Apricot brandy

by Lynn Cesar

  “Hey, Karl! Looking for this?” She thought her grin would split her face. This was too much! This was wonderful! “Draw, cowboy!” she crowed and gripping her right wrist with her left hand, just like in the movies, she fired off a shot in his general direction. The recoil spun her tube slowly around and when she’d cycled back to face him, lo and behold, there was a spray of red tissue on the top of his shoulder and mucho blood curtaining down over his hairy chest and belly. “Whoa!” she shouted and while there was a tiny corner of her that was stunned and frightened by what she’d done, what she’d gotten herself into, it was dwarfed by this mighty joy that filled her, an exaltation hoisting her high above the dirty struggle of her life up to this moment.

  “Wanna see me do it again?” she crowed and whack, fired off a second shot as reckless as the first, counter paddling with her feet so that she was not turned away, so that she saw a spray of crimson leap up from his other shoulder. Was she dreaming this? It was too perfect to be real!

  But what was the man doing with his legs? Something was happening to those crooked legs of his! They were darkening, growing longer, twisting and twining together into a single ropy braid and snaking, pouring off the end of the lounge, and sprouting branchlets as they rivered across the mud and into the water. His chest was shriveling and darkening, his arms too, becoming rootlike cables that joined the weave of the rest of him, all of him pouring into the pond, his head shrunk down to a featureless knot, a burl—

  Ice pierced the soles of her feet. It was not pain exactly, more like pure power, an energy so absolute it stilled her with its first touch. Was it pouring into her or was she pouring into it? Her body, meat blood and bone, became a cold thick smoke that tendrilled into a new shape beneath the water— coiling, reweaving itself according to a dark green Will almost as ancient as the bones of the planet herself. All that was left of her now was her head sliding under water. Before she sank her eyes showed her a sky of sapphire blue that stretched into two dimming streaks that turned green, turned black, were gone.

  * * * *

  “Almost forty-two flats,” Sal told his father. “Now I’m heading for the hot tub.”

  “Not so fast.” The old man had that gloating look that made his son so uneasy, though he didn’t seem as surprised at the volume of the harvest as Sal had expected him to be. Plucked up a slightly bruised peach and pulped it in that skilful, one-handed way he had. “Hot tub. Whadda you, da owner? Your old man goes to da hot tub. I wanchoo here sellin’ till sundown.”

  “Pop! Who’s gonna come?”

  “You kiddin?” He gestured toward the front of the produce arcade. Sal walked over, saw placards even bigger than this morning’s: fox fruit special price to move. And saw at least a dozen shoppers poking around among the other stands, while actually eyeing him and his father and the loaded truck.

  “Damn,” Sal murmured. “Pop, look. Lemme just grab an hour at home, say hi to Cherry, explain I’ll be late.”

  “Okay. But tanight you spend at her place. I want da tub, want da place ta myself. I got comp’ny.”

  So ten minutes later Sal, his little clippers in hand, was ducking through the sagging barbed-wire strands of old Mr. Kittredge’s fence and weaving his way through the thick bush, the manzanita and scotch broom and scrub oak that covered almost all the old man’s five acres. He followed an old deer trail which, for all his goings and comings along it, he had taken care not to enlarge with his passage and found his first patch, five fat dope plants just over six feet tall, buds nodding weightily amid the native foliage. Reminded himself for the hundredth time that his neighbor on the other side, acting Sheriff Marty Carver, was at least a quarter mile away as the crow flew and that all the pungent shrubbery of his own land stood between.

  He clipped suckers from the woody stalks and slipped them into a Ziploc. Just one more week and the buds themselves would go into bigger Ziplocs, then straight into the specially sealed trunk of his Volvo. Then just a (clip… clip… clip) four hour drive down to the city. From bulky agriculture to pure cash. Thirty-five K in pocket had no odor to worry about. Added to what was already in the lockbox, he and Cherry would have title to a comfy little condo in the city.

  From his first patch to his second— clip-clip— to his third, the Ziploc of suckers swelling in his pocket.

