by Lynn Cesar
Leaping out of the truck he went towards her. His sex seemed a lifted rapier in a war they must fight. And it astonished him, the power of this feeling, that they were in a battle. That the enemy, whatever it was, was all around them, merciless and dire. That he and Karen must cleave to one another for all they were worth.
He climbed into the tree and stood on the great bough before her. She came into his arms, giving him a shock of wonder and recognition as they touched. “Brace your back against the tree. It can’t hurt us if we love.” Kyle straddled the bough, his back to its bark; she straddled him, her breasts soft against his face. Moving as if within a sky-filling melody, the music of their hearts beat in cadence with the singing wind.
Kyle woke shivering. His sex was wet and cold and a scab had formed on his arm. Seated cross-legged on the roof of his truck was a small white-haired figure in a black coat and fedora. She spoke quietly, yet he heard her as if they stood face to face.
“Hombre. You must go through fire and fury to find her, mi hijo. You are not her lover, but you love her and must protect her. Sleep for an hour or two, my friend. You will need your strength. Go to Gravenstein, not to the orchard, for she is not there. Get to Gravenstein by sunrise and be ready to fight.”
XXII
In the deep of night Marty rocketed his cruiser down the Gravenstein Highway towards Jack’s acres. His face itched with its new pox of piercings, while jubilation twined with terror climbed his spine, like a clinging vine. Jack was with him, had been, since his immersion in Rabble’s pond. In waves of imagery and understanding, the sequence and reasons of Marty’s task had been revealed to him.
He summoned the night-shift’s cruisers to the station and let the men know that at their shifts’ end they must return to the station for extended assignment. Next he notified the day-shift troops— for troops indeed all the deputies were, an army that Jack now called to fight the witch’s army. Marty commanded some to duty at first light and some to stand by during the night “for special ops.”
With these redeployments in place, and the whole force poised for muster just after dawn, Marty saddled up his cruiser and headed out to Jack’s orchard, with his heart divided between delight and dread. And how not? The aura of this place had ruled his spirit since he was a boy and now, as Jack’s living will unfolded in his body, blooming before his inner eye, the feeling was equally of slavery and power. He wore his master’s mantle and wielded his might, but his every move was commanded from under the earth by this Master.
He rolled down the long drive, past the black-windowed house— past the vandalism of toppled plum trees, but did not pause— down the lane and into the night army of spiderish branches he went, the trees all gesturing in the starkness of his headlights. At the lowest border of Jack’s plantation, he knew the task he was summoned to.
The lights were on in Jack’s still shed and he stepped inside, into a gasoline stench. He gazed around at an interior he had beheld only once before, summoned here four years ago, the night he had become a man and seized the reins of power from Rabble. Jack had admitted him that very night, only then had he fully unfolded to him the coming mystery and Marty’s role in it. Told him of his power-to-be and the vista of the immortality that was to be his prize. He’d been so proud that night!
Now, knowing what he was about to do, awe was dominant— so much so that he had to struggle to find his breath, to master the galloping of his heart, and wrap his will around the hugeness of his mission here. Now, wirecutters and a hatchet… . With trembling hands he tucked both in his belt, and faced the kegs. So many of them! Awkward rather than heavy for his new-grown strength. He found he could hug two at once against his chest.
Out of the shed with them and around the huge compost heap. That black shape seemed like a shrouded giant with something of Jack’s power coiled within it. Marty only sensed this without understanding it; some seed or scion of his departed master lay dormant in that fecund mass. He hastened to the acres’ barbed wire border. Setting down the kegs, he cut through the wire, resumed his burdens and carried them down a rough and overgrown slope to the bank of the stream that skirted Jack’s land. And on this bank, wielded the hatchet, broaching the first cask in two blows and tilted a gurgle of brandy into the stream. Brandy’s breath scenting the night air.
A long labor lay before him. Near a hundred kegs remained to be transfused into the valley’s water-table. A long labor and a great terror to be subdued in the doing of it, to be bent to his will as he worked, because Marty understood what he was feeding here, understood he was, with this endless libation, awakening monsters from the earth, summoning the green god’s army of conquest to the battlefield this valley would become.
