Apricot brandy (7 page)

What an awful place this was, to suffer what Karen had suffered. Susan thought of her own mother’s oh-so-genteel form of abuse, her austere— no,
perverse
— denial of love. Whenever little Susan craved closeness, a simple, warm burrowing into love’s arms, her mother found some mistake in her, some slovenliness, some violation of what a Young Lady should be. Some excuse to mask her void of love.

But how much more cruel to pour your hate into your child, to maim the organ of her love itself. No wonder Karen had to be half-drunk to make love, to attempt to make love. Now that she wouldn’t drink, she would probably not even make the attempt, like last night. It crossed Susan’s mind that if she were a man, she wouldn’t be so shut
out
, could
enter
Karen’s wound, and gently but insistently probe until she liberated that scarred and buried passion… .

Jesus, what was she thinking? Where did
that
come from? This whole place was sick. It seeped into your brain… .

Finding her bladder full, she climbed down, considered trudging back to the house, then pulled her jeans down and squatted in the lane. “Piss on this place,” she said, feeling daring and slightly tipsy.

Karen laughed. “Amen to that,” she said, looking down from her tree. “You wanna lie in the shade a while? Take a wee nap?”

“The hell with that!” Susan went back to work, a trace more clumsily than before. This was getting more tiring as the heat rose and conjured bigger and more numerous flies— flies and a dozen other breeds of bug the trees swarmed with. The clippers had raised ripe blisters on her palm, which popped. Her sweat stung them. The twigs, which she’d avoided more deftly at the start of her labors, started poking her face, as if counter-attacking from every side.

She grunted and toiled on. These trees— it was like wrestling with huge crabs or lobsters, scaly lower life-forms— the cut twigs yielded with a repellent succulence. They seemed to thrash as they fell and to twitch on the grass, like the sundered tails of lizards or rats.

Then, as she leaned slightly off-balance deep into the branches, something big moved, so close to her face it was out of focus. She flinched back and saw, inches from her eyes, a huge gold-and-black spider seizing a large moth that had just struck its web. With quick, darting movements of its obese abdomen— horribly sexual ass-thrusts they seemed— the spider bound the moth’s wings tight, and pierced its head with its fangs.

Susan’s revulsion exploded. She swung a blow with her clippers that tipped her off-balance and seized the ladder one-handed as she felt it topple. They came down together with a snapping of branches, Susan desperately extending one leg as they fell sideways. Her foot took the impact, her ankle awry, and buckled under her weight with a sickening crackle.

It wasn’t broken, they decided. Seriously swollen and mottling with purple, yes. Excruciating to put her weight on, yes… but it would take her weight and with none of that grinding twinge that betokened a fracture. One of the closets yielded a cane, probably from Mrs. Fox’s final, arthritic years. They applied some ice. Susan considered and thought that a glass of something might perhaps ease the pain. They finally settled on a Bloody Mary. Susan found it tasty and soothing.

She bent to stroke the hot eggplant of her ankle. It answered her heartbeat with echoes of pain. “You know what this orchard
really
needs, Karen? A forest fire.” Said this devoutly— imagined, with bitter longing, the reptilian trees in flames.

“I think that’s a swell idea, but let’s sell it first. Come on, hon. While those aspirin kick in we’ll scoot up to Gravenstein. Get meds, ice packs, Ace bandages. We’ll sell some flats, too, and have some cheeseburgers.”

Susan felt her habitual irritation at Karen’s patch-it-and-truck-on attitude towards injuries. In Susan’s Mill Valley homeland, all injuries required the sacrament of a doctor’s visit. She felt some irritation too at Karen’s simple perennial faith in cheeseburgers as potent antidotes to all misfortune. But Susan mainly brooded on the thought that this whole foul place had
done
this damage to her in its spite. How right the Inquisition had been, to purge its demons with the stake and torch!

“That sounds great, Kare. Cheeseburgers. But could we drive around the orchard before we go? I haven’t really seen it yet.”

As they wound downslope in Karen’s truck, the land’s curvature slowly swallowed the house and sheds, and Susan felt herself in a sea of trees. And found it all a bit intimidating, really, the brute will and labor manifested by all these regimented trees, all this shackled, captive life.
Agriculture
. Look at it: an army of tamed trees. This was really Titan’s work. Susan remembered her childhood fear of the troll in
Billy Goats Gruff
. Farmer Jack Fox was a monster just like that troll. That big, black-souled son of a bitch… .

