Apricot brandy (23 page)

She seemed almost drunk for some time after that. Slowly she bent to pick up her hat, swaying slightly, one gnarled hand raking back her frosty curls, eyes staring inward, lips moving vaguely. At length she put her hat on and stiffly lowered herself to her knees. The sun was setting now and brazen light bathed everything. She spread her arms in a summoning gesture and a stir went round about her, a ripple through the flowers that jeweled the grass. The blossoms nodded and trembled as an airy gathering converged to her center.

“El Dios verde es la vida misma. He is life itself. Time without end we have been nourished by his fruits and sheltered by his boughs. Now I see to save his life, he means to kill us all and eat our flesh— take back our flesh. He’s learned to use our eyes, our limbs, to hunt us. Xibalba will feed on his killers and so we are at war to the death. I love the green god. Soy bruja! I am his servant, servant of all the gods. But he will feed on the good and the evil alike and by tomorrow night’s full moon he will come to birth in the form of many dragons, to scour human kind from the face of the earth. And so, I stand with you against him. Now, as quickly as he kills, we must take back the spirits of his dead. We must take their spirits back and swell our armies of defense. Emilia… .”

The ghost who was her first recruit called flower petals to herself and stepped before her protector, showing Quetzal the smile of love she wore, touching the seamed cheek with a silky fingertip of lupine.

“Emilia, your child will face Xibalba’s most terrible dragon, whom you know too well. Whether she will win, or die, is hidden from me. Go to her. Take the green path.”

The witch swept her hand at the trees surrounding them, addressing the whole ethereal entourage surrounding her. “Remember. He means to take all human lives, yet the green god is our world still. Leaf, branch, vine, and blossom, they are our Rainbow on Earth. They are radiance made solid to our touch. They are Light itself, Light made solid for our food and drink. Till the moment we die in his fangs, we inhabit the green god’s body and his green shade is our proper home.”

Emilia stepped into the trees.

It was windy in Bushmill as the sun sank to a redder phase near setting. The Bide-a-Nite, Karen’s motel, was on the burg’s northern edge. She stood in its parking lot, watching the light grow rosy on the low wooded hills that flanked the highway out of town. She deeply did not want to go back in that room and read the letter she had left lying open on the desk.

Just to stand out here was a kind of paradise! Her hand not a tape-bound torment, but sedated in a fresh white plaster cast, its trauma in the past, contained and treated. And this place, these trees—
other
than and
elsewhere
from Jack Fox’s orchard of nightmares. What a balm to be here, watching a different sun approach a peaceful setting. Just down the highway, a path branched up a hillside. She followed it up through tawny grass, past blackberry vines with a few late fruit, all gilded by the slant sun. A nice view of the rolling hills opened out.

A sneaky sweet feeling of nostalgia came over her… and she identified its source: sunny afternoons with Mom in her canning corner came back— the smell of blackberry compote simmering on the stove, the light on ruby jars of strawberry jam freshly sealed in wax, the gems of other jars so warm and solid when Mom let Karen take them in her small hands.

She looked at the hands she had now: usefully callused, neatly sinewy on the backs and wrists. Mom had always trusted tasks to her hands, letting her take hold of her world. She remembered picking those blackberries, greedily reaching on legs not yet quite firm enough and falling into thorny disaster. Remembered Mom hugging her grief away, Mom’s comforting smell.

Karen sat on the grass, watching two oak trees ripple in the amber air. For all the terrors in her life, did every life have such sweetnesses as hers had also held? She supposed not, so luckless were many lives. Tears sprang to her eyes. Rising up on her knees, she stared disbelieving at the rippling oaks above her. In their sun-and-shadow dapple the leaves, like Pointillist brush-strokes, held the unmistakable image of Mom’s face! The breeze did not destabilize her face, but rippled it with life. There was a special secret glint of brightness in her deep-set eyes and a tender hesitation around her lips, as if she just might speak if she could choose the words.

Karen closed her eyes and shook her head, looked, and saw Mom still, the features crumbling in a stronger gust of wind, but the woman even more piercingly coherent within that commotion. Was Mom
there
? Or only in Karen’s own heart? So piercingly real. Look at her eyes— grief in her eyes and joy within the grief!

