by Lynn Cesar
All the photos were of corpses, some new, some older.
She tilted the cannon again and drained this glass in a breath.
They were battle-dead to judge by one, a skull that still had its leathery skin and a collapsed tunic, with shoots and sprouts poking out of it like arrows and darts that had found their mark. Another sandbar shot showed a more recent death, a man sunk sideways, one reaching arm exposed, the open mouth, like a swimmer’s taking a breath, half full of sand. Had died when the river was in flood, it seemed.
She thumbed through them, nearly a score of them. She stopped at a group-shot of living soldiers, posed in fatigues, backgrounded by palm trees. Jack Fox’s platoon or company or whatever, because there he was, at the end of the front row of crouching men. It struck her at once he was older than most of the others. He had a grave, refusing face, giving the camera only so much. In his forehead, above the juncture of his brows, there was a slight knot. An inward grappling— even then— with some dark problem.
Susan lifted her face from the photos. Her will had ratcheted tight to the pitch of pure certainty. This Unclean chamber cried out to God for the flames.
She tipped some valedictory inches from the cannon and caught a flash of detail from the intricate carving around its spout. She leaned close, tilting the spider-fine web of incisions against the light. All at once, the pattern surfaced from the weave.
It was a dragon, sinuous, exquisitely scaled, circling the spout. Its tail did not quite meet its grossly fanged jaws, but both were buckled to the same human victim. The jaws engulfed the head and shoulders of a naked woman. The tail looped to present its dragon loins frontally and copulated with its meal.
With a hiss of outrage, as if scalded, Susan reached down to her side, uncapped the gas can, and toppled it on the floor. As she straightened again, she found the cannon suddenly quite near her face. She looked down its spout. And the crystal cannon, for just a nanosecond, was a pouncing insect, its crook-legs like diamond razors flexing, stabbing its crystal proboscis deep into Susan’s neck. She became a nova of blinding white light, became a spike of pain driven home by a wrecking ball… .
And she was stumbling, falling, scrabbling on the floor for her cane, then flailing it, in a frenzy to get up on her legs.
An utter drunkenness had descended on her. The whole earth lagged massively out of sync with her least movement. Wherever terror thrust her— and she was purely terror now— her movement was too soon, or too late, to stay in plumb with universal gravitation.
There was the gaping door— a big hole she could pitch through, out into the night, out of here. Her left shoulder collided with the frame and she toppled around it. Somewhere between the door and her car, the cane fell away, because it ceased to matter. She made the car, fell inside, found the keys’ dangle, and twisted.
At the car’s first forward surge, Susan felt a remote burst of hope, but as the floodlit trees roared past on either side, understood she had not yet escaped, that this earth under her wheels and the green deformities that sucked their lives from it, were all him, were Jack Fox. That she was not yet emerged from his body, his will, and that she had taken his poison inside her.
She was staggeringly, metronomically drunk, toppling left and right, upright only on the average; the car plunging in and out of the deep ruts, but— veering— she just managed to keep the wheels in the lane. The tires shrilled, trailing a plume of dust like a darker night on her tail.
Here, dear God, was the house at last, almost out, almost out. She watched its shadowed gables skim past, a woman she loved in there, a woman she had to abandon to save her own life… and she was within seconds of saving it now, there were the gateposts, the whale’s lips, gaping ahead, and escape just beyond. The gravel drive sizzled and snapped under her tires.
Keep it floored.
She almost didn’t make the turn onto the highway, fought back and forth, came screaming out of a fishtail… and then she was on the swift asphalt, the river of escape, pedal to the metal, salvation-bound.
Out of nowhere, headlights head-on, two great suns filling her windshield. There was an impact so total it knocked her body right out of her.
Not much of her left, after. Heard something far away… the boom and clatter of steel… .
X
Karen awoke alone in the sleeping bag. Out the window was the gray before sunrise and a thin, milky mist hazing the plum trees.
She lay a long time, remembering last night’s lovemaking. Feeling defeated, but then feeling something hopeful, too. Could begin to imagine, with Susan’s sweet persistence, a cozy sunlight place for them, quiet mornings of love fulfilled.
