Apocalypse (12 page)

Garrett says to me, “Go ask her about your Joan girl.”

I says, “No,” because something is bothering me and I don't know what it is yet. So I turned around and went on home.

One thing I saw when I was leaving: that sort of black girl, the one that rides into Hoadley on her horse, standing there in her funny clothes staring, not going away or going to say hi to Ahira either. She was one of the misfits all right, I figured, on account of her being the only halfway-black person in Hoadley. This town got a Jew or two, but no blacks except this one. But she didn't look happy about being there with us other misfits. Course she didn't hardly never look happy, even though she was so beautiful, most as beautiful as Ahira, except dark like creek water and Ahira was all milky pale.

So I went and drove my Chevy out them black, twisty country roads, not trying to think, because that don't never work for me anyways, but just waiting, because I knowed something was coming. When I got home my mom and dad was in bed, but my brothers was still up, and they teased me some when I come in. “Where you been?” they says. “You got a girl? About time you had yourself some fun.” And I looks at them and wonders if they're like me or if they're what Joanie would've called normals, what Ahira called “the others,” and I guessed that's what they was.

I went to bed and laid there in the dark and sort of dreamed about Ahira, and Joanie, and asking Ahira about Joanie, and Joanie and Ahira, and the darkness over the bed looked like it was spinning around, 'cept that was stupid. Darkness can't spin.

Mark Wilmore came back from his most recent burial and post-funeral social to find that Cally had put the kids to bed early and was waiting for him in the apartment, wanting to talk. At the sight of her he felt a spurt of anger, quickly smothered and quite inadmissible, since all was as it should be: she depended on him, and she had patiently waited until he was free to turn his attention to her. Why, then, did the deer-eyed look on her thin, boyish face annoy him? She did what a wife should do; she was exactly what a wife should be.

Nevertheless, he shouldered past her toward the bedroom, saying, “Let me get out of this damn pimp suit, Cal.”

The three-piece, dove-gray wool flannel suits he wore for funerals resembled those worn by top-flight procurers in the cities, especially when combined with a fawn-colored greatcoat. The irony was not lost on Mark and Cally, though likely no one else in Hoadley knew or cared; but he wore the expensive neutrals because he would not wear the black “preacher suits” of the older death specialists or the navy-blue polyester pinstripes of those who exhibited less taste than he.

Cally followed him and perched on the bed. Carefully hanging the suit, standing in his jockey shorts, he remarked to her, “I hate it when it's babies. Everybody feels so bad. I dread doing babies worse than anything else except maybe burn victims.”

“I forgot it was a baby,” Cally said.

The Bender baby, born with multiple defects, and nobody had expected it to live as long as it had: five days.

“Another Hoadley baby,” said Cally faintly, “in the ground.” A strange thing to say: Mark saw how she swallowed hard, as if swallowing at the words, and how the effort convulsed her throat. Such a frail flower-stem of a throat, he noticed wearily; he could have put one hand all the way around it, and sometimes he would have liked to, put one hand there and choke her.… He could see her searching her mind for something nice, wifely to say to him. But the best she could come up with was, “Did the family like the layout?”

“I guess they were satisfied. The mother said something about the blanket.”

Barry had done well with the blanket. Half-a-brain Barry Beal, that was another one he sometimes wanted to choke, just to shut him up from always asking about that pitiful Musser girl. But it would have taken more than choking to silence Barry. An ax, maybe.

“Did the service go smoothly?”

“Fine.”

She was a good wife. She was a good wife. Why did he feel so irritated at her when she was such a good wife? It did not occur to Mark to connect this phenomenon with his loathing of his mother. He considered that a discrete difficulty between Ma and him, and his mother's fault, because she happened to be whining, back-stabbing, manipulative and a martyr. He had never wondered how she got that way. He had not had occasion to notice that most of his mother's female peers exhibited the same unattractive traits when in the bosoms of their families. But as a young man he had seen with a lover's leaping joy how utterly different Cally was from his mother—at least, had been until he married her and brought her home to Hoadley.…