And then the sun was down. The trees were only trees, alive with wind.

For the first time in many days, terror was at bay. Karen remembered only sweetness and love and felt only sorrow. She knelt there in the grass and let the tears come freely. “Oh Mom… sweet precious Mom… Oh Susan… poor sweet Susan… ”

The stars were coming out when at last she wiped her eyes and got to her feet. To cry like that! It came so hard to her and seemed to drain her strength so utterly. And yet such relief and something like strength were in its aftermath. She thought of all that had been happening to her and found she could look at it and see it clearly for what it was, despite the fact what she saw was madness itself.

A man had broken her hand while almost raping her. She had killed the man, undressed his corpse, and buried that corpse on her own property. Simple facts, which would simply end most lives, destroy most people’s worlds. And yet these facts were not the worst.

Worse was poor Susan dead in a long steel drawer, only her lovely face eerily intact. But looking out of that dead lovely face— Karen saw it suddenly as a mask for another.

Or Wolf’s face as he chewed noisily on one of Dad’s peaches while, from behind the glaze of the man’s own brainless malice,
something alien, something murderous looked out.

Worse was herself sticking Dad’s gun muzzle into her mouth and touching her own blood, still wet on a yellow dress stained a quarter century ago.

There was something in Dad’s earth, something in her own home ground, and it stared out at her from the eyes of the dead. It had killed Susan. It had killed Wolf, using Karen as its cat’s-paw. It had tried to kill Karen’s spirit, through her unripe body, decades ago. And it had tried to blow her brains out, mere days ago.

A monster in the earth. It was
sanity
to face it and
in
sanity even to think it. She needed something— and it surprised her to realize it was not a drink she needed. No, somehow that had been buried in the compost heap in the dead of night. What she needed, she realized, was to hear the voice of a friend. A voice to pull her mind up out of this monstrous darkness.

There were no phones in the rooms of her dirt-cheap motel, only a pay phone next to the check-in desk. Needing to be alone with her call, Karen staggered down the trail and back onto the highway.

On Bushmill’s quiet little main drag, she found a gas station and behind the counter of its mini-mart, a big country kid with pale eyes who wordlessly made her change for the ancient pay phone in the corner., He then sat there watching her as she fed in the quarters, watching her as if he’d never seen this done or that there was nothing else in his world to think about. She turned her back to him.

Someone answered with a single word that didn’t sound like what Kyle had written: “Hello. I’d like to speak to Kyle, please— I think he just took a room with you today.” It stunned her that she didn’t even know Kyle’s last name, that he hadn’t provided it. Didn’t know his last name, his age, his origin, though such intimacy lay between them, though she could still see his muscled arms laying a naked corpse in her steaming black compost. A complete stranger had brought a killer into her life. She had killed the killer and he had laid the killer’s corpse in her native ground.

“Who?” The voice sounded like an old man, an old man blurred and husky with drink.

“Kyle. He’s a big guy, black hair with some gray. Muscular… . “There was a mumble at the other end and she thought she heard the phone set down. She had just described a phantom to a phantom. Despair embraced her like rising black water. She looked around and the kid’s pale eyes were still adhering to her, so fixed that they seemed inhuman.

“What the fuck are you staring at?” The kid didn’t twitch, didn’t even blink. Gave the tiniest shrug, turned sluggishly on his stool, and faced the window behind him. The window was filled with the interior’s bright reflection and he resumed staring at her mirrored image.

She stared at it too, a shadow-Karen, gaunt-faced and wild-haired, a woman almost gone, eaten away to near-transparency by the night, by the dark earth…

The mumbly voice came back. She thought she made out the word
message
. “Please tell him Karen called. K-a-r-e-n. I’m in Bushmill. B-u-s-h-m-i-l-l. Will you please tell him? I’m at the Bide-a-Nite Motel.”

There was only what sounded like “… tell ‘im,” and the man hung up.