She rose and pulled on her jeans. “Susan?” she called, tying her shoes.
And heard the gravel crackling out on the drive. Where could Susan be coming back from at this hour? She opened the front door. Susan’s car was gone. A patrol car coming around the bend.
Karen knew right then, really, but at that point could still refuse to know, could step out onto the porch, brusque and puzzled, come down the steps as the car’s door opened, displaying the county shield. She was expecting Marty Carver to emerge, but confronted a thicker brute with a waxed flat-top and a broad, bullock’s nose.
“What’s going— ”
“I’m Officer Babcock, Miss. Are you Karen Fox?”
“Yes, what’s— ”
“Are you acquainted with a Miss Susan Kravnik of San Francisco?”
“Oh, Jesus, what’s happened to Susan?”
“Are you acquainted with her?”
“What the fuck do you think, you moron? You know I am or you wouldn’t be here!”
But the man was implacable, indulging his hate— with a straight face— simply by refusing to omit a single step.
“Did Miss Kravnick have a rental? A new red Mitsubishi?”
“Yes, she did.” Knowing the truth past all hope now, but still desperately bargaining with it, telling herself she didn’t know, not yet.
“We need you to come down to the County Coroner’s office to confirm the identity of her body.”
You could feel him, behind his straight face, loving that. An under-thug, this guy, but surely prepped by Marty Carver. For a moment, her hate of him and of Marty insulated her and held off the pain and the horror… .
But then the hate blew away like smoke and she was left with it: Susan was dead.
* * * *
Harst poured Marty, and himself, a brandy. “So how have you been feeling, Mr. Assistant Chief Deputy?”
Marty didn’t answer. He had been in the office ten minutes and hadn’t yet sat down, had paced, had opened the inner door to the morgue and wandered around in there. Harst had followed him around with his eyes, enjoying the mismatch between the man’s deep ignorance and the stoically masterful persona he tried to project. A tall, lean drink of water— Harst conceded he was cute. Recalled with pleasure hurling the man across the floor. A few years ago, he might have raped him too, just to teach him respect for his elders. It would have been a fitting ceremony for Jack’s interment, but Harst was eighty now and it had seemed too much like work. Were his own final hours indeed approaching?
“I asked you a question, Carver.”
You could see Marty didn’t want to spill the beans about the premonitions of strength he had been feeling in the last two days, but that, like the punk he was, he also craved to gloat. He said off-handedly, “I might have something for you, maybe next week.” This was their code for a cadaver that had to be legitimized by the Medical Examiner’s Office.
“Oh, Marty, you randy scamp! It’s like elixir, isn’t it? And so it begins. So what’s your assessment? Is Karen going to stay on?”
“My feeling is, she will. She really hates us.”
“That surprises you? She will indeed stay. Rage and guilt will hold her there. Her squeeze-box died there, and of her disease, of drink. Would that be her now? I hear the rhino tread of Babcock.”
A knock at the outer
door, and there was Babcock, bulkily presiding over Karen’s entry. “Thank you, officer,” said Harst. “We’ll call you when she’s ready to go home. Close the door, dear, please. Sit there. I think we could all use a drink.” He set Marty’s glass by his and brought out a third. Filled all three, studying Karen under the cover of a condoling smile.
How well Harst knew that stunned slump of bereavement! She had her mother’s gold-and-brown coloring, but her father’s beauty, the lathed cheekbones, the jaw more delicately sculpted but just as unrelenting. Her body was stunned, but not her gray eyes studying Harst and Marty in turn, hate like a smoke in those eyes, looking down at the three shots of brandy and back up at Harst. “Smells like apricot,” she said. Her voice, gritty from long silence, was almost Jack’s voice. It made Harst falter in his answer.
“It’s Jack’s… it’s your father’s, of course. You know he was my dearest friend, the man who saved my life. When I drink his brandy, I commemorate my love for him, as well as my tenderness for his daughter. You’ve had two unbearable bereavements, Karen. I’m deeply concerned for your state of mind.”
