Apricot brandy (21 page)

“’Ey!” Giving her his parody of his old man. “Whatchoo tink? Every ‘ting great! Anudda week, tops!”

“You shouldn’t make fun of your dad, he’s a sweet man.”

“I don’t know about
sweet
. He’s been pretty good to me, sure, but I just don’t wanna be
like
him.”

“Do you really want to live in the city? I mean, isn’t it nice living where everything’s green? I know it’s Hicktown and all, but… look how good
you
grow things. Maybe you just think you’ll be happy in the city, but you really won’t. I mean, your
roots
are here.”

“Yeah,” he answered, “but in the city my
roots
will be in a nice safe closet under grow-lights. And there’ll be clubs and restaurants and movies and concerts. Come on, sweetie. Doncha wanta come with me?”

“’Course I do. I can live anywhere if I’ve got you… ”

Helen Carver stopped to pick up her son from Susie’s, where he was “hanging” with his pal Chet. They both begged her to let him spend the night with Susie sweetly seconding their plea— her husband was a long-distance trucker and she “loved the company.” Of course Helen agreed. “Skip can stay,” she said, “if Skip does his homework.” It was a love-token she offered him, to use his
own
name, as he called it, whenever Marty wasn’t around. He vowed prodigies of homework and when she demanded a hug, he gave it willingly.

Guilt pierced her as she briefly held him, an irrational guilt that she had given him Marty for a father. She walked back to her car grieving and fearing for her son. It was Karen Fox who had put her in this state. She had all but said that Marty played a role in the death of her lover. In the same breath as saying her father had also, her
dead
father. Karen was delusional with grief, there could be no other explanation, and yet she had seemed so present, sad and calm if anything.

Helen thought of the sexual cruelty of Marty’s fantasies. She had accepted the little rituals he wanted, they were scary at first, but for all years, she’d never been really hurt, maybe a bit sore sometimes. And he did provide for them. But over these last few days, Marty was different, had a kind of aura about him. Maybe a
scent
? Very faint, a hot-house aroma with a touch of the bitter smell of sap, especially when they had sex. So odd, how it struck her somehow as being a scent of danger.

She turned onto their own street and got a scare: fifty yards ahead, Marty’s patrol car erupted from the driveway. He seemed not to see her as he sped off, a man on urgent business.

When Helen let herself in, she confronted something that grew more and more disturbing the longer she stared at it. Down the hall, the door to Marty’s study hung open just a crack. Marty’s study was always locked, never to be entered by anyone but himself. He must have slammed it behind him in his haste, too distracted to notice the latch hadn’t caught. She stepped up to the door and touched it.

She didn’t open it, but she knew she was going to, and she stood there trying to decide why it was that all at once she believed what Karen had just told her. Marty was mean, yes, cold and withholding, indifferent to her feelings, but those things in themselves didn’t mean that someone was a killer. She’d liked Marty back in junior high, he had an innocent energy, enthusiasm. By the time he started courting her, right after high school, he wasn’t so likeable. In her shyness and humility she’d just decided that boys becoming men naturally got less nice. She decided that nicer junior high kid was still in there somewhere and she’d tried to find and love him.

But what it came down to at this moment was that Karen Fox said she was in danger from Marty; now Helen believed her. Just like that. She pushed open the never-to-be-violated door to his sanctum and stepped inside.

There were chests and cabinets, a rack of rifles above a workbench and, on the bench, aside from a stack of bondage porn magazines, nothing but handguns, just lying there spread out on its surface. Revolvers, automatics— beyond this she could not classify them, except that all seemed to be of different makes.

Why did he have all these guns spread out on a bench? Didn’t men keep them in racks or cases? Why would they just be lying around in the open air? And the air of the room touched her nostrils. A scent in the air.

She bent above that… smorgasbord of pistols and drew the scent into her nostrils. Far stronger than the smell of oiled steel it was. It recalled the smell of newly chainsawed trees on her dad’s farm: a bitter whiff of sap and raw plant fiber. It brought vividly upon her, the memory of Marty rutting in her, his invasion like a root breaking cold stiff soil, a brutish green imperialism.

He had rushed in here to choose one of these guns, and rushed out with it… .