“What’s that? Compost?”

They had a view of a great worm-shape wrapped in black plastic and weighted with tires: a tube of compost fifteen feet high and stretching a full hundred feet to one side of Dad’s still-shed.

“Why are those tires on it? I’ve seen that before… ”

“Their weight keeps a tight seal on the plastic, keeps the heat in, it rots even faster.”

“Boy. You could start a whole new farm on that much.”

“And next to it there is the still-shed. Dad read there. And made brandy from those fruit trees back up in the yard. When the screen door of that shed slammed, I could hear it all the way up at the house… .”

Karen began telling about it, still meandering the truck through the lanes as she talked. Susan watched her lover’s profile as she listened and saw that Karen could not quite believe she was saying these things out loud.

“Oh, Karen,” said Susan softly at the end.

Karen swung them back upslope and shortly had them on the highway. After a visible hesitation, she said, “I think I understand what you’re doing with this drinking and I love you for it. But hon, you don’t have to drink
for
me to help me stop,” saying this, she reached out and touched her lover’s cheek.

“Hey, who says it’s all about you? You always get to be the drunk and rowdy one. Asskicker. I’m little Miss Sweetness-and-Light. I keep our checkbook balanced and get you out of trouble. Maybe I like this. Maybe I just want to have some fun and kick some ass!”

A rusty laugh jumped out of Karen. “Girl, you may be kicking ass, but you sure fucked up your foot doing it.”

Karen had really laughed. Sober. Susan blinked at sudden tears and thought:
Daddy Fox, I
am
gonna kick your ass. You’re through hurting her.

The highway to Gravenstein showed Susan a lot of countryside, twenty miles of it. The green life here was like a conflagration. Between the beef-lots and walnut orchards, everything was grass and wild trees to the horizon. Ivy clothed those trees, mistletoe studded them, and mosses and lichens bearded them. The undergrowth poured down both banks of every stream they crossed, as if stampeding for a drink. Here and there the vegetation was reclaiming clearings where decayed sheds, long-spined and roofed with shakes, buckled and sagged at the roof-beam, settling like supple-backed scaly old dragons into dense garments of blackberry vine. The dairy-farms, with their piss-rich hills of compost under the hot sun, packed a stench that was almost ethereal, the incense of a Natural Mystery, life’s metamorphosis into organic soup.

And the roadkill! Animals in impossible flat postures flashed by. They looked like Cubist dancers, all their three dimensions, teeth, spines, tails ribs and paws, presented in a single plane. The highway was like a long narrow battlefield starred with red smears whose very species her eyes recoiled from determining.

“Boy, the country is so
real
.”

“Rich, isn’t it?”

“Hey! Are those
eagles
up there? They’re so huge.”

“Actually, sweetie, they’re turkey vultures. Noble when aloft, but mo-fugly up close. Bald wrinkly red heads for rooting in carrion.”

As they entered Gravenstein, Karen pronounced it “a lot bigger” than it used to be and told Susan what was new to her: outlying “townhouse” developments for the upper-middle, two new gas stations going in, new office buildings… .

“Lemme just hook through here for a look before the drugstore.”

“I’m fine, Karen.”

It was the older residential half of town, blocks sunk in big old trees, with overflowing gardens and root-buckled sidewalks where tricycles lay toppled. “Most of my friends lived around here. Girls I really liked. But when I went to their houses, I’d wear out my welcome with their parents, I felt so safe there. It was always hard to leave, get on the bus home.”

They drove back to central Gravenstein to the drugstore and. in the store’s parking lot, applied their medical purchases. Susan stuck her leg out of the cab and Karen bound it with the Ace bandage as snugly as Susan could stand. “It’ll cut down on the throbbing once you’re used to it. I’ll get some ice for the pack at that liquor store.”

“And… get me more beer. It helps with the pain.”

A slight pause. “Beer it is.”

Their next stop was Fratelli’s Produce Emporium. Near the tracks, in an older-looking district of shiplap-sided houses and wooden power poles, Fratelli’s still thrived. They parked in its back lot. Outdoor produce-stands under broad, pole-propped awnings adjoined the big brick structure of the store itself, from whose back door, as if they’d evoked him, stepped a narrow-shouldered, big-middled man whose jet-black hair and moustache were thirty years younger than his face.

