Apricot brandy (12 page)

It was like that time a sleeper wave had seized her off Point Reyes. Karen had been peering solemnly into the tide pools when, suddenly, she heard a hiss behind her and felt the whelm of an advancing mass. Then, inside of an explosion, she was racing, tumbling out to sea within a huge foaming fist.

Plunging down the stairs and towards the hall closet, she swept into and out of the closet, lifting the Remington twelve-gauge pump. Tucking the butt to her shoulder she hoisted the muzzle and blew a plaster-spraying crater in the ceiling beneath the sewing room. Her hearing gone, her shoulder stone-numb, with four more muzzle-blasts she harpooned the darkness of the bedroom hallway and punctured the living room’s walls.

In the perfect silence of her deafness, the dress echoed in her mind’s eye. Its yellow paled, its fabric soft with launderings, draped there with that scary emptiness of yourself that dropped clothes sometimes had…
Something has entered me
. She threaded five new shells into the magazine. Pocketed more, fearing if she stood too still, her heart would go out like a blown candle. Something has entered me and it’s telling me I’m already dead, that I was destroyed thirty years ago. But here I
am
. I’m a drunk. I have the DTs. But here I
am
.

She remembered the taste of a steel muzzle in her mouth. You could not back away from what was inside you. You could only move to meet it. The brandy went down her throat like a wrestler throwing a hold on her. Come in. Come out. Show me.

Karen patrolled the house with gun and bottle, the gun for dealing with apparitions, the bottle a far more familiar weapon. How many times had she shot herself in the mouth with one? How big would the exact number be? She went to every room, but not back upstairs. Went to the basement, the fruit cellar. Went outside to the big shed, the yard, the picking lanes, and back into the house. Into every room, but not back upstairs, not again tonight. Everywhere else she went, and stood, and dared him, or whoever was doing his work, to step forward. As the sun set and dark came on, she tried to call Dad up before her.

When at last she felt her strength crumbling, her thoughts blurring, she went back down to the basement and sat on the floor, the shotgun across her lap, and leaned her head back against the wall.

Once again, chainsaws woke her.

She wasn’t quite sure she was awake until she had understood her surroundings, for she found herself lying on the floor of the basement and hugging the shotgun, curled against the wall near Dad’s workbench. The light slanting down from the ground-level window was late, near noon, she thought.

She propped the shotgun against the wall and struggled to her feet. She held her right hand in the sunlight slanting on the workbench. Whorls of a dark stain, half worn away, etched the pads of her fingers. She put her tongue to them and they yielded the taste of her own blood.

Outside the chainsaws insisted, insisted, the dogs of terror snarling at her, hounding her to take up a weapon.

Wolf asked Kyle, “Is that another saw?”

Kyle held his own at idle. Yes. Another chainsaw roared beyond the house. Wolf looked a question, but Kyle just stared back at him. After a moment, they went back to work.

Wolf kept listening. “I hear trees falling,” he said, giving Kyle a sly smile. The older man again returned his gaze without answering and they went back to work.

Wolf got to look at last when he drove the new load out. The bitch was a wild sight. Hair in witchy strings, the muscles standing out in her neck as she back-cut a plum tree and toppled it with a frontal slice. She had a dozen trees down, the squashed clouds of their branches entangled with each other, the raw butts of their trunks red in the sun. She had started the slaughter right in the middle of the row— just plunged in and started dropping them.
This dyke was hysterical
…

Karen turned in time to catch Wolf’s eyes as he drove past. She saw the excitement, the joy of chaos in them, and didn’t care. Just turned again and attacked the next tree in the line, working until she ran the chainsaw out of gas. Stood sweating, swaying on her feet, and knew the approaching footsteps were Kyle’s.

“Karen?”

“Hey, Kyle!” Watching this careful man trying to decide what he could say to her.

“Are you okay?”

The trite question brought tears to her eyes and made her laugh at the same time. “Am I okay?” She dragged her sleeve across her eyes and put on an expression of honest bafflement. “Why, what makes you ask that?”

He smiled, almost a laugh. In her misery, it warmed her to find that this winter face, so shuttered against the cold, still knew how to laugh. “I’m worried about you, Karen. I think you’re a kind person, you’ve been kind to me. I… like you.”