But bubbling up beside his terror rose a devilish merriment, a mocking glee for the powerless enemy he knew rode above him, riding the air even now, cruising like a night-hawk or a great white owl. That white-haired bitch-witch whose leafy phantom had mocked him. She cruised up there, but dared not dive, oh no, for there was a guardian giant in this earth. Jack Fox himself, and one greater than Jack even deeper, and she dared not strike Marty, dared not try to kill him as she had surely killed the still-missing Haynes.
So Marty mocked her as he toiled, as he went back and forth trucking kegs, splintering them, disgorging them— mocked her with a work-chantey as he poured the pungent brandy in the stream:
“Here goes the brandy into the creek that flows to the swamp that drains to the stream that runs to the river that goes through the town that Jack killed!”
* * * *
When the moon had reached its zenith and its light suffused the night sky with the power she needed, Quetzal called her gathered ghosts close around her around her and spoke to them. “Now you must come into me, mis Queridas. Stretch these old bones, this old flesh with your spirits. Ayuda me. Help this old monkey-body of mine take the shape we need.
“Our enemy’s fortress is under the earth, there is a gate, a door he keeps open. It’s the door he’ll use to draw his servants down below. It’s the door he’ll use when he comes out to harvest every human life on earth. Help me find this portal from the sky. Then, if we can pass through it, we can go down and free your sisters and brothers taken before you. Come into me, you spirits of the air, y den mi alas! Make me wings!”
She took off her coat and her coarse-knit sweater and tied them around her waist. Her chest— lean, indeed, as a monkey’s— with her breasts like winter apples, wore the moonlight on their Mayan darkness. She spread her arms and the ghosts around her let their leaf-and-flower-petal flesh fall from them. Then the moonlit air round Quetzal’s skinny axis grew iridescent, the witch’s skin rippled and dimpled like dark water. Her chest began to expand like a ribbed cask, her arms began to thicken and to sprout… and moments later, a gaunt little form in a black fedora rose up on wings mightier than a condor’s, but of a plumage so richly tinted that even pale moonlight showed its emerald hue as she hung beneath the silver lunar disc, a huge disc, one night from full.
Circling upward in a slowly widening spiral, she sought that vantage where the topography would betray the green god’s hidden workings. She had thought it all but certain that Jack Fox’s land must hold a gateway in some secret nook or angle and there, indeed, was… the compost heap, a ridged black scar. She sensed beneath the wound it sealed that a titanic malice stirred and smoldered. By that path, she saw, the enemy’s realm was near indeed, but his power and watchful hunger held the gate.
Like her sister, the great white owl, she hung there watching the labors of Marty Carver, the flash of his hatchet in moonlight, the glint of liquor falling from his arms into the stream. She watched, too, as a furtive glow began to thread its way along the stream from the point where Marty poured his tribute in. This subtle luminescence moved faster down the stream course than the current’s flow could carry it: it moved like a spark down the length of a fuse.
In the water-table of this valley, amid the branchings of its aquifers, there had to
be another portal, and surely it would be downstream from here, perhaps right in town, where Xibalba’s harvest would be richest when, in his power, he rose with tomorrow’s moon.
“Look,” she murmured to her brood of spirits. “See how this beast in uniform toils to prepare his god’s coming. See how he fertilizes the whole valley for the birth of Xibalba’s dragons and when he returns to his men, he will still be about his master’s business. Let’s kill him, or at least slow him down. Lupe… Lupita, you let him misuse you so. Stay here, my daughter, ride back with him.”
Quetzal then tilted her great wingspan and, in a majestic glide, sliced southward across the sky, down along the Gravenstein watershed. When she passed above the portal she sought, she would know, and down it she would go to free more captive spirits to her army.
* * * *
Marty’s work was done by dawn and not a moment too soon. He flung himself behind the wheel of his cruiser and fired it up. Turned on the heat— it was cold in the god-damned car for some reason— whipped it into reverse, spun around and roared up the picking lane, pale dust rising behind him in the first gray light of morning.
