Apricot brandy (2 page)

“Are you Ms. Fox? I’m John Rubalcava.” He had a hard smooth hand like oiled walnut, a calm face carved of the same material. “You are going to view your father?” A quaver of hesitation on
view
.

Karen looked at him for a beat, trying to convey non-aggression. “I have to say goodbye to him. Think of it that way.”

“You have to know that he is dead.” Offering her own words back to her, spoken to the Haitian on the phone.

“I have to see, Mr. Rubalcava.”

“I respect your courage, Ms. Fox. But you know, all the looking in the world doesn’t change death. It remains what it is, stare as you will. You must excuse me. I’m so very sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you.”

Rubalcava’s step got strangely lively as he descended the stairs, which led down to a remotely clangorous region. Things faintly slammed, stainless steel clashed and a sneaky chemical whiff came up from that stairwell. He spun gracefully round the turning and his coat flared almost festively. The wings of it had reddish-brownish smudges here and there.

The transecting hallway down which she turned was even more behind-the-scenes, more frankly funky. The walls bore waist-level skidmarks from gurneys and the loud floral carpet was balding in spots. That muted clangor she’d heard from belowstairs was audible up here as well and the smell was stronger too, that haunting, industrial-strength perfume.

Another door: 311. She stood in front of the door like she was staring it down. She muttered, with all the sarcasm she could muster, “Karinna Foxxe had come at last to that last doorway, beyond which lay the last remains of that dark, unknowable man, who had for so long… ”

Oh, just fucking do it.

The first shock was the different carpet; again floral blobs were the pattern, but these screaming-loud in cobalt, marigold and scarlet. The floor’s ugliness filled the whole bare cube of a room. Its only contents— the gurney along the far wall and the plastic-sheeted oblong shape it held— seemed to float upon the Hell of color. For an instant she thought it impossible to take these last few steps, but then found herself crossing over to him with the weightless, unwilling compliance of a commanded child.

Here he was.

The body was tightly scrolled up in the kind of tough white plastic she’d seen on construction sites. Its cocoon, like the wrapping of a bouquet, was flared open at one end to display Dad’s neck and head, and at this flared end, the plastic was smudged and spattered a muddy red.

Still the commanded child, she leaned over him.
Take a good look at me, Karen. Look at the last thing I have to show you.

The dome of his head had been blown out and his brow shattered. That he had been
shortened
was how it kept hitting her, a hideous joke had been played on him, taking four inches off his height. How he’d towered, when she was small! Now his eyes were wider-spaced by the fissured brow and the left eye seemed to strain upward, disbelieving, at this ragged crown of bone he ended in. His jaw gaped, the hinge blown. Most of his upper teeth had left him along with his brain.

Leaning there, breathing his aura of refrigerated decay, Karen could not help but pity this obscene vandalism to a man once so handsome.

Dad. It’s me. Karen.

She had foreseen pain in this moment, but she hadn’t foreseen that its cruelest edge would be love. The first years, when he had been Daddy, when she had been weightless and safe in the crook of his arm, had sat in his lap for stories— how he seemed to love to read to her!— his chest her trusted backrest and a favored bed if she should drowse. Somewhere down in its root, her heart still held these things, was partly made of them. As she discovered this, the cruelty of what he’d later done to her stunned her, seared her as if it were brand new and her first blood not dry from it, while at the same time, she yearned like a little girl for the loving father she had lost.

Resting both hands lightly on the gurney’s side-rail, she leaned down to kiss his cheek. If she ever hoped to find that earlier undamaged part of her, she had to say goodbye to all of him.

Cold putty took her kiss, stubble nibbling her lips like frost crystals, chilled putrescence filling her nose. She straightened slowly, eyes still searching him, searching herself for the seam where this man’s life left off and her own life, whole and inviolable, could at last begin.

Her left wrist felt the clamp of an ice-cold hand, a crushing grip and freezing to the bone.

Explosively she wrenched free and spun around. There was no one else in the room. All her nerves were firing in a cascade that drained out the bottoms of her feet and into the floor, while the floor itself was plunging, plunging into the earth. She stood in the same room, but suddenly it was deep, deep underground, unreachable from the world overhead… .

