Apricot brandy

by Lynn Cesar

  “You see?” said Quetzal. Ahead, the stark ranks of autumn-denuded trees filed down to a small swamp. Black muck, a big pond of inky mud, spanned the lane, and the trees flanking it were bannered and festooned with vines and lianas. Thick moss wrapped the trunks and webs of creepers wove a velvety green fabric that tented the whole zone. Just beyond this uncanny micro-bog, a brown Dodge with front doors hanging open sat with its front bumper wedged against a tree-trunk.

  Quetzal led the ghost to the brink of the muck. Mosquitoes and dragonflies clouded the air, their wire-thin song stitching the silence of the leafy acres. The witch gestured at the bog, where a serpentine trunk or massive root threaded through the muck, thick as a man but sinuous, its bark so rough it seemed like scales. “A limb of the green daemon. Daughter, we must strike it till his green blood sprays!” At these words, here and there along the fissured limb, crude black gems appeared, oily-bright knobs that stiffly stirred, that searched for— and seemed to see— its enemies. Hoisting her axe, Quetzal shrilled, “With me, child! With me!”

  They brandished their axes, ghost with living woman, against the blue October sky and Quetzal cried, “Hunaphu! Ixbalanque! Itzamna! Strike with us!”

  In tandem, their axe-heads whickered down, the arcs of their honed bits flashing silver. Green sap sprayed, the limb convulsed. Again the axe-bits rose, flashed down… again… again, as vegetal tissue and geysering sap arched up from the wounds.

  A shudder went through its anacondan length. The eye-knobs dulled, a waxy pallor frosted them.

  Quetzal sighed, her shoulders sagged from their militant tension. She reached over and gently touched the back of her hand to the leaves that partially shaped one of long-dead Emily Fox’s cheeks. “Sweet hija. Queridita. That man, that lover who killed you with grief. You know now what possessed him. You know what he served and what he— deep under the earth— still serves. You know what your dear daughter fights, y que todavia tiene que luchar— what still she must fight. What we will fight. Y mira! Behold! We will not fight alone!”

  She faced the swamp— already less black, its tent of vegetation seeming to shrink, beginning to shrivel. Her sleeves fell back a bit with her priestly gesture and showed the stark thinness of her forearms, yet showed withal the tendony strength of those brown limbs.

  “Lupe!” she cried. “Tienes tu libertad! Ven a mi, pobrecita! Ven a mi, queridita tontita!”

  A muddy shape rose from the drying muck, a woman-shape from which the soil slid off, till she was only a sketchy earthen shadow— a shoulder, a thigh, a pendulous breast. Quetzal commanded a windy cone of leaves and clothed her. The full-bosomed shape staggered, raised the gapped yellow sketch of her face to the blue autumn sky… touched with foliate-hands her foliate torso and lifted the voids of her eyes in wonder.

  “Mis hijas,” said Quetzal. “Vamos a salvar otras, y otras, y otras. We are going to raise an army of murdered women and men! Vamos a matar a nos matadores! We are going to kill our killers and we are going to kill the killer of us all. Will you follow me?”

  Airy Emily Fox, a thing of sky and leaves, turned her half-invisible face to airy Lupe. Lupe reached for the second axe that Quetzal held and gripped its haft, brandishing and testing it. A smile spread across both their leafy faces.

  “Entonces, que vamanos!” cried Quetzal, smiling a smile of her own, a triumphant smile, her seamed eyes red and wet with tears both of tenderness and a jubilant anger. “Y mira!” she cried in a tone of discovery. “Here is our chariot!” She made one brief, beckoning gesture. The brown Dodge shuddered. Its front doors creaked shut and its engine came to life. It backed off the tree, with a slight creaking of its bent bumper, swung a half-arc in reverse, wheeled round, and trundled over the cloddy earth of the next lane over. Stopped. Both doors on its nearer side swung open.

  “Come, my sisters. We have brothers and sisters, who are waiting to join us!”

  * * * *

  Assistant Chief Deputy Marty Carver, acting sheriff of Gravenstein County, with one lordly finger on the wheel, steered up the Gravenstein Highway, sifting in his mind, as a miser sifts his wealth, the seeds of power he had planted and was about to plant. Jack Fox’s mantle had not been draped upon unworthy shoulders!

