Apricot brandy (10 page)

A strangely peaceful silence followed, as if a golden moment of accord, of understanding, had settled on the room. The big-chinned rancher Jessie Rangle gazed at her as if she’d just hummed a melody that wakened poignant memories.

“’Ey. Karen,”— this from her left—”come sitta table wit’ me, come on.”

The man in the leather sports coat with the garish dye-job— was Mr. Fratelli. Pocketing the Smith, she knocked back her drink. “Why not? I didn’t recognize you, Mr. Fratelli.”

“You bring us the same to our table, eh, Earl?” He laid a twenty on the bar. Outside of his store, it appeared that Mr. Fratelli had an expanded public personality: the leather coat and slacks of costly-looking shimmery gray stuff like mob guys wore in movies, an inch or two piled up on the shoes due to his short legs. When Earl brought their drinks to the table, Fratelli said, “Keep da change!” with a grand wave.

“Karen,” gravely, leaning close, “you got good dirt out there. T’ree hunnerd t’ousand.”

Expanded, indeed. How long had it been now? Working the store in his apron, but on off hours, in his slick leather coat, buying whole properties. “Do you buy much land, Mr. Fratelli, or is it only my Dad’s you want?”

“Huh! You be surprised, the lan’ I own! But you got good dirt.”

She wanted to see farther into this new Fratelli. “Well, current economy and all, that’s a possible price for a hundred acres of trees. But that leaves out the house. A classic two-story whatever, good for a hundred more years. In California some wine-yuppie would pay a million. Even out here, another four hundred K for the house.”

“I don’ wan’ the house, I wan’ the dirt. I only pay you for dat. Move the house you wanna, take it witchoo.”

“What would you do with it if I just left it there?”

“Tear it down an’ sell the wood.”

“Is that because you’re afraid of it?”

He sat looking at her, not unpleasantly. “Karen. You ask me that… why
you
stayin’ there?”

“I have things to do there.” She stood up.

“You call me.”

The sun was drawing westward when she returned to the orchard for the second time that day. She stood looking at the house, imagining herself asleep in there last night while Susan did… what? What had put her out on the highway at two a.m.? She found no clues in the living room, but in the kitchen… . Dad’s brandy, an inch left in the bottle and a sticky glass. Of course.

She poured the remnant in the same glass, her lips trying to taste the memory of Susan’s lips on the rim as she drank. Thought of Susan saddened by their lovemaking, getting up and getting dressed, coming in here for more of the brandy she must have been drinking pretty steadily since dinner. Then heading outside into the night… .

Here, near the big shed, was where Susan’s car had been parked. Karen looked inside. A stripe of low sun lay along its inner wall and showed quite clearly a dust-shadow under the chainsaws. The gas can was gone, was it somewhere outside here? Then she noticed the faint scars of tires slanting across the grass and onto the picking lane. Of course. If Susan had meant to burn and purge, the shed would be a natural place to go.

The sun was one diameter above the horizon as Karen drove down through the acres. Dad’s brandy shed was in the slanting shadow of the compost heap and through its gaping inner door she could see the bulbs blazing inside. She parked just short of Susan’s cane, lying on the grass.

And with the screen door screeching, she stepped into a dizzying reek of gas fumes. Saw the toppled can, the toppled glass, the sticky spill of brandy across… nightmare photos.

Susan must suddenly have run for her life. Had sat here drinking, sifting the contents of Dad’s desk, and then had run for her life, dead-drunk, reeling out of here, dropping her cane, firing her car up, rocketing away, straight out of the orchard, onto the highway, into her death.

Karen gathered the photos and put them in her truck. She went back for the brandy cannon, topping it off from a keg marked
Apricot
and carrying it as well to the truck. She had the last things Susan touched, the last things of Dad’s to hurt her, before her final hurt. Now she should strike a match… but she was not done with what the shed contained. Dad’s thoughts were here and some might be retrieved.

She left the lights on and closed the door— sealing in the fumes, leaving it all just a match-head away from destruction. The next time she left, she would leave it blazing.