“You mean my sanity?” A mocking challenge here. He had not expected this alertness in her, this… accusation. He did want to probe her sanity, had hoped, thinking to find her helpless and afraid, that she might blurt out something not sane she had lately experienced and thereby pass on to him a sign, a message from Jack. She had picked up her glass and studied it before he could frame his answer.
“The kind of grief you must be suffering has nothing to do with sanity, Karen.”
She ignored him. “Marty? Whaddya think? Should I knock back this hooch? Susan died with her blood running two-point-eight, according to Officer Ape.” This with a bright smile and batted lashes.
“I’m not sure what you’re asking.” Marty a little blustery. “A drink in moderation, to calm you down… .”
“No offense, Marty,” she smiled, “but you’re such a moron. You boys want to stand me a drink— how not? Okay. I’d like us to drink, not just to Susan, but to my father. I know you two loved him like a father. Maybe more than a father.” She paused, her gaze lingering on Harst. Saw pure poison glow in his lens-smeared eyes. She had guessed! “Such a man as Jack Fox,” she intoned, “is not erased by death!”
The two men drank and Karen knocked hers back, thrust out the glass. “Hit me again, Doc.” Slammed that one back, held out the glass again. “Three’s the charm, and not so stingy, Doctor.”
She stood up when she’d drunk this and slammed the glass down. “This the morgue through here?” She led them out.
Marty’s eyes questioned Harst, who shrugged. He limped quickly into the lead, brought them to the drawer, unlatched and slid it out. Kravnik, Susan. Severe spinal and thoracic damage… .
It took Karen’s eyes a long time to receive the catastrophic wreckage. She stood witnessing it, withstanding it. Then bent down to kiss her face, eerily lovely and undamaged above the broken ruin of torso and limbs. “Seems I’m always doing this,” she said in a small voice to herself. And then, to Harst, “That’s Susan.”
She turned and walked back towards the office, then slowed and turned again. “Did I understand right? You don’t know who she hit?”
“Not yet,” said Marty. “It had to be a head-on— her car was found mid-road, crushed in half. The other vehicle was apparently able to drive away. It had to be something big. Naturally we’ve got everyone alerted for a truck or semi with frontal damage.”
“Naturally. Tell Officer Ape I need to pick up supplies on the way out of town. I’m done here.”
* * * *
As Babcock slid back out the drive, Karen carried her forty-ouncer of Green Death— half empty now— over to the rim of the orchard. Stood looking at those six trimmed and picked trees, their litters of twigs on the weeds around them. There she had worked at Susan’s side, just yesterday. Could almost hear the echoes of their voices in those trees… .
Susan was up in the Boys’ Club now, up in the Monkey House. Was now the wholly-owned property of the he-chimps. Up there where everything was locks and keys, guns, paperwork, brandy, and smugly lying looks of sympathy.
When Harst poured her that drink, she’d almost slapped it from his hand and spat out in their faces all Dad’s crimes against her. But they already knew! Their postures confessed it when she first walked in, the comfy way they watched her, sure of her, a victim, a psychological wreck already in their pockets. They thought they’d made her drink. She’d done it. Stepped willingly back in the trap that she’d let Susan step into for her. Poor, tender Susan. The chimps had her now. In a drawer.
Here she stood, all at once alone in the world. It gave her a flying, snatched-by-the-wind feeling, the way that first drink in Harst’s office had felt. A wild letting go, an inner yes to the rage that was all she had protecting her from her grief. She had no reason to be careful any more. If anything, she owed Susan a death.
Yesterday had seemed almost summer, but this afternoon was wholly autumn, golden blue and chill, with a promise of night mists and shivers. Chug-chug goes the rest of the ale and smash goes the bottle against a trunk. She went into the house to get her old canvas coat from her duffle bag.
A drink back in town would be cheery, the 8-Ball, perhaps. But it would be wise for a single damsel to have some security at such a rowdy place. Hmmm. What would be appropriate for the 8-Ball in the fall? Why not Dad’s .357 Smith here? It worked just fine, when the ammo was live. And here was a fifty-count box right in the same drawer! She thumbed in the six rounds, snugly planted seeds, and planted the Smith in one of the coat’s roomy side pockets, with nary a bump showing, for all the piece’s brute heft.