  The ape Babcock was a done deal, as Rabble and his bitch would shortly be. He’d given Rabble the orders last night and even now the crippled cowboy should be picking up his hooker at the bus station. Once Marty made sure of Babcock, he would check on the retired Chief Deputy. Then his next bit of business would be that dope-growing punk next door.

  Babcock’s long absence all but assured Marty the ox had accomplished the one thing he was fit for: feeding the green god. Marty prepared his courage. Where the god had been fed, one of his dragons would be born and Marty would finally confront a soldier from the demon army he had been chosen to raise.

  Less than a mile from Spaith’s, straight at him in the opposing lane, came… a brown Dodge, one of the Department’s unmarked cruisers. And by the plate, the very one Babcock had checked out this morning! But Babcock was not at the wheel. No, it was some old Mex bitch, with white hair curling out from under a battered gray hat. She glanced and grinned at him as their vehicles passed each other… and from her rear window… a shape of yellow leaves thrust out! A knot of yellow leaves hung in the air, alongside the window, somehow contracting and clenching? A fist of yellow leaves it was, a fist from which a single, jointed leaf rose up. A leafy fist, giving him the finger!

  He stopped dead, right in the middle of the highway and, in the rearview, saw his slack face was beaded with sweat. He had come braced for awe, but of a marvel he had summoned— for a nightmare surely, but one whose horror he would harness. Marty fought to breathe. Why couldn’t he draw air? It seemed he’d just been inhaling the pure atmosphere of Power, only to have it punched out of him. Because suddenly Power was elsewhere, Power was with that chicken-killing white-haired bitch, Lupe’s neighbor. Was she a witch? A bruja? To command a fucking demon of dead leaves? How the hell did they get Babcock’s car?

  He could not doubt the powers his master had given him, he dared not doubt them. He had to shake this trance off and see his mission accomplished. Accelerating towards Spaith’s, he snatched up the mouthpiece and thumbed Central. “Bruce? Sheriff Carver. Gimme anyone northbound on Gravenstein Highway.”

  “Copy that, Chief.”

  Marty was pulling into Spaith’s acres when his earpiece crackled. “Shurrf? Haynes here. My Twenty is three miles north of town.”

  “Step on it, Haynes. One of our un-markeds has been stolen, maybe five miles north of Spaith’s by now. I want ‘em shackled and brought in, do you copy?”

  “Copy that, Shurrf. Shackled an’ brought in.”

  “Report on contact, you copy?”

  “Report on contact, copy that, Shurrf.”

  Very slowly, Marty rolled through the orchard, scanning left and right, the disregarded wealth of walnuts loud beneath his tires. Ahead he saw a spray of soil on the asphalt, where someone had accelerated out of the midst of the trees. He turned and rolled downslope between those two rows.

  There, a hundred yards ahead. When he emerged from the cruiser, he had to steady himself. A swamp spanned the lane, the swamp already a patch of black, fast-hardening mud. Shriveling festoons, a canopy of vines and creepers, stretched between the flanking trees. Explosive greenery had webbed this lane but was already brittle, gray as ash, its shriveled leaflets drooping like dead fingers. A massive, crooked, crocodilian shape lay half sunk within the hardening muck. As he drew near enough to see clearly, his legs half-buckled and he went down upon one knee.

  Brutal axe-wounds bit its scaly dorsum. Hindquarters sunk, its frozen forelimbs clawed the air, stiff as dead branches. The great jaws might have been a lightning-split bough lined with thorns that were all too plainly fangs. What brought Marty’s reverent terror to its peak were the pallid fungal nodes that studded the head like a pustulous pox. All eyes they were and in the milky spheres of
some, the dimming outlines of a human iris gleamed.

  The raw shock of miracle— before he could collect his full-grown self about him— threw Marty back in time, far back into a younger self. It was back when he first picked for the Foxes, a gawky pre-adolescent, when he first— come evening amid the sweet-smelling plums— sensed something in that Fox earth, sensed a privilege, a potency, a promise in that soil. Back in those days, he saw a beautiful sinister something in Jack Fox’s eyes, eyes that hinted there was a secret in that ground, a precious power, an immortal power. That was the year Jack Fox had become, in his heart, his true father.

