Apricot brandy (5 page)

Marty hastened now as they set out towards the far wall, Harst lagging more with every step, hating the younger man’s eagerness. Near the wall, the materials for their rite were already in place. Marty fired up a generator and switched on a pair of contractor’s floodlights, spotlighting a portable compressor and a forty-pound jack-hammer against the wall. He turned on the compressor and over its stutter said, as Harst came up, “There’s a spot right here— just like Jack said— that echoes when you tap it with a hammer. Took me less than fifteen minutes to find it.”

To Harst, the Assistant Chief Deputy seemed to be babbling with excitement, with
greed
. Harst gently laid Jack on the floor. As Marty turned to say more, Harst reached out, seized his shoulder, and flung him sideways. Plucked his feet right off the floor, sent him tumbling over and over, punishing his knees and elbows on the concrete.

“SHUT YOUR FUCKING PIE-HOLE! SHUT IT!”

As stunned by the strength of the doctor’s voice as he was by the strength of his arms, Marty gaped up from the floor. The old man towered trembling over him. “You smug little snot-nose, I read you like a book. You think your time is coming and mine is over. Maybe that’s true, maybe it’s not. But what you have no conception of, and what you
will
grasp, is the awe, is the
reverence
that you owe this man. This is a
great
man who has faced a Reality that you would shit your
pants
to face. From this moment, as long as you are in his presence, you will say absolutely nothing. You will humbly, mutely do your work like the acolyte, the altar boy you are, or I will snap your spine.” Harst’s voice had grown almost quiet. He pointed at the jack-hammer.

Marty rose and obeyed. He had his ankle-rig, a snub-nose .38, and a reflexive voice in him said
cap the old motherfucker and send him down after Jack
… but Harst’s power had reminded Marty that he was working towards a kind of miracle here and that the old man was its only surviving gatekeeper. Marty’s time
was
coming— he had provided enough brown victims to Jack Fox to pay his way, but until that way was opened, he must walk the line.

The jack-hammer’s hysterical clatter filled the great chamber— how could the whole town not hear it?— but almost at once, deep cracks branched from the bit. He probed them here and there, and a shard of concrete vanished into underlying blackness. He circled the hole and larger chunks sank away… .

He killed the compressor. The floodlight fell through the ragged aperture and down the dank throat of a rocky fissure in the earth. A cold fetor of subterranean water welled up from it. He heard Harst, behind him, unzipping the body-bag, and stepped aside.

The old man approached the brink, Jack Fox’s nude corpse cradled in his arms. The ragged-crowned head with its addled eyes and blown-in mouth rested against the Doctor’s shoulder. Harst made as if to speak, but only a noise of strangled weeping came out of him. He kissed Jack’s broken brow, knelt, and eased him head-first down the fissure.

Jack slid down… and got jammed in the earth just at the limit of the light’s reach. A whisper seemed to rise from the narrow chasm. Jack’s head turned, or sagged, his averted eye glinting as if he glanced below. The earth made a slick sound of acceptance and Jack Fox slithered down and out of sight.

The sun set as Karen drove back up to the house, with a lidded jar of apricot brandy on the seat beside her. Out her open window, she declaimed, “How quickly the shadows gathered between the trees of the vast Foxxe estate! Soon the crickets’ song would start to rise, leaking up here and there at first, like some strange subterranean gas, till the sound of night would be everywhere, chirring, chirring… .”

Karen laughed, delighted with her eloquence, her anesthesia. She parked at the side of the house, got out and looked up at it. The smooth eroded siding was, as the light turned violet, as expressive as wrinkled skin. And how wonderful to see it through glass like this, through the thick membrane of brandy. There was pain in every eave and molding, there was unbearable defeat in the gable-darkened window of Mom’s sewing room up there… but Karen could laugh! She could shake her fist at it and mock it in the prose of a bodice-ripper.

Still, once inside, she felt her buoyancy colliding with the weight of all the dark rooms around her, all the years they held. So she went straight to the living room, put her boombox on the mantel and cranked up Bonnie Raitt, then set to building a fire in the huge fieldstone fireplace.

She’d meant to roust some kind of meal from the kitchen, but the feelings in there were too complex. She wasn’t hungry anyway, the brandy tasting rich as food. This, right here by the fire, was base-camp. She’d return to exploring the house tomorrow.