Midnight found Karen in the living-room armchair. The cannon was down on the floor in her right hand’s reach and her glass was asleep in her hand on her lap and no dreams were visible behind her sleeping face.

She had waited patient hours for the house to confront her, swallowing penance in the form of danger. Through it all, the house had stood silent. She felt snug as she went under. Snug in the belly of the whale.

Just after midnight, Dr. Harst sat at his desk, idly studying his hands under his low desk lamp’s small wedge of yellow light. His office was otherwise dark, its inner door open on the morgue, the morgue dark too, just a low gleam here and there along the tables, the banks of drawers.

It was in your hands, he thought, that you most poignantly saw the passage of your years and all their loss and bitterness. You felt no self-pity, but a more dignified, detached compassion, for these old monkey-paws now close to gripping their last branch.

These fingers, when they were smooth and strong, had clutched the back of Jack Fox’s web-belt as Jack, a single great piston of uncrushable strength, carried Harst’s younger self through howling, hammering, steel-shredded jungle. And just two days ago, these hands in their present knuckly, ropy, spotted shape, had delivered Jack Fox down to the furnace of the under-earth.

“I’m afraid, Jack,” he told the darkness behind him. “It’s just that I’m afraid.”

Did his low voice wake echoes out in the corridors? Madly, he wished for that. Some night-shift Deputy wandering over here, into the locked half of the County Building. Someone from the
surface
world blundering in here, interrupting. But there was only silent darkness outside his front door’s pebbled glass.

He’d come here two hours ago, because he could no longer pretend he didn’t feel that low, insistent tugging in his spine that had nagged him his whole day at work. A meth-lab out on some decayed farm had exploded and he’d had two-and-a-half crisped decedents to examine for pre-incineration entry-wounds… . Throughout, he’d felt this fugitive touch along his backbone, like a gesture from the earth rippling up through the air.

But he’d gone home, made a dinner he didn’t taste, sat down to his journal… and found, of course, that the only thing to be recorded was the demand being made of him at every other heartbeat in his ribs.

And so, at last summoning the obedience, squarely facing the duty owed, he had come limping back through the dim halls. Had entered his office, passed through it to the morgue, through the morgue towards the utilities plant. He’d brought a penlight, but turned neither it nor any other light on as he advanced, his pace dignified but unhesitating, a priest’s advance towards the shrine.

Without light, not even down the blackness of the iron staircase, nor across the restless, buckled concrete floor, he moved blind as any mole, navigating towards the aperture by the scent of its cool, rank updraft and, when he was quite near, by the pull of it, the dizzying gravitation it exhaled.

Only when he had painfully knelt beside it, touched its ragged concrete lip, did he switch on the penlight. He was holding it at his chin, though, lighting only his own face. Leaned his lit face over the vent, self-presenting, and said, “I am here.”

What he had expected, had come: a dizzy downward sagging of his body, a pulling of his heart towards his master.
Come down
, Jack told him… .

But Harst’s terror had mutinied and taken back his will. He aimed the beam down the vent then. The fissure’s wet throat had widened farther down there, a hungry gullet of ribbed clay and, still farther down, some movement dully glinted.

Harst had reared up, staggered back, and on fear’s rebel legs marched back to the stairs and up them. The light beam, like a shaft of sanity, led him, and his shaky, coward’s body followed until, coming back into his office, he saw this desk, the center and sanctum of his priesthood for nearly thirty years. All the power he’d had here, all the lust gratified… here, he found his better self again.

No further retreat. He took his chair, turned on the lamp. And murmured, “I yield, Jack. I do not flee farther than this. But I just can’t meekly enter my own grave.”

Thus he sat there through the hours. If he was summoned, let the summoner prove his power. He was sincere, believed the summoner
would
come, and so he sat here in good faith, in obedience. But there was also, sneaking at his mind’s rim, a baser thought: that the summoner could not literally come, and required his self-delivery, his assistance, and in that case, the green hills, the sunlit sky, the sweet breath of the breeze… all these things might— just might— be his again tomorrow.

And so he studied his hands and, with a certain sense of ceremony, embarked on a journey of memory through the long years of his love for Jack. Jack was that rare thing, innately a hero. He’d always gone first into the Hard Places, was born to walk point. Harst thought again of that two hundred meters of jungle, the torn leaves spitting on all sides.

