Malus Domestica (76 page)

V
ALDEZ
SUMMER
WAS
IN
full swing as a 1974 Winnebago Brave trundled into the parking lot of Cap’n Joe’s Tesoro gas station. The sky was a mystical, permeating fog that hovered at a height of about sixty feet. Emerald mountains crowded around the town, their peaks thrust into the low clouds as if jostling for a drink of rain. Robin angled the RV underneath the awning (wincing in anticipation as the vehicle’s brow just slipped under the eaves) and parked next to the pump at the end.

Satin gray ocean lapped at the shores of the bay across the road. She sat there for a moment, gazing absently, not really thinking.

Eventually she unclipped the seatbelt and climbed out of the driver’s seat, squirreling into the living area. A trash bag full of clothes sat in the floor under the breakfast nook. She opened it and her lip curled at the coppery stink of blood and munge of wet ashes roiling up out of it. She tied it shut and opened the door, carrying it outside.

The parking lot was wet and seal-black, mottled with rain puddles. She clomped across them in her combat boots and threw the bag of clothes into a Dumpster, then went into the gas station.

She came back out with a little bag, glass clinking inside. She left the bag in the breakfast nook and went out to pump the gas.

Wind rolled in off the ocean, giant blundering warps of air that pushed waves across the puddles and made the aluminum sheeting in the awning bark metallically.

Robin gradually became aware of a presence standing at her left.

“Hi, Mom,” she said, smiling over at a feminine figure as it coalesced from the cool Alaskan air.

Annie Martine smiled back. “Morning, love.”

Robin’s mother didn’t talk much these days, but when she did, she spoke without the speech impediment of a scarred tongue. Her AM-radio voice was tinny and hollow, but her diction was razor sharp.

She wore a long flowing gown or sundress, or at least that’s what Robin thought it was; the revenant was mostly diaphanous and gauzy, just coming into focus around the face and shoulders.

Only Robin could see and hear her. Ever since she’d pulled Annie out of the dryad and into herself, her mother appeared from time to time, as if checking in. She supposed she carried Annie in her heart now, or at least in some room of her mind. Or maybe it was a pleasant hallucination caused by going off her meds? She didn’t know, but if so, this was the kind of delusion that she could live with, at least.

While she was standing there with a handful of nozzle, her mohawk whipping in the gale, a red pickup truck pulled in, paused as if in indecision, and then eased up to the other side of the last pump.

Robin eyed the bed of the pickup truck. A bundle of fishing poles, nets, a tackle box. A clutch of mashed beer cans.

The driver opened the door with a rusty
crack
and got out. She was mildly dismayed when she saw that he was dressed like some kind of farmer, in a dirty chambray shirt and even dirtier jeans. His face was a wild widower bristle of salt-and-pepper scruff. So it was a surprise when, instead of opening his mouth to reveal grungy chompers and a
Howdy, y’all,
he smiled with flawless eggshell teeth and said, “Guten morguen. Schönes Wetter, nicht wahr?”
Good morning. Lovely weather, isn’t it?

Robin blinked. “Uhh… Ja. Wenn Sie eine buh—Beerdigungen, v-vielleicht.”

Yeah. If you like funerals, maybe.

The German laughed. “What brings a beautiful young woman like you out here to the middle of nowhere by herself?” he asked in a heavy accent. His eyes were hooded but clear. And they were gravitating to her ass. “And in such an unwieldy vehicle!”

“What a creepazoid,” murmured the ghostly Annie.

Robin smiled patiently, glanced at the treeline, and whispered confidentially behind her hand, “Ich bin hier, um eine Hexe zu töten.”

The German laughed even harder, throwing his head back. But when it began to fade, and he unscrewed his gascap, he looked up at her and saw something in her eyes that made his smile fall cold. If it were possible for a man’s ears to lay flat back like a dog, Herr Fisherman’s would have done so.