With the fire roaring, she lay on the couch with her paperback thriller, the Stones now thumping away, her toes sketching the beat as she sipped and turned pages. The phone rang. She’d forgotten all about Susan!

But it was some man, deep-voiced, asking for Mr. Fox.

“He died three days ago.”

“Oh. I’m very sorry. I’m Kyle. We’d arranged last week to cut some of his trees into cords for him.”

“Which trees?”

“This is… ?”

“This is his daughter.”

“Oh. Well, I’m sorry. Very sorry. It was a grove of oaks in your northwest corner, near the highway?”

Karen had played there. It was her special “forest” at seven and eight, wild and druidical, not like all the tame plum trees in their rows. It was where she and a girlfriend might “hike” to on a Saturday afternoon, with doll-dishes and real lunch in their backpacks. Dear Dad had done it to her out in the trees now and then, but never in her play-forest. Too close to the road, no doubt.

“You said your name was Kyle?”

“That’s right.”

“Hi, I’m Karen. Listen, I guess he didn’t want those oaks, but I do. But there are some trees you could cut, some fruit trees in the yard. They’d make lower-grade firewood, but there must be seven or eight cords in them.”

“Well, they’d still go for ninety a cord and if I could get that many, I could leave you three cords and still do fine.”

“So when can you come? I basically just want them gone.”

“Not for two or three days, Ms. Fox. Could we say Sunday around eight, just to be safe?”

“That would be great.”

“Okay, then. Thank you. And please accept my… sympathy.”

“Thanks, but none needed.” She hung up wondering why she’d said that. It was saying a great deal, really, to a stranger. Remembered Mom telling her when she was small, “When someone calls, you say, ‘Who’s calling?’ and after they tell you, say, ‘How may I help you?’ You don’t start telling them your business.” The recollection was piercing, a sweet touch of Mom’s voice. Why was Mom so little in her memory?

Dad tyrannized Karen’s memory, as his spirit tyrannized this house. Where in it now could she still feel Mom’s sweet and concerned presence, the way she could feel Dad’s lurking everywhere? Her eyes went to the breakfront in the dining room where, above heirloom dishes, a photo of Mom as a young woman looked out the glass door, but faint moonlight from the dining room window hid her image behind its reflection.

Well, if Karen started uprooting Dad, maybe Mom would… start coming back out. A nice first step this, converting Dad’s precious brandy trees to firewood. His pet orchard in the back yard, whose fruit went down to his still. Start with those. Bit by bit she might do it, dig him up and throw him out for good.

She jumped up and began to dance. Dancing, she heaped split after split of cured oak on the fire. She danced over for a hit of brandy and her Ry Cooder disc, danced the disc back to the machine and popped it in, and set to boogying all over the room.

Karen could rock. She strutted, bucked, and swooped. She raised up and testified. She danced through the kitchen, out the back door, and raised her jar in salute to the brandy trees standing in darkness. “Say goodbye to your parents, Baby Brandy!” She drank a prodigious toast and danced back to the fire.

Disc after disc she danced in front of the roaring fire, till her body’s movement seemed far, far away, amid the thud of the music more and more remote. And there was her friendly old sleeping bag spread on the floor near the flames. She dropped to her knees and fell into it.

She stood naked in the downstairs bathroom, in front of the mirror. Deep night was outside the window, the big house around her brimful of dead silence, and here she stood, both her hands squeezing her breasts till they ached, her eyes staring into themselves in the mirror. Her breasts hurt, she wasn’t dreaming. This self-caused pain had brought her full awake.

Her hands stroked down her flanks, slid behind, and covetously traversed the curve of her buttocks.

She said to her reflection, “Nice tits. Nice ass. Come on. I’ve got something special I want you to swallow, bitch.”

Her smile was playfully cruel, not a trace in it of the terror that was freezing her, icing her solid from crown to sole. She watched herself give herself a wink, then turned and sashayed with a hooker’s gait out of the bathroom, down the hall, past the living room, butt still switching grotesquely, into the short hall before the front door. Yet, within all this movement, Karen hung bodiless, an icy axis of fear unlinked to the prankish body that carried her.

