F Wilson - Deep as the Marrow

“They don’t know we’re coming?” Poppy’s stomach was cinched into a double granny knot as she looked around. Trees. Nothing but trees and sand and scrub brush… and a path leading away through the brush.

“How was I supposed to let them know?”

“You didn’t—?” She stopped herself. She’d been about to say something about calling them, but remembered there were like no phone lines out here. No electricity, no running water, either. “Never mind.”

She carried Katie along the path, keeping close behind her uncle. At least the light was better now. The cloudless sky was turning a pale blue as the path moved onto an upslope. Going to be another beautiful sunny day.

“Are these more uncles we’re visiting?” Katie said.

“Oh, no,” Poppy told her. “I’m not related to—”

“ ‘Course you are,” Uncle Luke said.

“Well, sure,” she said, wishing her uncle would shut up. “Everybody in the pines is related one way or another. I meant—”

“No, these are real kin. My great-grandfather Samuel— your great-great-grandfather—married off his sister Anna to Jacob Appleton way back when. These folk are your cousins.” Poppy wanted to kick her uncle in the butt. Damn! Why’d he have to go and say that sort of stuff in front of Katie? She didn’t want the little thing to know she shared blood with the Appletons.

Suddenly Uncle Luke stopped and Poppy bumped into his back.

“Hello to the house!” he called.

Poppy jumped as a voice shouted from no more than ten feet to their left. “Who the hell’s out here so goddamn early in the mornin‘?”

“It’s me—Luke Mulliner. I got my niece Poppy with me, and she’s got a little one with her.” A grizzled-looking guy who could have been sixty or could have been eighty, skinny as the scrub pine he’d been hiding behind, stepped into the open. He held his shotgun ready while he gave them the once over.

And Poppy gave him her own once-over. His overalls were worn through in spots—so fashionable in Soho, but this was the real thing. He wore worn sneakers with no socks, and his ankles were filthy. His hands weren’t much better. His left eye seemed to be stuck looking at his nose while his gray hair shot from his scalp in tufts. His back was bent and twisted, which made him lean forward and to the right.

She remembered this Appleton from when she was a little girl, even though almost everything about him had changed. Everything except his tongue. He kept licking his lips. Every two or three seconds his beefy red tongue would zip out and run along his lips, then disappear. Poppy remembered that tongue.

“Yeah,” he said finally. “You look like a Mulliner.”

“And you’re Lester, aren’t you?” Uncle Luke said. “I haven’t been out here for a while.”

“That’s right,” Lester said, lowering the shotgun. He didn’t offer to shake. “C’mon. I’ll take you up the house.” He eyed the jug dangling from Uncle Luke’s finger.

“Here for some jack?”

“Yep. Been a while since I had some and I miss it.”

“It’s awfully good, ain’t it.”

“That it is.”

Poppy remembered stealing some of her dad’s stock of applejack when she was a teenager. Powerful stuff— Jersey lightning. And no one made better applejack than the Appletons. Matter of fact, she’d been high on Appleton applejack when she and Charlie did it and conceived Glory.

But that wasn’t the Appletons’ fault.

Another hundred yards uphill and they came to a large clearing hazed with blue-white woodsmoke, and sprawled in its center… the house.

Poppy stopped and stared as it all came back to her.

The house… the crazy Appleton house.

It looked like it might have started out as like a oneroom shack. Then somebody must have added a shed to one end, and then maybe an extra room to the other, then an extension on to the shed, and so on… and so on…

That was because as the Appleton kids grew up, they didn’t move away, they just like added a section for themselves. Poppy guessed that if the Appletons had been some rich and respectable clan like the Kennedys, this sort of thing would be called a compound.

But this was no compound—this was a… sprawl. A sprawl with lots of galvanized pipe acting as chimneys, and all those chimneys smoking. The place looked like they’d built it out of whatever scrap material they could find with little or no thought to matching it with what they’d used before. No section looked like it was any kin to any of the other sections nuzzling up against it. Corrugated metal nailed to marine plywood abutting particle board and cedar shakes. Roofs of genuine shingles, vinyl siding, sheet metal, or old rugs and linoleum tacked over wooden slats.

The hide of a deer was tacked to one wall; and over to the right, three dead rabbits hung head down from a clothesline. She turned Katie slightly so she wouldn’t see them and ask what had happened to Bambi and Peter Cottontail.

The Appletons had lived here as long as anyone could remember. All of them. Nobody left, and nobody new was allowed in. And that meant that with no outsiders to choose from, you had to like pair off with somebody who was a pretty damn close relation. Which was why a lot of the Appletons tended to be soft in the head and look the way they did.

“Company, everybody!” Lester shouted. “Companeeee!” And then they started coming out. The men in dirty shirts and jeans or work pants, the women in stained housedresses, hardly any shoes on anyone, and the bare feet as tough as shoe leather and just as brown. Some folks with no hair and misshapen skulls, some heads too big, some way too small, some with pure white skin and hair and pink eyes, some looking pretty normal at first glance, but a second look telling you that not all the circuits were making contact inside. And the kids… some of them were running in endless circles while others sat and rocked… and rocked… and others just stared.

Poppy felt Katie’s arms tighten around her neck in a fearful strangle-hold.

“I want to go h-home,” she whimpered. “I want my Daddy.” And deep in her breaking heart Poppy knew that had to be. Katie couldn’t stay here—couldn’t stay anywhere with Poppy. Maybe it had been all the fear and stress and near panic, maybe it had been the heat, but for a crazy time yesterday she’d really thought she could keep Katie. Now she knew that was impossible. Too many people were looking for them. She wanted what was best for Katie, and a life on the run wasn’t it.

“I know you do, honey bunch. And I’ll see that you get back to him. As soon as it’s safe.” They’d stay here today—just today, but not overnight. No way overnight. Maybe Uncle Luke could go back to Sooy’s Boot and find the feds… make sure they were real feds, and help her like cut a deal.

Yeah. That could work. She’d saved Katie’s life—two, maybe three times—and took good care of her. Why couldn’t she get a suspended sentence and like some sort of protective custody in return?

Hell, even a short jolt in a federal joint would be better than moving in with the Appletons.

2

Dan Keane had barely seated himself behind his desk when Decker called.

Please let this be good news, he thought, knowing that good news for him would be quite different than for Decker.

Dan so desperately wanted this nightmare over. Another call had come from Salinas last night, telling him about a tape that Poppy Mulliner had, a tape that would topple the entire house of cards. And then he was demanding phone numbers and call frequencies, and when Dan asked why, he was told not to worry about it, just do as he was told.

“Just do as you’re told…” Carlos Salinas speaking that way to him! Giving Dan Keane orders. Just two days ago that would have been unthinkable!