And how much farther than that Jack had carried him, through all their succeeding years together! Along a path both dire and miraculous. Harst’s eyes filled and ran over. So much he owed Jack. All those raptures in the wild night when Harst, red-handed, had known the presence of Power Undying in his spine… .

But always underneath it was this unthinkable point: that immortality meant
transmutation
, into something so Other that the passage loomed like death itself. And again Jack had walked point! Had taken leave of his body with the brusque, imperative gesture of a king doffing his crown to seize up a greater diadem.

There was a sound from the morgue behind him. A sound? Yes: a drawer unlatched. And then… the steely whisper of a drawer sliding out. Shedding his resolve that he would not move from this spot, Harst willed himself up and away, but discovered he could not move. Could not stir the smallest muscle.

The drawer clicked and rattled delicately in its frame. Next, a soft smack, bare skin touching concrete. The drawer gave a last rattle as its burden left it. Just before Harst heard the next faint, naked footfall, a waft of air tardily touched the back of his head and flowed softly around to his face: a scent of cold and the beginnings of decay.

The moist chafe of foot soles on floor.

Could. Not. Move.

The cool waft teased him more insistently. He was already floating in the stream of its will and, in moments, it would set him in motion.

Was this that merciful shock they said the zebra felt as the lion ate it alive? This suspension? A sense that tearing jaws were already at work on him, but still far away somehow?

The air swelled more strongly against the back of his neck, displaced by a nearing mass. Cold blue fingers sprouted before his eyes, interlocked across his brow, their grip like winter stone. An effortless, inhuman strength bent him back in his chair.

What he saw above him was the eerie loveliness of Susan Kravnik’s untouched face, above her shattered chest and limbs. Her hands took a grip on his cranium and
wrenched
his head, sending a complex, surrendering crack through his frame.

His body sagged, a long floppy thing, a Something Else he was anchored to. Harst’s eyes scanned for the last time this odd little office he’d ruled from for so many years. One dead hand gripped the back of his collar and dragged him out of the chair. His legs and arms hit the floor.

Out of the light she dragged him, then down the length of the morgue. Facing forward, with a click and a hitch like clockwork in her tread (he recognized that brutally fractured femur on the right) she hauled him one-armed behind her. He looked around him, watched the trusty old tables passing, gleaming him goodbye.

Then down through the utility plant, its big gloom starred with small red and white trouble lights, lit gauges. Harst, his torso hissing across the polished floor, saw around him other old friends, these elemental servitors of his temple who had furnished him with the heat, and the deep cold, and the light, and the voltage for his handy little bone-saws… .

Goodbye, then.

Down the black iron stairs and into real darkness. His heels dragged drumbeats down the crusty risers, as he sank into the echoes, into the big, dank breathing of this stony lung. This was the buried breath of life itself, of life’s relentless conspiracy against the universe.

They crossed concrete, its bucklings like a sine wave his limbs traced, a reading of the restless gravels, the fractured sediments, the snaking waters just beneath this earth… . Yet there was a node of light down here. He glimpsed it when a jolting cocked his head back far enough to see, slantingly, there along the farther wall, a low faint exhalation, a most delicate glow of the dimmest memory of green… .

When she had laid him by the aperture, he saw this nimbus, smelled its cold fetor, close at hand. It whispered to his nostrils of recycled generations, deep-layered ancestries of lives as remote and numberless as stars. The corpse, most awkwardly upon its shattered props and hinges, was kneeling at his side.

She gripped his clothing at the throat and tore it half asunder with one pull. Turning him, tilting him, gripping him, she tore his jacket and shirts to rags, and clean away. The thickest seams shrieked and yielded. As she worked, the unreal loveliness of her face made her seem to daydream, her gaze slanting up and away, inwardly following the landscape of death’s discoveries, still so new to her… .

The livid fingers snapped his belt, stripped off his trousers and briefs, the cloth surrendering like dead leaves. Tore the stout leather cuffs of his leg-brace free, the aluminum struts ringing on the concrete… .