My son comes back. I feel him at my side. I glance at the shadow the sun throws in front of us and look quickly up at the sky when I see the apple’s silhouette, the round fruit impaled on the stick like something from the dark ages.
I hope my son doesn’t notice how fidgety I’ve become. I want him to live a normal life. I want him to grow up healthy. Isn’t that the hope of every father?
He takes a bite and I hear the squish of his teeth in the apple’s pulp. As the nausea builds in me, the world swivels on one big spindle, and I can’t help but turn to look.
His face is covered with blood.
He takes another bite and I feel the world falling out from under me.
More blood spurts from the apple, splattering his chin, his neck, drenching his yellow tee-shirt with it.
He looks up at me. Smiling. Chewing.
I swat the thing from his hands, a good hard smack so it goes flying and smashes against an overflowing trash can. I gulp air, ignoring the stares from passersby, watching the apple as it falls stickily down the side of the trash can, leaving a snail trail of clotting fluid.
I look at my son. His eyes brim with tears, his mouth quivers.
There is nothing on his face. No blood. Nothing on his shirt, his chin. A few pieces of caramel but that is all.
“Sorry,” I mumble. I hate to lie to my son, but feel I have to in order to protect him. “Saw a worm. You almost bit into it.”
He’s still stunned, my words only beginning to register.
“I kind of over-reacted didn’t I?” I give him a chuckle. “Jeez, sorry Will. Didn’t mean to get you too.”
He accepts this with a nod. Looks back at the perfectly good caramel apple laying at the foot of the trash can, trying to see the worm I claimed was there.
“Can I get another one?”
“Shoot. That was my last couple bucks. I think it’s time to go home now. Mom’s going to be wondering why we’re taking so long.”
I put my arm around him. Ruffle his hair. Even as things are okay again between us, I think I see a small drop of blood on the corner of his lips. I ignore it. Look away.
II.
“Davy, I don’t know what to do. I can’t live like this. It’s eating me alive.”
My brother Spencer’s words only two days ago.
“I came so close to telling someone.”
I speak quietly into the phone. “But you didn’t.”
“I came so close, Davy. I even got in the car. Turned on the engine. I sat there in the garage. Even thought about shutting the garage door, and—”
“Don’t talk like that. You hear me, Spence? Don’t say things like that.”
“I gotta tell someone.”
“You can’t.”
“I have to.”
I hear him breathing on the other end. “I’m coming down there. I’ll be there tomorrow.”
I picture him shaking his head, the receiver pressed into his forehead.
“Spence? You hear me? I’m coming down. We’ll work through this. Okay?”
There’s one more sigh, then, “Yeah. Okay. Sure.”
III.
Spencer first told me about the Apple Tree Man when we were kids. It was the middle of October. I was twelve, Spencer fourteen. His friends, Paul and Jack, rode their bikes alongside of us down the gravel road to Nathan Hench’s farm. Hench owned a dozen acres of field corn, a few scrawny dairy cows, and two rows of apple trees.
Paul was short for his age, with a full head of black, curly hair. He often had bruises on his arm from where his dad hit him. Jack was thin and ropy; always on the move. Even when sitting, his limbs were in constant motion. Jack was Spencer’s best friend.
My brother Spence — what can I say about him? He was my brother, and I’ll always love him. That’s all you need to know about him.
It was dark. We wore sweaters, could see our breath wisp past us as we pedaled. We slowed at Hench’s long dirt driveway. Saw him within the golden glow of his kitchen sitting at a table, tending to a brown whiskey bottle. We heard the barking of a far-off dog. The wind rustled through the apple trees, carrying the faint scent of manure. We dropped our bikes at the side of the driveway, skirted around a barbed wire fence ’til we faced the side of an old barn.
We stepped through the fence. Paul and I held our backpacks open as Spencer and Jack plucked ripe apples and loaded us up.
When the backpacks were full, we pushed aside the dead and fallen apples beneath one of the trees and sat there, each sinking our teeth into the fruit. Nothing tastes as good as an apple picked right from the branch. They were crisp; felt good on the teeth. We licked the cold juice that dribbled down our chins, wiped our faces with the sleeves of our sweaters.
“You ever hear about the Apple Tree Man?” Spencer asked between bites.
We shook our heads.
“You’re supposed to leave the last apple of the season for him or else you’ll have a bad crop the next time around.”
“Yeah, right,” Paul said.
Jack threw his apple core at him. “Did you hear the story about the time I fucked your mama?”
Our laughter was cut off by the slam of a screen door. We looked toward the house and saw the silhouette of a man. The beam of a flashlight jerked violently among the trees.
“Who’s out there?” Mr. Hench coughed up something from his throat and spit it on the ground. “I said who’s out there?”
We scrambled to the fence. The beam of his flashlight caught us.
“Stop,” he said. “I got a gun.”
We didn’t stop. We’d gone through this before. Yes, he had a gun. We’d seen it; a WWII standard Army issue revolver. But it was just old Mr. Hench. He wasn’t going to shoot at a bunch of kids.
We scrambled through the fence.
“Goddamn it!”
We heard the strain in his voice. We stopped and turned. He stood on the other side of the apple trees, the beam of his flashlight pointed to the ground. He was doubled over, his breathing harsh and asthmatic. The smell of whiskey drifted toward us.
I know we should’ve left him alone. I know we should’ve hopped on our bikes and rode away into the night. But something about Mr. Hench brought out the worst in us that night. His vulnerability was a fuse to our anger.
Jack threw first. The core of his apple hit Hench in the knee. Paul reached through the barbed wire fence and grabbed a soft brown apple from the ground. His throw was perfect. The apple hit Hench in the forehead.
Hench lifted a hand in front of his face. “Stop it! Stop it, now!”
Spencer and I found our own rotten apples to throw.
Hench turned away as one after the other, the apples hit their mark. “You’re hurting me!” Hench fell to his knees. Crawled toward his screen door. “Please stop. Please.”
We kept throwing, whooping when they exploded across his back, laughing when they broke upon his skull.
He dragged himself to the screen door and fell inside, the door slamming shut behind him.
We kept throwing. At the windows, the door, at the rusty old pick-up sitting in the long dirt driveway. We threw until our arms ached. Until the laughter, the adrenaline left us and all that remained was the feel of the moon, bright and sharp in our eyes.
As the days passed, the legend of the Apple Tree Man grew. He became a skeletal old thing that lived in the canopies of apple trees, a skinny old pervert waiting in the cold autumn nights for children to pass below. He’d reach out a long bony hand, grab you around the throat with fingers strong as steel, and lift you up into the tree. He’d rip your heart out. Eat it as you watched. Throw your carcass to the ground as his laughter carried through the night in the blustery autumnal winds.