This body opened the drawer of a lamp-table near the front door and found a prize. Took it out— a massive, blunt-nosed revolver, a .357. “Off to the dining room!” she crowed. “Let’s eat!”

Sashaying into the half-dark of the dining room, she sat in Dad’s old chair at the head of the table… and set the revolver down to make a comic production of pulling the chair up comfortably to the table, like an eager gourmand settling in for the feed. Then Karen took up the gun again and turned the muzzle up towards her face, lacing the fingers of both hands around the back of the grip, hooking her left thumb across the trigger and her right thumb on the hammer. Karen could see plainly the domed slugs nested in the four exposed chambers.

“And now,” she said cheerily, “you degenerate little bitch,
bon appétit!
”

She leaned down and took the two inches of the muzzle in her mouth, while inside she thrashed with a frenzy that didn’t stir the least muscle of her body. Her most extreme will could move no more of her than her eyes, which she raised to the breakfront across the room and found within the moonlit glass her mother’s face, visible after all. She looked helplessly at the deep-set darkness of Mom’s eyes, at Mom’s young lips, parted as if about to speak… .

She cocked the hammer with a sharp meaty click and squeezed the trigger home. When the hammer slammed into the cartridge her bladder let go as her terror, in a surge, reentered the circuits of her body, convulsing her, toppling her chair backwards.

Gasping, she found it was herself who drew these breaths, that her limbs were hers again. She got to her knees and knelt over the pistol on the floor. Reached for it, recoiled, then forced herself to seize it.

Her legs shaking badly, Karen stood up, horror and rage sputtering in her like a wet flare. Releasing the gate, she swung the cylinder out. Six rounds, the chambered one pitted by the firing pin.

Lurching at first, still unsure of her power to act, but moving at a dead run by the time she crossed the kitchen, she sent the back door crashing open, and took aim at Dad’s brandy trees. Speed-fired the pistol empty.

Five muzzle-flares geysered, five thunders merged into one and left her ears deaf and keening with pain.

Her flame-scared vision clearing, she broke out the cylinder again and emptied it on the porch. Five empty casings and one unfired round, dimpled by the pin.

Long afterwards, Karen lay in her sleeping bag, holding that round. The windows were just beginning to gray. A few hours ago she’d guzzled more than a quart of hundred-proof brandy, yet her body was as pure and sober as a child’s. She’d never felt so clean of booze. The monster that had filled her had purged every molecule of it. The monster was Dad, the monster was alcohol, the monster was
her
, when she drank and let Dad in… .

She’d shot herself in the mouth with the brandy cannon to make some kind of discovery and now she had made that discovery, not foreseeing that the price of it was supposed to be her life. Because of that long, long chance— one in a thousand at least!— of a dead round, she accidentally still
had
her life. She had her discovery as well: that drinking was a hurt she did herself in homage to the hurt Dad had done her. A whiskey sour was a glass of Dad. And now that Dad had vandalized himself, a glass of Dad was a glass of Death.

Karen sighed out a long shuddering breath. She tenderly gripped that cartridge as, long ago, she had gripped her stuffed rabbit, and settled down to sleep.

At last! At long, long last! She could quit drinking.

She sank into a feeling of deep solace, the feeling… here suddenly was more lost memory. Precisely the feeling of snuggling down into Mom’s arms, for a nap, when she was small. She remembered Mom’s eyes, staring from that photo just before she’d squeezed the trigger. So… Mom was here, too.

Awaking in the late afternoon, Karen gingerly re-entered her body, cautiously hefted her limbs. No trace of last night’s unearthly tenant, no alien will in her muscles. That tenant had been pure booze and her own sick heart. Absent booze, that tenant was no more.

Still, she stood stretching timidly at first… .

Outside the living-room windows stretched her new horizon of plum trees, all of them heavy with ripe fruit. It vividly came back to her, just how it had felt, when she was six or so, to look out these windows and watch Mom and Dad when they joined the pickers in the harvest.

Up on their three-legged ladders, filling their hip-sacks with plums, while everywhere among the trees there were other ladders, and hats bobbing amidst branches, and crates on the grass filling up with purple fruit. What a glorious bright business it had all seemed! By the time she was eight they were letting her help and by the time she was ten, letting her up a ladder.