Malus Domestica (7 page)

Roy enjoyed watching videos on the internet of riots and fights, natural disasters, and sometimes people falling off of bicycles and skateboards. Fights were fun as long as they were street-fights. Ultimate Fighting was too structured—he didn’t watch fights for the gore or brutality, the unpredictability was what drew him, the chaos and incongruity, the panic and frenzy that was almost slapstick in a way. Aimless beating, kicking, the rending of shirts and slipping and falling and flopping around, reducing each other to meaningless ragdolls.

If he were a decade or two younger, he probably would have enjoyed playing videogames like the
Grand Theft Auto
series.

As it was, behind the wheel he often fantasized about driving off the highway and tearing through back yards and flea markets, plowing through birthday parties and bar mitzvahs. Not so much for the violence of it, but for the strange sight of a car tear-assing through a place you didn’t expect to see it. You just don’t
see
things like that, and that’s what he enjoyed: things ‘you just don’t see’.

When he was a kid, he’d gotten his hands on a smoke bomb and set it off in the gym showers after sophomore phys-ed, when he knew it would be full of unsuspecting people. Waiting until the smoke had almost filled the room and was beginning to curl over the tops of the shower curtains, Roy had shouted,
“Fire! Fire!”
and ran outside.

His father had whooped his ass for it, but seeing thirty butt-naked high-schoolers storming through the gymnasium had been the highlight of his freshman year.

He tipped another pint of gasoline into the ants for good measure and got back on the lawnmower, starting it up and climbing the sprawling hill toward the adobe hacienda. A garage stood open out back where the driveway snaked up out of the darkness and curled around the house like a cat’s tail. Roy drove the lawnmower inside, filling the space with a deafening racket.

When he cut the engine off, the silence was even louder. He sat in the dark stillness beside the girls’ Winnebago, packing a box of cigarettes.

Outside, the evening was tempered by the faint murmur of Blackfield’s fading nightlife, an airy, whispering roar washing over the trees. In close pursuit was the constant drone of cicadas and tree frogs.

Southern cities don’t necessarily have nightlife. You go up north or out to Atlanta, maybe, or Birmingham—Roy had been to Atlanta twice and didn’t care to ever go back, that traffic was horseshit—and yeah, the cities don’t sleep. Life runs around the clock. Out here in the sticks, though, a city of six thousand, seven thousand like Blackfield, there’s a few creepers after dark (meth heads, winos, that sort of thing, sometimes hookers) but for the most part the main boulevard is a clear shot from one end of town to the other after dark.

He lit up, wandered back up the driveway and around the house sucking smoke out of the Camel as he went. Standing at the top of the drive, he was treated to a horizon swimming with the red cityglow of Blackfield, and under the jagged rim of the treetops glimmered the windows of the blue Victorian on the other side of the trailer park, a tiny hive of glowing elevens in the night.

As he blew the smoke into the night, multicolored lights flickered in the cupola. Someone was watching TV up there. “Looks like somebody’s moved into the old Martine place.”

An old woman stood by a barbecue grill crackling with flames. The ice in her glass tinkled as she took a sip of a Long Island Iced Tea. Cutty always started dinner with one to whet her appetite. “Know anything about them?”

“Black fella from up north, I expect.”

Roy ashed his Camel and spat a fleck of tobacco. The wind rolling across the top of the hill pushed at his copper hair. He’d once let her make him a Long Island, but it was so strong he could barely finish it. No idea how she could manage it, with her scarecrow figure. “He brought the car down couple weeks ago and the real estate agent showed him around the place.”

“Have you spoken to him?” Cutty threw another handful of
Watchtower
tracts on the fire. The smoke stank, and the ink turned the flames green.

“No.”

She wore enormous shirts and patterned sweaters and dressed in loose layers, so that she always seemed to be wearing wizard-robes, even in the heat of summer. Roy was rail-thin and the jeans he wore draped from his bones, but even so he still sweat right through his shirts when he worked.

“Have you got anything for supper?” she asked the flames.

“No, ma’am.”

Cutty closed the grill lid and started off toward the back of the house. “Why don’t you stay and eat with us, then? Theresa is making porkchops.”

“I might just do that,” said Roy. “Thank you.”

As soon as the door came open he was bombarded by the aroma of pork rub and steak fries, corn, green beans, baked apples. Theresa LaQuices bustled around the spacious kitchen, buttering rolls and stirring this or that.

