Apocalypse (16 page)

I knowed just why Joanie always hated him so much. He was the sort of fat-ass always pushing himself forward, like he just done. And always thinks he's right, when most of us don't hardly never know when we're right about nothing.

And all the time he's bulling and pushing and shoving crippled people to the side he's yelling. “Antichrist!” he's yelling at Ahira. “False prophet! You are the beast out of the pit, the treacherous beast come to lead the people into captivity, the people of God down into perdition!”

And she's just standing in the bandstand and smiling at him, real still, and he's sweating and turning red above the tight collar and tie grabbing his neck under them three chins of his.

He yells at her, “Satan! Demon woman! Your appearance is fair, but your bowels are foul as the pit you wallow in! You look like a lamb and speak like a dragon and blaspheme the name of God! You come to kill with the sword. You come to whirl the world down to Armageddon!”

He run out of breath, standing at the bandstand steps, ain't got enough breath left to take them, and he's lunging at the railings as if he wants to shake the place, standing at Ahira's feet, and she finally moves that quiet mouth and says to him, sweet as honey and just dripping with hate, “You're right, of course. You're always right. I am the Antichrist, and I have come to be worshipped and to destroy all you preachers.”

Then all of a sudden his red face turns white like a john tank with the sweat still on it, and instead of shaking at the railings he's grabbing onto them to hold himself up, and Ahira says to him, almost friendly, “Why so sick? Armageddon is what you always wanted, isn't it? Don't you Christians say that after the end days comes the kingdom of God? Won't you get to go up to God in glory? Isn't your name written in a book somewhere?”

Then I wasn't looking at Reverent Culp no more. I looked back at Ahira, and something come together in my head, and I seen her different, and I seed who it was.

I just knowed, clear down to my bones. It was something about what she just said or the way she talked or moved her hands, the way her head tilted or something. You stay around somebody for a long time, you get a feel for them. Maybe it was her voice. She always had that classy voice, and it was just the same except that squashed-nose tone was gone. I don't remember no more of what she said, but I knowed it was her, right to my heart. Not no monster like Reverent Culp was trying to make out. It was Joanie Musser. My Joanie.

“It's her!” I yells out loud, and I was shoving forward just like Reverent Culp did. I almost yelled her name, but I knowed Joanie wouldn't like that. She wouldn't want nobody in that town to remember her the way she was before, not now that she was beautiful.

She hears me, and she sees me, and I guess maybe she thought I was saying she was the Antichrist. She smiles at me sort of soft and points me out to Reverent Culp, and she says to him, “There's one who already bears my mark.”

He's still white like a china plate, and he just sort of slides down the railings and lays on the ground, and I knowed just looking at him that he was dead. I seen enough dead people, I should know. But Ahira talks to him like he was still alive. “I'm not surprised you knew me,” she says to him. “You have always been good at recognizing demons. You should know the devil right away when you meet him.”

The people in the crowd are sort of edging away, because they see Culp lying on the ground and they don't want trouble. Though I bet Ahira could of got them to stay if she wanted. But she didn't want. She looked at me and beckoned me to come up to her, and then she sort of lifted her hands at the rest as if to say, That's okay, go on home for now, and then she come down the bandstand steps and walked off, and I followed along after her. Generally there would've been a bunch of us misfits trailing along, at least for a while, but this time there wasn't nobody but me, because everybody else was scared. But I wasn't scared or nothing. Whatever Joanie wanted or did was okay with me.

Except I was scared to say to her, Hi, Joanie. She was so beautiful, I was afraid she wouldn't like it.

She says, to herself or me, “Damn preachers. I hope they notice I never ask for money like a goddamn preacher.”

She swirled along like some sort of wild dream in that white dress lifting like wings and them beautiful bare feet of hers, and I just followed along and watched her. I waited until we was clear out of town and she'd turned off the street and was walking on the railroad tracks, and then I come up and walked closer behind her. “I'm Barry Beal,” I says to her, and all the time I'm telling myself that I'm going along with her game for fun, so I can surprise her later. But deep in my gut I knowed the truth. I was scared.

