Apricot brandy Read online

  And here was the door, the one to the basement. Standing before it, Karen tried for some bravado and declaimed, “That dark-browed, masterful figure, that brooding, elemental man might now be gone forever from this earth, but Karinna Foxxe felt his presence still in the long, echosome halls and chambers of Foxxe Hall!” It fell flat. It didn’t work without booze in her to bring it off.

  She toughed it out and, though cold to the bone, she opened the basement door and stepped down, experiencing that same twinge she’d felt here so long ago as Dad shepherded her past this point: up there was Mom’s kingdom, there in the kitchen with its warmth and good smells. Down here, where Karen had to go, was Dad’s much darker world.

  The basement was unchanged. When she was six, it had been a half-spooky playground, gloomy in the corners with spiders and racks of big weapon-like tools, but basically safe because there was Daddy at his bench, fixing things, making life work right for all three of them. When she turned fourteen it became a true dungeon, where Dad grotesquely punished and shamed her ignorant body with his own.

  Still, one level deeper was a place that was worse than this: the fruit cellar. Its door was at the basement’s far end. Why were the times he’d taken her down there the most frightening?

  Do it and be through the worst.

  She opened the door, switched on the one yellow bulb, then sank down the steep wooden steps into the deepest part of the house. The close air was honeyed with preserves. The shelves of dark jars breathed a complex sweetness just bordering on spoilage. These jars had walled her on either side when she was sprawled beneath Dad’s weight and though it was Mom who had filled them, there was no help from Mom in those moments and her bright jars just blindly stared at Karen, reflecting her fear.

  But there was something else about this place that had made it the worst place of all. Something about its being down at the level of the roots of the orchard. As Dad rooted in her, she felt them all around her, just outside the buried walls, those millions of greedy roots reaching toward her like sharp, hairy fingers… .

  Karen had come all the way home now.

  Hello, again. It’s me.

  When she came outside the sun was already halfway down the sky. It shocked her. Well… night was just going to have to be faced. While the light was good, she’d explore the orchard, for the orchard itself was one of the witnesses to her long-ago destruction. This army of trees in which the house stood, their roots reaching beneath the house. The bigness of their silence had always been a part of the house itself for her, a part of its scariness at night when she was small.

  She got in the truck and set it to rolling slowly down the lanes. The weedy, draggled trees looked best in this slanting light— burnished, bursting with foliage and fruit. Their battalions rode the gentle, down-trending slopes of the land. The whole spread sank towards its southern boundary. She saw it now ahead, down there near one end of the huge plastic-cocooned compost heap: Dad’s shed, his study and distillery in one.

  Maybe she’d been wrong. Maybe there was a worse place than the fruit cellar, though Dad had never taken her there in his shed. Karen had rarely even been inside it.

  For a while she rambled left and right down the harvesting lanes, dropping southward a lane at a time, glimpsing the shed now and then through breaks in the trees, until she found the nerve and the anger to take the next turn straight down to it.

  A faded plywood shed with a raked tar-paper roof. A big old ‘fifties Chevy pick-up crouched under a shelter built off its side. That gray brute of a truck… . With a shudder— of fear, of course, but also fascination— Karen walked to the bangy old screen door. She pulled it open a few inches and let its spring pull it back to the jamb with a soft clap.

  Way up there at the house on certain quiet summer afternoons, lying in the grassy yard where Dad’s personal fruit trees grew, Karen could hear this screen door bang from almost half a mile away. Flopped on the grass with some comic books, Karen might be absorbed, only half hearing the far faint summery stir of the ocean of leaves around her. Mom was gone into Gravenstein for shopping and the girl, restlessly trying to get at the gist of one of those encyclopedic Superman thought-balloons, might be only remotely aware of the wide-scattered outbursts of birds or the wandering hum of a bee.

