Orchard Grove

by Vincent Zandri

  She no longer bothers with the Mace. Now it’s just she and the cleaver.

  Pulling herself away from the wrestler, she grabs hold of the blade, which is stored inside her bag.

  “Ted,” she says, “I want you to meet a friend of mine.”

  She pulls out the blade.

  “Beaver Cleaver meet Ted,” she says. “Ted meet Beaver Cleaver.”

  The wrestler stands paralyzed with confusion, his young eyes locked on the big axe-like blade.

  When she swings the blade into his neck, all he manages to do in his defense is work up a near silent gurgle. It sounds almost like the air that suddenly escapes a punctured inner tube. She’s just about to finish him off when a pair of bright headlights cut through the night and shine on them through the trees and the scrub brush.

  I resumed my usual spot in front of my typewriter. Stared at the white paper, positioned my fingers on the keys. My mind was spinning with memories of the previous night. My blood still boiling. I replayed them in my brain like a videotape. Lana, shirtless, opening her legs. Susan, leaning into her, kissing her, the barrel of John’s gun pressed against the back of her head, the mechanical metal-on-metal noise of his thumbing back the hammer.

  Why the hell wasn’t I calling the cops right now?

  Why the hell wasn’t I screaming to having the bastard arrested, his threats be damned?

  Maybe because he was the cops, and the cops would never believe my story over his. Or perhaps that’s just what I wanted to believe. I needed to be honest here. If I wasn’t going to the cops over what happened on my back deck last night, it was because of one thing and one thing only: Lana.

  If I went to cops I’d risk losing Lana.

  Losing Lana was the last thing I wanted to do.

  I’d do anything to be close to her. To smell her, feel her, kiss her all over.

  I’d do anything, even if it meant letting her husband get away with murder.

  Writing even a word was an impossible fantasy. Knowing that Lana would be outside right this very second made it impossible. My temples pounded and my stomach ached because I only desired one thing.

  Lana.

  I love you… I lust you… I loathe you with every fiber in my body…

  I got up, went into my bedroom, hobbled to the window.

  She knew I was watching her. I knew it because instead of laying herself out on her lounge chair, she was standing on the sun-drenched deck, facing me straight on. A full frontal. Her hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail, and she was back to wearing those big square sunglasses. She was also wearing her red kimono. Watching her, I felt my heart pound and my head grow dizzy. How was it possible that this woman possessed so much power over me?

  I was spellbound by her… Bewitched.

  After a moment or two passed, she did something that took me by surprise but something I should have expected. She raised up her hand and waved at me in a manner that told me she wanted me to come over. Needed me to come over. I couldn’t be sure if she actually saw me standing in the bedroom window, but I was certain that, regardless of vision, she knew in her flesh and bones that I was standing there admiring, lusting, bleeding.

  Turning on my crutches, I sat down on the bed, put on the jeans and T-shirt that had been tossed there earlier. Lifting myself up, I hobbled to the back sliding doors as fast as my crutches would take me, and exited the house.

  The flesh was weak that day.

  In just a few moments, I would discover just how weak it was, and how willing I would be to do anything in exchange for Lana’s love.

  Even kill for it if need be.

  As I entered into her yard through the open gate, I spotted her standing on the edge of the deck. Almost immediately I sensed that something was wrong. Something besides the obvious anyway. Something that went beyond the boundaries of sexual perversion and voyeurism. Like I’d mentioned before, her breasts were uncharacteristically covered up by her kimono, and as she held out a cup of coffee for me… a cup I couldn’t possibly take hold of while operating the crutches… she used her free hand to tighten both ends of the robe together in order to hide every trace of bear skin. As if modesty was now as important to her as breathing.

  I gestured for her to set the coffee cup on the table, and then I made the step up onto the deck, and sat myself down, leaning the crutches on the table beside me.

  “How is Susan?” she said, sitting down across from me.

  “She’ll live,” I said, John’s ugly round face flashing in and out of my brain. “That was some game we played last night.” Taking a sip of the still hot coffee. “Seems to me you and the husband have played it before.”

  She stared up and into the hot sun with those thick sunglasses shielding her eyes.

  “You have no idea. We’ve played a lot of games and to be honest, last night was one of the more tame experiences.”

  “Tame,” I said, cynically. “He put a fucking gun to my wife’s head.” Then, “Why’d you invite me over here?”

  “Calm down,” she said. “I’m only talking.”

  “Oh, so that’s what this is. You’re only talking. I should have known. Did you know that I now suspect that my wife is actually falling in love with you?”

  She grinned. “She told you that?”

  “No she hasn’t come out and said it,” I said. “But I have eyes, Lana.”

  “Why would she fall for me, Ethan? Do you think I’m her type?”

  “Is it your habit to send all the neighborhood women perfume and sexy underwear?”

  I might have mentioned the WhatsApp message on her phone. But then, I didn’t want her to have the satisfaction of my admitting to sneaking a quick look at it behind her back.

  She cocked her head, maintained that long stare up at the sun, as if the radiant heat that bathed her face and warmed her blood was never enough.