“You know I’m queer, right?” Karen, grinning, feeling friendly towards this guy, was surprised by the hostility she heard in her question. His eyes held hers, a little sad now.

“I don’t see anything queer about anybody loving
anybody
. And… when I tell someone I like them, it’s not because I want something from them. It’s just because I like them. I only bring it up… in case there’s some way I might be able to help them.”

“Help them,” echoed Karen, nodding, with a forced smile she meant as an apology. Looking back over her shoulder, she gazed up at the house, its windows blinded by the noon sun. In her life-long aloneness she had always lived there, had never for a moment lived elsewhere. She turned to see Kyle looking at it, too. Thought, maybe wishfully, that he felt what she did: that this house was a monster.

“Kyle. Would you… come over for dinner?”

He smiled. “I’d be pleased to. We could talk. I think you’re like me. Talking about the hardest things can seem pointless. But sometimes it loosens their grip.”

“What time is good for you?” Already she felt helped. Another person would be with her when night fell. Another voice to listen to, instead of the squeaking of her own brain in its squirrel-wheel.

“When we’ve got our last load, I’ll take Wolf to get some cash and put him on the bus out of state. Then I’ve gotta drop the load, clean up. If we finish in another four hours, let’s say between eight and nine?”

When Marty found Harst’s office empty at nine a.m., found his big swivel chair lying on its back and the drawer that had held the Kravnick woman open and empty, a terrible joy began tingling in him. That the woman’s body would be gone was not in itself remarkable. Over the last few years especially, Jack had required offerings which Marty and Harst had been deputed to provide.

No. It was the toppled chair and the drawer left jutting open, that sent the prickling up along Marty’s spine. Some upheaval, some peremptory will had erupted here. Jack had required
two
offerings last night. How had Marty’s dark master executed his will? The Assistant Chief Deputy of Gravenstein County actually shuddered, just detectably, as he stood imagining the century-old basement below him, the fissure in its floor… imagining that what he had helped slip down into that fissure, might have the power to climb back out of it, in the dead of night.

There was terror in this image, but there came an exaltation with it. He’d felt hyper-alive all morning. He’d come sharp awake in bed just at sunrise, sensing a conversation going on quite near him and found it was his body speaking within, a murmuring of joint and muscle, a rumor of change cadenced by a new authority in his heartbeat. He’d dressed, breakfasted, driven here— and all the while, this rumor of rising strength was running through him.

Calling Harst’s house from the phone on his desk, after six rings he heard:
Dr. Harst is either occupied or away. Please leave your message.
As Marty listened, his heart began to gallop. It felt like a mighty engine he drove. A new gulf echoed around Harst’s canned voice. After the beep, he said, his words ringing like an epitaph, “I think you’re both occupied
and
away.” Smiled. “
Can
you get back to me?”

In the morgue he slid the long drawer shut. Whatever had happened here last night, it had been a changing of the guard. Marty remembered Harst’s hands, hard as oak, hurling him across the floor. Those hands’ strength had now passed into Marty’s own, or was beginning to… .

He went up to his office and patiently, all morning, he played Assistant Chief Deputy. The two morgue workers, Phil and Jed, came on-shift at noon, and he went down to talk to them. Phil was young and plump, with evasive, intelligent eyes. Jed was fifty and plump, with a perfectly dead-pan face. Phil kept nodding as he listened, busy projecting conviction and comprehension. Jed just listened.

“The doctor was working late and I stopped in,” Marty told them. “Just after he gave me the paperwork, we got the call. Transatlantic, from Paris. A hired van was already on the way out from the city. Got in at midnight and took her off. I guess the doctor is sleeping in today.” Babcock alone had brought Susan’s body in. Susan’s mother was as ignorant of her daughter’s death as she was of her whereabouts.

Phil said, “Such a sad thing. A daughter, the mother so far away… .”

Marty went into his office and emerged in boots, jeans, and a cowboy shirt. Told Contos, the day captain, that he was out on personal business the rest of the day. Fired up his pickup and headed out to the Spaith walnut orchard, twenty miles east of town.

