Malus Domestica (20 page)

An athletic black guy came out of a doorway stirring what appeared to be a milkshake. “Hey, kids. How’s it going?” he asked, walking over to the counter and taking up position behind a laptop.

Directly behind him was a showcase with a glass front, containing a vast array of dazzling knick-knacks and mementos: signed book jackets, DVD cases, and comic covers, a Freddy Krueger claw, and a veritable army of action figures still in their blister packs. The centerpiece was an uruk-hai cuirass, a vest of armor worn by the orcs in the
Lord of the Rings
movies, and if Wayne viewed it at the right angle he could see the silvery writing where someone had signed it with a Sharpie. Peter Jackson, probably. The chainmail underneath seemed older than Blackfield itself.

Pete bellied up to the counter as if he were a cowboy in a saloon, putting his chubby elbows on the glass. Underneath was a carpeted display with rare cards: baseball,
Magic: The Gathering
,
Pokémon, Garbage Pail Kids.
“Hey, Fish. It’s goin all right, how are you?”

“About as good as good gets. Been a while, Petey boy. What brings you?” Fish chugged half the thick, sludgy milkshake in one go and put it down, waking up the computer.

“We’re showing the new guy around.”

“His name is Wayne. But we call him Bruce Wayne,” said Johnny Juan, clapping his diminutive friend on the shoulder. “Him and his dad just moved here from…?”

“Chicago.”

“Welcome to the middle of nowhere, Batman,” said the man. He wore a thin blue sweater that hugged every muscle as tightly as a wetsuit. “My name is Fisher. Fisher Ellis.” He offered a hand to shake. “Everybody calls me Fish.”

Wayne shook it. “Wayne Parkin.”

“Sweet name. Well, welcome to my little slice of America,” said Fish, gesturing around the shop with a sweeping hand. He leaned over the laptop and started typing furiously. “I’ve got to do a little work. If you need anything, gimme a holler.”

Wandering away, Pete and Johnny took to a table of boxed comic books, cultural geologists flipping through sedimentary layers of superhero history. Amanda simply stood next to the counter, her arms folded, looking uncomfortable. At first Wayne thought about browsing the action figures, but he wanted to know more about Fish and the shop. The fact that it was so empty of people was nagging him.

“So what are you doin?” he asked, pointing at the computer. “For work. On the computer. Do you—” The question felt rude, but he couldn’t think of any other way to put it. “Do you
sell
anything? I mean, it doesn’t really look like many people come in here.”

Fish smiled. “I’m actually a director of IT for a postal company.”

Turning the laptop around, he flashed the kids a screen full of cryptic text. Wayne thought it looked like the green code from
The Matrix
turned sideways. “I work from home, doing programming and things like that. ‘Home’, in this instance, being my hobby shop. It lets me be here at the shop and still do work for these guys.” Wagging a finger around the room, he explained, “This stuff is really for sale, but, yeah, I don’t do much business. It’s more like…like my personal stuff-room, you know? …You ever heard of George Carlin?”

Wayne couldn’t say that he was familiar.

“Well, old Carlin was a comedian, did a lot of stand-up. He had a bit about making money and buying stuff. ‘A house is just a place to put stuff,’ he’d say. ‘Bigger houses are
more room,
to put
more stuff.’
And I don’t have any room at my house for it, so here it is. This is my Room of Stuff.” He picked up the milkshake and toasted the air with the cup. “If I’m going to have all this Stuff, people might as well see it. What good is Stuff if nobody knows you got it?” He downed the rest of the shake. “Besides, I like the company. The shop keeps me social and out of my apartment.”

“Oh!” gasped Amanda, darting over to one of the displays and picking up an action figure package. “I didn’t know you had
Adventure Time.”

The gray cat jumped up on the counter and went to stick its nose in Fish’s cup, but he took it away and stroked the cat’s back. “No ma’am, that’s not for you. You already get enough protein, you don’t need anymore.”

“I want to have a shop like this one day,” said Wayne.

“You look like the kind of man that would take care of a shop like this. Treat it right.”

A sheepish pride blossomed in Wayne’s chest at being called a man, and a grin crept across his face. “It’s really awesome. Maybe when you get tired of running this place and retire,
I
can inherit it.”