  He ducked back over onto his father’s property. Cherry already had the hot tub fired up and her bikini on when he got home and now she had some margaritas mixed. “Hey, honey,” he told her. “I’m sorry, I gotta go back to the market till dark. And we gotta stay at your place tonight.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “So I could do this.” He wrapped his arms around her and stood hugging and enjoying the half-clothed feel of her. “And this,” he added, releasing her just enough so he could grab a margarita and down it with a smack of the lips. Then he gave her the moronic smile that he’d used since high school to disarm all his aggressive corn-fed white-boy schoolfellows and keep them at a distance. It was his and Cherry’s private joke now. “Simple Sal!” she smiled. “You sure you won’t have a nice bubbly bath? Just a quick one?” She cocked a comic hip at him and waggled her eyebrows.

  This led to another interlude of hugging and kissing and fondling, from which, at the last possible moment, Sal disengaged with a groan. “I gotta give Pops a break. He never asks for overtime.”

  “Okay hon. Can I take a quick dip?”

  “Sure, but I think he’s got plans for it when he gets back. I think he’s having Maureen over.”

  The hot tub was half screened by potted plants and trellised flowering vines and, as she entered it, Cherry comically half-draped herself with vines, posing as a jungle beauty before she sank into the water. Settled in, she asked, “So how’s it looking?” with a nod towards Kittredge’s property. Some of her nervousness about the dope showed through, couldn’t help it, having been raised a conventional little corn-fed white girl herself.

  “’Ey!” Giving her his parody of his old man. “Whatchoo tink? Every ‘ting great! Anudda week, tops!”

  “You shouldn’t make fun of your dad, he’s a sweet man.”

  “I don’t know about sweet. He’s been pretty good to me, sure, but I just don’t wanna be like him.”

  “Do you really want to live in the city? I mean, isn’t it nice living where everything’s green? I know it’s Hicktown and all, but… look how good you grow things. Maybe you just think you’ll be happy in the city, but you really won’t. I mean, your roots are here.”

  “Yeah,” he answered, “but in the city my roots will be in a nice safe closet under grow-lights. And there’ll be clubs and restaurants and movies and concerts. Come on, sweetie. Doncha wanta come with me?”

  “’Course I do. I can live anywhere if I’ve got you… ”

  * * * *

  Helen Carver stopped to pick up her son from Susie’s, where he was “hanging” with his pal Chet. They both begged her to let him spend the night with Susie sweetly seconding their plea— her husband was a long-distance trucker and she “loved the company.” Of course Helen agreed. “Skip can stay,” she said, “if Skip does his homework.” It was a love-token she offered him, to use his own name, as he called it, whenever Marty wasn’t around. He vowed prodigies of homework and when she demanded a hug, he gave it willingly.

  Guilt pierced her as she briefly held him, an irrational guilt that she had given him Marty for a father. She walked back to her car grieving and fearing for her son. It was Karen Fox who had put her in this state. She had all but said that Marty played a role in the death of her lover. In the same breath as saying her father had also, her dead father. Karen was delusional with grief, there could be no other explanation, and yet she had seemed so present, sad and calm if anything.

  Helen thought of the sexual cruelty of Marty’s fantasies. She had accepted the little rituals he wanted, they were scary at first, but for all years, she’d never been really hurt, maybe a bit sore sometimes. And he did provide
for them. But over these last few days, Marty was different, had a kind of aura about him. Maybe a scent? Very faint, a hot-house aroma with a touch of the bitter smell of sap, especially when they had sex. So odd, how it struck her somehow as being a scent of danger.

  She turned onto their own street and got a scare: fifty yards ahead, Marty’s patrol car erupted from the driveway. He seemed not to see her as he sped off, a man on urgent business.

  When Helen let herself in, she confronted something that grew more and more disturbing the longer she stared at it. Down the hall, the door to Marty’s study hung open just a crack. Marty’s study was always locked, never to be entered by anyone but himself. He must have slammed it behind him in his haste, too distracted to notice the latch hadn’t caught. She stepped up to the door and touched it.

