Apricot brandy (20 page)

“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.”

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,
disoriented
. 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.

“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.