Lying Under the Apple Tree (72 page)

There were still some pieces on the floor that he had missed. She turned away, thinking to get the broom, which was in a closet near the back door. He caught her arm in a flash.

“You sit down. You sit right here while I’m eating.” He lifted the bloodied arm to show it to her again. Then he made an eggburger out of the muffin and the eggs and ate it in a very few bites. He chewed with his mouth open. The kettle was boiling. “Tea bag in the cup?” he said.

“Yes. It’s loose tea actually.”

“Don’t you move. I don’t want you near that kettle, do I?”

He poured boiling water into the cup.

“Looks like hay. Is that all you got?”

“I’m sorry. Yes.”

“Don’t go on saying you’re sorry. If it’s all you got it’s all you got. You never did think I come here to look at the fuse box, did you?”

“Well yes,” Nita said. “I did.”

“You don’t now.”

“No.”

“You scared?”

She chose to consider this not as a taunt but as a serious question.

“I don’t know. I’m more startled than scared, I guess. I don’t know.”

“One thing. One thing you don’t need to be scared of. I’m not going to rape you.”

“I hardly thought so.”

“You can’t never be too sure.” He took a sip of the tea and made a face. “Just because you’re an old lady. There’s all kinds out there, they’ll do it to anything. Babies or dogs and cats or old ladies. Old men. They’re not fussy. Well I am. I’m not interested in getting it any way but normal and with some nice lady I like and what likes me. So rest assured.”

Nita said, “I am. But thank you for telling me.”

He shrugged, but seemed pleased with himself.

“That your car out front?”

“My husband’s car.”

“Husband? Where’s he?”

“He’s dead. I don’t drive. I mean to sell it, but I haven’t yet.”

What a fool, what a fool she was to tell him that.

“Two thousand four?”

“I think so. Yes.”

“For a minute I thought you were going to trick me with the husband stuff. Wouldn’t of worked, though. I can smell it if a woman’s on her own. I know it the minute I walk in a house. Minute she opens the door. Instinct. So it runs okay? You know the last day he drove it?”

“The seventeenth of June. The day he died.”

“Got any gas in it?”

“I would think so.”

“Nice if he filled it up right before. You got the keys?”

“Not on me. I know where they are.”

“Okay.” He pushed his chair back, hitting one of the pieces of crockery. He stood up, shook his head in some kind of surprise, sat down again.

“I’m wiped. Gotta sit a minute. I thought it’d be better when I’d ate. I was just making that up about being a diabetic.”

She pushed her chair and he jumped.

“You stay where you are. I’m not that wiped I couldn’t grab you. It’s only I walked all night.”

“I was just going to get the keys.”

“You wait till I say. I walked the railway track. Never seen a train. I walked all the way to here and never seen a train.”

“There’s hardly ever a train.”

“Yeah. Good. I went down in the ditch going round some of them half-assed little towns. Then it come daylight I was still okay except where it crossed the road and I took a run for it. Then I looked down here and seen the house and the car and I said to myself, That’s it. I could have took my old man’s car, but I got some brains left in my head.”

She knew he wanted her to ask what had he done. She was also sure that the less she knew the better for her.

Then for the first time since he entered the house she thought of her cancer. She thought of how it freed her, put her out of danger.

“What are you smiling about?”

“I don’t know. Was I smiling?”

“I guess you like listening to stories. Want me to tell you a story?”

“May be I’d rather you’d leave.”

“I will leave. First I’ll tell you a story.”

He put his hand in a back pocket. “Here. Want to see a picture? Here.”

It was a photograph of three people, taken in a living room with closed floral curtains as a backdrop. An old man—not really old, maybe in his sixties—and a woman of about the same age were sitting on a couch. A very large younger woman was sitting in a wheelchair drawn up close to one end of the couch and a little in front of it. The old man was heavy and grey-haired, with eyes narrowed and mouth slightly open, as if he might suffer some chest wheezing, but he was smiling as well as he could. The old woman was much smaller, with dark dyed hair and lipstick, wearing what used to be called a peasant blouse, with little red bows at the wrists and neck. She smiled determinedly, even a bit frantically, lips stretched over perhaps bad teeth.

