Malus Domestica (4 page)

Her jeans were snug enough that the boots fit over them. “If you’ve been watching my channel, then you’ll know what I’ve been through. Who I am. My purpose. Well, I’m here. …Back where it all started.” She tied the laces into a big floppy knot, then looked directly into the camera. “Home,” she said, as if the word were a hex. “Blackfield.”

Crows razzed at each other outside the van, chittering and muttering dark gossip.

Moisture on the windows made a swimmy, crystalline netherworld of the overcast day outside, where several black birds marched back and forth across the gravel in their bobble-headed way. She tucked the laces into her boots and turned the camera to point through the rear window.

“As you can see, the day is shit. And I feel like shit.”

She swiveled the camera back around, filling the tiny viewfinder screen with her pale face and the dark circles around her eyes. Instead of giving her the tough rock-chick look she’d been going for, her wavy mohawk and shaved scalp made her seem otherworldly and delicate, fuzzy with a week and a half of chestnut stubble.

The bar-bell piercing through her tongue clicked against her teeth, a tiny silver ball like a pearl in an oyster. “So
this
girl is going to go find a cup of coffee.”

Big black crows took flight in every direction when she opened the back door, complaining in their harsh voices. She stepped down out of the van and unscrewed the camera, then grabbed the vinyl messenger bag. As the doors met in the middle with a slam, a blue-and-red logo reconstituted itself: C
ONLIN
P
LUMBING
.

She took some B-roll footage of the area. The van was parked at the edge of a large graveled clearing, and mild white-gold sunlight was trying to break through into the day. Several tents had been erected in the grass along the periphery some thirty yards away, and beyond them was a two-story cinderblock building reminiscent of a poolhouse, with doors labeled
MEN
and
WOMEN.

From inside came the white-noise rush of hot showers running, and steam poured from PVC pipes jutting out of the roof. Simple black graffiti was spraypainted on the walls as if God had stepped down with His Mighty Sharpie and written it Himself: B
ITE
M
Y
S
HINY
L
IBERAL
A
SS
. S
T
. V
INCENT
. Y
EE
-T
HO
-R
AH
. Doodles of a monkey taking a shit and a robot on a motorcycle.

To her right, a sprawling split-level cabin lurked in the shadows of the woodline, pumping out the constant smell of cooking food. The back of the restaurant opened up in a large hangar-like seating area with five trestle tables.

As always, the hallucination waited for her.

A hulking figure stood half-visible behind the angle of the restaurant wall, seven or eight feet tall.

Her camera was oblivious to her private delusions.

She went around front, climbing a hill, and clomped across the front porch, where a smiling gray fireplug of a dog was leashed to the banister.

“Hello,” she said, pointing the camera at him.

The Australian sheepdog licked his chops, regarding her with one icy blue eye.

Miguel’s Pizzeria was dimly-lit and claustrophobic, with clumps of ropes and climbing gear hanging from the ceiling, and stacks of shoeboxes by the door. A half-dozen booths filled the room, all of them empty.

Robin went to the counter, a glass case containing mementos and historical knick-knacks, but nobody was there. A tip jar and a charity jar stood by the register, and A4-printed photographs postered the wall behind the counter.

The photos were of semi-famous people posing in their climbing accoutrements with the owners of the restaurant, and panoramic shots of the mountains around the valley. She thought she recognized Les Stroud of the TV show
Survivorman
in one picture, and maybe Aron Ralston in another, his prosthetic arm around Miguel’s shoulder.

A man came out of the kitchen, wiping his hands on a bar towel. He was a dark, ruddy sienna and looked like he could handle himself in a fight—but he was wearing eyeshadow, a silk do-rag covered in purple paisley, and under his apron was an eggplant halter top embroidered with curlicues.

Eyeing the camera in her hand, he tucked the towel into his back pocket and leaned invitingly on the counter. “You a bit early for lunch.” The nametag on his apron said
JOEL.

“That’s okay,” Robin told him. A glass-fronted mini-cooler stood on a counter behind Joel. She pointed at cans of Monster coffee inside. “I’ll have one of those. I’ll stick around and wait for lunch time, if that’s cool with you.”

Joel regarded her with a tilted head, rolling a toothpick around and around his mouth. “You look supers-familiar. Where do I know you from?”