Fish studied him for a long moment, then tipped the cup at him. “I tell you what. How do you feel about working up here after school a couple days a week? You could stand right here at the counter for an hour or two while I catch up on my code work, and on Thursdays you can help me get set up for Movie Night. Maybe I can start doing em on the weekends, too.”

“Are you for real?” asked Wayne, incredulous. “That—that would be so cool!”

“All you gotta do is guess what superhero I’m thinking of.” Fish touched a fingertip to his temple. “It’s my favorite superhero. You get three guesses.”

Wayne eyed the front window. “Spider-Man?”

“No, but you’re on the right side. It ain’t neither of them guys up there on the windows, though.”

“Can I get a hint?”

“Umm. Grass.” Fish tapped on the glass counter in thought. “Grass, frogs, and avocados. What do those three things have in common?”

Wayne considered them in turn, picturing them in his mind, chewing on his lip in concentration. “They’re all green?”

Fish nodded deferentially.

“Green Lantern?”

“Nope.”

“The Hulk?”

Pounding his fist on the edge of the counter in feigned defeat, Fish pointed at him and said, “You got it. Man, I knew I made that too easy. What was I thinking?”

Wayne threw his fists in the air and Pete golf-clapped. “To be fair,” he said, “there’s only like two green superheroes, and one of em is DC.”

“Swamp Thing. Martian Manhunter. Beast Boy. Gamora. You gotta do your research, man.”

“Shoot, you know a lot about comic books.”

Fish smirked. “Okay. Bonus points if you can tell me what makes the Incredible Hulk so incredible. Why the Hulk is my favorite.”

The man behind the counter was chiseled but slim, with a triangular neck and an overhanging shelf of muscle across his chest.
That’s an easy one,
thought Wayne, confident in his answer. “Because he’s so strong.”

“He
is
strong. But that’s not why he’s incredible.”

“Because he’s so big?”

“Nope,” said Fish, leaning on the counter, his dark eyes pinning Wayne to the spot. “It’s because the Hulk
adapts.”

Flexing his bulging arms, he explained. “The madder Hulk gets, the stronger Hulk gets. It’s the stress, y’know, it’s what makes him mad. The rage is just a by-product.”

Fish spoke with the magnetic didact focus of a self-help guru, his words clear and precise. Between every sentence, he paused for a beat to let his words sink in. His energetic hands did as much speaking as his mouth did, cupping and flinging every third word. “Everybody has to deal with stress. Hulk deals with it by becoming
stronger
than the stress. He soaks up the energy around him and channels it into his strength, uses it to go one step above the problem at hand.

“You hit him with a hundred tons of force?” He punched at the air, slapping his bicep to give the strike a theatrical
oomph.
“Hulk hits you with
two
hundred tons of force. …He’s not my favorite because he’s strong. He’s my favorite because he never lets a challenge beat him, he’s always ready to go that one-step-farther than the other guy.”

“Yeah. Yeah!” Wayne nodded, fidgeting as the story soaked in. “I get you. I get you.”

His father was pretty much the only adult that Wayne ever had conversations with that felt as intellectually equal as this one, with this well-spoken man and his superhero fixation, and now he felt a bit antsy—almost patronized, except he knew Fish was being earnest. It was a bit awkward, like being drafted into a stage performance in front of all his friends, but he liked it. Made him feel ten years older.

“Absolutely, you dig it?” Fish peered at his computer screen and rattled off a burst of typing. “And that’s my motto, man. Adapt and overcome. When life gives you a problem, you gotta adapt and be stronger, you know? Be the Hulk. Be better. Be bigger. Be
badder.”

10

M
ARILYN
FOUND
R
OY
OUT
back in the garden beating up the board fence with the weed-eater, his eyes shielded by his cheesy wrap-around redneck sunglasses.
WHEEEER, WHEEEER,
the trimmer-line cut through crabgrass and wild onions, tinting the air with a bitter green scent.

The secluded garden was massive, cutting deep into the encroaching forest. Impeccable landscaping occupied the majority of the space, a field of five one-hundred-yard wire fences, each one tangled in grapevines. Flanking the vineyard were shallow hillocks of purple dahlia and lavender, watched over by trees drooping with Texas mountain laurel.