But it was the younger woman who monopolized the picture. Distinct and monstrous in her bright muumuu, dark hair done up in a row of little curls along her forehead, cheeks sloping into her neck. And in spite of all that bulge of flesh an expression of some satisfaction and cunning.

“That’s my mother and that’s my dad. And that’s my sister Madelaine. In the wheelchair.

“She was born funny. Nothing no doctor or anybody could do for her. And ate like a pig. There was bad blood between her and me since ever I remember. She was five years older than I was and she just set out to torment me. Throwing anything at me she could get her hands on and knockin me down and tryin to run over me with her fuckin wheelchair. Pardon my French.”

“It must have been hard for you. And hard for your parents.”

“Huh. They just rolled over and took it. They went to this church, see, and this preacher told them, she’s a gift from God. They took her with them to church and she’d fuckin howl like a fuckin cat in the backyard and they’d say oh, she’s tryin to make music, oh God fuckin bless her. Excuse me again.

“So I never bothered much with sticking around home, you know, I went and got my own life. That’s all right, I says, I’m not hanging around for this crap. I got my own life. I got work. I nearly always got work. I never sat around on my ass drunk on government money. On my rear end, I mean. I never asked my old man for a penny. I’d get up and tar a roof in the ninety-degree heat or I’d mop the floors in some stinkin old restaurant or go grease monkey for some rotten cheatin garage. I’d do it. But I wasn’t always up for taking their shit so I wasn’t lasting too long. That shit people are always handing people like me and I couldn’t take it. I come from a decent home. My dad worked till he got too sick, he worked on the buses. I wasn’t brought up to take shit. Okay though—never mind that. What my parents always told me was, the house is yours. The house is all paid up and it’s in good shape and it’s yours. That’s what they told me. We know you had a hard time here when you were young and if you hadn’t had such a hard time you could of got an education, so we want to make it up to you how we can. So then not long ago I’m talking to my dad on the phone and he says, of course you understand the deal. So I’m what deal? He says, It’s only a deal if you sign the papers you will take care of your sister as long as she lives. It’s only your home if it’s her home too, he says.

“Jesus. I never heard that before. I never heard that was the deal before. I always thought the deal was, when they died she’d go into a Home. And it wasn’t going to be my home.

“So I told my old man that wasn’t the way I understood it and he says it’s all sewed up for you to sign and if you don’t want to sign it you don’t have to. Your aunt Rennie will be around to keep an eye on you too so when we’re gone you see you stick to the arrangements.

“Yeah, my aunt Rennie. She’s my mom’s youngest sister and she is one prize bitch.

“Anyway he says your aunt Rennie will be keeping an eye on you and suddenly I just switched. I said, Well, I guess that’s the way it is and I guess it is only fair. Okay. Okay, is it all right if I come over and eat dinner with you this Sunday.

“Sure, he says. Glad you have come to look at it the right way. You always fire off too quick, he says, at your age you ought to have some sense.

“Funny you should say that, I says to myself.

“So over I go, and Mom has cooked chicken. Nice smell when I first go into the house. Then I get the smell of Madelaine, just her same old awful smell I don’t know what it is but even if Mom washes her every day it’s there. But I acted very nice. I said, This is an occasion, I should take a picture. I told them I had this wonderful new camera that developed right away and they could see the picture. Right off the bat you can see yourself, what do you think of that? And I got them all sitting in the front room just the way I showed you. Mom she says, Hurry up I have to get back in my kitchen. Do it in no time, I says. So I take their picture and she says, Come on now, let’s see how we look, and I say, Hang on, just be patient, it’ll only take a minute. And while they’re waiting to see how they look I take out my nice little gun and bin-bang-bam I shoot the works of them. Then I take another picture and I went out to the kitchen and ate up some of the chicken and didn’t look at them no more. I kind of had expected Aunt Rennie to be there too but Mom had said she had some church thing. I would of shot her too just as easy. So lookie here. Before and after.”

The old man’s head was fallen sideways, the old woman’s backwards. Their expressions were blown away. The sister had fallen forward so there was no face to be seen, just her great flowery swathed knees and dark head with its elaborate and outdated coiffure.

