The Orchard

by Charles L. Grant

  A crow called, and she followed its coasting flight over the trees. Behind her I could see the dimming branches of the orchard, and I shivered when I thought of the run through it. No one went in there. Not even in fun. I don’t know why, but I thought then it was probably because it was so gloomy.

  “You’re losing weight, huh?”

  I had to blink and force my attention back. “What?”

  Her hand fluttered through the space in front of my chest before landing on my left arm. “I said, it looks like you’re losing a little weight. You on a diet?”

  I almost hit her. Flattery is okay, but not when it’s so obvious, and so obviously wrong. I shook my head, though, and slapped my hands against my stomach. “I wish I were. As a matter of fact, I’m going to, real soon now.”

  She kept on looking at me, frowning so hard I couldn’t help but look down at myself. And when I did, I grunted my surprise. Either my clothes had stretched themselves to their limit in anticipation of the next two weeks’ worth of meals, or I really was, honest to god, losing a few pounds.

  “Son of a bitch.”

  “See?” she said brightly. Green eyes wide now, and laughing; green eyes I wanted to jump into and live in; green eyes that darkened when she saw how I watched them.

  “Don’t,” she said quietly. “Don’t even think it.”

  And I was saved from lying by the sound of a horn, the sound of a scream, the sound of a car braking too late.

  Mainland Road is only two lanes wide, and the only way past the Station. On the east side is a tight wall of evergreens, which prevents drivers from seeing the village unless they turn directly into one of the streets; on the west there’s a wide, graveled shoulder, a shallow ditch, and a climb through thick hedges and brush before you reach the Armstrong farm.

  There’s not much traffic, even at this time of day.

  But he was lying in the ditch anyway, a pants leg torn from knee to ankle, one shoe half off, and from the angle of his head and the blood bubbling at his lips, I knew he was dead.

  Mary screamed and jumped down to cradle him in her arms.

  While Stick, ghost-pale himself, tried to pull her away, Mike took off up the highway, trying to catch the license plate of the car that didn’t stop; someone else, maybe it was Toni, had the presence of mind to run up Chancellor Avenue, heading for the police.

  It wasn’t me.

  I stood at the top of the rise and kept telling myself how wrong, how evil, how goddamned sick it was that I should feel glad Rich Verner was dead.

  I almost threw up.

  But I couldn’t turn away, not even when Mary looked up at me and pleaded.

  I know I didn’t move when a patrol car came screaming across the road, and right behind it an ambulance; I know I didn’t say a word when Mike came back, puffing, stumbling, admitting his failure in a loud string of obscenities that had Amy weeping.

  It was full dark now.

  My perfect twilight had ended.

  Instead, red and blue spinning lights turned everything a strobic and sickly purple; people walked through stabbing flashlight and spotlight like disjointed black ghosts. Voices whispered, asked questions, gave orders, faded away.

  The streetlamps came on and made the night darker.

  And when Stick finally came to stand beside me after the police and ambulance had gone, I tried hard to make him think I was miserable; I didn’t have to pretend I was cold.

  “We might as well go home, Herb, huh?”

  I shrugged.

  He kicked at a rock and sent it skittering into the road. “Mary went with him to the hospital.”

  There was a faint, annoying buzzing in my ears, almost like whispering.

  He turned his cap around and slipped his hands into his belt, thumbs out and drumming. “You suppose the cops’d mind if we waited until tomorrow to clean up the mess back there?”

  I shrugged again, and rubbed a finger along my ear to drive the sound away.

  “C’mon, pal,” he said softly. “They’ll catch the bastard, don’t worry. We gotta go. C’mon, we gotta go. There’s nothing left to do.”

  I let him push me a bit with his hip, let him start down the slope to the ditch before I followed, clumsily, my head feeling as if it had been pumped full of winter air, my arms and legs so suddenly weightless I had the horrible sensation that I was actually flying. It made the food in my stomach turn to acid; it made my vision blur so that I had to stretch out a hand to keep myself from falling.

