Orchard Grove (2 page)

She takes hold of the two-pound axe-like blade, feels its awesome solid weight in her hand. Feels its power. Cocking it back, she takes aim and swings.

But she’s not fast enough.

Her step-monster grabs hold of her forearm only a split second before the sharp steel touches the skin on his sweat and filth-covered neck. He squeezes her forearm like he’s trying to crush bone while digging his fingernails into her skin. Her hand opens and the cleaver drops to the ground, bouncing off an exposed tree root.

White-hot pain shoots throughout her body. She drops to her knees, screams.

Reaching down with his free hand, he grabs a fist full of T-shirt, rips it away from her chest, exposing two small breasts protected only by a flimsy white bra.

“Go ahead and scream,” he barks, the tears streaming from his poisoned eyes. “Not a soul can hear you.”

Pushing her onto her back, he takes a knee, unbuttons his pants, pulls them down. He then pulls her jean shorts down, pushing them past her knees. Positioning thick hands between her legs, he pushes them apart with all the ease of pulling apart a rotted log.

“Scream,” he insists. “I like it when you scream.”

He forces himself on her and she feels like her entire body will tear in two.

…
Patience, Lana… Be strong…

Reaching out with her right hand, she uses her fingertips to feel for the cold steel blade. She knows that in just a matter of a few seconds, the blade will find its home buried in the step-monster’s skull. Just believing that soon his blood will be spilling all over the orchard floor, makes the pain go away.

He thrusts himself at her like a rabid, wild animal. Rather than resist him, she concentrates only on retrieving the blade. It takes great effort to move the blade one micro inch at a time. But then suddenly, she finds the blade gripped between her index finger and thumb. That’s when she shifts the cleaver around so that she can once more grab hold of the wood handle.

The cleaver back in hand she does something that agitates the step-monster.

She smiles.

“Are you enjoying yourself?” he pants, his voice gravel-filled and coming from a place south of purgatory. “Maybe I’m not working hard enough.”

“Don’t be angry with me, daddy,” she says.

For a brief instant, he stops all movement. A single droplet of sweat falls from the tip of his nose to her pale lips. He shoots her a confused look like he’s suddenly been teleported to another planet.

“What the hell’s the matter with you?” he says.

“Please don’t be mad,” she says, swinging the meat cleaver around swiftly, burying the blade into the side of his head.

The cleaver impaled in his skull, his wet blue eyes wide open, staring down at her, he tries his best to speak. But all he can manage is to move his mouth without sound. He makes a gesture with his left hand, like he’s swatting at a mosquito that’s buzzing around his ear. Sliding out from under him, she bounds up onto her knees, pulls the blade out of his head, a stream of dark arterial blood spurting out of the wound. She could stop then, run home to her mother, call the police, explain everything to them.

But she does no such thing.

Instead she watches the blood pouring out of his head, and she watches his eyes rapidly blink and his mouth open and close like he’s begging her to be heard. That’s when she feels something come over her. A warmth that’s different from the sun’s radiation. More like the kind of warmth you feel when you set yourself down gently into a hot bath.

She’s no longer scared. Rather, she feels empowered. If this is what it’s like to play god, she loves it. She’s god about to enact her vengeance on the devil.

Taking aim, she positions the cleaver at the mid-point of his neck. Then, cocking the blade back as if her arm were a coiled spring, she swings it against his neck, impaling it halfway through the flesh, bone, and cartilage. The surprising thing is that he’s still balanced on his knees, his eyes still wide open, mouth still moving like a ventriloquist’s wooden dummy. Still trying to form words. Pulling the blade back out like it were an axe buried in a wood stump, she takes one more swipe at the neck, this time severing the head.

The head falls to the ground, rolls until a couple of rotten apples prevent it from rolling any farther. Peering down at the head, she’s surprised to see that the expression planted on her step-monster’s face is not one of fear or surprise, but more like confusion. As if he’s perfectly aware that his head is no longer attached to his body, and he has no idea how it got that way.

Her eyes locked on his wide open eyes, she’s never felt more satisfied in her life.

She’s happy.

After she’s dressed herself and cleaned herself up as best she can, she calmly makes the half-mile walk back through the orchard to her white farmhouse. In the garage she finds a spade and a pickaxe. Waiting until dark, she heads back to the spot in which the step-monster lies in two separate pale pieces and she proceeds to bury him beneath the apple tree.

It will take some time, but she’s seen enough episodes of
Hawaii Five-O
to know that sooner than later, he will be considered a missing person by the Albany Police Department. But she will always know the truth. His body will always reside beneath this tree while his soul rots in hell.

Later on, when the farm is sold for a new subdivision to be called, appropriately enough, Orchard Grove, all the trees will be cut down to make way for dozens of the cutest little cookie-cutter houses you ever did see. But one tree will grow back, its limbs distorted and ugly, its fruit rotten, poisoned, and inedible.

It will be a tree only Satan could grow.

I
started watching Lana Cattivo two months ago through my master bedroom window. You know the one what I’m talking about. The slider window that’s located at the top of a seven foot exterior bearing wall and that’s hell to open and close when it gets too hot outside and this thirty-six- year-old house warps and expands. The kind of slider window that seemed modern and hip back in the 1970s when the ranch house was constructed for twenty thousand dollars along with dozens of identical houses on what had been a pristine upstate New York apple orchard.

Thus the name, Orchard Grove.

The funny thing is, by the time I got around to buying this house, the twenty grand price tag had shot up to three hundred K. By no means a financial stretch for a somewhat successful Hollywood scriptwriter. Or so I assumed at the time. But now that it’s in foreclosure, I’ve had no choice but to glue myself to my typewriter and hope for a sale of David Fincher or Angelina Jolie proportions.