“I could of just sat there feelin good for a week. I felt so relaxed. But I didn’t stay past dark. I made sure I was all cleaned up and I finished off the chicken and I knew I better get out. I was prepared for Aunt Rennie walkin in, but I got out of the mood I had been in and I knew I’d have to work myself up to do her. I just didn’t feel like it anymore. One thing my stomach was so full, it was a big chicken. I had ate it all instead of packin it with me because I was scared the dogs would smell it and cut up a fuss when I went by the back lanes like I figured to do. I thought that chicken inside of me would do me for a week. Yet look how hungry I was when I got to you.”

He looked around the kitchen. “I don’t suppose you got anything to drink here, have you? That tea was awful.”

“There might be some wine,” she said. “I don’t know, I don’t drink anymore—”

“You AA?”

“No. It just doesn’t agree with me.”

She got up and found her legs were shaking. Of course.

“I fixed up the phone line before I come in here,” he said. “Just thought you ought to know.”

Would he get careless and more easygoing as he drank, or would he get meaner and wilder? How could she tell? She found the wine without having to leave the kitchen. She and Rich used to drink red wine every day in reasonable quantities because it was supposed to be good for your heart. Or bad for something that was not good for your heart. In her fright and confusion she was not able to think what that was called.

Because she was frightened. Certainly. The fact of her cancer was not going to be any help to her at the present moment, none at all. The fact that she was going to die within a year refused to cancel out the fact that she might die now.

He said, “Hey, this is the good stuff. No screw top. Haven’t you got no corkscrew?”

She moved toward a drawer, but he jumped up and put her aside, not too roughly.

“Unh-unh, I get it. You stay way from this drawer. Oh my, lots of good stuff in here.”

He put the knives on the seat of his chair where she would never be able to grab them and used the corkscrew. She did not fail to see what a wicked instrument it could be in his hand but there was not the least possibility that she herself would ever be able to use it.

“I’m just getting up for glasses,” she said, but he said no. No glass, he said, you got any plastic?

“No.”

“Cups then. I can see you.”

She set down the two cups and said, “Just a very little for me.”

“And me,” he said, businesslike. “I gotta drive.” But he filled his cup to the brim. “I don’t want no cop sticken his head in to see how I am.”

“Free radicals,” she said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s something about red wine. It either destroys them because they’re bad or builds them up because they’re good, I can’t remember.”

She drank a sip of the wine and it didn’t make her feel sick, as she had expected. He drank, still standing. She said, “Watch for those knives when you sit down.”

“Don’t start kidding with me.”

He gathered the knives and put them back in the drawer, and sat.

“You think I’m dumb? You think I’m nervous?”

She took a big chance. She said, “I just think you haven’t ever done anything like this before.”

“Course I haven’t. You think I’m a murderer? Yeah, I killed them but I’m not a murderer.”

“There’s a difference,” she said.

“You bet.”

“I know what it’s like. I know what it’s like to get rid of somebody who has injured you.”

“Yeah?”

“I have done the same thing you did.”

“You never.” He pushed back his chair but did not stand.

“Don’t believe me if you don’t want to,” she said. “But I did it.”

“Hell you did. How’d you do it then?”

“Poison.”

“What are you talkin about? You make them drink some of this fuckin tea or what?”

“It wasn’t a them, it was a her. There’s nothing wrong with the tea. It’s supposed to prolong your life.”

“Don’t want my life prolonged if it means drinkin junk like that. They can find out poison in a body when it’s dead anyway.”

“I’m not sure that’s true of vegetable poisons. Anyway nobody would think to look. She was one of those girls who had rheumatic fever as a child and coasted along on it, can’t play sports or do anything much, always having to sit down and have a rest. Her dying would not be any big surprise.”

“What she ever done to you?”

“She was the girl my husband was in love with. He was going to leave me and marry her. He had told me. I had done everything for him. He and I were working on this house together, he was everything I had. We had not had any children because he didn’t want them. I learned carpentry and I was frightened to get up on ladders but I did it. He was my whole life. Then he was going to kick me out for this useless whiner who worked in the registrar’s office. The whole life we’d worked for was to go to her. Was that fair?”