“Des Teufels Tochter—!” he said under his breath. He got back in his truck without putting the gascap back on, cranked it, and pulled around to the pump next to the store.

Then he sat and stared through the windshield.

His doors locked.
Clunk!

Robin laughed. “You’re gonna be waitin a while for
me
to leave, sucker,” she said to herself. The meter on the pump had climbed to nine dollars. “This fat bitch is thirsty today.”

She engaged the auto-cutoff and climbed into the Winnebago. Her Macbook sat on the breakfast nook table, a cord running up to the mobile internet by the window. She opened the laptop and woke it up to find a couple of new emails buried in a mess of spam and Malus Domestica fan mail.

The first was from Anders Gendreau, asking her how Alaska was treating her. She typed up a quick answer and fired it off.

Hey Andy,

It’s beautiful up here but hard to sleep with it daytime all the time. I’m done here for now, but I might spend a couple more days up here in the mountains before I take off back to the Lower 48, if you don’t mind—I think I could use a little more nature in my life.

Looking forward to getting back to the States. Let me know if you guys want to get together for the Fourth.

—Robin

The second email was from Wayne Parkin.

Hi Robin!!!!!

I hope you’re having fun and doing okay. Dad and I love the pictures you’ve been posting in Alaska and Canada. That moose you saw on the freeway was crazy!!!! I hope her and her calf are okay!!!

We miss you here. I dont know if you saw the pictures we put on Facebook but Joel Ellis and me fixed up the comic shop real good and with Fisher’s fianceé Marissa’s help, we got it up and running this week. Its doing great. I guess he made a will a couple years ago and left the shop to Joel. Him and Marissa are sharing ownership and thanks to all our ideas……especially Marissa coz she got a business degree………Joel says the shop is “out of the hole” whatever that maens.

And it turned out that Miguel was the one that bought Kenway’s art shop and turned it into another pizzeria……the Rocktown Cafe………and since they’re right down the street from the comic shop we share alot of business!!!

Anyway I just wanted to say hey and tell you that I’m doin real good in school. And thank you for kicking that demon out of our house. We sleep real good now. Dad had that symbol tattooed on our shoulders. At first the tattoo guy didn’t want to do it but then Dad showed him your videos and told him what happened to him, and then the tattoo guy was all about some tattooing a kid. It hurt real bad but I didnt cry at all. Dad was proud of me.

Dad hasnt had a drink since we moved here. He misses Mom sometimes and he gets this look on his face when Mr Johnson messes up and offers him a beer but he never takes one.

So I’m real proud of him too.

Love you Ms Martine. You come see us when you get back.

PS. Joel decided to try his brothers “keto diet” after all. He had a hard time with it at first but now he looks like he’s doin alright. He still cheats sometimes but he says he feels better than he has in a while. He says he’s gonna get you on it when you come back.

Robin closed the Macbook, digging through the bag and coming up with a can of green tea. She opened it with a
snick!
and sat in the nook slurping and staring out the window, smiling.

She sighed.

“Get up, you lazy bastard,” she groaned into the back. “I’ve been driving all night. It’s your turn.”

Kenway groaned back.

“Get uuuuup.” Robin slurped tea.

“Uuuuuhhng.”

She got up out of the nook and went into the back. The big vet was sprawled facedown on the bed in his underwear, the sheet sideways like a toga.

She pulled the sheet off and smacked him hard on the ass.

“Yo!” he shouted, scrambling to roll over. Grabbing her wrist, he dragged her into the bed and held her down until she was forced to pinch him, at which point it turned into a tickle-fight. He won by forfeit when he took her face in his hands and they kissed, an intoxication of slow gulping and lip-biting and tongue-licking.

“My devil-girl,” he said, her cheeks cupped in his bear paws.

“The guy at the register in the gas station said that there are cruises out into Valdez Bay all day,” she said, her breath gusting against his cheek. “There are sea lions and free danishes and all kinds of stuff. What do you think?”