  “Herb?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You okay? You want some help?”

  Stick. Good old Stick. Labeled that way since kindergarten because he looked like a skeleton someone had dressed in used clothes. Taking hold of my arm like I was an old man or something and leading me up the avenue, saying nothing, whistling without a tune, pulling me across the street when we reached the police station because there was a man in a dark suit standing on the steps, watching us. It was Detective Gilman, and he turned his head as we passed, probably not letting us go until we disappeared around the corner of Raglin and didn’t come back.

  Good old Stick. Always there when you need him, and even when you don’t. Opening the gate and guiding me up the walk, ringing the doorbell and explaining to Aunt May what had happened, that I was all right, just a little funny because Rich was my friend.

  She thanked him and gathered me in, called out to Uncle Gil, and took me up the stairs.

  Put me to bed.

  And did not say a word about the noise that was so loud, so persistent, I was positive she could hear.

  The noise no longer like whispering, but like a dry cold wind sifting through dead leaves.

  Richard was dead, and I was glad, and Mary had seen it all in my eyes.

  I stayed in bed most of Saturday morning. I didn’t dream the night before—I don’t remember dreaming, at least—but I slept badly, wrestling with the blanket, punching the pillow, several times coming up hard against the wall as I rolled around in search of someplace to give me peace.

  When I did waken at last, May was sitting at my desk, watching me anxiously. She was young, my mother’s baby sister, and not very much older than I. A slender, blonde woman who seemed, when I was having fantasies of great power, to be more my type than the type she had married.

  “How are you feeling?”

  I almost sat up, then realized my clothes were gone and there were no pajamas in their place. I think I blushed; I know she grinned.

  “Okay, I guess.” I waited for the buzzing. When I didn’t hear it, I smiled. “Okay.”

  “Gil wants to talk to you, if you feel up to it.”

  I groaned and fell back on the pillow. “Do I have to?”

  “No, of course not. But he’s worried. He … he remembers.”

  I knew without her telling me. I knew that, until last night, the only other time I had seen a person dead was when I found my mother in her kitchen, lying all twisted around on the floor under the table my father had made one Easter. When I told my father, he beat me for not keeping an eye on her. I was only five, but I was supposed to watch her when I was home because she had a bad heart. The heart stopped. My father stopped beating me when my arms began to bleed. Then he arranged for the funeral, the burial plot, and for his sister-in-law to look after me while, as he put it, he hunted for new employment in some other place besides this miserable hole.

  He never came back.

  The dreams did, forever.

  “I’m okay,” I told her again. “Really. I don’t want to talk.”

  She waited to see if I was telling the truth, then nodded and came over to the bed. I could smell lemon oil on her hands as she tucked the sheet around my neck and ordered me, smiling, to stay where I was until she brought something up to fill my tank.

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “I can see that. I think you even look a bit thinner. But you have to eat something, boy, to keep your strength up.” She kissed the tip of her finger and pl
aced the finger on my forehead, a comfort when I was little, a little disturbing now. “You still have those exams, Herb. You don’t want to get sick.”

  “Exams?”

  God, didn’t she realize what had happened last night? Didn’t she know?

  “Yes, exams,” she said sternly. “This is a bad time for something like this to happen, I can understand that. But you can’t let it throw you, you hear? You’ve got to be strong, Herb. You’ve got to be strong. For yourself, as well as your friends.”

  “That’s an understatement,” I muttered sourly.

  She left without saying anything else, and I closed my eyes, saw Rich bleeding in the ditch, and opened them again. This is dumb, I thought; this is really dumb. He wasn’t anything near as bad as my mother, but I just couldn’t shake him.

  Dumb.

  Really dumb.

  Finally, when my back and buttocks ached so much I couldn’t lie down anymore, I got up, dressed, sat at the desk, and tried to do a little studying. After an hour I could barely keep my head from falling off my shoulders, so I lay down again and promptly fell asleep.