She walked back through a town that appeared utterly empty, though it couldn’t have been later than seven or eight. It seemed she was walking the seafloor under miles of water crushing down her shoulders. Each step sank her deeper in exhaustion, till she felt her walking was an illusion and that she was still bent shoveling black muck, digging a bottomless grave. Stepping at last into her room, closing the door… there was the letter on the desk. Let it stay. She would not look at it yet.

Her clothes fell from her. The bed… a safe place down at the very bottom of the universe. She dove in.

She sat up in the dark as a vast uproar shook the walls. Her windows had grown larger, lost their blinds and— right outside them, in a flood of moonlight— blown branches surged against the panes. Deep within the tumult someone cried to her, a woman’s frail voice that pierced her heart. Karen saw Susan, pale, naked and storm-tossed in the leaves.

She sprang up and leapt to the door… no more than turning the knob when the door was snatched into the gale. Running into the slippery turmoil, she was a leaf blended into the blizzard with the rest. She ran through black and silver jungle after Susan, who twisted to reach her, but was pushed always onward— grass-like cold fur under their feet, cold leaves licking their nakedness.

They erupted into emptiness. Earth vanished under foot and they fell and fell into a vast black pit from whose floor far beneath glistened a huge reflected moon. It seemed they had endless time in that long fall, time to swim the rushing air and reach at last each other’s arms. Susan’s breasts cold against Karen, the uprush numbing their skin. But their limbs locked at last, at last rejoined, their love snatched back from the night. And thus re-knit, they crashed against and sank beneath the liquid moon.

In their drowning, the moonlight showed them to themselves so clear in the liquid dark, so pale in the perfect black.

They were deep, so hopelessly deep, falling together when an upthrust of seething black roots enclosed Susan and tore her from Karen’s arms. Karen screamed for her, desperate to reach her, to pull her from the muck below. She fought, entangled in the roots. She could not lose her again!

Powerful arms dragged Karen upwards. Hot arms burning her, showing her that her own skin was cold as death. Arms and legs doubly clamped her, seared her till the lift and the warmth of them won her will and she became frantic to feel their warmth and rise back to the air.

“Susan!” she cried. All the sorrow on earth in her voice.

She sat up, alone in the dark. Outside, only a moonlit wind moved through the trees. Once again, she’d failed to hold her, to protect her. Karen lay curled in a ball then and wept bitterly. The arms that had saved her in the dream, that had saved her from Wolf’s tomb… a thousand years ago, seemed for a few seconds more to be holding her still.

Unanchored and strange to herself, she sat up in the bed and saw, under its cone of light on the desk, Dad’s letter. There would be no good time to slip her mind into those pages, another black tarn though it lay in the light. She stood and slipped on the jeans and canvas coat, regretting the .357s absence from its pocket, and sat down to the document at last.

My Beloved Emily,

A friend will mail this for me, probably from Mexico City. You must have the truth from me, while I am still resolved to tell it. I want to hide nothing from you.

Something in this jungle has found me and entered me.

We were on a “counter-terrorist” mission, meaning we were neutralizing, or rather killing, impoverished native Mayan insurgents.

I was with two operatives I will call Black and Jack, Company Men, smug because they “had kills.” CIA kills, nine out of ten, are inserts with full back-up. Ambushes. These spooks were dry-gulchers and, perhaps because I was Special Forces, they had to keep boasting of their exploits.

The true horror began when we captured two insurgents. One young, the other old, both wiry brown men as lean as coyotes. We put them in shackles. And then Black came out with the inspiration he’d been secretly gloating over, the way to achieve “maximum negative effect” on the morale of the insurgents. I call the younger spook “Jack” because he reminded me of myself when I first went to Nam, not particularly evil, just young and ignorant. But Black, ten years older, had a pouchy face with a half-hidden glee in it that
liked
killing.

Cenotes are natural wells in the limestone sub-floor of these jungles. The Maya used them for human sacrifice and there was a big one just a few days from where we had taken our captives. We should, Black said, weight and drown one in this cenote and free the other to spread the tale.

I had resolved to free them both on my watch, then kill Black and Jack. Night after night, I took the night rotation and watched all four men in their sleep, but did not act.