Apricot brandy (15 page)

Scraping her face against the floor, Karen looked to either side and saw the dusty glint of the dark jars on their shelves. It seemed to her these jars were filled with rot, pure jellied poison. They had watched her taken apart decades ago and it was time for them to watch it again. Wolf was working at his own belt and britches, having trouble and muttering,
shit.

He laid the shotgun on the floor and as she felt it knock the earth she lay on, she realized that her right hand, sandwiched between her belly and the ground, was pinched between two different hardnesses— the floor and something metal in her coat. Sucking in her stomach, she found the lip of the coat pocket with her fingertips. Her hand gophered into it, fingered a checked grip, swarmed like a spider around the full shape of the Smith… the web of her thumb on the hammer… her forefinger crossing the trigger.

She pressed her broken hand on the floor, its agony a remote fact, as she levered her chest up off the floor just enough to free her right hand, bringing it up, swinging it back. And with one liquid trigger squeeze, she squirted thunder from the blunt, brute barrel and blew a hole through the center of Wolf’s throat.

Kyle drove up an hour later, his headlights flooding Karen on the porch steps. He took in her damaged face and dead eyes, the bottle between her knees and her hand laid across them. Her other hand, holding something, hanging down between her thighs…

Killing the lights and the engine quick, he got out and stood there a moment before approaching her. Finally, carefully, coming close. He seemed to consider touching her and decided he shouldn’t.

“Karen?”

Her gaze wandered, as if everything around her had changed. Both amazement and bitterness in her eyes, as if she’d foreseen what it had changed into. When she saw him, she seemed to be trying to make him out from a distance. Absently, she brought up a big-bore revolver and rested it on her thigh. A bruise on her head peeked out through her tangled hair.

“Tell me what happened, Karen.”

Her eyes moved from him to the orchard around them, like he was part of it all. With the bottle, she gestured behind her, “Go down to the basement, the door’s near the kitchen. Go down to the fruit cellar.”

He climbed the porch and entered the house.

Following him in her mind’s eye, she sat there. Mentally watching Kyle approach the fruit-cellar enabled her, at last, to possess what she had done. Her very own homicide lay down there dribbling blood on the packed-earth floor. Karen Fox had fired and sprayed the life out of that body. Slowly, oh so slowly, her heart began to rise within her, her spirit lofted, exulting. The terror would come, but first she had this all her own. It was joy. It was Justice.

Beyond this moment loomed Marty, Harst, Babcock— they’d love it, they’d eat it up, they’d make sure she spent the rest of her life behind bars. But first— now— was this genial sun rising inside her, a wound unwounded, a murder of the soul avenged before it could be committed against her. Tears of silent gratitude ran down Karen’s face.

Kyle came back out of the house, looking older, haggard. She looked up serenely at him. “Karen, I was in prison for killing a man who tried to kill me, in a fight of his making. I did seven years, but I did no wrong. Neither have you, you have done no wrong. Do you hear me?”

“Yes. I’m amazingly lucid, I know exactly which bone in my hand is fractured. I know who’s in the cellar and what I did to him. I’m
calm
. I just don’t have the least idea what I’m going to do now.”

“I’ll help you. Let’s be clear about this, though. If you hadn’t killed Wolf and I’d been here,
I
would have. You don’t have a killing on your hands— I do. I never trusted Wolf, but I thought I had his measure. I fatally underestimated… his hollowness. I thought he had some friendship in him. I’ve fucked up your life with my mistake. I owe you anything at all I can possibly do.”

“Like what?”

“I know the criminal justice system. Even innocent, in a situation like this, you’re grist for their mill, you’re product. We’ll do whatever you want, but I think what we really must do is clean up everything and make the body disappear.”

“You’re just like I thought you were,” said Karen dreamily. She was still somewhere in the ozone it seemed, still high on Justice, on deliverance. “You’re like… an Upright Man, like in a Victorian novel.” She smiled.

He smiled back, but sadly. “An upright man is what I’d like to be, but I am saying that we must commit a major felony and not give even a moment’s thought to obeying the law. If you choose otherwise, we’ll go to the Sheriff.”

Karen shuddered. She considered where they might hide Wolf’s corpse… and an image came to her. Yes, give Dad his own, make it
his
murder. “I know where to put him,” she said. “That piece of shit will be clean bone in a week.”