I was scared, now she was Ahira, she wouldn't want me or like me or need me no more.

And the way she looked at me didn't help none. She looks at me like she's sizing me up, and then she chuckles deep in her white throat like she's laughing at me. I guess she was worried at first I really did know her, and that's why she invited me to come with her, but now she's fooling me. I didn't really mind, I was so glad to see her again. Though I wasn't exactly seeing her again. Because she looked so different, I mean. But it didn't matter, because I knowed it was her.

She says, “Would you like to come home with me and see where I live?”

And I says, “Sure.”

We was out where all the slag heaps was, them black mountains the old folks calls bony piles, and Joanie went off the tracks and ducked behind one of them. I followed her, and I couldn't figure out why she didn't limp or cut them new pretty feet of hers on the clinkers, because that is rough stuff. But it didn't seem to bother her none. Anyhow, she took me around back of the slag heaps where the woods started, and there was her white horse, waiting for her, and another horse beside it, like they knowed I was coming.

I can tell you now I don't think much of horseback riding. I knowed Mrs. Wilmore done it all the time and said it was real fun, but I sure as heck don't know why. Them horses run us up the mountain through them woods in the dark, and I don't know about Ahira but I got my knees banged against trees and my face bashed with branches and I got shook around so I thought I was going to lose my teeth. And I got my balls banged against the saddle every jump. Course Ahira didn't have that problem.

The only good thing was it didn't take long. Pretty soon we was there, and I slid off.

I could see a little bit because them woods was more open, and I seen them horses jump away into some sort of big building. Ahira motioned me to come on and went in after them. It was dark in the building, and I stopped walking, and Ahira come back to me and took my hand. That surprised me. I didn't want to touch her or think she'd want to touch me because she was too beautiful, even though she did say she loved all the misfits.

She led me around all them things in the way to where she had a flashlight, and then she turned it on, and I seen the things she'd led me around was wooden horses, and I knowed where I was. The old trolley park. I'd been up once or twice with a bad girl, but didn't nobody generally go up there except kids. And I hadn't never been inside the merry-go-round before.

Ahira says, “You want something to eat?”

Now you got to know I'm most always hungry. So I says yes. And then she pulls something out of a cardboard box and offers it to me. Of course I should of knowed what she would have to eat. “Have a banana?” she says. And I could of spit, because then I knowed for sure that she was really playacting, even with me, that she didn't want me to know she was Joanie, and she hadn't brought me there to tell me. Joanie knowed from way back that I don't like bananas.

“No, thanks,” I says.

So we sets down there on the floor of the merry-go-round, and she eats one of them damn bananas of hers, but she don't offer me nothing else. “How'd you come to live here?” I asks her, and she tells me a little bit about it, and over the next few days I figured out some more from what I knowed already. And I figured out the rest later on. A lot later.

Here's the way it was:

Before she left Hoadley with my welder's mask and my five hundred dollars she'd got good and mad and made up her mind that if Culp and the rest of them preachers and her mother and all were going to say she belonged to the devil, because her face was so ugly, and if they was so sure they wasn't going to hell the way she would've liked them to, well, she'd just go there herself and thumb her nose at them and their God. She didn't want to be noplace where they was. Any God would put her in hell was a rotten God and she wouldn't brown-nose him no more. Their God hadn't never been no use to her and she didn't want no more to do with him. She'd go to the old gods, the ones that had been around before there was a fat-ass God, and maybe they'd be better friends to her.

There was two things she wanted real bad. One was to be beautiful for once in her life. And the other was to get back at all them people had made her miserable.

I didn't understand till later that she meant to kill them, kill the whole town, kill Hoadley. I was still thinking Culp had give himself a heart attack. And she didn't say nothing about none of that to me. She just said about deciding to call up the spirit of deep earth and fire, black and orange, the old Halloween god who had been around longest of all.