Dad lay there, mummied by the plastic, limbless, yet surely it had been his hand upon her wrist, just the way she had felt it in her youth, when he dragged her down to the fruit cellar, deep in the earth then, as she was now, in this deep hell of color and corruption.

She backed away from the gurney, taking slow steps, to show she still defied him, did not flee him. She tried to face him down as she withdrew. She closed the door behind her and leaned against it, rubbing her wrist to erase that grip it still remembered. Karen stood in perfect silence, all subterranean sounds were gone.

It seemed impossible to tread the swollen blossoms of the corridor’s carpet, but she had to walk out of this nightmare. She lurched and staggered, till her legs came back to her. What festering wound had been revealed in herself? For the first time in her life, she had hallucinated. What had been torn in her brain, to bleed madness into her thoughts? Dad was finally gone, but was it only to leave her forever damaged by the booze he’d cursed her with?

No one appeared in the corridors, the Haitian’s gleaming desk stood empty. She stepped out into the last light of the day and was glad, the hugeness of the city around her a balm. Glad to be above-ground, as if the city might erase that room from her mind, the growl of traffic replacing its awful silence. Standing down there in that room, death’s antechamber, confronting what she had confronted… after all, who would not have gone a little crazy?

“Karen Fox,” she said with quiet determination, “is going to be all right.” But please dear Jesus— she started, still unsteady, across the parking lot— how could that be her last vision? Dad in his spectacular death, printed on her mind’s eye. His crime against her scorching her heart. If she did not find strength and defiance somewhere, she would come away even more broken, even more crippled.

The door of a white pick-up opened as she passed, one of those new oversized brutes, and out stepped a tall, lean man in a deputy’s uniform. A clipboard and shades, even in the declining light. As he moved to intercept her, Karen had a qualm of premonition.

He confronted her and took off his shades. “Hello, Karen.”

“Marty Carver.” A gulf of years had just been bridged. Marty’s hair and his tufty eyebrows, like two vertical brush-strokes, were dulled to ginger from the red they’d been in high school. The plump mouth, still smug, was set in a chin a bit squarer now, somewhat pouchier underneath.

“Are you on an official mission, Marty?” Karen noticed that his armpatch said Gravenstein County Sheriff. He
would
have stayed in their hometown and he
would
be a cop. “You’re a long way from home here.”

“I’ve got some errands of my own, but I’m here for you too. This is kind of a personal gesture, Karen. I called to find out when you’d be here. You didn’t show yesterday, so I stayed over. I wanted to let you know personally about the Medical Examiner’s Report.”

“You mean the autopsy findings?”

“That’s right. It’s a sad thing of course, but I thought you’d be reassured to know that there was no foul play. Definitely a suicide. GSRs on his right hand.”

“And those are?”

“Gunshot residues.” He showed her some stapled sheets on his clipboard.

She noticed the signature. “Dr. Harst filled this out?”

“He’s been our County M.E. for fifteen years now.”

“Of course. He called me about Mom, before.” Army buddy Harst, weeping on the phone three nights ago, had been a comrade-in-arms whose life Jack Fox had saved in combat. Marty was also Dad’s old friend, though a generation younger. As a teenager, Marty had, in some wordless way, idolized Dad. Dad’s tour in Viet Nam, and afterwards in Central America, seemed to have something to do with it. Marty had done a lot of hired work in the orchard throughout his and Karen’s high-school years, though at school he’d never pursued any personal acquaintance with her. But near the end of their senior year he’d begun making a big deal to Mom about wanting to take Karen to the prom. Poor Mom knew that no one else had asked her daughter, that her daughter was set on not going at all. In the end Karen accepted for Mom’s sake. She brought a flat of bourbon in her purse and got rowdy on the dance-floor. When Marty managed to get her out to the parking lot, she smashed the windshield of his car with her bottle.

“Well, thank you, Marty. It was very thoughtful of you. But you know, there was never a doubt in my mind that he killed himself.”