  Then, far out across that sea of leaves, would come that remote tiny flap-clatter of this door. The minuscule distinctness of it, a micro-noise of wood clapping wood! This the child could hear as clear as thunder. Dad had gone down to the shed some hours ago. If he went down, he stayed drinking till dinnertime. Except some of those times when Mom was gone somewhere. Would she hear the microscopic truck next? Firing up to come up here?

  … Yes, there it went. So faint to be so unmistakable! But already that young girl knew how quick its roar would grow as big as life, its tires come clawing to a stop at the yard’s edge, Dad booming from the cab, “Karen, get over here to me! Double-time, girl!” And if she was not quick enough, he would grab her wrist and haul her up aboard… .

  Half-consciously Karen touched her wrist and found again last night’s tenderness, though lessened, it seemed. If only that memory of being gripped were fading, were not still so stark, like madness, in her brain. Of course, it was only memory she had felt in that mortuary room— the memory of what had happened here.

  Only? What was the difference between a delusion like that and the full-blown DTs? Oh please, please don’t let my brain already be that crippled by alcohol. Oh that son of a bitch. That cruel black boar.

  She yanked on the screen door and shouldered the inner door open.

  She was surprised by how well she remembered this interior, though it had all been so much neater, those few times she’d glimpsed it as a child. Dad’s desk-and-armchair corner, with all its miscellaneous freestanding shelves and files walling it in, was now snow-drifted with papers, magazines, and books in sagging stacks. The other half of the space was occupied by the still. The benches and sinks, the trellises of copper tubing, the domed copper cookers, the cooling fans stationed along the coils, the little bunged kegs of oak— all looked orderly as ever, but dust-heavy cobwebs extravagantly festooned them.

  She took a few steps towards the desk. Crowded with so much else, there was still a place on it for the brandy cannon, its muzzle aimed at a forty-five degree angle at the cobwebby roof-joists. A cut-glass howitzer that fired booze.

  She turned back and stood looking out through the screen door. Dad’s view.

  As a child, most of Karen’s visits down here didn’t bring her inside. She would trot down across the acres in the late afternoon, important and pleased with her errand, admiring the gold light on the swelling plums. She would knock at the screen door and call, “Daddy! Mom says dinner is in one hour exactly.”

  From inside, his preoccupied, cheery voice. “Okay, Punkin! I’ll be up!”

  What had happened in those years that came after? Those years when he would step out of this shed and go up to find his daughter? She shoved open the screen door, stepped out, and let it clap shut behind her. And stood there looking up towards the house. You could just see the tops of Dad’s prized brandy-trees in the back yard, the peaches and apricots under which his daughter lay reading. Because Dad, after the door banged, always stood looking for a moment, didn’t he? Because there was always that uncertain interval between the far, tiny door-noise and the miniature engine-growl that followed it.

  Yes, she was sure he had stood here, eyes probing that green skyline for her, for that faraway long-ago girl. Stood staring here and thinking… what? Could she ever know? Perhaps, if she could, it would kill her to know it. That brutal shit! He had murdered her heart here, buried it here so many years ago. Now all that she had was his sickness, but none of his reasons.

  She snatched open the screen and slammed it wildly three times back against the shed wall, as if she could shatter it. Then she went back into the shed and flung herself down into Dad’s big tattered leather armchair bought at some yard sale be
fore Karen’s birth. At first she thought she was going to root through his books and papers, search there for some fragments of his thoughts, but she found she had eyes only for the brandy cannon.

  It was a long-spouted two-gallon jug of thick faceted glass, notched to rest on an axle between two wheels of carved wood. The neck of the spout was wreathed with an almost indecipherably fine-cut design, something with perhaps a dragon in it. It was filled only and always— filled now— with Dad’s own hundred-proof apricot brandy.

  Karen reached and plucked out the glass stopper. A gust of Dad’s breath stung her eyes and nose, soft and stunning, a vaporous smack in the face. For an instant his huge weight crushed down on her again, smothered her smallness in that sweet stink of poisoned apricot.