* * * *
The 8-Ball was both spacious and richly dark. The light was dim even at the bar. She took the most separate available stool— one stool away from a guy in a leather sports coat on the left and the same clearance on her right from two grizzled men— the nearer badly needing a shave— both of them in suspenders and worn flannel shirts sweated under the arms.
The old bartender, his wattled face sagging towards hound-dog, aimed at her shifty eyes that Karen still recognized: her first-grade pal Shelly’s dad, Earl Sodder. “Hi, Mr. Sodder! Recognize me? Old Jack Fox’s daughter?”
“Karen. Real sorry about your dad.”
“Well, it turns out you can help, Mr. Sodder. A double Jack Daniels and a water back!”
As Sodder set it up, the bristlier suspendered man turned toward his friend. Karen heard, “… California pervert… ”
She turned her stool to face him and addressed him brightly. “You’d be Jessie Rangle, wouldn’t you? Sheep-rancher out on Vine Creek. Midge Adams’ mom, Carla, she’s your neighbor.” This brought him around. He had a long chin, like an oversized gnome’s, and tiny chips of gray eyes webbed in his sunburned squint-lines. He didn’t hide his scorn, but showed his curiosity foremost. Karen, still smilingly: “Did you know old Jack Fox? Did you fear him?” She surprised herself with this second question… then watched it pay off. The troll-face contracted slightly, as if recalling a foul taste. The man blinked.
“The reason I ask,” she enthused, “is that I viewed his remains. And oh, dear lord! The mess that buckshot made of my poor daddy’s skull! The whole top was gone! I’m here to tellya that I, for one, have the greatest respect for high-impact gunshot wounds. Look here. Case in point.” With unthinking expertise, she drew the Smith and set it on the bar. “See, I’m a woman alone, an orphan now. But praise Jesus, my daddy taught me to use guns real good! Do you know what I could do to the skull of any scum-sucker I didn’t like who stepped his sorry, saggy ass onto my property? Why lordy-lordy! I could spray his redneck face across a full five acres of Daddy’s plum trees!” Smiling and batting her eyelashes, leaning closer across the intervening stool, she said this.
A strangely peaceful silence followed, as if a golden moment of accord, of understanding, had settled on the room. The big-chinned rancher Jessie Ra
ngle gazed at her as if she’d just hummed a melody that wakened poignant memories.
“’Ey. Karen,”— this from her left—”come sitta table wit’ me, come on.”
The man in the leather sports coat with the garish dye-job— was Mr. Fratelli. Pocketing the Smith, she knocked back her drink. “Why not? I didn’t recognize you, Mr. Fratelli.”
“You bring us the same to our table, eh, Earl?” He laid a twenty on the bar. Outside of his store, it appeared that Mr. Fratelli had an expanded public personality: the leather coat and slacks of costly-looking shimmery gray stuff like mob guys wore in movies, an inch or two piled up on the shoes due to his short legs. When Earl brought their drinks to the table, Fratelli said, “Keep da change!” with a grand wave.
“Karen,” gravely, leaning close, “you got good dirt out there. T’ree hunnerd t’ousand.”
Expanded, indeed. How long had it been now? Working the store in his apron, but on off hours, in his slick leather coat, buying whole properties. “Do you buy much land, Mr. Fratelli, or is it only my Dad’s you want?”
“Huh! You be surprised, the lan’ I own! But you got good dirt.”
She wanted to see farther into this new Fratelli. “Well, current economy and all, that’s a possible price for a hundred acres of trees. But that leaves out the house. A classic two-story whatever, good for a hundred more years. In California some wine-yuppie would pay a million. Even out here, another four hundred K for the house.”
“I don’ wan’ the house, I wan’ the dirt. I only pay you for dat. Move the house you wanna, take it witchoo.”
“What would you do with it if I just left it there?”
“Tear it down an’ sell the wood.”
“Is that because you’re afraid of it?”
He sat looking at her, not unpleasantly. “Karen. You ask me that… why you stayin’ there?”
“I have things to do there.” She stood up.