It was as if a gunshot had shattered a shell that had encased her all her adult life. Without her knowing it, cold new air bathed her and the thought
Why am I here?
slapped her in the face. Look around! A den of ropes and guns and bondage porn. A cop rushing in to grab a surely unregistered gun, and rushing out with it! She almost ran, but a cold, steely thought gripped her spine. Her hand darted out and took one of the pistols, a heavy, blunt-snouted revolver. Her hand, yes, but feeling like someone else’s as it hefted the weapon’s mass… . or the hand of a different Helen, just as afraid as the one she’d been a moment ago, but freer to move— a Helen whose fear
was
the power to move, instead of the paralysis it had always been.

She stood a moment baffled, unable to decide whether to leave the door as she had found it or pull it shut. Surely he had assumed it had shut behind him, so it was safest to close it.

Hurrying to her room, Helen threw things into a suitcase, and ran from there to
Skip’s
room— and threw more things in. As she backed out of the drive and swung onto the road, she didn’t yet know where she was going, but for now, it was enough knowing where she would never return.

Marty rocketed towards Rabble’s place, with a glance at Fratelli’s driveway as he passed it. The Beretta he’d just grabbed from his stash of Wands (as he privately termed them) was for his return trip, for Sal Fratelli and his squeeze. As soon as Marty had made sure of Rabble, he’d work Jack’s magic on that little dope-growing punk.

“Forgive me, Jack,” he murmured, “for the witch’s murder of the green god’s serpent. I didn’t suspect the old bitch’s power. Please sustain me in the service of Xibalba.” But in his heart, Marty silently withheld a reservation in his faith. For Jack Fox he felt awe and love, and for the green god felt the same. But it was up
here
Marty wanted to wield their power, here under the sun, in the cleanness of the wind and rain, ruling over men and women, constraining them, enjoying and disposing their bodies and lives. He did not want to go under the ground, as Jack had done by his own hand, as Harst had surely done, though far less willingly, Marty suspected. Harst’s vanishing had helped him to see his own unwillingness for that last transition. Marty wanted the sun, and humankind to rule. He did not want that empire, however vast, of black earth and root and worm.

He arrived at Rabble’s drive and the Chief Deputy’s truck was in it. Marty’s thundering fist on the front door produced… an encouraging silence within. A walk around the side of the house to the back yard revealed… emptiness. An unsettling emptiness. That Rabble and the hooker should be gone was good, but where was the lush, unearthly luxuriance? There was no new growth. Just the empty deck, the littered mud, the scummy pond…

He approached the brink of the pond. Sitting open beside his lounge was Rabble’s bag, no pistol in evidence. The lounge was collapsed, the aluminum legs buckled flat beneath it. And these… these were definitely deep drag-marks, crossing the mud between the foot of the lounge and the edge of the water.

He followed the drag-marks, moving more slowly with each step closer to the pond. Stood right at the brink, his senses radiating, straining outward for the answering touch of what had been seeded here by the fructifying fire of Jack’s wand. All the signs suggested success: that the bitch he had shot had changed, seized him, changed
him
, and dragged him under… but where was Xibalba’s garden and serpent? Where was the flowering the god had nourished on their flesh?

Probing with every sense, he stepped cautiously into the water, stooping to reach his hand down into its dimness… advanced another step down its silty bottom, wet to the knees, both hands searching under water for the rough touch of the green god’s scion.

Nets seized his legs and arms. Not nets, but snaking vines that poured up from the silt, that laced him in a leafy weave, till he stood like an ivy-shrouded tree-trunk, his human shape engulfed in a dense macramé of stem and foliage. Peering out of this boscage half-blinding him, he saw a luxuriance of vine and creeper and moss radiating everywhere from the pond’s rim. It clothed the whole shabby yard in verdure, all of which seemed like a vast extension of his own body, for rootlets pincushioned every inch of his skin and through them he felt the tremor of the whole green weave around him.

He stood there and saw— saw eyelessly, within his mind— the great eye-studded serpent coiled on the pond floor’s darkness.