  She didn’t open it, but she knew she was going to, and she stood there trying to decide why it was that all at once she believed what Karen had just told her. Marty was mean, yes, cold and withholding, indifferent to her feelings, but those things in themselves didn’t mean that someone was a killer. She’d liked Marty back in junior high, he had an innocent energy, enthusiasm. By the time he started courting her, right after high school, he wasn’t so likeable. In her shyness and humility she’d just decided that boys becoming men naturally got less nice. She decided that nicer junior high kid was still in there somewhere and she’d tried to find and love him.

  But what it came down to at this moment was that Karen Fox said she was in danger from Marty; now Helen believed her. Just like that. She pushed open the never-to-be-violated door to his sanctum and stepped inside.

  There were chests and cabinets, a rack of rifles above a workbench and, on the bench, aside from a stack of bondage porn magazines, nothing but handguns, just lying there spread out on its surface. Revolvers, automatics— beyond this she could not classify them, except that all seemed to be of different makes.

  Why did he have all these guns spread out on a bench? Didn’t men keep them in racks or cases? Why would they just be lying around in the open air? And the air of the room touched her nostrils. A scent in the air.

  She bent above that… smorgasbord of pistols and drew the scent into her nostrils. Far stronger than the smell of oiled steel it was. It recalled the smell of newly chainsawed trees on her dad’s farm: a bitter whiff of sap and raw plant fiber. It brought vividly upon her, the memory of Marty rutting in her, his invasion like a root breaking cold stiff soil, a brutish green imperialism.

  He had rushed in here to choose one of these guns, and rushed out with it… .

  It was as if a gunshot had shattered a shell that had encased her all her adult life. Without her knowing it, cold new air bathed her and the thought Why am I here? slapped her in the face. Look around! A den of ropes and guns and bondage porn. A cop rushing in to grab a surely unregistered gun, and rushing out with it! She almost ran, but a cold, steely thought gripped her spine. Her hand darted out and took one of the pistols, a heavy, blunt-snouted revolver. Her hand, yes, but feeling like someone else’s as it hefted the weapon’s mass… . or the hand of a different Helen, just as afraid as the one she’d been a moment ago, but freer to move— a Helen whose fear was the power to move, instead of the paralysis it had always been.

  She stood a moment baffled, unable to decide whether to leave the door as she had found it or pull it shut. Surely he had assumed it had shut behind him, so it was safest to close it.

  Hurrying to her room, Helen threw things into a suitcase, and ran from there to Skip’s room— and threw more things in. As she backed out of the drive and swung onto the road, she didn’t yet know where she was going, but for now, it was enough knowing where she would never return.

  * * * *

  Marty rocketed towards Rabble’s place, with a glance at Fratelli’s driveway as he passed it. The Beretta he’d just grabbed from his stash of Wands (as he privately termed them) was for his return trip, for Sal Fratelli and his squeeze. As soon as Marty had made sure of Rabble, he’d work Jack’s magic on that little dope-growing punk.

  “Forgive me, Jack,” he murmured, “for the witch’s murder of the green god’s serpent. I didn’t suspect the old bitch’s power. Please sustain me in the service of Xibalba.” But in his heart, Marty silently withheld a reservation in his faith. For Jack Fox he felt awe and love, and for the green god felt the same. But it was up here Marty wanted to wield their power, here under the sun, in the cleanness of the wind and rain, ruling over men and women, constraining them, enjoying and disposing their bodies and lives. He did not want to go under the ground, as Jack had done by his own hand, as Harst had surely done, though far less willingly, Marty suspected. Harst’s vanishing had helped him to see his own unwillingness for that last transition. Marty wanted the sun, and humankind to rule. He did not want that empire, however vast, of black earth and root and worm.

  He arrived at Rabble’s drive and the Chief Deputy’s truck was in it. Marty’s thundering fist on the front door produced… an encouraging silence within. A walk around the side of the house to the back yard revealed… emptiness. An unsettling emptiness. That Rabble and the hooker should be gone was good, but where was the lush, unearthly luxuriance? There was no new growth. Just the empty deck, the littered mud, the scummy pond…

  He approached the brink of the pond. Sitting open beside his lounge was Rabble’s bag, no pistol in evidence. The lounge was collapsed, the aluminum legs buckled flat beneath it. And these… these were definitely deep drag-marks, crossing the mud between the foot of the lounge and the edge of the water.

