Apricot brandy (11 page)

Harst lay, his clothes in a torn, placental scatter around him. He was nude as a newborn, but a
re
delivery, to be popped back into the oven of birth. Lay while she worked herself upright again on her broken frame, the surviving one of her small breasts rocking with the labor on her half-crushed thorax.

Collecting the litter of his torn envelope, she wadded and flung it down the fissure, seeming, in these movements, nightmarishly maternal, gathering his garments before tucking him in… .

No utterance? No promise? No… warning?

There was a moment of her face close to his and he saw then, hovering far back within its remoteness, a relentless purpose, an inexorable will. He saw Jack, the hand that worked her puppet frame, and saw the Master whom Jack served. Harst understood this was the only utterance that would be granted him.

She tipped him backwards down the fissure, fed him down— gripping his calves, as she angled him to the aperture. Harst was dangling, arms stretched like a diver’s. His eyes flashed starkly, left and right, at the ribbed throat of swallowing clay that received him, and she let him drop.

Once more, on her Rube-Goldberg hinges, Susan’s corpse knelt down. On her knees at last, still seeming to daydream, she leaned over the fissure, and dove after.

Chainsaws woke Karen. The crackly
shusss
of a fruit tree toppling out in the yard, and she remembered Kyle. Karen Fox, brandy-tree slayer, her troops had arrived and she had begun striking back. And the world, again today, was empty of Susan.

In the kitchen she opened a can of pineapple juice and guzzled thirstily and, from across the room, watched them out the back window without showing herself. They had two trees down and were trimming off branches. Kyle’s helper was like him, all shoulders and no stomach, but a good deal taller and much younger, with black hair sleeked back and a lupine, clean-shaven face that radiated handsomeness. There was something self-displaying about him, the postures he struck as he worked.

Well, they had their task, but what was hers on this Sunday, Day Two of Susan dead?

She knew, all right. Go back to the still-shed, where Susan had somehow caught her death, and get Dad’s papers. He was the black hole that had sucked half the life out of Karen. She’d seen those renderings in astronomy texts: a dimming star, with a ribbon of its substance snaking off of it, into that gravity-pit. A dimming star, that was her self.

She spread Dad’s casualty photos on the kitchen table, in Mom’s domain, in the morning light. It didn’t help. Was Karen’s world from now on to be a world of corpses? Tears of self-pity filled her eyes; she wiped them angrily away and looked. Stills of the Dance of Death in the Central American jungles. The earth’s unstoppable clockwork ticking away the forms and features of the dancers. Collapsed men, like flowerpots sprouting shoots. In what spirit had Dad made this record?

In an older black and white group shot from Dad’s first war, Viet Nam, was dear old Dad younger than Karen had ever seen him, but still ten or twelve years older than most of the men around him… giving the camera the somber riddle of his gaze. He had gone to this war, though old enough to have skipped it, and Karen was born when he’d just been back a couple years. But six or seven years later, through some friends in the CIA who went back to his Nam days, back he went to the jungles of Central America. How strange to go back to war at almost forty like that.

Karen left the photos spread on the table and, weeping, came into the living room. She stood looking at Susan’s suitcase, there on the floor by the fireplace. “Oh sweetheart,” she choked, “what a shit hole I dragged you into!”

Willing the shock to wake anger and purpose in her, she took a cold shower, brushed her hair back and ponytailed it wet, and stepped into clean denim and flannel. Outdoors, Kyle was feeding rollers to the splitter. The helper was loading the splits into the truck bed, but as soon as Karen stepped out onto the back porch, this younger man turned towards her and exclaimed, “The lady of the house!”— and came striding toward her, snatching an apricot from one of the standing trees he passed. “I’ve gotta tellya, this is crazy, cuttin’ down these trees! There’s still good fruit on ‘em! Look! It’s delicious!” Standing in front of her, he took a bite, chewing noisily, demonstrating the fruit’s goodness. He wore a mock-innocent expression, while behind it, in the flinty black eyes, was a genuine stupidity, a simple ferocity.

“Wolf.” Here came Kyle, stepping between them, holding Wolf’s eyes with a faint smile. “I’d call that truck loaded.”

Wolf stepped back, theatrically smacked his forehead. “I’m outta line again! I’m sorry, Miz Fox! I get excited, is all. I haven’t been outta the joint long, is all. I’m just really grateful, you lettin’ a couple cons work for you like this!”

Something she didn’t catch passed from Kyle to him and Wolf was comically backpedaling, making showy haste toward the truck. “Yessir, Kyle, I’m outta here! I’m gone!” He gunned the truck out, splits bouncing in the bed.

“I apologize for him, Karen. He looked me up a week ago and I owe him some help. I was glad when you… when I thought you wouldn’t be here. He’s one of those people who’s never really
out
of jail. Myself— ”

“You don’t owe me any explanations, Kyle.”

“Yes, I do. I’ve been out three years now and I
am
out. I have never, and would never, hurt anyone, except in self-defense. Wolf’s only here because he helped save my life once, or what amounted to my life. Does this sound like I’m trying to… intrude my life on you?”

Karen saw in the fitful movement of his eyes— going inside, returning to hers— an unaccustomed labor. Saw he lived alone and found a curious comfort in his isolation, a kind of relief from her own. “You say what you want, Kyle. I’m listening.”

“I want to put Wolf on a bus tomorrow night, with the money I make from these cords. I can keep him in line, but he’s very obnoxious. Can you, and your friend, stand having him around? Because if not— ”

She held up her hand to stop him. The man was a noticer. He had sensed Susan’s upper-class discomfort with himself, clearly saw what it would be— would have been— with Wolf.

“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.