He drove the top speed he could survive within the Fox acres and when he reached the highway, cranked it up to ninety. So much to do! And by God he was afire with it, was just the general to lead the conquering army! He felt like Hannibal, bestriding not an elephant, but the green god himself, Xibalba his own gigantic mount, the whole round earth his conquest, the endless green horizons of Eternity unscrolling before him. Jack Fox might skulk in the dark below, his deity’s minion, his Morlock, but Marty Carver bestrode the god and ruled a sun-washed world.
First, by oh-eight-hundred, every last department cruiser and van must be deployed to every ag-worker ghetto and labor-camp in the Valley. Marty’s plainclothes people would have to be separately briefed— must be armed with a “special issue” of Jack Fox’s sorcerous sidearms. He would identify their targets as Terrorist Sympathizer Mexes and Pakis, all of whom were armed and dangerous and to be taken down on sight. These officers would, of course, be utilized along with the immigrants they took out. It didn’t matter where the green god got his eyes and brain matter, his DNA for vertebrate structures.
Meanwhile Marty’s uniforms would bring in every brown body their cruisers and vans could hold— pack them in the drunk tank and holding cells. He would use the day-captain, Contos, whom he’d put half in the know, to help him start staging the immigrants down to the old foundation, and down into the portal, and put Contos himself down the portal last of all. Well before that time, everyone else on the force would be responding to frantic calls from all over the county. Soon thereafter, every responding officer would have joined the callers in the green god’s many jaws.
Oh-six-hundred hours, not a moment to spare. The woods and farms and fields had form, though not yet color, as they flashed past him. Christ, it was so cold in here, the cold like a muscled shape clenching his skin, squeezing his bones in an icy slippery grip and, just as he roared onto Fast Creek Bridge, the wheel convulsed hard right, breaking his grip, slamming his cruiser at ninety-plus into the parapet, whipping the whole car up ass-to-the-sky. The car cartwheeled in the gray void like a performing dolphin to slam down into the black surge. Marty was surrounded by dark now and upside down, as he fought to unbuckle his belt with at least two fingers broken, and the windows blown to atoms, and freezing water entombing him in the taste of brandy.
A slick naked shape rubbed itself against his face, rubbing big wet breasts against his drowning face. He blacked out still trapped… but still struggling, it seemed, for he came to an eon afterwards, skin and clothing torn, with crippled hands fiercely gripping weeds on the bank, his face barely clear of the current, coughing and sucking air.
Now he remembered his superhuman strength and he called upon it in his wakening rage. Clear enough who’d done this— a dead Mex bitch not dead, thanks to a white-haired bitch-witch. Any other man would have been killed, but the hag hadn’t grasped the kind of power the god had set against her.
He dragged his stunned mass up the bank, up onto the bridge, knew he had a simple fracture of the forearm, broken fingers, at least two cracked ribs… and knew it didn’t matter. Fifteen miles from the station and no one on the road this early Saturday and it didn’t matter. His legs were mighty, his lungs were mighty, and fuck the pain of cracked bone. He began to jog and then jog faster, feeling a warming power rise through him, like green sap in the springtime sprig. Began to run outright— long, unflagging antelope strides that ate the miles. In less than two hours, he would reach town. He would muster his troops in time and strike back for the Master.
* * * *
The sun had just cleared the horizon and begun to spread upon the town a peaceful, radiant Saturday morning. The whole Gravenstein Valley— edged and woven with autumn gold— was unbelievably lush and green. A sweet and fruitful smell rode the early breezes and the county’s veins ran loud with bright indigo water. As if awakened by the sheer color of the day, people were up early everywhere.
Duina Tyler, coming out of the kitchen to cut back her roses a bit, noticed what a rich blue-green Crabapple Creek was, running along the border of their property, and noted how plump and brilliant her roses were, despite the lateness of the season, and how rich their scent. All around her, in fact, such a smell of… fertility in the air!