He stood there he knew not how long, for he was under the earth, just where he had feared to be, down in its ancient Darkness where seed and spore and root and filament and sleepless worm commingled, and there he conferred with Xibalba, or rather stood enfolded in that Titan’s will, and knew His might, which grips the earth as a hand grips a stone… .

Even when the growth that gripped him fell away and joined the green weave as it enveloped ever more thickly the yard, deck, house— even when he moved dazedly from the water and picked his way through the deepening growth back to his cruiser, Marty had not yet returned from that Darkness. He scanned the sky, struggling to believe it was not a hallucination. In his rearview, he studied the micropunctures all over his face, a faint red stippling where the rootlets had pierced him. They itched and it was this that brought him to himself at last. He rubbed his face again and again. It dulled the itch, but not the awe still in him.

He radioed Dispatch and asked for a report on Officer Haynes, Haynes had been out of touch for some time after reporting a possible sighting of the stolen unmarked cruiser. He’d signed off without giving his location. Marty absorbed this stoically. He told Dispatch that Chief Deputy Rabble was missing from his residence and that a unit was to be stationed there. Two more units were to be dispatched to proceed north on Gravenstein Highway from the Spaith orchard. If they encountered the stolen cruiser, they were to shoot the driver on sight, for she was known to be guilty of a farmworker’s homicide, was likely to be guilty of Rabble’s as well, and was known to be armed.

Armed indeed, he thought when he had disconnected. He recalled that skinny white-haired bitch in the battered fedora and the thing that rode with her, that thing of leaves and empty air that had gestured its defiance of him. Recalled and shuddered. For his Master had imparted to him, down there under the earth, that the white-haired bitch was raising an army against them.

Quetzal drove the unmarked Dodge down miles of county highway in a manner most normal observers would find strange: she trod the accelerator to the floor, climbed to a hundred, a hundred-twenty miles per hour, and pulled back on the steering wheel as if it were an aircraft’s joy stick. And what these observers would have found stranger still, this caused the howling vehicle to lift— just six inches or so— all four of its tires from the pavement and hang there above the blacktop, still doing a steady one-twenty for a hundred yards, two hundred yards— until it dropped back to the pavement again. She would let up on the gas for a moment, scowl, fall back to a speed of fifty or so, tires in conventional contact with the road… and then she would try again.

Meanwhile her passengers seemed oblivious to all but themselves. Their leaf-latticed hands touched wonderingly their own and each other’s leaf-latticed faces. Their arms and torsos interleaved in fluttering sinuous embraces. They entered and emerged from one another, sharing one another’s histories and hearts and hopes of vengeance… .

And at length, while their living guide still fought to wrestle flight from earthbound steel, they took flight themselves, poured from the open windows like leafy flames, streamed alongside their chariot like flapping flags, dancing in little whirlwinds on the hood, in perfect spirals of spinning foliage which a hundred miles an hour of onrushing wind was powerless to deform.

But when Quetzal at last let out a howl of frustration, they came pouring back in through the open windows, sat beside and behind her, and touched her cheeks with their feathery fingers, consoling. The witch’s Mayan obscenities gave way to calmer speech. “My daughters, you have sisters and brothers buried in these hills. Their lives were taken to feed the power of Xibalba, alimentar su poder, in his house of darkness, his house of seed and root. He grips the earth con manos mas duras que piedra, his hands harder than stone, fingers stronger than steel. It is Xibalba, Emilia my beloved, whom your poor tortured consort served, and still serves within the earth. Y que busca el Dios Verde? What the god seeks is all our lives, todas las vidas humanas en la tierra, because for him human life is a disease, una enfermedad mortal!”

“But from the spirits of these murdered ones, we, too, can raise an army. We must be swift. The more he kills, the more he can. We must find them encontraremos estas hermanas y hermanos, these sacrifices his servants made to him. Where they lie I cannot know unless I can take to the air and for this I need… wait— Yes! What I need approaches now! Come close and learn my thought.”

Deputy Haynes saw Burly Babcock drive out this morning in the same unmarked county cruiser that Carver was so steamed about. Well, the missing Dodge Twenty should be somewhere in the southwest quadrant and though this was a very big county, still Haynes thought he might just be the one to spot the Dodge and recoup the ape’s fuck-up.