  What Marty remembered, as he looked upon the miracle of his God’s murdered scion half-sunk in the mud, was a single fleeting moment in that crucial childhood autumn of his. It was a moment before the immortal power had seduced him. In that instant, young Marty Carver had felt only terror of the secret he sensed in Jack Fox’s earth.

  And just for an instant now, as he looked at the corpse of the green god’s dragon, that younger Marty cried, “Thank God!” within his heart.

  But Acting Assistant Chief Marty Carver was made of much sterner stuff, was far more powerful than that long-vanished adolescent. The treachery of his heart became rage. He towered to his feet and shook his fist. The green god had an enemy, this enemy had power… but Marty was the green god’s general, his first in command. That gray-haired bitch, that witch. She would die in pain. She would die in pieces!

  He plucked out his cell-phone and thumbed the speed dial. “Rabble?”

  “Hey, Marty.”

  “Where are we?”

  Some throat-clearing. “I’m in town to pick her up,” Rabble answered. “I think that’s her bus that just pulled in.”

  “Listen carefully. You fuck this up and I’m going to snap your spine. You got that, sir?” The sneer at Rabble’s nominally superior rank was an infallible goad to the man’s abject compliance. It recalled to him his last moments as Marty’s actual superior, writhing on the floor of his office, his shattered leg shattered anew.

  “It’s a done deal, Marty.”

  “Make sure you use that piece I gave you. I’m coming to your place in an hour. I’d better find it done. And listen. If you see one of the Department’s unmarked Dodges drive onto the property, with a white-haired bitch at the wheel, you put a bullet right through her face, no questions asked.”

  XIX

  Sal couldn’t believe he was still picking— the sun was halfway down the sky… How long since that scary old lady had left? She’d walked out of the house, into the big shed and out of it with a pair of axes over one shoulder, the hafts clamped together in one gnarly little hand. Just walked off the place and seemed to be talking to herself as she went, leaving behind her a weirdness hanging in the air. No other way to put it. The afternoon silence got creepy, the leaves in the breeze took on a muttery, secretive sound, and the fruit felt even nastier, even more like fuzzy skin to Sal’s fingers.

  And there seemed to be no end to it! Eighteen flats he’d brought in his truck, all filled already and stacked back in the bed. Then he’d gone into the shed and gotten more flats there, had a dozen of those filled, and still it wasn’t done. Like the fruit was breeding in there in those tangled heaps of lopped-off branches— breeding even while he was picking it. Everybody said the Fox fruit had like special powers, nudge nudge. Fine, whatever. Just typical hick-town local lore, but Sal still didn’t like the way his old man acted around the stuff. There was something unpleasant in that Old-Country sly look Pop got in his eyes as he set it out on his stands. And that same weird feeling was right here all around him, was in this earth he was standing on, the soil this stuff grew out of. And if that was crazy thinking, then it was this god damned place that made him crazy. All he wanted was to box the last of this stinking fruit and get the hell off of Jack Fox’s land.

  * * * *

  Karl Rabble led the skinny whore— Kitty, she called herself— out of the bus station to his Ram Charger, hitching his crooked legs along on half-crutches. He knew she was calmed by his condition. How could an old gimp like him threaten an oblivious meth-head hooker in her twenties, all the world her John? He could almost pity her if he had the time, if his terror of Carver allowed it. Just get it done!

  Playing the courtly old cowboy, he handed her up into the cab and then clambered up behind the wheel. Ceremoniously propping his crutches on the seat between them, fired up the engine, gave her a smile. A skinny, pale antsy little thing in a loose top string-tied behind her neck. “Three-four miles out of town, dear, I got a nice piece of property. I’m the sheriff here, sweetheart, semi-retired on account of injuries. Check my wallet and take out those three hundreds while you’re at it.”

  She liked the money, but looked slightly worried by the photo I.D. He swung out from the curb, waved ostentatiously to a deputy in a passing cruiser, and told her, “Now don’t you be scared because I’m the law, ex-law. It means you’re safe with me and safe from anyone else in the department. Out here in the country, we don’t pay this kinda harmless recreation any mind at all. And it ain’t any big thing either, what I want from you. I mean you can see I’m not in much shape for rough stuff. Fact is— my, you’re a pretty little thing!— fact is you just have to help out an old jerk-off. All you gotta do is pose for me. On an inner-tube! Floatin’ out there on my own personal trout-pond I got in my yard.”