He kissed her on the nose.

She looked down and feigned shock. “Looks like
somebody’s
turned on by sea lions.”

“No, but free danishes get me goin pretty good.”

Not as good as he got
her
going. A potent warmth spread from the pit of her stomach.

Kenway got up and pulled an elastic sock over the end of his leg, then pushed it into his prosthetic foot and strapped it on. He lumbered through the Winnebago, pulled a can of coffee out of the bag, and opened it, slugging it back. Then he put on some jeans, a T-shirt, and a sandal, and went out to put up the petrol nozzle.

She watched him through the window. While they’d been necking in the back, another car had pulled up to the other side of the pump, a raggedy-looking station wagon.

A young woman was feeding gasoline into her car, her shoulders bunched up against the damp wind. Her eyes were rimmed with the dark circles of insomnia and she looked like she’d dressed in the dark.

Sitting in the back was a little boy. He seemed to recognize Kenway and rolled down his window…he said something, but it was so low Robin couldn’t make it out.

The woman—his mother, assumedly—whirled on him and gave him an earful. He frowned and rolled the window back up. Before any further words could be exchanged, the boy’s mother got in the car and drove away so fast that she skidded a bit when she stopped at the frontage.

“What was
that
about?” asked Robin as Kenway came back in and tucked his bulky self behind the wheel of the Winnebago.

“The little boy asked me if I was the guy from that Malus Domestica show on YouTube.” He buckled his seatbelt and cranked the RV up, putting it in gear. “I told him I was. Then he said there’s a witch that lives in the woods near his house. That she almost got his sister and now she’s been prowling around all night trying to get
him.
The old fella at the general store calls her ‘the Qalupalik’, the Old Woman of the Sea.”

“I take it his mom told him to shut up about the witches.”

“Actually, she told him to shut up, shut up,
shut up about the goddamn witch.”

He was already fording the parking lot, chasing after the station wagon. She staggered across the listing deck of the RV and plopped into the passenger seat. Catching a glimpse of the Dumpster she’d thrown the bag of clothes into, she realized that someone had spraypainted graffiti on the side of it.

“W
ELCOME
TO
A
LASKA
”, it said, in two-foot-tall letters, the word A
LASKA
the largest of the three. What concerned Robin was the fact that the second A was the rune for
homelands
.

ᛟ

Witch territory.

A seagull cut the sky over the road and was gone. Robin leaned over to turn on the radio. A garble of static brought her to a station playing Halestorm’s ‘Daughters of Darkness’. Twist-tied to the sun visor was the old mosquito Mr. Nosy, smiling as he always did. She kissed her fingertips and tapped them to the stuffy’s cheek.

“I thought you were taking a nap,” Kenway said, pulling onto the highway as rock n’ roll filled the Winnebago with sound and fury. Annie Martine stood behind the transmission hump, her hands on their headrests, smiling. As Robin watched, the shade vapored into nothing.

“Promises to keep, babe,” she said, picking her fingernails with the Osdathregar, “and many witches to kill before I sleep.”

T
HE
E
ND

A
BOUT
THE
A
UTHOR

S. A. Hunt lives in Lyerly, Georgia. Sam’s been writing and producing art for almost twenty years, and short stories and illustrations can be found at his website. If you liked the book, don’t be shy! Feel free to go say hi! Keep up with the process by mailing list or by following my Twitter.

http://www.sahuntbooks.com/

http://twitter.com/authorsahunt

O
THER
B
OOKS
BY
S. A. H
UNT

The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree (The Outlaw King 1)

Law of the Wolf (The Outlaw King 2)

Ten Thousand Devils (The Outlaw King 3)

The Big Crunch (The Outlaw King 3.5)

The Fear Suit

S
HORT
S
TORIES

Chimneysweep

Talent Show

Pocket Change

The Hidden

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Malus Domestica,
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