His weary tone and his delicate mannerisms were somehow masculine, yet…at the same time stunningly effeminate. He smelled like citrus and coconuts, strong enough to even overpower the burnt-bread smell of pizza crust coming out of the kitchen.

“I have a YouTube channel.” She indicated the camera as he took a coffee out of the cooler and put it on the counter. “Called ‘MalusDomestica’. Maybe you’ve seen it?”

Joel rang up the coffee and gave her the total, then inhaled and said, wagging a finger, “No, no, I think…I think I mighta went to school with you. Where you go to school at? You go to high school in Blackfield?”

“Yes, I did.” She swiped her debit card and put in her PIN. “Do you have wi-fi here?”

“We sure do.”

Joel printed out her receipt, operating the register in a bored, almost automatic way, not even looking at his hand as he tugged an inkpen out of his apron pocket, clicked the end, and gave it to her. “The password is on the receipt.”

“Thanks.”

Sliding into a booth, Robin took a Macbook out of her messenger bag and turned it on. She hooked up to the wi-fi with the password on the receipt
(sardines)
and went to YouTube, where she signed in and started uploading the week’s latest video to the MalusDomestica channel.

While it processed, she perused the thumbnails of the videos already posted. Almost three hundred vlog videos, most of them no more than twenty minutes long, a few stretching into a half-hour. Her face peeked out from most of them, as if the webpage were a prison for memories, for tiny past-versions of herself, as if she continuously shed prior selves and kept them around as trophies. A packrat cicada, a collector-snake dragging around a suitcase full of old skins.

She enjoyed browsing through the grid of tiny pictures, each one representing a day, a week, a month of her life—seeing all those chunks of time, those pieces of creative effort, fulfilled her, made her feel accomplished. Three million, seven hundred and twenty-two thousand, six hundred and fifty-nine subscribers. 3,722,659 viewers’ worth of video-monetization ad revenue and MalusDomestica T-shirt sales.

Their patronage was what funded her travels, was what put food in her mouth, clothes on her back, and gasoline in her C
ONLIN
P
LUMBING
van.

She clicked one of the thumbnails, opening a video from a year and a half ago. Past-Robin’s hair was dyed pink and she was slightly heavier, a spattering of blemishes on her cheeks and forehead. Now-Robin clicked to the middle of the video.

A pumpkin sat on a picnic table in a quiet park somewhere. The day was overcast and wind coughed harsh and hollow against the camera’s microphone. Past-Robin turned and flung a hatchet with one smooth lunging movement.

The weapon somersaulted thirty feet and planted itself neatly into the rind of the pumpkin with a morbid
splutch.

❂

She was reading the news when Joel slid into the seat on the other side of the table, startling her. His tropical aura of perfume swept in behind him, pouring into the booth.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hello, Joel.”

“You looked like you could use some company. And by the by, it’s not
Johl,
it’s…
Joe-elle.”
he said, poetically pinching the syllable at the end with an A-OK gesture. “You know, like Noel? Or ‘go-to-hell’?”

She smiled tightly. “Nice to meet you, Joe-elle.”

“Likewise.” Joel turned in his seat, throwing a leg over one knee and his elbow over the back of the bench. “I think I know you.”

“Oh yeah?”

“You think ain’t nobody gonna recognize you with that shaved head,” said Joel, flourishing fingers at her. His fingernails were polished, glittering in the fluorescents. “Which looks really good on you, make you look like Demi Moore n’ shit. Very Amazonian. I likes. And you got the cheekbones fo it.” He leaned in close, talking over the Macbook’s lid. “Your name is Robin Martina, ain’t it?”

“Martine. Yes.” She took him in with tightened eyes now, assessing him fully.

“Your mama used to babysit f’
my
mama when we was little kids.” He sat back again, smiling like a satisfied house cat. His eyes were almond-shaped and guileless, in spite of his sly tone. “You and me, we used to play together. If you had hair, it would be jet black. I knows you, yeah, I do. We didn’t really ever talk much after that—”

“My father wasn’t too keen on having other kids in the house in addition to—”

“—No, honey, he didn’t like
black kids
in the house.”

She felt transitive shame, even though she had no such prejudice herself. “Well, he’s dead now. So….”