The trees were years untended, ragged and shaggy. A paving of walnut shells popped under his tires as he drove through the acres to the fieldworkers’ shanties, a web work of bleached barracks and battered sheds, all of them shedding a dandruff of shingles. The shanties were the only gainful enterprise left on Spaith’s acres— rental housing for migrant hands employed at other ranches and orchards. At mid-day in harvest season, the shabby complex was as empty as he had expected. He parked behind an outlying shed.

A Mexican woman opened to his knock. She was somewhat stout, but her neatly muscled frame was equal to the weight of the big breasts that swelled her shirt. A face in its thirties, burnished by hard work, broad but still exotic, lips cushiony and curved, her sloping, thick-lashed eyes reminiscent of Central American bas-reliefs Marty had seen.

He held up before her a packet of twenties and a pair of handcuffs.

“Okay, but make hurry please, I don’ wan’… ” Any of her neighbors to know, of course, or at least to directly observe. She shut up quick at his glare, though. The wordlessness of this transaction, his implacable looks, her mute submission— all these were essential erotic elements, as he had taught her.

He came out two hours later, leaving another packet of twenties with the woman on the theory that well-greased wheels didn’t squeak, no matter how hard they were run.

Looking around at the yellow leaves of the walnuts blown like flames in the late-morning breeze, he exulted in his newly revealed power. Harst had surely gone under and the mantle was Marty’s now.

A wooden door clapped. Turning, he saw a short, lean old woman crossing the leaf-strewn ground with a hatchet in one hand and a red rooster by the legs in the other. A tiny gaunt and seamed mahogany woman with thick white hair crowding out from under a battered gray fedora and down onto her ancient denim jacket.

Her gait was purposeful as she headed for a stump that was stained by previous bloody work, but she stared at his face as she passed, seeming bemused and then astonished at something she saw in Marty. Was his new power so plainly manifest to others? But when she came to the stump, she was suddenly businesslike, whipping the bird down on the wood, which stretched its neck out under her quick hatchet. The head flew away and the body jerked, spraying, still gripped in her brown fist.

And when her eyes came back to Marty’s, he thought he saw fear in them. Then he thought he saw measurement and solemn purpose. He made himself taller, staring his authority back at her. She smiled and gestured the truncated rooster at him. Offering it to him? He waved it away and headed for his truck. He should have summoned her to him, made her feel the weight of his presence here, but he couldn’t be bothered.

He rocketed back to the highway, walnuts exploding under his double-wides. There was another new-born power in him that he was eager to demonstrate, this time to his brother, Rodge.

The old woman knocked at the cabin Marty had stepped out of. When there came no answer, she opened the door and went in.

The younger woman tiredly raised her head from the pillow, told her elder in Spanish, “Leave me, grandmother, and take your bloody rooster with you.”

The old woman answered, “Aren’t you afraid that animal will kill you?”

“Him I don’t worry. I leave here soon.”

“You say you’re leaving a year now. You not leaving.”

“Why would he kill me?”

The little lean old woman looked at her. “To feed you to something.”

“Quetzal, you ancient daughter of a whore, leave me alone.”

“Lupe, you young daughter of a whore, you should leave here.”

Rodge had been a classic big brother, country-style. He’d thumped young Marty pretty good during their early years, teaching him to jump to it and keep his mouth shut. But Rodge had had a sense of responsibility to Marty, too, and had taught him very solemnly the things Marty needed to know to be a man. That there were two kinds of men in the world: beef ranchers and sissies. Rodge was totally sold on good old Daddy. Daddy was his hero. Marty, like everyone else, saw the old man for what he was, an incompetent half-drunk with a pitiful three hundred acres.

But Rodge was a believer. He worked other people’s ranches all through high school when Daddy’s sorry spread offered no work. And right out of high-school had begun his long campaign to marry Marsha Maitland, ten years his senior, daughter of Maitland’s Super Market. Cal Maitland was judged the cagiest old sonofabitch of his generation and his daughter was a wholly self-focused and intrinsically combative woman who was genuinely bemused by handsome Rodge Carver making calf’s eyes at her and constantly pestering her to go dining and dancing.