It wasn’t the writing part that had been hard for me lately, but the selling part. Seems I couldn’t sell a script to my own mother if she were still alive, even if I put a knife to her neck and started slowly sawing. But as for the writing? Well the writing was still coming out okay.

Correction… the writing
had been
coming out okay, until recently that is.

Until she moved in on June first.

The beautiful, blonde drink-of-water who moved in directly next door to my wife, Susan and me on Orchard Grove, as if this were the only place on God’s great earth she could have possibly moved to.

Here’s how I’d watch her.

I’d position myself directly to the left of a queen-sized bed that faced the east since Susan insisted a bed should always face the rising sun, and that by nine in the morning would be empty and made up with a blue satin bedspread and non-allergenic pillows covered in matching cases. With all the lights turned off in the bedroom on a bright sunny day like the kind we’ve enjoyed all summer long, no one could possibly see inside my bedroom from the outside, even with the shades wide open. The sun coming out of the east would create a glare that would blind anyone on the outside trying to look in.

At least, that’s what I thought at the time.

I had it all down to a science. If I positioned myself with my aluminum crutches far enough away from the surface of the slider window, I could see her without worrying for an instant that she, in turn, could see me watching her. Problem was, all too often I could make out my reflection in the window. The unkempt hair, the three-day facial growth, the almond-shaped eyes, and a slightly crooked nose that I broke during a high school football kickoff return. No one wants to see their own face looking back at them when secretly staring out the window at a beautiful woman.

Sad truth is, I was housebound then, which sort of made spying on her easier since I wasn’t able to go outside very often and risk a run-in with her. You see, I’d just turned fifty, and years of football, jogging, hiking, weight lifting, had taken its toll on my feet. Not all scriptwriters are sedentary sloths who eat three-hour lunches with famous directors and spend the rest of the day bellied up to the bar. Some scriptwriters prefer to be men of action. But that action had caught up with me down in the jungles of Peru where I’d travelled late last year on my dime to research what I hoped would be my new movie. The movie that would re-launch Ethan Forrester’s career, even if he no longer lived in Hollywood, the land of broken dreams and shattered contracts…“Don’t call us, we’ll call you, fuck you very much.”

But it was a script I would never get around to writing now that Lana had moved in next door. Her sudden presence in my life turned out not to be a distraction, but instead an obsession. A half-naked and beautiful obsession.

But allow me to back up a bit.

Because, let’s be real here. An obsession isn’t something that just pops up overnight like a boil on your ass cheek. An obsession takes time. It requires slow simmering. It needs to sprout and grow like a sapling into a sturdy tree with a healthy root system and leaves on the branches. It needs constant feeding and watering or it will die an early death. That said, maybe the right move for me would have been to cut off the food supply to my ever growing obsession which, of course, was none other than my watching her through the window. Maybe the right thing to do would have been to simply stop, concentrate on something else. Like a new script for instance.

It didn’t help that my wife Susan had already gotten somewhat acquainted with Lana, having run into her at her local P90X workout class the two take together. Susan even carpooled with Lana. Since we’re spilling truths here, I’ll even admit that I got a special kick out of watching them get into Lana’s red convertible, the two of them wearing not much more than workout shorts and bikini tops. One brunette and the other blonde. With their sunglasses on, they looked years younger. Like a couple of college sorority girls heading for the beach.

On more than one occasion since the Cattivo’s moved in, Susan offered to introduce me to Lana, but considering the condition I was in, I steadfastly declined. I just wasn’t myself any longer. My surgery had thrown me for a loop, and weeks of being off my feet made me feel fat, old, and insignificant. Not an easy thing to swallow for a man who was used to running three miles per day and training with weights for five out of the seven days.

Plus I smelled.

I hardly ever showered or bathed, and it was a struggle to work up the enthusiasm to shave. It didn’t help that I hadn’t sold a script in months… Okay, scratch that… hadn’t sold a script in years. Or that our house was in foreclosure proceedings, or that Susan who’d only recently entered full force into a new body-changing exercise regimen worthy a Navy Seal, was in the process of becoming a chiseled statue and just as hard. While her life changed for the better, mine seemed to know no bottom, as if in slicing open my foot and inserting four permanent screws, I’d allowed my life, my talent, and my confidence to spill out onto the floor.

There were other issues to contend with… issues that kept me from being formally introduced to the woman I watched in secret through the window. The main issue being that I’d become reacquainted with the bottle, so to speak. The bottle helped me out on two fronts. First, it helped me forget the physical pain that seemed a constant companion. And second, it helped fill the void left behind when I found I was far too occupied with Lana’s presence to even type the words, “Fade in.”

So I guess you could say the booze became like a friend to me after she moved in and all I wanted to do with my time was stand by that bedroom window, crutches holding me up, my brown eyes staring out onto the most angelic sight you ever did see living and breathing on Orchard Grove.

And sure, the liquor helped me cope with the guilt. Guilt that accompanied looking at her for even a few seconds. It wasn’t just an invasion of her privacy. It was just plain wrong, and I knew it. Still, I found myself glued to that window while everything else around me seemed to fall apart. In all honesty, it made me feel good to look at her. Made me feel like I was still a man and that all the old private parts still worked.

It was the opposite of how I felt when Susan would return home from work or her P90X class. When she’d take a good look at me, a double bourbon gripped in hand, no pages typed on the typewriter, a three day growth sprouting on my face, she’d simply shake her head in disgust (or disappointment which was worse) and silently walk away.