Sitting on the couch by a fire built high and hot, Kyle wrapped her hand and forearm, splinting them with a scrolled magazine, making a sling from bandanas. He cleaned her scrapes and cuts and smeared them with antiseptic ointment, brought her water and a prescription bottle of Mom’s old Vicodins, relics of her months of dying.

For all the gentleness of his ministrations, it was like being flayed. It stripped her down to her pains and under the pain was the cold. Her exhaustion was absolute. The intoxication of justice had left her. At the center of her mind was terror— of the corpse she had made and the prison bars to come from it.

She sat sweating and trembling as Kyle disappeared for a while. He came back with Wolf’s clothes in his arms and spread them carefully, piece by piece on the flames. The shirt and jeans were sprayed with the blow-back of tissue and blood that had geysered from the slug’s entry— all the gore was stark-lit for an instant before it blackened and shriveled.

“Karen… Karen?… Listen… . He’s wrapped in the tarp. I’m going to be down there a while— doing a wipe down and full scrubbing with rags. We’ll fine-tune it later… . You hear me?… .
Listen
… . When those are ash, lay more wood and put his boots on top, will you do that? Keep stirring it, burn everything down. We’ll bury the ashes tomorrow.”

Kyle steered his pickup into the back yard, parked by the kitchen door, and switched off the engine. They sat in the dark a moment. “We’ve got about four hours to sunrise,” he said. “I wish I didn’t need your help.”

Karen just shook her head. Her body seemed mere mass, as void of movement as a stone. “Karen, I don’t really know you. A few things, maybe, I know. Important things, but not what I— not what
we
need to know right now. So I have to ask, and you have to be sure of your answer, because the rest of our lives depend on it.”

“Yes. Okay.”

“Are you your own woman? Can you bury your own dead and keep silence? Can you carry the knowledge of that secret grave for the rest of your life?”

Karen looked once more down the corridor of her alternate life, should she turn away from this black rite before them: the arrest for murder by Marty Carver was a given. If Marty suppressed evidence, she might never get out of prison. If he merely obstructed and dragged his heels, she would be years at the toil of proving her innocence— would grow older and dimmer and drunker, a caged animal in that pompous circus of the law. All this, while justice was
hers
. She had
been
justice.

“I can keep silence.”

He touched her arm and nodded— slipped out of the cab and went in through the kitchen door. And came out with the long tarped bundle folded over his shoulder. When he dropped its weight into the truck bed, Karen flashed back on the childhood sensation of sitting in Dad’s truck and feeling it sag when he climbed aboard. She looked at the heap of lopped branches that Kyle, and the corpse in back, had left from Dad’s brandy trees, and her hand remembered what it had found dangling from one of those branches a lifetime ago, three hours ago. It struck her that this orchard was the arch-Gothic setting. If she was the heroine, as she had jested the day she first came back, then this, Dad’s Manse, was the ultimate Dark Castle, where dwelt the male energy at its most murderous…

Down the lanes they drove, the tools rattling in the truck bed, Wolf’s shifting weight slithery in its tarp. The plum trees were startled green beasts in the headlights, surprised in their deep communion with the night, bristling like spiders at the intruders.

They arrived at Wolf’s tomb. They stared at it, the compost heap’s black, tire-studded bulk lost in the darkness to either side of the headlights’ white splash. Unfed for three years now, the great worm’s plastic sheath was shriveling like old skin. The offering they’d brought it was so small, a mere morsel to its hugeness… .

“We spread the plastic at that seam, then fold it back. I’ll toss the tires down— can you carry them out of the way? The less we drag up the dirt here, the better.”

“I can carry them.”

Pulling the truck tight alongside the heap, Kyle climbed onto the roof of the cab. The tires he couldn’t reach he pushed aside with a branch prop they’d brought. He pried up the edge of the sheeting and Karen peeled it back. The wall of rot exposed— black as the plastic— steamed in the night air.

Kyle aimed the idling truck’s lights at their niche. Near the shed were flat-topped hand-carts for hauling picked fruit out of the lanes and they pulled these over. “We’ll pile all the spoil we can on these. We can hose ‘em off after. Let’s spread out that tarp for what has to go on the ground.”