Most of his life, as far back as he could remember, Mark had wanted to run a funeral establishment. At the age of five or six, going from his linoleum-and-Lysol home into the hushed, thick-carpeted, high-ceilinged, swagged-damask-and-pilaster-heavy sanctuary of the former Lentz Funeral Parlor for the viewing of a great-aunt, he had known at once that this, this velvety-rich, flower-scented dimness and elegance and ritual, this was where he belonged. As a teenager he had gone to work for old Lentz and spied on some of the mysteries of the embalming room; they had not troubled him any more than the dissecting of a frog in biology class, heady with the odor of formaldehyde, had bothered him. Dead humans were not very different from dead frogs; he could handle dead humans. And he had liked the idea of service, heroism in fact, of being of use to people who needed him at a difficult time, almost as much as he liked the gold-flocked wallpaper and the thick tassels on the fringed and scalloped window blinds. He had prevailed upon his parents to send him to the Pittsburgh Institute of Mortuary Science for education; they had borrowed from the bank, and his father had worked extra shifts to pay the way. It was in Pittsburgh that he had met Cally.

By a marvelously romantic accident they had met; she had literally fallen at his feet on a slippery campus sidewalk and sprained her ankle. Mark had picked up her dropped books, helped her to the infirmary, sat with her while she waited. Hoadley men, at least those who didn't drink themselves silly every weekend, thought of themselves as protectors, defenders, strong providers for women and children; this mindset ran so deep in Mark that he accepted it without being conscious of it, as a premise and essential of male existence, like wet dreams. Atop it he had added his own bright myth of Mark as hero, helper, friend in time of trouble and death. He had fallen in love at once with Cally, with her childlike good looks, her helplessness. Yet what he liked even more in a way was her spirit, that she sometimes slapped away his hands from her books and crutches and her life, that she never thanked him. That she wore boots and jeans and went her own way, and saw him only when she wanted to, even after she agreed to marry him.

She still wore boots and went her own way, on horseback—though Mark had insisted on a safe horse and proper headgear, as befit his role of concerned protector. She sometimes refused to wait on him or the kids at mealtimes. She still protested when he became officious, as he knew he often did. Yet in a deeper way.… Something essential had changed, and not for the better, once he had married her. Once he had brought her home to Hoadley.

He did not question the pattern of life that had brought him back there. Of course he had come back to Hoadley. It was unthinkable to go anywhere else. His parents were there, his family was there. Family above all else; this credo of duty had echoed through his childhood to the determined exclusion of all siren songs of Elsewhere.

Nor did he ever question the idea of marriage. Like newlyweds everywhere, he and Cally after the wedding had at once discarded the fatiguing intensities of courtship and begun to imitate the marriages of their parents. There was little in her parents for Cally to build on, but Mark admired his hard-working father for the most part. He acted toward Cally as his father acted toward his mother: strong, protective, working hard to provide.

God, he felt tired.

“So, Cal,” he said, sitting down on the bed, “what's up?”

“Cicadas, mostly. Up in the trees.” She ducked her head like a five-year-old about to bare her heart. “Listen, Mark. There's something scary in the air around here.”

“Spooks?” he teased. “Somebody been telling ghost stories?”

“I'm serious. Strange things have been happening.”

She told him, in a disjointed, fumbling way, picking at blanket fuzz with thin fingers—it was hard to believe that this hesitant woman was the person who had taken the Expository Essay Prize her senior year. Mark listened, hearing all the words yet absorbing only snatches of the meaning. A naked man in the woods—an exhibitionist, a sexual pervert, a danger to her? Should he forbid her to ride there? A changing picture—superstitious nonsense. Somebody had imagined something. When Cally was upset, she was quick to draw confusions.… Bugs with baby faces—more excited imaginings. The strange woman on the white horse, Ahira—a crackpot. Everyone had been talking about her, and he didn't want to hear any more conjectures. He didn't want to hear any part of what Cally was saying, and so in a sense he did not, although he listened and nodded until she faltered to a stop.

“What are you getting at, honey?”

She hesitated, then forced out words. “I think—I think it's just what Mr. Zankowski said, Mark.”