Glancing back at the kitchen window, Duina saw her husband Ry, still sitting at the table, waving a forkful of last night’s peach pie at her and tucking it into his smiling mouth. Duina had to smile, too, and perhaps she blushed just a bit. It was good to be close again and to hell with their age. Neither one of them held much with all these new pills for men— though Duina was not entirely easy in her mind with Fox fruit either, with anything about Jack Fox, alive or dead, come to that. Lord, but her roses looked so lovely. She had to step close to them again, take and stroke their silkiness between her fingers, just had to place the blossoms against her cheek.
* * * *
County Clerk Fiona Billings came out just as early, went down to feed the chickens, and paused by their coop to consider the rich color and sharp scent of Fast Creek, which divided her property from the old Sanders house. She was startled to realize both her neighbors— Phil and Jed, the Coroner’s Assistants— were also gazing at the creek from their own bank, still wearing their sweats from their morning exercycle routine. Fiona called, “Morning!” with uncertain cheeriness. She had alerted the pair of them when the Sanders place had come up for rent, but once they had become the Billings’s neighbors, her husband Bob had begun to wonder out loud just how “close” the older and younger man were. Then, right after work yesterday, Fiona had been embarrassed to encounter them both at Fratelli’s fruit stand, lined up for Jack Fox’s peaches and apricots, just like her, there at Bob’s behest. “My!” she exclaimed a little uneasily. “Isn’t the creek green today!”
“Yes!” said Phil. “We were just noticing!” An embarrassed pause. Phil, perhaps just searching for something to say, asked, “Have you reached Dr. Harst at home yet, Fiona?”
“I haven’t tried again. Marty Carver says he’s heard from the doctor and he’s just a bit under the weather, will be taking a few more days off.”
“It’s just we had an unusual, ah, subject come in after you left. One of our own— Officer Haynes… . “Oddly, as his partner was speaking, Jed had wandered abstractedly over to their small vegetable garden, knelt down, and was closely inspecting their tomato vines, sniffing their leaves, and stroking the fruit against his cheek.
— From the house, Bob’s voice called out, in a parody of seductiveness, “Oh Fi-ooooo-naaa!” She decided she’d better get back to him, before he called out something more embarrassing, though she was intrigued by Phil’s news and more than a little fascinated by Jed’s strangely intimate behavior with his tomato plants. “You better tell me about it later— I haven’t made Bob’s breakfast yet.”
She made her way back
across the yard. As she mounted the back steps, her eyes were drawn to the luxuriant morning glories, so profuse upon their trellises flanking the back door. Their colors and textures seemed irresistibly alluring, compelling her eyes and then her hands, which set to stroking their blossoms.
Closer to the heart of town, at the home of Midge and Kenny Adams, Helen Carver was another early riser. Leaving Skip asleep on the cot beside her bed, she slipped out of the guest room carefully, fearing to wake her hosts, whom she’d faintly heard disporting themselves last night. She’d flung Marty’s peaches out the window on her way over last night, only to find a peach cobbler on the Adams’ table for dessert.
But, padding into the kitchen for coffee, she was surprised to see, out the back window, Kenny pushing a hand mower through the high grass of their big back yard and Midge on her knees rooting in the dense lush weeds that choked their plantings. Amazing. In a county full of green-thumb homeowners, the Adamses— with their shaggy front yard— were notable underachievers.
Helen felt a pang of envy: to be a real couple! Make love one night, then get up early on a Saturday morning and do something on a whim, like groom the yard for the first time in months. How sweet to live with a lover and a friend, to have your life blessed like that.
She watched them as she made coffee, just peeking out now and then. Until, halfway through her first cup, she realized how long it had been since they had changed their positions. Kenny knelt by the mower, his back to her, freeing blades that had been jammed by the long grass. Midge, too, presented more back than profile, also kneeling, with her hands thrust deep into the weeds— even deeper now, it seemed, than when Helen had first started looking.
Were they moving at all? Yes. They both were, unmistakably, but oddly. A gentle, reciprocating movement it was, sort of quietly oscillating backwards and forwards, their faces aimed earthwards. Some private game of theirs she guessed. Helen found herself heading to the back door and stepped out onto the porch, smiling a bit uncertainly. “Good morning! Kenny? Midge?”