to sleep more before you start… but here’s an alarm clock I found. Then please go and get your hand treated, out in Bushmill, or even farther. Say you hurt it cutting down those plum trees— get that in the record.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m sorry I have to leave you now, Karen. Alone. But with my record, we can’t afford the attention. Remember that we’ve already made this disappear, these are just details.”

  “Kyle… ” What had already passed between them stopped her from thanking him. That he should have brought a man like Wolf here was part of who he was. But the whole of who he was, tears came to her eyes and she opened her arms.

  He moved into them. The caution with which he embraced her recalled the first time he had shaken her hand— hydraulic strength applied with exquisite gentleness. She felt his voice through her breasts, her ribcage, like the purring of a gentle beast. “Karen, I brought this on you and I’ll never rest until I know you’re safe.”

  At the door he gave her a slip of paper. “Here’s the number of the hotel I’ll be at. Call me tonight from Bushmill.” From the window, she watched his truck move out the drive, still feeling his arms around her. Together they’d buried Wolf… and buried Dad with him? But that thought made her shiver and the feel of Kyle’s arms left her.

  When he was gone, she resolved to start at once. She lay down for just a moment, reviewing the materials she would need to clean the cellar… and was gone.

  * * * *

  An hour later, she came full awake, weighing a thought that seemed to have come in her sleep. Last night, just before Wolf came crunching down the drive, she had heard the sound of a motor out on the highway. The sound tapered slowly, as if it might have slowed down not much beyond the orchard. What if the son of a bitch stole a car and drove it out here? And it was hidden just off road near the property?

  There was a knock at the front door.

  She was up and striding to it, swift confrontation her only remedy to her terror. The taped up hand? Hurt it cutting down those trees. The trunk of the last of them came down before she was ready.

  It was Mr. Fratelli, short and upright, in the full pomp of his leather coat and gaudy black hair. “Karen! I wake you up? You gotta get up wit da sun, run an orchard. Whaddya doin’ to those trees out there?”

  “Hi, Mr. Fratelli. I’m doing whatever I want to them, is what I’m doing.” She made a wry face and raised her taped hand, on which Fratelli’s sharp eye had already lighted. “I hurt myself cutting them down. I’m resting up, but I have to take off.” Her relief at encountering only a greedy buyer for Dad’s land was waning fast. Fratelli acted very familiar with the place, coming to the back door. She couldn’t invite him in. She remembered the ragged holes the double-ought had punched in the living room walls, the ceiling.

  But he showed no wish to enter. “You say you got apricots, peaches. I got Sal inna truck, we take some off your hands.”

  “I got thirteen flats already picked. Drive around to the back and load them up. And I’ll do my own picking. I’ll bring you the rest in a day or two, when I get my hand tended to.”

  Sal, w
ith his occasional meaningless leer at her, loaded the flats. Fratelli gave her a wad of twenties. “Three hunnerd. I don’t squeeze the pennies wit’ friends.” And he looked around saying this, an indescribable something in his face as he took in the stumps of Dad’s brandy trees, the mountain of trimmings still jeweled with fruit.

  “Were you really good friends with my Dad, Mr. Fratelli?”

  Acknowledging the undertones of her question, he looked her in the eyes as if to say, We both know something about old Jack Fox, don’t we, Karen?

  Which, oddly, reassured her. He wasn’t like Marty, or Harst, a disciple of Jack’s. He was more a detached observer. He wanted to buy this place, but she saw, with instant certainty, that he wanted it to sell at great profit to those who truly craved it.

  This brought inspiration.”You know the idea of selling this place, Mr. Fratelli, the idea appeals to me more and more. But you’re way too low, number one. Number two, I have to talk with some business partners in San Francisco— settle some questions about my reinvestment plans. Bring me a better offer— a much better offer.”

  “’Ey. We talk again, I see what I can do, but you gotta be a realist here! Sal! Whadda ya waitin?”

  She weighed what she’d done, watching them drive off, and hoped that she’d set invisible tumblers clicking around her. Some feelers must have gone from Fratelli to Dad’s eager heirs and he’d be sure to make them aware of accelerating negotiations, if not of his purchase price. If Marty and Harst thought they had ownership in view, they would leave her alone. Hopefully, no more of Marty’s poking around on this or that pretext.

  But, she would never sell Dad’s place now. Not until she could haul off the compost heap and dump it into the sea.

  XVII

  After Marty sent for Babcock, he sat at his desk, unlocked and opened a lower drawer. Nestled in there: a Smith .38, a Glock 19, an old but lovingly conditioned 1911 Colt .45, and a Ruger 9mm. He’d taken every one of them from Jack Fox’s house the same evening he had learned the great man had set by the scepter and the mantle of his lordship and had sprayed some of the trees of his orchard with his skull and his teeth and his brains.