  There were no dreams, or none that I could remember.

  But when I awakened for the second time that day, the sun was down and there was the smell of food cooking deliciously in the kitchen. My stomach made like a geyser ready to blow, and I jumped off the bed, ran down the stairs, and only barely restrained myself from charging into the dining room.

  No one was there.

  I walked around the table and into the kitchen.

  It was empty.

  The oven was off, there were no pots or pans on the stove, nothing waiting on the table. I was a little confused and scratched the sleep from my eyes, squinted, and saw a note on the counter from my aunt, telling me she and Uncle Gil had gone to the movies in the new theater in town, and that I’d had a couple of phone calls while I was napping. She said she didn’t want to wake me up because she knew what I was going through.

  Stick had been in touch, and Mike, and Mary (she underlined the name) three times.

  Rubbing a nervous hand over my stomach to calm it down, I hurried into the living room and sat in my uncle’s chair, pulled the telephone into my lap, and dialed Stick’s number first—he and Mike would be the quickest to get through, and by then I would have worked up enough nerve to concentrate on Mary.

  It took a while to get to talk to Reese, though. First I got his father, who was, by the sound of it, halfway through his ninth case of beer. He wasn’t all that bad a guy, not really, but he’d been out of work for over two years, laid off by the railroad and unable to get anything else but the occasional odd job. I let him jabber, made the right sounds Uncle Gil had taught me, then asked again for Stick.

  I heard some muffled yelling, and what could have been a slap. Then: “Hey, man, how you doing?”

  Good old Stick.

  I told him I wasn’t too bad, all things considered, and asked if the cops had found the hit-and-run driver yet.

  “No way. That guy was a hundred years gone before we even got there, remember?”

  “Damn. I thought Mike saw him, the car anyway. Did anyone else see it?”

  I heard someone popping bubble gum like a machine gun then, heard Stick yell at his kid sister to get the hell out of the room, right now, goddamnit, and preferably not stopping until she reached Alaska.

  “Nothing,” he said when he came back. “I don’t know. It’s like … Shit, I don’t know.”

  I straightened a little; he didn’t sound quite right. “Hey, you okay?”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “I’ve just been thinking, y’know? Rich was my age. My age, you know what I mean?”

  “Right. I … right.” I wish he hadn’t reminded me. His age was my age, and I sure didn’t want to talk about mortality just now.

  We yakked a bit more, about the exams, about how rotten things were, then he asked me about the stupid game we had played.

  I looked at my watch. “What about it?”

  “You went through the orchard, right?”

  “Well, sure! Only a zillion yards ahead of you, that’s all.”

  His laugh was short and dry. “When you went through, Herb, or when we were sitting there, did you … this is dumb, but did you kind of feel something?”

  “What?” Jesus, I thought; Rich’s dying really got to him, bad. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, man.”

  “The cold, Herb. Didn’t you feel the cold?”

  I thought, and I remembered. “Yeah, sure. What about it?”

  “Weird, huh?”

  “No, it wasn’t weird, for god’s sake. It was almost dark. And it ain’t the middle of July, in case you hadn’t noticed. What did you want, ninety degrees or something?”

  “Oh, absolutely,” he said, too loud and too fast. “I am a Sunbelt baby, remember? Born and practically bred in the wilds of Miami, and I don’t intend to spend the rest of my stupid life in this stupid icebox.” He yelled at his sister again and apologized, saying he was stuck at home, babysitting, because his father wasn’t feeling well and his mom was out at some meeting at their church.

  “No sweat,” I told him and we agreed to meet at the student union after the English exam; tomorrow being Sunday, he had to stay home, help his mom around the house and do the yard work. I knew he wanted to bitch some about it, but I didn’t give him the chance. I told him Mike had called, and I promised to get back to him if there was any gossip he should know.

  “Good deal,” he said. “Maybe he knows who that joker was who crashed the picnic.”