Theresa was a solid and ruggedly pretty iceberg of a woman, a few years younger than Cutty. Her raven-black hair was dusted with gray. Spanish or maybe Italian or something, because of her exotic surname and olive skin, but Roy never could quite pin down her accent and it never really struck him as appropriate to ask. She was given to dressing like a woman twenty years her junior, and today she had on a winsome blue sundress roped about with white tie-dye splotches.

He couldn’t deny that she wore it well. Against the well-appointed kitchen, she looked like she belonged on the cover of a culinary magazine. Reminded him of that Barefoot Contessa chick, only a lot older and a lot heavier.

“Well hello there, mister!” Theresa beamed. “Are you gonna be joinin us for dinner?”

Roy realized that Cutty had disappeared. She had an odd habit of doing that. “Yes, ma’am. And it smells damn good. I wasn’t even hungry before I came in here, but now I could eat a bowl of lard with a hair in it.”

Theresa made a face and gave a musical laugh. “I didn’t prepare any lard, handsome, but you’re welcome to a pork chop or two.”

“I’ll be glad to take you up on that.”

Roy passed through a large dining room, past a long oak table carved with a huge compass-rose, and into a high-ceilinged living room with delicate wicker furniture. On a squat wooden pedestal was a flatscreen television that would not have been out of place on the bridge of a
Star Trek
spaceship.

Behind the TV were great gaping plate-glass windows that looked out on the front garden inside the adobe privacy wall, a quaint, almost miniaturized bit of landscaping with several Japanese maples and a little pond populated by tiny knife-blade minnows.

The downstairs bathroom was one of many doors in a long hallway that bisected the drafty old house. The slender corridor, like the rest of the house, was painted a rich candy-apple red, and as the light of the lamps at either end trickled along the wall Roy felt as if he were walking up an artery into the chambers of a massive heart.

He washed his hands in a bathroom as large as his own living room. It was appointed with an ivory-white clawfoot tub, eggshell counters, white marble floor, gilded portrait mirror over a sink that looked like a smoked-glass punchbowl.

The vanity lights over the oval mirror were harsh, glaring. Roy was surprised a house occupied by three elderly women would have a bathroom mirror that threw your face into such stark moon-surface relief. Every pit, pock, blemish and crease stood out on his skin and all of a sudden he looked ten, twenty years older. And he had a lot of them for being in his forties.

His lower lids sagged as if he hadn’t slept—which he hadn’t, really, he didn’t sleep well—and his red hair was fine, dry, cottony, piled on his head in a Lyle Lovett coiff. The lights made his normally attractive face look sallow, made him look melty and thin, like a wax statue under hot lamps.

Junk food, that was probably it. Slow-motion malnutrition. He ate a lot of crap because he didn’t cook.

He
could
cook, no doubt—he could cook his ass off, learned from his mother Sally—but he never really made the effort. Not because he was lazy, but because he could never find anything in the cabinets that enticed him enough to cook it, and he never had anybody to eat with. So he really appreciated the chance for a proper home-cooked meal that left him out of the equation and gave him company to eat it with.

Back in the hallway, Roy passed an open door through which he could see a headless woman in a crisp new wedding dress.

“Hi there,” said a woman’s voice.

“Hello, Miss Weaver.”

An elderly flower-child came flowing around the mannequin to him, decked out in a busy, psychedelic dashiki. “How many times do I have to tell you?” she said, wagging a knurled finger. “Call me Karen. Are you staying for dinner tonight?”

Locks of silver-blonde hair tumbled down from underneath a green knit cap and a long curl of yellow tailors’ measuring tape yoked over the back of her neck, draping over her bosom. Karen Weaver had the open, honest face of a grandmother, and eyes as blue as a Montana sky. A silver pendant on her chest twinkled in the light, some obscure religious symbol he didn’t recognize. It could have been a pentagram, except there were too many parts, too many lines.

“Yes, ma’am.”

She playfully slapped him on the shoulder. Wisps of Nag Champa incense drifted through the open doorway behind her, accompanied by the sinuous, jangling strains of the Eagles. “Don’t ma’am
me,
young man.”

“Yes, ma’am,” grinned Roy. He flinched away before she could slap him again.