  “Ooooh!” she said, giving him a practiced lascivious look. “I love jerk-offs! Say, you mind?” She held up a pocket-rocket she’d plucked from her pathetic bra.

  “Not at all! Get happy. Get comfy. We’re near half-way there.”

  Ten minutes later, they were roaring up his drive, parking in a smoke of dust at his rambling ranch-style house. He led her out to the back deck, thinking as they went that his place looked kind of dark and shabby. He tried for a jovial air as they emerged on the deck. “It don’t look like much, an old bachelor’s digs you know, but looky there! Isn’t that the prettiest little pond?”

  He gestured grandly at the theater of their tryst: saggy lawn furniture and flattened beer cans on the pond’s muddy border, the half-deflated inner tube bobbing at the edge of the water, which was coffee-brown and decked here and there with bubbly green patches of algae. He rubbed his hands together to express gusto. “Well now. I’m gonna get changed and set on that lounge down there. You just get undressed and get on out there on that tube and I won’t be a minute. And here’s your bonus up front.” And he plucked another pair of hundreds from his shirt pocket.

  “Ooooh! Thanks. You hurry on out now, big daddy!”

  Kitty meandered on down to the pond, honking up an extra big dose of vitamin M from her pocket rocket and thinking, boy, was this something new. That water looked cold and nasty, but it was Easy Money and it shouldn’t take long. She noticed, lying by the lounge, an open gym bag, with towels and sun lotion in it. She paused to gratify a life-long petty thief’s instinct and bent to rummage in the bag. Her fingers met a dense metal shape… .

  Well, what d’ya know, an automatic! She could sell this for plenty to Rafe, one of her connections back in the city. She decided to keep on her ultra-brief cut-offs and hid the gun behind her, tucking the blunt square barrel down there between her buttcheeks, then shed her top and bra. Eager to hide her prize, she snugged her rear down into the tube and, with her heels, pushed herself backwards into the water.

  But what if he wanted to see her pussy? She unzipped the front of her cut-offs and spread them open as much as she could in front. Well… he’d be able to see some of her pussy. Somehow she would persuade him to go with that— there was no way she was going to give up the extra three or four hundred she could get for the piece.

  But why would he have a gun in that bag? Well, he was a cop. But why would he have a gun in that bag? Christ. What if he was a hurt-freak? What if he meant to shoot her?

  No way. It was just that she’d honked way too much. She was cranked to the gills and beyond, was truly spun, disorie
nted. Even the water beneath her was giving her a creepy feeling of nasty green things lurking around below. Get a grip, girl!

  Of course she was disoriented, look at how she lived! Just look at what her life was. And all at once, unbidden, a flood of memories came to her. Herself in sordid contortions on floors, on beds, on greasy Naugahyde couches, in the back seats of cars. Men’s bodies gripping and kneading and twisting and penetrating her… .

  This kind of mood had come on her once or twice in the last couple years. It was rare because she prided herself on never looking back, never recalling or dredging things up. Her motto was just keep moving ahead, onward to the next party, the next gram, the next drink, the next pill. But when it hit her as it did now, it was intense. She floated there on the pond, slack and astonished, as the tableaux flashed, humiliation after humiliation.

  Out came Karl in black swim trunks, crutching his crooked legs along, the neck of a bottle sticking out of his waistband and a big grin on his hairy face. “Don’t you look sexy! Oh, my! I can’t wait! Just paddle back here a minute and take a slug of this— it’s good for what ails you!”

  Look at that potbellied bastard, just like how many other whiskery rank-smelling sonsofbitches who’d mauled and dirtied her over the years, starting with her stepdad before she’d even had her first period. No way she was paddling back in, letting him find his gun and take it back from her.

  “No thanks!” she called. “Drink mine for me!”

  He did, too, then gave her a genial wave with the bottle and socked down three major gulps of it. Easing himself down onto the chaise lounge, he took three more. Like some guy in a movie drowning his sorrows or something. Looked like his hand there had a bit of the shakes, too… . And then that shaky hand reached down into that gym bag. Reached farther in and fished around.

  A smile sprouted across Kitty’s face. She felt something big rising through her body. A kind of joy, an energy that seemed to well up from the water beneath her. Like the tables were turning. Like the course of her whole pitiful life was reversing and the shit was flowing the other way for a change. She took out the gun and waved it in the air.