Apricot brandy (3 page)

They walked together toward the mortuary, Marty slowing his pace to match Harst’s limp so that their advance was measured, almost ceremonial. This difference in their gaits made Marty realize what a crossroads this was for both of them. With Jack Fox in the earth now, the relationship between him and the doctor was going to change.

They pushed open the great front door and Marty slipped his shades back on: it felt right. Funereal. The wide carpeted spaces were deserted. Beside the reception desk, a gurney gleamed, supporting a bulky blackness— a thermal body bag. They stood in the silence beside this plastic sarcophagus till Dr. Harst said, roguishly, addressing the body bag, “We’ll have to haul ass on this, won’t we, Jack? Have to get you back while the frost is still on the pumpkin, so to speak?” And laughed. Marty resented the old man’s impiety with this powerful corpse. Envied it too. Harst, so much closer to him, could get away with it.

It was strange to wheel Jack Fox out under the big-city night. Rolling him across the asphalt, the body bag seemed like Jack’s spacesuit for crossing an alien wasteland, on his voyage to reach the dark earth and deep roots that were to be his new mansion.

“I’ve cleared the back of my wagon— ” Dr. Harst began.

Marty’s nostrils flared at the sight of that old wreck. “My truck bed’s better, Doc— we can secure him better there.” The doctor was so dreamy-clingy about Jack Fox’s mortal remain… and might have thought so himself… for he acquiesced at once. They bungied Jack Fox snugly in Marty’s truck bed.

All the way back out to Gravenstein County, Dr. Harst’s eyes clung to the only love of his long life, a cocoon in a truck bed that was dancing through traffic ahead of him. More than once those red-rimmed eyes leaked tears. Oh Jack. How long we have shared the same world! It was everything, for me.

The doctor’s grief at the loss that lay wrapped in that bundle filled his heart. He was in mourning. But in another part of Dr. Harst’s mind there was calculation and the ant-like first tickles of fear. Now that Jack had moved on, was the doctor’s own term near?

But, as always, Harst forgot calculation and came back to his tears. Forty-five years of almost hopeless love. At least there had been their friendship, unfaltering friendship.

Dr. Harst had seen Marty’s distaste for this old station wagon. He’d never know the reason the doctor still drove it. It was because Jack, with the power upon him, had taken him into the back of this old wagon— pulled off on a dark country road— and sodomized him there, for the last glorious time in Dr. Harst’s life. Again, his tears flowed.

The motel room offered one towel, one micro-bar of soap, one plastic glass, one blanket, one dim TV that got three channels, and one picture on the wall above the TV— a trite sad-clown print, very dusty. Except for the tiny nook of the bathroom, this room was very near as bare and square as Dad’s room this afternoon.

She hadn’t chosen the motel with this penance in mind, but instead for the liquor store one block away. A brisk walk down a boulevard of sleepless traffic, a brisk walk back, the crisp fracture of a half-pint’s seal as you twisted its head off… and then solace.

Karen lay and sipped and watched the news with the sound off, the blow-dries making their pretty faces— how long now? Soon it would be too late to call Susan. She had to call Susan, but sipped again from her spiked Seven-Up and put it off. From time to time she glanced up at the clown print. When it hung too long at the periphery of her vision, the vague smeared face hinted at a more dreadful one. And as she watched, her fingertips traced her wrist. She should not be drinking. Not ever again. Because her wrist which had been gripped… was sore now to her touch. Her wrist which
she
must have gripped. Her wrist which
she
had gripped… though she so clearly remembered both her hands resting on the chrome rail of the gurney when that cold clench had had melted every nerve in her body.

Except, of course, an alcoholic “clearly remembering” was an oxymoron. She should not be drinking. Not ever again.

The thing was, there was still tomorrow, and the orchard, and the house to go into, and what she had faced in the mortuary had settled nothing, had laid no ghosts. The thought of going into that house was as frightening as it had ever been, going in and staying there. And she had to stay there without drinking, facing everything and beating it cold, if she was to free herself at last and forever. So she should flush this bourbon and start not drinking here and now.

But she took another pull of bourbon and wryly thought that perhaps the real reason for her drinking was, if she ever got totally sober, she would finally realize she could never quit drinking… .

Must call Susan or drive herself crazy. She dialed. It was picked up so quickly, Susan must also be in bed, snatching the receiver from the nightstand, “Karen?”

“Yeah, hon, it’s me. Calling from the land of the dead and the dead-tired.” Trying to take the edge off things, sound amused about her mission.

“You saw him, huh?”

“I saw him. He— ” a giggle rose up in her “— he’s a lot
shorter
than I remembered him.”