What she did, she took the bus toward Pittsburgh just so's everybody would think she'd left Hoadley, but she got off at one of them gas stations with a little food store in it and bought a bunch of food with some of the money I give her and started walking back, cross country. Joanie was a big strong girl but she still got awful tired with all the stuff she was carrying and she didn't get to the trolley park until way after dark. Which was okay, cause it had to be dark for what she was doing.

“I knew it had to be a spinning place,” she says to me. She says all the poets and them prophets in the Bible says so. “Yeats and the gyres, Ezekiel's wheels and all that. And I knew this carousel was up here, not that far from town but isolated. And I had a good idea what to do.”

She'd come up with some spells to try by doing the opposite of them Christian spells in the pow-wow book. Turn the sign of the cross upside down and like that. Take the three highest names and say them backwards. Plus she had my welder's mask for protection, plus she had this weird snake she hadn't never told me nothing about. She stood in the trolley park beside the carousel and told her snake to crawl all around her in a circle, and it done it. And she put on the welder's mask, and told her snake to stay between her and the merry-go-round, and she said her strongest spell.

“Next thing there was this crash,” she says to me, “like the earth splitting apart, and a big ball of fire came out of the carousel. Broke out through the wall like it was something solid and came rushing straight at me, and poor old Snakie just turned belly-up and died.” She gave a sort of chuckle deep in her throat. “I was so scared I about wet my pants.” For a minute there she sounded like the old Joanie.

The earth god was in the fireball. She could see him a little bit in the middle of the fire by looking through the welder's mask. He had horns. And he was mad as hell because she'd interrupted his dessert or something, dragged him away from a good dinner. But he couldn't come across the snake line to get at her. And he couldn't see her face through the welder's mask, to see how ugly she was, and that made her feel better.

So they talked, and he calmed down when Joanie told him what she had called him up for. She wanted him to take people and burn them for her. Lots of people. He liked the sound of that, and he invited her to step outside her snake circle and come into the carousel with him.

“You're crazy if you went,” I says.

“Of course I am.” She give me a little smile. “So I did, and he stood where we are now, and even in the mask I could see the whole place lit up brighter than the sun. He lifted his hands and said, ‘The hub of the universe and time now turns in Hoadley, just as each Hoadley soul believes.'”

I says, “That's Hoadley, all right.”

She throws back that beautiful head of hers and laughs out loud, and I'm happy cause I made her laugh. But she didn't tell me the rest of what the earth spirit said.

And she didn't tell me most of what happened then, because she was pretending she was Ahira and beautiful all along, and she never told me she was wearing my welder's mask, because then I would have knowed who she was. That beautiful new face of hers was so perfect it was almost like a mask itself, and it didn't show me none of what she was feeling, especially in the dark, with just the flashlight to see by.

“He touched me,” she says. “He reached over and touched me. I put my hands up to try to keep him from doing it, and I burned them. I felt my hair go up in flames.” Joanie shuddered in her voice. I couldn't tell nothing from her face, but I could hear everything I needed to know in her voice, and I knowed later, when I got time to think about it, that he had pulled that mask off her. “I felt my eyes go blind, and I wanted to scream, but I felt like I couldn't move or scream. He turned me toward the hub.” The middle of the merry-go-round, she meant. “And I could see the mirror; it was the only thing I could see. And I could see myself in it.” Her voice got hushed, and I knowed the bad part was over.

“And I was Ahira.”

And I knowed something else: she really wanted to tell me, tell old Bar, just that one thing. How she changed, got the face she always wanted. How it felt to look in the mirror and see herself more beautiful than anybody had ever been.

Except then she'd have to be Joanie to me.

So instead she says, real casual, “You say your name is Barry Beal? Barry, stand up.”

I done it, and she says, “Look in the mirror. Let's see what you really look like.”