Apocalypse (11 page)

Instinctively, then, the members of the council did not want to hear any of what this fool Danyo was saying. They rooted their hind ends deeper into their chairs, stared down at their hands and composed elaborate arrangements with their fingers. The president poked discreetly at nose and ears with his pinkie, finding nothing to distract him from his ordeal. Danyo had to be a jackass, a screwball at best, and at worst downright dangerous to say such things.

Knowing that Shirley had never been afraid of being considered a nuthead, Elspeth allowed herself to feel darkly amused.

“What I mean,” Shirley concluded earnestly, “it looks like the end of the world, unnatural things happening.”

“We were discussing business before you came in,” hinted the council president.

“I won't take but a minute longer. What I wanted to say, what if it ain't God? What if it's a witch? If that's what it is, youse guys ought to be able to stop it.”

A few of the council members actually blushed, as if Shirley had ripped open her work shirt and exposed her breasts. All except the woman taking notes looked profoundly discomfited. The latter (Zephyr Zook by name), as secretary, found Shirley somewhat more bearable and less offensive to her sense of parliamentary procedure than President Wozny.

“Ahhh—we will refer your concerns to the appropriate departments,” said that gentleman, and he got up and laid a hand on Shirley's elbow, as if he could steer her out of the room that way. Shirley looked down at him, and he removed the hand.

Elspeth spoke for the first time, with wry pride in her voice. “C'mon, Shirl. These people have other business to discuss.”

Shirley acknowledged Elspeth with a nod, then looked hard at Wozny. She was not stupid; she had known before she came that whatever she might say would do no good. But being Shirley, she had to try anyway. “Them was babies crying,” she declared to the round man before her. “Ghost babies. Something's bothering their rest, I tell you.” She left without waiting for a reply, and Elspeth left with her.

CHAPTER FIVE

I told you libraries is nice places. I ain't much of a reader, but after Joanie went away I started hanging around the Hoadley library anyways. It wasn't but a little ways from the funeral home down past the hardware store and a couple boarded-up stores and the Goodwill to where they'd put the library in another of them stores, and I'd go down there when I was done with the bodies. In there with all them books I felt like Joanie wasn't so far away. Anyways, old Beulah Coe the librarian knowed Joanie. I kept asking her if she'd seed her.

“Barry,” she says, “you think she's folded herself up inside a book, or what?” But I still kept asking. I didn't know what else to do.

There was another boy, Garrett, hung around in there too. I guess he wasn't really a boy. He was a lot older than me, probably as old as my mom, but he didn't act old. He always brought lots of dominoes with him in his pockets, and he'd pull them out and set them all up on their ends on the big library table, around and around in circles. He'd take maybe a couple hours doing it. And then he'd take and touch one and knock them all down in a minute. It was real pretty to watch, the way they all rippled down. Sometimes he let me touch the one to knock them down. Or he'd let the little kids that come in the library do it. He liked it when the little kids paid attention to him. That was all he come for, was to set up his dominoes and knock them down and make them do flips and like that. He was real smart with dominoes. Other than that he was dumb like me. The little kids liked him because he looked normal except his head was big. That seemed fanny to me, that Garrett was dumb like me with his head as big as it was. A person would think he should have been smart. But his face looked okay and he set his dominoes up good so the little kids liked him. They was scared of me because my face was marked up and ugly.

Garrett and me talked sometimes, hanging around the library, and when he found out I worked for Mr. Wilmore he started making dumb undertaker jokes. “Hey, Barry,” he'd say, “how's business up there? Dead, huh? Going in the hole?” And then he'd heehaw laugh. “Hey, Barry. Didja hear the one about the undertaker had two bodies at once, a bank president and a lawyer? And he got them in the wrong caskets? And when the families complained, he said he'd switch them? And in them three-piece suits nobody ever noticed he just switched the heads?” Hee-haw, hee-haw. “Hey, Barry. Didja hear the one about the undertaker got married? And on his wedding night he told his bride take off all her clothes, but he couldn't get it up? So he told her go in the bathroom and get in a tub of cold water for a while, and when she came back to bed she should just close her eyes and lie real still?” Garret snorted when he laughed, too, in between hee-haws.