  “You really messed with me, didn’t you, Cannon?” Her voice was breaking, hot tears were sliding down her cheeks. “You shot me full of holes.” This was what she had come here to face. Right here. To hell with logic, resolutions. This was the demon she had come here to wrestle.

  No less than three dusty glasses stood near. She plucked the least sticky one, polished it on the tail of her Pendleton. She pressed the cannon’s muzzle down and poured it— a generous tumbler-sized glass— full of gold. And she took it down in a breath, in three long golden gulps.

  V

  “I’m heading home now, Dr. Harst— okay?” Fiona Billings, his clerk, poked her head into the morgue. Looking up from the dead Pakistani he was working on, Dr. Harst beamed her a look of kindly dismay.

  “My goodness, Fiona, it’s after six! You should have left an hour ago. Phil and Jed are long gone.”

  Plump Fiona scowled her pleased scowl. “Well, shame on them, then, with all this work you’ve got in.” Last night a van of Pakistanis had hit a tree and four were now residents of the morgue. When Harst and Marty Carver had arrived after midnight with Jack’s body, the Pakistanis were just being brought in. “At least you’ve got three of your reports typed up now, Doctor,” she said. She worked from the tapes he made while performing the post-mortems.

  “Fiona,” he said, “you’re an angel.” Meaning it, too, feeling, with a rush of sentiment, how long and faithfully she’d worked for him. Wondering suddenly if his own long career here could really be nearing its end? “I’m going to check your time-slip very closely this month— I want to see plenty of overtime billed there.”

  “Oh, Doctor.” She flapped a deprecating hand at him and withdrew.

  The sound of a distant door closing announced her exit, then silence filled the building. Harst murmured to his mini-recorder, completing his observations on his subject’s severe thoracic damage which included the penetration of the pericardium and the heart itself by the ends of two of the crushed ribs. That had been a harrowing moment, pulling into the rear lot, with Jack’s body-bag in plain sight in the bed of Marty’s truck, and finding the station was like a kicked anthill. The meat wagon and three sheriff’s patrol cars, deputies standing around talking, EMTs rolling bodies inside. Marty parked a short way off and advanced aggressively, keeping them away from his truck. But when he’d talked to the responding officer— Bud “Burly” Babcock, looking very ill at ease to encounter his Assistant Chief Deputy here at this hour— Marty found the situation was going to be marvelously manageable.

  Pursuing Sheriff’s Department policy of letting no immigrant agricultural workers pass unscrutinized, Babcock had “initiated a pursuit” when the van failed to pull over for a tail-light violation. He indicated that he “might have fired a warning shot” just before the van hit the tree.

  “You might have fired a warning shot? Let me see your sidearm.”

  “I did fire one, sir. I already reloaded. I was, ah, confused after the crash.”

  Marty let just the right rectum-puckering pause go by. “Are you telling me this, Babcock, because you think we might find a bullet in one of these men?”

  “Sir, I fired in the air, I shot way high, I know— ”

  “Shut up. Just shut up.” Marty pantomimed deliberation, letting the moron’s balls contract a few more notches. “Have you filed your report?”

  “No sir.” Already the ox was feeling a stir of hope.

  “I want it on my desk first thing in the morning. Leave the warning shot out. If we don’t find anything in these bodies, we’ll leave it that way.”

  “Thank you, sir. I just— ”

  “Just shut up. Leave us what ID you’ve got on these guys and all of you get out of my sight. And Babcock, even if this blows over, I’m not going to forget it. I’m going to be thinking it over and thinking you over.”

  So, when they were gone, Harst and Marty had installed Jack Fox in one of the freezer-drawers and locked it. And all day today, through the last ten hours, the doctor had felt Jack’s secret presence in that freezer drawer, a hidden gravitational center around which his thoughts had orbited during his toil on the Pakistanis. Their dark bodies had seemed unreal, like phantoms, compared to the reality of Jack Fox hidden so near.