  “I’ve had girlfriends in the past. Some were in love. Other were in lust. I believe Susan falls into the latter category.” She licked her thick lips. “You’re not jealous, are you?”

  “Are the emotions of an enchanted if not bewitched human being categorical?”

  “There you go answering a question with a question again,” she said. She inhaled and exhaled. Then, “All things can be explained, until they can’t be explained or trying to explain them takes too much out of you…too much pain and sweat and blood.”

  “And anyway, who’d be willing to explain last night?” I posed with all the sarcasm and acid I could muster. “After all, a proper explanation might scare us to death. It would be one hell of a problem for all of us, now wouldn’t it?”

  For the first time since I sat down at the table, she pulled her face away from the sun, and locked her black-shielded eyes on me.

  “My husband is the problem, Ethan,” she said with a blunt coldness that made my spine shiver, like the sun had suddenly been shut off with a light switch. She removed her sunglasses then to reveal a black eye. “But I’m sure you’ve gathered that by now.”

  The fine hairs on the back of my neck perked up like the bristles on a frightened cat. There was something in her voice. This wasn’t the voice of a frustrated woman or a sad woman at her wits end. It was the frigid, mechanical, calm voice of a woman who was not just now plotting something, but who had been plotting it for a long time. And looking at that shiner, I couldn’t blame her one bit.

  “The gun thing was a dead giveaway,” I said. “Holding my wife at gunpoint while forcing her to perform sexual acts with a woman she hardly knows.”

  She slipped the sunglasses back on, picked up her coffee, drank some, then set it down again. After a beat, she raised up her hand, pointed to something beyond the fence.

  “Look,” she said.

  I turned.

  “You see that tree?” she went on. “The one that’s smaller than the others. The one that’s not a pine tree.”

  I noticed it. It was pretty much the only tree that wasn’t a pine, and it was partially full of leaves
, and there were a few pieces of fruit hanging from the crooked branches. Apples. Small, odd looking apples.

  “An apple tree,” I said. “What about it?”

  “This entire area was once an apple orchard,” she said. “But then, I suppose as a resident, you already know that. When I was a kid, I played here. In this very spot. I picked the apples, filled the bushels, helped my family sell them during the fall.”

  I was a bit shocked to hear what she was saying.

  “You grew up right here?” I said. “On Orchard Grove when it was a real apple orchard?”

  She nodded. “Orchard Grove was our family farm. Burns Apple Orchard. I was just twelve years old when my stepfather disappeared and the land was sold off, the apple trees cut down, and these houses built.”

  She was staring at the tree, but I could tell she was seeing something else instead. Something from her past that haunted her. A part of me wanted to ask her what she was seeing, but then another part of me insisted I keep my mouth shut. That whatever was running through her brain was not very pleasant, and perhaps even disturbing.

  “Yes,” she said, “I grew up on this land. This orchard was my home.”

  I felt a tightness in my throat and in my chest.

  “You’ve come back home,” I said.

  “That’s one way of putting it,” she said. “And that apple tree? It shouldn’t be here.”

  “I don’t understand. Why shouldn’t it? Maybe they didn’t cut them all down.”

  “They did cut them all. I was here. I watched them destroy all of the trees. I wanted them destroyed. I watched them burn. My mother watched it happen too. She held my hand, and we both watched until every single tree in the orchard was gone.”

  In my head I saw the tractors, saw the men with their chain saws cutting down the trees. I saw the wood being burned and I saw the charred barren land. I saw what Lana was seeing.

  “So why is the tree still here?” I asked.

  “Because it was cut down, but not killed. If you really want to kill something… kill it for good… you have to destroy it at its roots. Or else it will grow back. And when it does it will be distorted and ugly and so rotten inside you can’t even enjoy its fruit.”

  I gazed at the ugly, stunted apples. “Those apples are rotten, aren’t they?”

  “The tree is strangled by the roots of the other trees that have grown around it. The fruit doesn’t get enough nutrients from the ground, and it doesn’t get enough sun. The apples it produces are bitter and sour.”

  I shook my head.

  She refocused her gaze on me, picked up her coffee, drank some, then set it back down again. “Ethan,” she went on, “what would you say if I asked you to help me with something? Something very… well, let’s call it delicate and very illegal.”

  I don’t know why the question gave me reason to pause. After last night’s less than legal game, it shouldn’t have been any more shocking asking me if I preferred apple juice to orange.

  “There’d be a great deal of money in it for you, Ethan,” she added. “More than a great deal. Perhaps you could use it. Or is that pot garden keeping you flush?”

  The corners on her mouth rose up, giving her the look of someone who knew far more about me than I realized.

  I stole another sip of coffee.

  “I’m listening,” I said.

  She breathed in slowly, then exhaled even more slowly. She pulled her kimono tighter around her, as if a sharp chill just coursed through her veins.

  “I’m not entirely sure how to say this,” she said, her eyes once more focused on the sun. “So perhaps I should just come right out and say it.”

  I looked at her face, her eyes shielded by the sunglasses. Watched her lips move as I listened for the words.

  “I want John dead,” she said.

  The words might have come out as barely more than a whisper, but my ears were ringing, my head pounding, as if she’d gotten up from her chair and screamed in my ear.