“By God, old Fratelli’s still clockin’ away. No, hey, just stay here with the ice on— ”

“Using it’s the quickest way to heal, how often have you told me that? I wanna meet him.”

The man stood at a kind of ceremonious attention as they approached. Karen glanced at the Ranier can in Susan’s free hand as she caned along, but Fratelli did not. “Karen Fox! Shame about Jack. Whaddya got for me?”

“Mr. Fratelli. It’s so good to see you… after so long.”

“You t’ink I was dead?” Mildly asked, but with no smile.

“Never. This is my friend Susan Kravnik.”

Only then did he look at her, the same calm, formal face. “A pleasure. Whaddya girls got?” The question sounded more searching to Susan the second time. As if he’d heard something about them, was alert for something. Susan smiled charmingly.

“Mr. Fratelli, what
would
we have?”

“Plums, Mr. Fratelli,” Karen put in. “And I thought— ” it seemed to strike her “— I could bring some apricots and peaches, if you wanted them.”

“Plums I gotta lot of. For good… fi’ bucks a flat. Apricots an’ peaches… from Jack’s brandy trees?”

Susan saw Karen blink. “Yes. The ones in the yard.”

“Those, I don’t gotta lot of. For good, thirty a flat.”

“That’s very generous.” Karen sounded a shade more remote. “So, come take a look at the plums?”

“I trust you. How many flats?”

“Twelve.”

Fratelli dug bills from his pocket, sorted among them. “Take eighty for you plums. B’tween fren’s. My sympat’ies. Sal! Bring the cart!” He turned and walked back into the store.

Susan asked, “Is he always so… businesslike?”

“I remember him more chatty. But I was small then and he was younger.”

“You don’t think it’s two dykes from Frisco that… stiffens him up?”

Karen laughed, but not like before. “I guess I wouldn’t rule it out.”

Sal rattled up with the cart. “Hey, Sal,” said Karen. “You were this high the last time I saw you.” Now bigger than his father, with some brawn on him, and livelier too.

“Hi Karen, who’s your friend? What happened to her?” Big lips in a grin somehow conspiratorial, his eyes drinking them both in greedily.

Susan said, “I was practicing cartwheels and injured my foot against the ceiling.”

He was giving them a goofy smile, just looking at them, not registering the joke. It crossed Susan’s mind he might be a little slow. Karen said, “Hey, Sal, you think we look funny or something? Are you memorizing us?”

“Huh? Hey, I’ll get your flats. Bad bad news about Jack, Karen. Really, really sorry.”

Thoughtful pulling out of the lot, Karen said, “I didn’t even
know
Sal. He was like six the last time I was here… . Hey, the Koffee Kupp’s still open! If their cheeseburgers haven’t changed, you’ll love ‘em.”

Susan did, in fact. Devoured two of them. Looked fondly, as she sipped her beer afterward, on Karen. “You’ve been so strong. You’re facing so much. We should do something just for fun.”

“We should go camping,” Karen said with a wry smile. “Just to be on a piece of ground that isn’t Jack Fox’s.”

“I say that’s a great idea. Sleeping-bag cuddles! I love camping.”

Karen laughed more freely. “Dear love, you don’t know jack shit about camping, but I think I could make us pretty comfortable. There’s some beautiful places down along the river.”

The sun was just an hour from down when they got back. And found a bulky blue pickup— decades old, and not unmarked by ding and rust— parked behind Susan’s rented red rice-rocket. As they got out of their truck, a man stepped into view from the far side of the house. A wide guy in a faded gray flannel shirt, raising a hand in greeting, coming forward… . an older guy with a short, gray-shot beard, becoming wider as he neared, appearing very solid.

“I’m Kyle, Ms. Fox— we talked on the phone? I’m so sorry to drop in— I called but you were out. I had a bid to make out this way and I wanted to grab a look before Saturday.”

“It’s totally okay, Kyle,” shaking hands with him. “This is my friend Susan.”

“Hi, Susan. I’m sorry to intrude.”

“No problem.”

“I also wanted to mention, Ms. Fox, that I just hired a helper… . so I expect we can be out of your hair in well under two days.”

“Hey, whatever it takes, Kyle. Actually, we’ll be gone camping when you do it.”

“Oh.” Susan thought he sounded pleased with the arrangement. “Where should we leave your cords?”