Apricot brandy Read online

  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.

  VI

  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.

  VII

  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.

  Not long after, though, her parents stopped joining the pickers. In his fifties, Dad began spending more time reading in the shed. He was still physically powerful and did everything necessary around the orchard, but no more than that.

  Karen must put her hand to this place, must treat it as she willed and drive its ghosts back into the ground. She would mess with those plum trees, pick some of them. See if Fratelli’s was still operating in Gravenstein and might give her a few bucks a flat.

  There was bread in the pantry, old, but toastable. She made toast and coffee, ate greedily, enjoying how the house felt simply like a house. A place where she planned a day’s work, a place she could change any part of she chose. Eager— with the sun declining— to be outside, she almost forgot to call Susan before rushing out.

  Karen was glad to get their answering machine, to make this quick. “Hey hon, sorry for not calling, it was… overwhelming here at first. But listen, it’s going well now. I feel like I’ve crossed a line. It’s going better than I hoped. I’ve got to rush out before dark. I’m gonna pick some plums! I love you. I’ll call you.”

  * * * *

  The Big Shed, they’d called this, the roof’s rafters twelve feet high. The picking ladders covered one whole wall and the others were hung with long-handled pruners and branch saws, the props also leaning there in standing stacks— notched planks for supporting branches getting too heavy with fruit. Packing flats were stacked on one end of the long central bench. The cardboard separators, dimpled like egg cartons, were there, too. Karen still liked the feel of this big interior, its dust-motes shot with rays of late sun through gaps in the siding. It felt full of a benevolent, earth-loving energy.

  A pouch on her hip, some flats and separators, some parrot-beak shears for all the wild twigs and suckers— she brought these out to the nearest tree and went back for the ladder. Despite having years of experience carrying extension ladders hooked on her shoulder, she found the picking ladder, which flared at the base, a more awkward matter and was running sweat by the time she had set it, its third leg slanting through the bristly branches, and finally climbed up into the tree.

  Karen kept on sweating after that, a good two hours and more. Wherever she leaned in, she was assailed by ear-poking, eye-poking, mouth-poking twigs. You thought you saw them, then poke— there was another one you hadn’t seen. Her relationship to the tree quickly became one of attack and counter-attack, and repeated assaults with the parrot-beaks. Each time she climbed down with some plums, she stood in a litter of twigs and her tennis shoes trod a muck of fallen fruit mouldering
in the deep weeds. Each time she re-set the ladder, she fought a new battle with the clippers, the smell of decay floating up around her.

  When the sun set, there were four flats of plums to carry back into the big shed. And, under a sky half rose, half violet, she was glad she’d stuck with the struggle. She felt sweat-drenched and purged, felt so much herself, with the night coming on.

  She’d get up first thing tomorrow. Could pick Dad’s special trees in the yard, yeah— peaches and apricots should fetch more than plums. Go into Gravenstein in the afternoon with seven or eight flats. See how the town had changed.

  Time for a shower. What the hell, she’d rinse down right here under the hose… . A little afraid of that bathroom at night, are we? Well, so what? Take things at your own pace, get your mind back, get strong.

  Dropping her clothes on the ground, turning the hose onto her scalp, Karen sent cool water spiraling down her nakedness. Wonderful, this garment of water. She stood wearing it, stroking it on her skin.

  She carefully wrung out her hair and scraped the wet from her skin, watching the dark just beginning to congeal around her. Suddenly it seemed terribly blatant, terribly reckless of her, standing naked in front of the trees like this. It seemed the whole two hundred acres, and everything in them, beheld her, discovered her there in its midst.

  She shook her fist at the orchard and carried her clothes into the house. A nice clean T-shirt and jeans. Hot tomato soup, more toast, and a dish of plums.

  Next, another fire. The night was cool, but it was really the movement and the noise of the blaze she wanted most. Karen settled into the couch with her thriller.

  The story seemed terribly thin, but that was okay. She clung to the sketchy characters, their faint voices and unlikely actions, while underneath hearing and feeling the house around her, its shadows and silences testing her calm. This was to be expected. She would conquer the place one night at a time, by enduring it, defying it, coldly sober—