“Oh, yeah. I know.”

Joel took out a pack of cigarettes and packed them against his palm. They were some brand she didn’t recognize, with a logo in flowery script she couldn’t read. “You mind if I…?”

She didn’t mind. He took one out, but paused, waggling the pack offeringly.

“No.” She waved him off. “Trying to quit.”

Joel cupped the cigarette in one hand with a lighter, lit it and drew on it, then dragged an ashtray over and blew a stream of menthol smoke into the air. “Break a leg, bitch,” he mused, tapping ashes. “I’ve quit
many
a time. Not as easy as it looks.”

Robin studied her keyboard and decided to pay more attention to Joel than the computer. As slow as the internet was, it would be useless while the video was uploading anyway.

“So,” said Joel, kicking a toe to an unheard beat, “What does ‘Malice Domestic’ mean?” He smiled evilly and feigned a shiver. “It sounds so
sinister.
Ooooh,
Mufasa.”
He shivered again.

“Malus domestica.
It’s the Latin scientific name of the common apple tree.”

Joel stuck out his bottom lip and nodded as if to say
fair enough.

She opened the can of coffee with a discreet
snick!
and dug the orange pill bottle out of her pocket, tipping one of the tablets out. Cupping the tablet with her tongue, she swallowed it with a swig of Monster and savored the sinking of the hard little pill, to be assimilated into the constant swamp-light still humming in the marrow of her bones from yesterday’s dose.

Joel took another draw and french-inhaled the smoke up his nose, then blew it back out.

“What’s it about?” he asked, studying the cherry at the end of the cigarette. “Your YouTube channel.” She couldn’t tell if she were being interrogated, flirted with, or patronized, but she had a distinct suspicion that there was nothing behind Door #2.

“It’s sort of like…a travel journal, I guess.”

“Whatcha travelin around doin?”

“Just, ah…trying to appreciate America.” Robin fumbled for the words, wishing Joel would take a hike. “Roadside attractions, restaurants, that kind of thing.”

“Kind of like a homeless Guy Fieri.”

Robin chuckled. “Well, I live in my van—but, heh. …Yeah, I guess you could say that.”

“You is
so
full of shit.” He shook his head, the do-rag’s ties rustling behind his head like a ponytail. “Look at this thrift-store Lizbeth Salander over here, talkin about highways-and-byways. You ain’t Jack Kerouac.” He leaned in conspiratorially again. “Whatchu
really
up to?”

Robin hesitated, glancing down at the camera. It was still rolling. “Well…I hunt witches.”

“Really.”
Joel ashed his cigarette.
“That
is fascinatin.” He reached over and turned off the camera, surprising her.

“Hey!”

“You needs to stop playin. I assume
huntin
witches means
killin
witches, and there ain’t no way you’re videotapin
that
shit. And I want to talk to you without this camera here. Backstage, so to speak. Off the record. Cause I can tell you just puttin on a show for the people at home. But I want
real
talk.” He smiled darkly. “I
know
what you doin. You lookin for
them,
ain’t you?”

Her breathing had become labored without her realizing it. She felt cornered. “Them who?”

“The ones that killed your mama.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Joel squinted in the murk of smoke hovering over the table. “When it happened,
my
mama lost her shit. I remember this
vividly…
because she scared the
hell
outta me.

“This was about… sophomore year? Junior year, of high school? She was out of her mind freaked out about it. Shakin, wide-eyed, lockin-all-the-windows freaked. Like she thought the sky was fallin, like she was afraid the Devil himself was gonna get in the house. She asked me all kinds of weird-ass questions about this and that—wanted to know what kind of person Annie was, what kinds of things she did. Did she hurt animals, did she do anything to
me
when me and Fish was little….”

“She never would have.” Robin felt her brow knitting together in defensive anger. “Mom wasn’t like that—”

“Oh, I know.” Joel traced imaginary hearts on the table with a fingertip. “She was a good woman. A good-hearted woman. I told my mama that. I still remember the way she cooked her bacon when me and Fish came over in the mornings. I cook mine the same way—” He illuminated each point with his hands, forming invisible shapes in the air, snapping and wagging invisible bacon, “—crispy, damn near burnt, but still floppy, fatty but not gristly.”