He saw her soft mouth shaking, a subtle tremor barely visible above her chin. He saw how the bone showed white through her taut face, through her twiggy hands now lying clenched in her lap. He remembered briefly, though not in any felt way, how he had once desired that ever-so-slightly pouting mouth, that gamin face, those hands, back when they were younger, before he felt so tired all the time. The memory softened the scorn in his voice.

“For God's sake, Cal. The end of the world?”

“Something like that, yes.”

Her seriousness, her fear, thrust him into the role of strong protector and made him feel simultaneously exasperated, superior and amused. “Why in the name of heaven would the world want to end in Hoadley?”

“Why not?”

Mark snorted. On the water tower looming above the town somebody had once spray-painted, black on the blue metal, “Everybody knows this is nowhere,” and truer graffiti had never been vandalized onto public property. Everybody did know that. Mark, the native, knew it; the knowledge informed the loyalty and inverse pride that had drawn him back to the place where he was needed. Why couldn't Cally, the outsider, know it too?

Cally said, “I don't know why it's happening here. But the point is, something weird is going on—”

“Millennial fever. They're trying to downplay it, but it's going on everywhere.” Mark listened to the government-censored news reports from the outside world.

“What's going on here is more than just people's imaginings, Mark! Do you think I'm imagining things?”

Yes, he wanted to say. It was the easiest thing for him to think, and he saw no reason not to. He had not known Cally to be irrational in the past, but, well, she was a woman, after all. Nearly every woman he had ever known in Hoadley had “nerves.” And ever since she had had the kids, Cally had been wired too tight. It was good for her to get out of the house on that horse of hers. When she was home she hovered around the apartment with that haggard face, those bony, shaking hands.… Mark knew she didn't eat right, but it did not occur to him that she was starving herself. So she didn't eat much at meals; his mother had never eaten at meals. She had “snitched” in the kitchen all the rest of the time, and got fat. Women were strange. Like an alien species, almost. They didn't think like men.

So to be honest he should say yes, he thought she was imagining things. But then she would be angry at him. His father would have said yes, would have teased, would have told her she was cute when she was angry. But Mark didn't feel he had the energy. He was tired. People had been crying on his shoulder all day. Most likely more people would come and cry on his shoulder tomorrow. God knew there were enough poor souls in this town.

He said with a more than a little edge in his voice, “What do you want me to do about it?”

It went without saying that she wanted him to do something about it. That was his function in life, to comfort the weeping, take care of the details, serve on the church council, join the Jaycees, do things for other people—and then for her yet. But that was the hell of it, she was entitled to expect it of him. He was her man, her defender, her protector, and he should have said, Sure, I'll look into it, it'll be all right, I'll take care of it. She just shouldn't have talked to him about it at bedtime, was all. She knew he was always tired at bedtime.

“What do you want me to do about it?”

She shook her head, looking at him with a flash of white in her eyes, sensing his mood. Wouldn't tell him, or didn't know, and that irritated him more. She said, “Nothing. Forget it. Let's go to bed. We can talk about it in the morning.”

Great. He had that to look forward to, then. And in the bed, she would want him to do something, too. And he wasn't going to.

Cally rode alone the next day, with a purpose in mind. She was not afraid of the cicadas, she decided, though if their wailing voices advertised their presence, she would stay away from them as best she could—but ride she must. If Mark was not going to look for answers, she would. For that reason, and perhaps for others, she wanted to see the naked whatever-he-was again.

She rode to the mine tipple first. As she had hoped, Mr. Zankowski was not at the shack; he spent most of his time down in the mine, puttering with his unreliable machinery. But the black snake lay on its sunlit stone by the door, near a chipped china bowl of yellowing milk. With irrational sureness Cally got down from Dove and picked up the snake—her hands for once quiet, steady, soothing, for she was going on her own to do something, an action more calming and buoying than any drug a fatherly Hoadley doctor could give her. She draped the snake around her shoulders as she mounted Dove, then rearranged it so that it rode on her left arm, where she could best observe it. All of this the snake placidly accepted, for there was a hypnotic confidence in her touch. She had had a dream, or a half-waking insight in the very early morning, to tell her how this project had to be carried out.