He tried to call me “Digger,” too, but that didn't work because I didn't dig graves. They got backhoes to do that. It didn't make me mad none, the way he talked about undertakers. Mr. Wilmore was a funeral director, and funeral directors is different from undertakers.

So I talked to Garret different times, and I'm glad I did, because I guess I must have told him about Joanie, and he's the one told me to go see Ahira.

“You gotta go look at her,” he says. “She'll get your mind off that Musser girl.” And he laughs like he said something smart.

“I don't want my mind off Joanie,” I says.

“Then go and ask her about your sweetie, for crying out loud, and quit asking everybody else.”

Ahira knowed about stuff like that, he says.

So I went that night. Garrett told me where. There was this little park between the post office and the bank, don't hardly deserve to be called a park, just a patch of grass and a couple benches for the old geezers to loaf on and a statue of some army guy on a horse. But there was this little round building there too, sort of a picnic pavilion, pointed like a circus tent only it was made of wood. Every year at Christmas the town put lights on it, and it looked real pretty, like a carnival ride. Except they always forgot to take them down till about the fourth of July, so half the rest of the time it looked dumb.

Anyways, this was May, and the lights was still hanging on the bandstand—people called it the bandstand, but Joanie always said that wasn't what it was, it was a gazebo, but I never heard nobody else say gazebo, but I never seed no band on it neither—only them lights wasn't lit, and they looked dumb. They looked like that junk old ladies hang around the tops of their porches. But Garrett says this is the place where Ahira comes every night.

So I hung around, and after a while she come. And as soon as I seen her I knowed she was the one Mrs. Wilmore kept talking about, the lady on the white horse. She didn't have no horse with her, but no two people in Hoadley could be that beautiful.

She come at dusk, in a white dress down to her feet and kind of floating around her, and her hair was down her back and lifting like soft yellow wings each side of her face, so she come like a white-and-yellow butterfly. And her feet was bare, and just as beautiful as the rest of her. Don't ask me how that could be so, because feet is generally ugly, but hers was nice. And her face was beautiful like an old painting, wide at the top where her big eyes was, then coming down to a little chin, like her face was a heart. But strong. Like them schoolbook pictures of Joan of Arc or somebody. And her mouth was full and sweet-looking and real still. Right away, before she even opened her mouth to talk, I felt like she was somebody who
knowed
, just from looking at her. Not just thought she knowed, but really knowed, like God.

She went up there on that bandstand, and there was already people standing around waiting for her down below, like Garrett and me, and she called out over our heads, “Misfits! Come to me! All you people who sleep alone and fondle yourselves and have messy dreams in the night, come to me! All you bent-out-of-shape, stomped-on people, all you thumb-suckers, bed-wetters, the ones the world looks down on, come here; I am Ahira, and I want you.”

And they come, too, more every minute. I hadn't thought till then how many freaky people like me there was in Hoadley, because we mostly all hid ourselves away. But they come out that night, like bats coming out in the dusk, out of places can't nobody believe, them little narrow places under the eaves. There was the old woman who always smelled like a hamster, and the skinny one whose back was so bent she looked at the ground all the time when she walked, and her head went back and forth like she was sniffing her way with it. She had to sit down on the ground to look up at Ahira. And there was the man who walked on the stumps of his legs and wore big leather feet on them, like elephant feet. And there was the blind guy with the paper bag on his head. His face looked okay, not ugly like mine, but he hardly ever showed it, only on real hot days. Most of the time he kept a paper bag on. I guess it didn't make no difference to him if he had a paper bag on his head. I guess he wore it to keep warm.