  He followed the drag-marks, moving more slowly with each step closer to the pond. Stood right at the brink, his senses radiating, straining outward for the answering touch of what had been seeded here by the fructifying fire of Jack’s wand. All the signs suggested success: that the bitch he had shot had changed, seized him, changed him, and dragged him under… but where was Xibalba’s garden and serpent? Where was the flowering the god had nourished on their flesh?

  Probing with every sense, he stepped cautiously into the water, stooping to reach his hand down into its dimness… advanced another step down its silty bottom, wet to the knees, both hands searching under water for the rough touch of the green god’s scion.

  Nets seized his legs and arms. Not nets, but snaking vines that poured up from the silt, that laced him in a leafy weave, till he stood like an ivy-shrouded tree-trunk, his human shape engulfed in a dense macramé of stem and foliage. Peering out of this boscage half-blinding him, he saw a luxuriance of vine and creeper and moss radiating everywhere from the pond’s rim. It clothed the whole shabby yard in verdure, all of which seemed like a vast extension of his own body, for rootlets pincushioned every inch of his skin and through them he felt the tremor of the whole green weave around him.

  He stood there and saw— saw eyelessly, within his mind— the great eye-studded serpent coiled on the pond floor’s darkness.

  He stood there he knew not how long, for he was under the earth, just where he had feared to be, down in its ancient Darkness where seed and spore and root and filament and sleepless worm commingled, and there he conferred with Xibalba, or rather stood enfolded in that Titan’s will, and knew His might, which grips the earth as a hand grips a stone… .

  Even when the growth that gripped him fell away and joined the green weave as it enveloped ever more thickly the yard, deck, house— even when he moved dazedly from the water and picked his way through the deepening growth back to his cruiser, Marty had not yet returned from that Darkness. He scanned the sky, struggling to believe it was not a hallucination. In his rearview, he studied the micropunctures all over his face, a faint red stippling where the rootlets had pierced him. They itched and it was this that brought him to himself at last. He rubbed his face again and again. It dulled the itch, but not the awe still in him.

  * * * *

  He radioed Dispatch and asked for a report on Officer Haynes, Haynes had been out of touch for some time after report
ing a possible sighting of the stolen unmarked cruiser. He’d signed off without giving his location. Marty absorbed this stoically. He told Dispatch that Chief Deputy Rabble was missing from his residence and that a unit was to be stationed there. Two more units were to be dispatched to proceed north on Gravenstein Highway from the Spaith orchard. If they encountered the stolen cruiser, they were to shoot the driver on sight, for she was known to be guilty of a farmworker’s homicide, was likely to be guilty of Rabble’s as well, and was known to be armed.

  Armed indeed, he thought when he had disconnected. He recalled that skinny white-haired bitch in the battered fedora and the thing that rode with her, that thing of leaves and empty air that had gestured its defiance of him. Recalled and shuddered. For his Master had imparted to him, down there under the earth, that the white-haired bitch was raising an army against them.

  XX

  Quetzal drove the unmarked Dodge down miles of county highway in a manner most normal observers would find strange: she trod the accelerator to the floor, climbed to a hundred, a hundred-twenty miles per hour, and pulled back on the steering wheel as if it were an aircraft’s joy stick. And what these observers would have found stranger still, this caused the howling vehicle to lift— just six inches or so— all four of its tires from the pavement and hang there above the blacktop, still doing a steady one-twenty for a hundred yards, two hundred yards— until it dropped back to the pavement again. She would let up on the gas for a moment, scowl, fall back to a speed of fifty or so, tires in conventional contact with the road… and then she would try again.

  Meanwhile her passengers seemed oblivious to all but themselves. Their leaf-latticed hands touched wonderingly their own and each other’s leaf-latticed faces. Their arms and torsos interleaved in fluttering sinuous embraces. They entered and emerged from one another, sharing one another’s histories and hearts and hopes of vengeance… .