  “Joker? What joker? Stick, who are you—”

  Then his little sister screamed bloody murder right in my ear and the line went dead, and I knew if I called back, I’d get his father again.

  Mike wasn’t home. His mother said he had gone over to Amy’s just a little while ago and—she laughed—he wasn’t in the best of moods. She called it a lovers’ spat; I watched my language and told her she was probably right.

  Then I took a deep breath, said a few prayers to anyone who was listening, and dialed Mary’s number.

  She answered on the third ring, and she sounded like hell.

  “The funeral’s Monday afternoon,” she said.

  I leaned back and stared at the ceiling, feeling like a shit for not feeling a thing. “You want company?”

  “I don’t know if I can go.” Then she started crying, the dry kind that makes you want to scratch your throat because suddenly it feels like it’s been filled with sand. “I don’t know, Herb, I don’t know. What should I do?”

  “He was our friend,” I told her as gently and truthfully as I could. “He was a buddy. We should.”

  “He wanted me to marry him!”

  Oh, hell, I thought.

  “He said we could wait until after graduation and then get married.” The crying stopped; she had the hiccoughs now. “He said we could have our own careers, you know? He said we didn’t have to have children until later.”

  I didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t want to know it. But I couldn’t stop her because she didn’t know me. So I sat there for nearly an hour while she told me all the plans she and Rich had made, and how her life was ruined because some asshole in some asshole car was too damned drunk to see where he was going.

  “Mary,” I said at last, “calm down, huh? Take it easy.”

  “It just isn’t fair that he’s dead! Damnit, Herb, it just isn’t fair!”

  I didn’t say anything. I let her go on until, finally, she dropped into a silence that had me thinking, after a minute, that she’d hung up.

  Then, softly: “I’m sorry, Herb. I didn’t mean—”

  “It’s all right, okay? It’s all right.”

  “Are you angry?”

  “With you? C’mon, Mary, don’t be a jerk. Unless you want me to be.”

  “What?”

  “I mean, if you really want me to be mad at you, I will.”

  “Herb, please …”


  “No, I mean it sincerely. Of course, you realize I’ll have to come over there and hang you from the ceiling by your thumbs and give you forty lashes with a wet cat.”

  She giggled.

  “You want me to come over? I can pick up a cat on the way.”

  “No,” she said, reluctantly. “I can’t see anyone, I don’t think. I look like hell and i can’t stop crying and Jesus Christ, why the fuck did it have to happen to him?”

  I had no answers, but I think I did a fair job of telling her so in the right way because the hiccoughs soon stopped and she was sort of laughing again.

  “Jesus, Herb, what would I do without you?”

  “Stagger on somehow,” I told her in my best, lousy British accent. “Chins up, eyes forward, pulling yourself together with a paper clip and a hammer.”

  Another laugh, a quiet thanks, and we rang off.

  I sat there forever, staring at the receiver, squinting at the far wall, finally pushing myself to my feet and heading for the back door. I needed to think. I needed to tell myself that it just wasn’t done, what I was thinking, which was to make myself so available to handle her grief that Mary would never think of being without me again.

  In the old days, they called jerks like that cads.

  I paused in the kitchen, sniffing the air vainly for the cooking smells I had noticed before, and shrugged. It must have been a reaction to the fact I hadn’t eaten all day, and my diet-killing mind was bringing up fond memories of Aunt May’s best meals. But since I still wasn’t all that hungry, I continued on outside, into a backyard walled in by house-high pines, the grass perfectly mowed, the flowers under the windows all the same height. My uncle’s doing. And the only break in the symmetry he had forced on it was a small shed in the back. Green, and the one place I could go and not be disturbed.

  St used to be Uncle Gil’s toolshed until he got tired of doing all the work himself and hired a gardener; now it was my studio, heated for winter, a couple of small windows to keep me from frying in summer. After a glance back at the house, I unlocked the door behind me, and switched on the light.