And there was all the ones that picked their noses and pulled out big wet boogers in public and talked to themselves and wore stripes with plaids. There was people with crooked teeth long and gappy like fence pickets and breath like hound dogs been eating road kills. There was a woman so fat I guess she couldn't go to movies no more, and the bald girl who went to the high school. She'd got cancer and lost her hair, and the kids was mean to her, kept stealing her wig until she didn't bother wearing it no more. I guessed soon as she could she'd quit school, like Joanie and me done. I wished Joanie was there. She should've seed it, all those people misfits like her and me. It made me all excited that there was so many of us. I felt almost sort of proud and strong, like we could have done something.

“Misfits, come to me!” this Ahira woman calls out to Hoadley. “All you others, stay away! No people with second homes and tax shelters allowed here. No fat-ass bankers, no lawyers, no preacher men with nicey-smiles on their faces and larceny in their hearts, no housemamas serving up green vegetables and guilt. None of you people in designer clothes here. All you ones who think you've got it made, go away! Ahira doesn't want you.”

Nobody went away, even though there was some people there looked normal to me. There was a couple young guys in long hair and jean jackets and tattoos and earrings, and some just regular fat people, and even the pretty blond girl with the cast-iron eyelashes from down at the drugstore. What she was doing there I didn't know. Maybe it was some sort of disease, made her do that to her eyelashes. Then I started to think, maybe some of the normals was misfits too, inside where it didn't show, instead of on their faces like me.

“Misfits,” says Ahira to all of us listening, “I am a misfit too.”

She was, sort of. She was too beautiful for a regular person.

“I am Ahira, child of the sun, and Estrella, daughter of the stars, and Amaris, moon child, and Anona, born of the earth. The people with big cars and swimming pools, none of them know me.”

Then she started telling us what was going to happen, and just listening to her voice I knowed it was all the truth.

She said the people who thought they were big was going to find out what it was like to be small. She said the ones who beat us to death with their Bibles was going to find out what was really in the Bible. She said if they knowed the secrets, a misfit could do healing better than any preacher who ever lived. She said strange things were going to happen as a sign that we should listen to her.

Her voice was like them blankets in the funeral home, silky with just enough roughness to make it warm. I could've listened to her forever.

She said for us not to be afraid, because we was her misfits and she'd never hurt us. Then all of a sudden that gazebo thing she was standing on started to move, spin around, and them stupid Christmas lights flashed on all green and red and yellow, up and down the poles and around the circle roof and up in candy stripes to the point where the metal-horse weathervane was, and there Ahira stood on the bandstand going to town like a merry-go-round, but she didn't move. She was like a real still, white-and-gold place in the middle of it, and it was going crazy all around her. And the crowd was yelling, and some of them was falling down like Garrett's dominoes, except he hadn't pushed them none. He was standing next to me shaking and gaping like I was. I guessed this Ahira woman hadn't made the bandstand spin before.

Then she lifted up her arms like wings, just about the time I thought Garrett would pee his pants, and that merry-go-round stuff stopped, though them lights was still on.

Ahira says, “Listen to me, misfits. You are my people. You are my family, and I love you. There are six hundred sixty-six of you in this town, and I am going to find you, and not many days after I have found the last one of you the great backturning will begin. And every one of you will wear my mark.”

Then it seemed to me that she looked straight at me. But them big, greeny-dark eyes of hers, it seemed like you always felt them. They latched onto a person like her voice.

She says, “On that day I will come gather you, and I will take you to the good place where the world began, the spinning place, while the rest of them go down into the pit.”

Then she closed her eyes, but even when her eyes was closed I felt like she was still looking at me and holding me that way. And she started to say words like out of the Bible, but they wasn't no Bible words I have ever heard. They was from something she called Yeats. She says:

“I hear the Shadowy Horses, their long manes a-shake,

“Their hoofs heavy with tumult, their eyes glimmering white;

“… The West weeps in pale dew and sighs passing away …

“The Horses of Disaster plunge in the heavy clay.”

She didn't open her eyes when she was done, she stood like she was dreaming, but she lifts her hands like to tell us that was all. Some in the crowd was going away, and some was heading towards her.