She could hear Susan trying to join her laughter, but not really succeeding. Susan would be waiting to get past the bravado and closer to her lover’s pain. It irritated Karen. She didn’t
want
Susan to get closer to her pain.

So she added, abruptly, “I know I mentioned it before and said I wasn’t going to, but I think I
do
have to go back to the place, deal with it face to face. A couple days, maybe, is all I’ll need… but I have to. I’m sorry.”

“Hon,” Susan began, striking a note that gently urged they get to the heart of their feelings. This was a flashpoint between them. How angry Karen had let it make her in their earlier days. But Karen had learned since then how wrong an angry answer was. “You’ve got to forgive me, Karen. I’ve got to say this. Will you let me?”

“Sure. It’s nice just hearing your voice.”

“You shouldn’t
do
this alone! Move back in there alone! You don’t need to. Please let me be there with you and help you through it. You were defenseless when you lived it; now you have an ally.”

Karen imagined it: she and Susan bedding down together in the dark of that house, Susan’s lovemaking voice singing out in the silence of those rooms, those halls.

“Sue, if I can’t do this alone, it’s not
facing
him. Not by
our
rules. And he’ll never leave me then. He’ll just keep eating me hollow. But maybe, after just a little while, maybe things will look different… . “Thinking to herself that maybe even this was too much to be yielding and with half her heart whining
Yes! Be with me. I can’t go in there alone!

“
Your
rules? His and yours?”

“Don’t ask me to make sense, Sue. It’s just that to face it I have to relive it and I lived it alone. Mom just refused to know.”

“… You’ll call me tomorrow when you get there?”

“Tomorrow afternoon, yes. Tomorrow afternoon or tomorrow night.” She might not be up to talking to Sue right away. She was damned sure going to arrive there in broad daylight, though.

And she did. It was in the blaze of noon that her tires sizzled up the gravel drive again. And, amazingly to her, she was bone-sober. She took her foot from the gas and let the truck coast to a stop, confronting the house once more. Sitting bemused, Karen was amazed by what she had just accomplished. Waking before sunrise, she’d jumped out of bed, peed, washed, and changed, flung her things in the duffel, the duffel into the truck and roared onto the freeway.

It was
whoosh
all the way. An off-ramp down to a liquor store just ahead?
Whoosh
. It sank behind in a blur. Pure onrush had kept her panic bottled. (
You can’t go there sober! You can’t go in there with your mind naked!)
But now here she was, sober in fact.

What had she done? Had she lost her mind?

Momentum. It was her only hope. She flung her door open and surged from the truck. Jumped up those steps (worn round-edged by the years) up into the Stonehenge shadow of the massive porch roof, her key already out. She stabbed it into the lock like a dagger, shouldered open the heavy-boned door, and plunged into the dimness where armchairs, armoires, tables, door-frames, crowded her eyes with their ancient, intimate anatomies, sending through her a ghostly rout of childhood days and nights.

All urgency vanished. She stood there accepting what had dawned on her yesterday: that she had already been living here all along, had never lived anywhere else. All the fear and pain and ancient sweetness that breathed from every door and wall and chair around her now, had been the air she breathed every day of her life.

Moving slowly, she began to engage the place. Downstairs first. She pulled back the curtains, opened all the blinds and windows. Checked the closets, meeting in the hall closet a twelve-gauge shotgun propped in one corner, not surprised that Dad would have more than one, as the police must have the one he’d used on himself.

The kitchen, its sunny utility porch… . These were Mom’s domain and brought Karen warmer memories. Her big stainless steel sink was on the porch in her canning nook with its worktable and shelves of jars that breathed out an aura of luscious jams and jellies. And here by the pantry door was her chopping table, its whole top a heavy cutting board which whispered a breath of tomatoes and onions and beef, precursors of Mom’s stew.

It was harder to go upstairs, to those bedrooms and closets. She did little more than look into Mom and Dad’s bedroom and her own, but in Mom’s sewing room she lingered. It echoed with all Mom’s years of patient— maybe desperate— labor, as if she sometimes had to work down her fear of what might be happening to her daughter, stitch that fear down tight and fold it away. She had to have feared, at least… whether or not she’d successfully avoided knowing? All the silence Mom had suffered here. Pity filled Karen’s eyes and she wiped them angrily with her knuckles.

She went back downstairs. The dining room, the living room, the hallways— all had become Dad’s in the three years since Mom’s death. There were even more hand-guns and rifles showcased on the walls than she remembered. There were other beefy hand-guns in unexpected drawers, like that of the telephone table and the silverware drawer of the dining-room breakfront. And booze of course, even more booze than before. Bottles of quality whiskeys and brandies occupied every sideboard and end-table, occupied the mantel over the big field-stone fireplace.

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.