And so it began, axe and spade, axe and spade. Not all the sinew of twig and branch in the compost had quite dissolved. Kyle had to chop free a wedge before his spade could bite it out and heap it reeking on the carts. As he dug deeper, thick steam wrapped him till he seemed to be melting into the headlights’ radiance. He worked like a demon and mulch collected on the tarp to either side of him. The urgency of this work swept Karen up. It was like surgery on a giant worm, tissue to be removed and replaced at urgent speed, so that sunrise would find the giant whole and unscarred.

She took up a shovel and unslung her left arm. Found she could use her left forearm for a fulcrum on the haft and socket the haft’s butt against her right shoulder for added shove. She shoveled the spoil onto the carts, ducking in and out of the rhythm of Kyle’s much more violent labor.

When they were piled high she trundled the carts aside… positioned the emptie… . shoveled, shoveled, shoveled, with the scorching wet breath of the crypt drenching her. Kyle’s voice welled out of the steam. “Christ! It must be a hundred and twenty in here. It’s a sauna!”

Two hours had passed before Kyle slit Wolf’s duct-taped sheath and unwrapped his nudity. So complete Wolf seemed to her in his nakedness, if she didn’t look at his head… All the detailed symmetries. It seemed she looked on an alien species, such was her sense of revelation. They carried him inside the smoking niche, Kyle with his shoulders, Karen with his knees. Between them he lay. The bullet had broken his neck and his head lolled. A dreamer, Wolf floated to his steaming bed.

In a deep angle of muck, soft and hot as just-cooked pudding, they tucked him. A shaft of the headlights struck him there, as white as snow by contrast with the black rot. Kyle tucked his legs up and Karen remembered photos of Neolithic burials, knee bones tented against ribcages, bony toys put away after their brief dance millennia ago. They were hiding Wolf away in the distant future… .

The filling-in went faster. Kyle made the muck fly into the hellmouth of mist. Karen shoveled in tandem, a sense of victory growing in her. She had never worked at such a sweating pitch and still felt so
cold
.

She couldn’t help at the end, when Kyle had to toss it high enough to restore the compost’s upper curve, so no betraying sag showed in the plastic when it was scrolled back in place. Then he once more moved the truck, climbed on its roof and, with Karen’s help below, re-draped the black shroud. He replaced all the tires, used a rake to drag the higher ones back into position.

Mucky tarps and tools back in the truck-bed, the carts hosed clean beyond the shed— Karen was no help at all now. She leaned against the truck, her consciousness ebbing and then returning with a shock. The east was just getting gray.

She was back in the cab of the truck, rocking up the lanes towards the house. “Karen? Karen?”

“What?”

“We made it… . But you’re hypothermic, you’re almost in shock. I’ve got to undress you and get you in a tub of hot water. Trust me, please. I’ve got to get your temperature back up.”

She nodded, or maybe only thought she did. She was gone.

She was naked in Kyle’s arms and he held her like a lifted bride, his arms and chest all muscle, like knobbed and padded wood. She lay in the air on these strange supports, then was sinking, sinking into searing heat, unbearable heat… no…
luscious
heat, embracing warmth, salvation.

Karen woke in her sleeping bag on the couch, morning light flooding the windows, smelled coffee and the fresh-soaped scent of her own body within the bag. Kyle was in the armchair. He smiled and gestured at the steaming cup on the table, toasted her with his own and sipped. His face looked battered in this light, scars on his cheekbone and brow she hadn’t noticed before. The one on his brow looked like a side-ways slash aimed at his eyes he’d ducked just in time.

“You washed me,” she said.

He looked embarrassed. “Not too thoroughly,” he said. It made her smile and him, too, after a moment. “You were— ”

“Hypothermic. You saying that’s the last thing I remember… . Thank you, Kyle”

“No! I brought this on you. Don’t thank me. Just forgive me.”

He looked so desolate it made her danger dawn on her afresh: a corpse of her making hidden here. But she wanted to comfort him too, his guilt recalling her own for Susan. “There was death here… trouble here before you came. You walked into something, you didn’t just bring it.”

His eyes were fixed on hers, seeing something of what she wasn’t daring to say. She had
touched
that dress and there had been black blood on her fingers the morning after… .