This made something flare in his eyes and Karen realized she’d meant it to. Did he guess her accusation of his hero? Had Marty maybe, even as a kid, sensed her father’s crime?

“You know,” he said, “I wonder, Karen. After your Mom died, I made it a point to call and check in on your Dad every couple weeks. Did you ever call him once that whole three years? I didn’t get the feeling that you ever did. I got the feeling you were just too busy with your lesbo friends out in San Francisco to give a damn.”

Karen smiled. For a couple years after leaving for the coast forever right after high school, Karen had now and then come back to visit Mom. Always at some diner in the county seat, Gravenstein, twenty miles from the orchard, but still within Mom’s driving range at her timid, invariable thirty-five miles an hour. Karen had brought an early lover on one visit. Both had more than a few drinks in them. Marty was there with some scared, docile girl. Karen had taken her lover to his table and introduced her at length.

“Hey, Marty. You just don’t get it. I haven’t called, I haven’t talked to my old man for
twenty years
. Do you understand what I’m saying?” She had laid the ugly truth right there, just one question away from good old Marty, if he dared to ask it: Why not?

Real anger now in his yellow-brown eyes. But he didn’t dare. Put his shades back on. “Your life, your choice.”

“My life, my orchard.” She was furious now, enraged he’d backed away, hadn’t let her spit it out, and she grabbed the handiest thing, remembering how Marty had always loved the orchard. “You know, I think I’m gonna have some fun with that orchard. I think I might just burn it down tree by tree.”

He didn’t even nod. She’d got to him though, she could tell by the way he almost slammed his truck door closing it.

As he drove off, and she stood there waving after him ironically, it hit her. If Dad, with half his face, were not to out-face her, and drive her down into fear and pain for the rest of her life, she
had
to go into the house after all. Had to go back home and face it all again, till she had faced that bastard down and, once and for all, thrust him and his crime down into the earth, and finally set her spirit to mending.

After meeting Karen, Marty killed some time in the city till Dr. Harst should arrive. A uniform meant something whatever jurisdiction you were in, and he drove like it. Smooth, peremptory, decisively claiming his space.

He liked the city’s decayed old core. Lots of heavily-grilled mom-and-pops, run by ragheads and slopes. He liked immigrants— they kept their heads down and
worked
. They were usually easy arrests, too, and too poor for anything but Public Defenders, so they kept his production level high at the Gravenstein County Correctional Facility.

Why did winos like to camp behind dumpsters so much? Because they knew they were trash, Marty guessed. He could’ve gotten a ninety-day bit for public disturbance out of every one of these people. The city had too much real crime and the police, no doubt, had a harder time beefing their budget out here than Marty did back in Gravenstein. People in rural county seats knew each other and how things ought to be run. They worked together.

Marty wished he’d worn his civvies when he passed the porn shops. He’d had a good piece of Helen this morning, after the boy left for school, but you could never get it just right with Helen. If you tied the ropes too tight she’d start to whine and nag and break the mood. He was forced just to accept with his wife the more fictional degree of bondage and make the best of it. When he returned to the mortuary, it was dark. Among the four or five vehicles left in the lot, Dr. Harst’s old dirty, battered, olive-drab station wagon had arrived. The doctor’s big baggy profile was visible behind the wheel. His head was slightly cocked, as if he were watching something very distant.

The old man had gotten distinctly dreamy, since Jack Fox shed his mantle with a Last Supper of double-ought. Harst and Jack Fox went way back, to those jungles in Nam and Central America. My God, wouldn’t
that
have been something! Marty honored them both for it, honored them still, but this was no time for dreaming. He and Harst had an appointment, a life-and-death matter.

“Hi, Doctor. How was your drive down?” Looking down through the window at him, watching, behind the thick glasses, those pouchy old eyes, yellowish like tarnished cue-balls, coming back from far away… .

“Hello, Marty. The drive was fine.” Such a bleak little smile, saying that. The old man looked like a cartoon vulture; with his weak jaw, the puckers of his face flowed right down into those of his neck. A man who’d aged a lot more severely than his lifelong friend Jack Fox had done before his death. But Harst straightened and flashed a sharper smile. “It’s time to join our friend.”