  As he loosely sutured the thoracic flaps and turned his subject over on the stainless steel table, positioning the throat on the pillow-block to present the back of the neck, Harst imagined Jack to be sardonically smiling. Jack had been familiar with certain small chicaneries the doctor had practiced here, for their mutual benefit, over the years… .

  This fellow had been the van’s driver and, yes, he had what looked very much like a bullet entry on the cervical spine. When the scalpel had flensed away a bit of muscle, voila. The third cervical vertebra was shattered and more than half ablated. Plainly the work of a bullet. He murmured into his recorder: “Laceration of the neck and damage to the cervical vertebrae consistent with impact injuries sustained in the collision.”

  He clicked off the recorder and stood sharing an ironic after-silence with Jack. Very soon now, when Carver came down here, the doctor would see Jack again— for the last time in his life. His tears flowed once more.

  Eyes blurred, he opened the Pakistani’s drawer, picked him up, carried him over and set him inside. He had never concealed his strength from his assistants. Foolish pride, no doubt. A man near eighty, with orthopedic braces on his right ankle, who handled cadavers like a youngster carrying his bride across the threshold. Power. It craves to be known, hungers for the awe of others.

  He wiped his eyes. Was this purely grief over Jack that racked him? Or was it also a selfish dread that his power— and his life— might soon end together?

  No, Jack. No, my only love. You’re gone and all that’s left of me is desolation… .

  And thus it was that Marty Carver, stepping into the morgue, found him weeping afresh, leaning on the autopsy table, choking out rusty sobs, and mixing his tears with the Pakistani’s blood in the table’s gutters.

  “Dr. Harst.” Harst turned and met the Assistant Chief Deputy’s chilly smile, his barely-concealed disgust. Harst wiped his eyes on his sleeve, polished his glasses. As Marty started for Jack’s drawer, the old man blurted harshly, “Don’t get near him! I’ll carry him.”

  “Suit yourself, Doc.” And Marty had to marvel a little in spite of himself, watching this codger lift the bagged bulk from the drawer and hinge it at the waist across his shoulder— all in one smooth hoist. The corpse, half-skulled and all, had to weigh two-thirty at the least. Harst faced him, one arm hooked over his burden.

  “Jack Fox carried me like this, through a half mile of jungle, under heavy fire, and me with a thirty-cal round in my leg. You think you know some shit, Carver, but you don’t know shit. You’ve got the keys— let’s go.”

  The morgue occupied the west half of the County Building’s basement floor, but the entire building was partly foundationed on an older structure. A big fieldstone-and-concrete cider warehouse had been sited here, one of Gravenstein’s first large municipal works, springing up near the railroad line shortly before World War I. It was razed in the post-World War II boom, but the massive walls of its big cellar offered support the architects of the
County Building incorporated into their new structure. The old civic center was found to occupy an ancient river bed. Riparian gravel underlay it, honeycombed, not far beneath, by major channels of the water-table.

  Marty led the way through a door in the morgue’s west wall. A short corridor past the darkened offices of Maintenance brought them into the utilities plant. Fuse-boxes, steam heaters, fans, generators, tool benches bulked in the shadows. Conduit, pipes and ducts branched up the walls and across the ceiling, like roots sent down by a forest of steel. Marty heard the implacable limping gait of Harst behind him and couldn’t help glancing back at this gnome, face all wrinkles in the half-light, tirelessly bearing his great burden, the glint of his glasses accentuated, no doubt, by further tears.

  From the utilities plant’s far corner, another exit opened onto a dim-lit stairwell. At the foot of one short flight was a padlocked double metal door, cold to the touch. The chain rattled out of the doors’ bars, Marty thrust both open, and touched a switch.

  It was a vast space, feebly starred by bulbs along the girders raftering its concrete ceiling. The floor of the former warehouse— of much older, buckled concrete— lay twenty feet below. They descended an antique staircase of stamped black iron, the soft boom of their tread like distant funeral bells.

  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.”