Dinner was excellent. The four of them ate at the compass-rose dining table under the soft crystal glare of a chandelier, Cutty hunched over her plate like a buzzard on roadkill, Theresa with a napkin pressed demurely across her lap. Weaver ate with the slurping-gulping gusto of a castaway fresh off the island.

In the background, the vinyl turntable in the living room was playing one of those old records the girls liked so much—Glenn Miller, Cab Calloway, one of those guys, he wasn’t sure which. Roy was a golden-oldie man himself, dirty southern rock. Skynyrd fan through and through.

“Cuts like birthday cake,” said Weaver, flashing Theresa an earnest smile. “I’ve been cooking for ages, and somehow I still don’t hold a candle to you.”

“You get a lot of practice, cookin for a long line of husbands.”

Cutty said in a wry tone, “I wonder why you outlived them.”

Theresa feigned hurt at her and went back to feeding herself dainty bites of pork chop with the darting, practiced movements of someone steeped in Southern etiquette.

Roy interjected, “That’s a nice dress you’re working on, Karen. Where’s this one going?”

The old hippie’s smile only broadened. “Oh, it’s going to a very lovely couple in New Hampshire. They’re planning on a November wedding. No expense was spared.”

“Too bad it won’t be a Halloween wedding. That’d be interesting.”

Cutty shook her head. “Ugh. I can’t think of anything that would be cheesier than a bunch of youngsters decked out like extras from the
Rocky Horror Picture Show
or something, exchanging their vows in front of Elvis and a congregation of monsters.”

“A congregation of monsters!” said Weaver, bright-eyed and smiling. “What a wonderful thought.”

“Only you.” Cutty eyed the voluptuous Theresa. “And what are
you
doing tomorrow?”

The dark-eyed Mediterranean straightened in her seat. “I’ll have you know I’m volunteering at a soup kitchen tomorrow evening. The one in Blackfield. I’ll be there all evening.”

“You?
Volunteering?
At a soup kitchen?” Cutty huffed in disbelief and pushed her food around her plate. “The only thing
I’ve
ever seen you volunteer is your phone number.”

As sullen and stormy as Roy could get, he enjoyed watching the sisters banter. They weren’t biological sisters, or at least he didn’t think they were. Never talked about where they came from, other than to swap stories and anecdotes about long-dead husbands. They never mentioned children.

“So, it looks like we’ve got new neighbors. Down the hill, in Annabelle’s house.”

The other two looked up from their dinner. Weaver was the first to speak. “Oh yeah? Well, are they nice? I think that house deserves someone nice.”

“I haven’t talked to em,” offered Theresa. “I saw em when I was comin home from the grocery store earlier today…I was behind them on the road comin out of Blackfield. Looked like a man and a little boy. Colored folks. They was drivin one of them Japanese cars.”

Sometimes Weaver could be a little eerie, but when she smiled, the old woman could light up a room. “Oh, that’s nice—this gray old neighborhood could use a splash of color, I think.”

At that, Cutty dipped her face into one hand and rubbed her forehead in exasperation.

“Say,” Weaver added, “why don’t we invite them up for dinner one night this week?”

“Like a welcome wagon,” said Theresa.

“Yeah!”

“We’ll have a barbecue out back and invite the whole neighborhood, and dance around the maypole and sing songs and tell stories,” Cutty growled flippantly. “It’ll be a regular bacchanalia.”

Picking up her goblet, Weaver swirled a splash of wine. “That’s the spirit! We’ll even have a bonfire!”

Cutty gave her a shrewd glare.

“You
know
how I
feel
about bonfires.”

“Oh, right.”

“Still,” said Theresa. “It would give us a chance to get to know them. After all, they’re going to be livin in Annabelle’s house. Like that bunch in Nebraska, they’re gonna be askin questions sooner or later. We might as well lay the groundwork. Establish a little rapport.”

“Redirect their curiosity. Yes.” Cutty forked a piece of porkchop into her mouth and chewed thoughtfully. “Yes, good idea. Curiosity killed the cat, after all.”

❂

After dinner, Cutty stood at the island in the kitchen and cut an extra porkchop into pieces, then put it in a food processor and chopped it into a dry, grainy paste. Then she used the processor to chop up a cup of green beans, and then a cup of corn.

She assembled all this processed food on a plate with two steak fries and took it upstairs, along with a glass of tea. She put the plate on a sideboard in the hallway and pulled a rope set into the ceiling, hauling down a hinged staircase behind a hidden panel. She took the plate up into darkness.