The girls didn’t make their own wine anymore, too much of a hassle; these days with the internet they could very easily purchase much better wine, older stock, and to be honest Roy was a bit of an idiot and couldn’t be trusted with the delicate processes of producing a fine red.

The aforementioned idiot was at the very back near the dryad, the bright late-afternoon sun shining on his copper-and-salt hair. He cut the weed-eater off as she approached, pulling plugs out of his ears. “You look like you’ve had a hard week, dear,” she told him, her long hands clasped together over her belly like a gentleman vicar. “Why don’t you take the rest of the day off? Get started on the weekend a little early.”

“It
was
a pretty long drive down from Virginia. I admit I am a mite run down today.” Roy pushed his iridescent NASCAR sunglasses up, revealing his pale, ocean-bleached eyes. Putting down the trimmer, he beat the grass off his jeans with his gloves.

As always, his eyes cut over at the tree.
The
tree, the tallest one on the property.

Marilyn relished the hint of old fear in that anxious glance. She smiled ingratiatingly. “I would like to ask you one favor before you go, though.”

“What’s that?”

“Mother tells me that there is…well, it seems that our new neighbors have…
disturbed
something in Annie’s house. I’d like to go investigate with my own eyes while they are gone to work and school, but I would like a chaperone. Karen and Theresa have gone to the forest to look for wild mushrooms, and I would appreciate the company.”

Even if it’s you,
she thought. Roy rolled his shoulders uncomfortably, his head bobbing as if he could duck the request. He tugged his sweaty T-shirt to air out his chest and Marilyn caught a whiff of him. Pickled asshole.

“…Yeah, sure.”

“When you’ve put away your tools, I’ll be in the kitchen, making you something to drink—it’s surprisingly warm for October, isn’t it?”

“Warmest year on record so far.” Roy hefted the weed-eater and headed for the garage. “How about that global warming, huh?” Marilyn watched him track across the back lawn, slipping between two grapevine fences, disappearing.

Standing in the absolute rear of the property, a stone’s throw from the back fence, was the apple tree that made Roy so nervous.

Underneath the lush, brilliant green foliage was a sinuous violin trunk, with its suggestion of an hourglass shape, as if it had grown tall constricted by a ring around the middle. Two main branches thrust up from the top of the trunk in a great Y, bristling with smaller boughs and twigs. Apples studded the tree’s endmost fingers, gleaming red under the indigo sky.

As if the branches and leaves were an unbearable burden, the trunk seemed almost to kneel like Atlas carrying the globe, as twisted and bent as a bonsai. Marilyn reached up with both hands and took hold of one of the apples—huge, fat, like heirloom tomatoes—and pulled on it.

The bough resisted, bending right down to her waist before the fruit finally ripped free. She buffed the apple on her sleeve and wordlessly toasted the dryad with it in gratitude, heading toward the house.

❂

He had changed into a fresh shirt while he was in the garage, significantly reducing his stench. Marilyn approved of this. She handed Roy a glass of iced tea and they went out the back door and down the driveway.

They said nothing to each other on the way down the hill. Neither of them was much for small talk, and besides, they’d said pretty much everything that needed to be said a long time ago when she and the girls had found him in 2003, living on the streets in rural New York.

She contemplated New York City as she crossed the dirt and gravel on her horn-hard bare feet, her skirt curtaining around her ankles in the breeze.

The city was nice—the buildings, they’d grown so tall since the last time she was there, and it was a sight to see. But all those ugly new cars were so noisy and horrible, and the air stank, and there were so many new witches and their stunted, half-assed dryads. Suckling like piglets at the teat of the Big Apple, sucking it dry until its core was rotten with consumption, apathy, darkness.

She hated it. The poverty and large-scale drain made the people mean, insolent, resistant to influence. Hard to live with. Hard to control. Cows driven mad by flies. Marilyn preferred small covens in small cities like Blackfield, a town with a population under ten thousand.

You only really needed one tree and as long as you had plenty of cats you were always protected. One tree meant you had a sort of bottleneck push, instead of the constant pull of the piglets. It was why Annie’s apples were so fat and rich—Blackfield
surged
with life, stupid red-blooded American hillbilly life, and Marilyn and her girls gorged on its underbelly like ticks on a dog, unseen, unnoticed. A bit like having a secret fishing-hole, really.

They were halfway across Chevalier Village when Roy started belting out a country song to himself.