  “Why are you telling me this?” I said, choking on my words.

  “Because I can’t do it on my own. I need your help, Ethan. And what’s more…”

  Her thought trailed off, until I said, “And what’s more what?”

  “And what’s more,” she repeated, “I know how much you’d like to see him dead too.”

  She uncrossed her arms, allowed her robe to open up again, just enough so that I could make out the smooth tan flesh in the space between her breasts. It was all I needed to feel my already boiling blood speed rapidly through my veins and capillaries. For my sex to grow hard as a rock. She was right, of course. I did want to see him dead. After what he’d done to Susan last night, and after what he’d done to me by making me watch, I wanted nothing more than to see him dead and gone.

  “What exactly did you have in mind, Lana?” I said.

  She said, “I’m going to invite you and Susan over for a barbeque tonight to make up for the craziness that went on last night at your house. It will be a way for us to say we’re sorry and no hard feelings.”

  “You don’t waste time,” I said.

  “It must be tonight or never.”

  “Why? Why tonight?”

  “Because John is going to kill me.”

  Pulse elevated. Throat constricted.

  “He’s going to kill me and make it look like an accident,” she went on.

  If it wasn’t for my foot, I would have shot up.

  “Let’s just fucking call the police right now,” I said. “He’s already hit you in the eye.”

  Her face went pale.

  “You don’t understand,” she cried. “He is the police. They will believe his story, no matter what. Even if they know he’s lying. And yes, even if he’s already hit me.”

  “I get it,” I said. “That’s the way the cops work in Albany. They serve and protect their own.”

  She nodded, wiped a tear from her face with the back of her hand.

  I said, “How do you know he’s going to kill you and why? I just assumed he was as much in love with you as I am.”

  “He knows I committed the worst sin a cop’s wife can possibly commit.”

  “I’m listening, Lana.”

  “I slept with his partner, Carl. And now he has no choice but to kill me.”

  News of her sleeping with Carl felt like a punch to the gut, even if I had suspected the truth all along. But I didn’t want to give away my emotions.

  “He wants to kill you purely out of revenge,” I said, trying my best to maintain a straight face.

  “No,” she said. “To save face.”

  We sat quiet for a moment, while the cicadas buzzed in the trees and our hearts beat.

  She added, “I overheard him on the phone… it must have been one of his minions. Someone he trusts. He asked the guy to come over to do one of his special ‘clean up jobs.’” She shuddered, delicately. “How many of those do you think he’s ordered?” She leaned forward, her eyes intent on mine. “At some point this afternoon he’s going to bring Carl over here so that all three of us can confront one another. It will be the final proof he needs to condemn and convict me, if you want to think of it that way. Then, tonight, before we go to bed, I’m to have an accident. I’m going to fall down the stairs. That’s how it’s going to look.”

  “And you’re sure this is planned for tonight?” A question for which I already knew the bloody answer.

  “Yes. So you see, Ethan, we must do it this evening before he has the chance to get at me first. No choice. We have no choice in the world.”

  I exhaled. “I see everything clearly now. You want my wife and I to come over so you can buy some time. But tell me something. What if Susan refuses to step foot back over here after what went down last night? What if she never wants to see John again?”

  “She’ll want to,” she said, wiping more tears from her face.

  “How can you be so sure I’ll help you?” I said, after a beat. “Is John’s murder really worth it?” />
  “You won’t have to lay a hand on him,” she said. “I have it all figured out. That’s the real reason why I need you and Susan to be here tonight. Don’t you see, Ethan? John is going to kill himself with a little help from his friends.”

  She’s certain the police did not get a good look at her, because as soon as the white lights broke through the tree cover, she slipped the cleaver into her leather bag, grabbed it by the strap, and put her high school sprinter abilities to the test. She turned and ran as fast as she could into the woods. At best they’ve captured the fleeting image of someone running away. Someone who’s wearing a hoodie and blue jeans. That’s as far as the description will go. They won’t even be sure if the person they witnessed running away is a man or a woman.

  She runs through the brush, the branches slapping her smooth face, stinging it, making blue eyes tear. She scoots down to the gravelly bank in order to heave the bag into the river, which she does. She then runs some more. But in her head, however, she knows that running is futile. That there are too many cops and she will never be able to outrun them all. She needs a hiding place. Needs it now.

  Soon she comes upon a concrete culvert that empties into the river. The aroma coming up from the culvert is most unpleasant. Like raw sewage combined with rotting food and toxic chemicals that must come from one of the refineries inside the adjacent Port of Albany.

  She stops in her tracks, stands perfectly still.

  Up ahead in the distance, she can make out the metal smoke stacks and big iron oil drums inside the port. She sees the flames spouting from out of the stacks of the refineries, sees the bright lights that illuminate the metal trucks and buildings that litter it behind a fence topped with razor wire. Listening carefully, she can make out not only the sounds of trucks, machines, and voices coming from the port, but also the much closer sound of the police as they smash through the brush on foot. They’re like human bulldozers. She’s convinced then that despite her speed, they’ve managed to keep up and now they are on her tail.