Apocalypse (28 page)

“But maybe I needed it,” she says.

“Didn't look to me like you needed me for nothing no more.”

“I need something. Maybe a brain transplant.” She started trying to tell me what was wrong. “It's like—Bar, it's like I'm two different people, and they each want different things. And then there's all those—all those misfits together in one place, treating me as if I'm really special.…”

“Well, ain't you?” I says.

“Sort of. I did what I had to do. I made myself into Ahira. Made a name for myself. Started something. I'm better than other misfits.” She sounded like she was making fun of herself. “That's what I was thinking.”

“Well, that's okay,” I says.

“Yeah, sure. So you say.” She sounded dead tired. “Everything I do's okay with you. It's okay with them, too. They're a lot like you, Bar. They're sweet, gentle people. Most of them, anyway. I want them to—I want them to like me.”

“They do like you!”

“No. They like Ahira.”

And I'm staring at her, I didn't understand, and all of a sudden, like it was inside her all the time but it just busted out, she was really upset. “They don't know me! I might as well have a goddamn mask on. It's just Ahira they like. Gorgeous Ahira. And all the time there's a—a child inside me, crying and crying.…” She set up, and her hands were in the air, fluttering like doves.

“Huh?” I says again.

“She made me let her out.”

“Who?”

“Joan Musser! She made me smash the mask to let her out. I—I had Joan Musser hidden inside!” she yells. “Like in a dark place, a closet, a cellar, under my damn face, where they couldn't see her, and she was screaming—” Joanie was shaking so bad, seemed like she shook them wooden horses all around us. “—all the time screaming and crying, like a child in the dark, crying ‘Please, please,
like
me, l-l-l-love me,' and they're sweet people, they just might have liked her even the way she was, and Ahira yelling no, no, dead thing, smelly thing, stay where you are, hateful, hateful—”

I tried to get hold of her to calm her down, but she scooted away from me under one of them wooden horses.

“I'm all ugly inside!” she screamed.

I couldn't think of nothing to do, so I patted the only part of her she was letting me reach, which was her leg. She had her face turned away. “Joanie,” I says to the back of her head, “you ain't ugly. You're talking
ugly
, I mean, have a look at me.”

“Shut up,” she says, crying.

“You come out of there and look at me once,” I says, and I keep at her till she done it. She looked at me fit to kill. And she looked like hell, her nose broke and her face cut and her eyes and mouth all swole and the eyes already turning black.

“Okay, so you're ugly,” I says. “We can be ugly together.”

She almost laughed, and choked on it, and then she says, “You don't understand.”

“That's true.” Didn't bother me none. It always tooken me a while to understand things. “Lean on me anyways?” I snuggled her up against my shoulder again, and she let me.

“I ain't so smart,” I says. “If I would've been smart I would've knowed I love you. I would've never let you go off and leave me.”

“Huh?” She sounded tired.

“I love you, Joanie. Always did.”

She stayed quiet a long time, not moving, not looking at me. “That doesn't help as much as you might think,” she says finally.

“It's the best I can do.”

I just set there holding her, both of us on the floor of the merry-go-round with them wooden horses pawing at the air all around us, spooky looking because there ain't much light in that place. They made me feel like I wanted to get out of there, and get Joanie out of there, even though she was letting me hold her, and I says to her, “Joanie, c'mon, let me get you to a doctor. There might be some glass still in them cuts.”

She moved her head a little without looking at me. I could just feel it against my shoulder, her shaking her head no.

“Joanie—”

“I don't care,” she says.

“Look, I care.”

“Stuff it, Bar.” She set up and looked at me out of eyes that was just slits between black-and-blue swole-up lids, like she really was looking out of a mask. “You want to care about me.…” She broke off, and then she didn't say what she meant to at first. She says, “Did my father drink himself to death yet?”

“Not yet,” I says, because I would've knowed if he did, because he would've come in the funeral home, I would've did a blanket for him if he was dead. Mussers was Protestants, sort of. But it was a weird question for Joanie to ask, because she would've knowed too. Everybody in Hoadley knowed everything. “How come?” I says.

“I want him to die,” Joanie says.

“Well, I guess he will soon enough, won't he?” I says. Either drinking himself to death, or when she took down everybody in that town.

“I don't want him just to die,” she says. “I want him to scream. I want him to shake and know he's going to die and know why. I want him to shit his pants and hurt and die.”

I set there not looking at her beautiful, messed-up face, not looking at Ahira, just listening to her voice, just listening to Joanie. I could tell she hated her father a lot worse than I thought.

“I didn't know you hated him so bad,” I says.

“I'm the rose that's sick, Bar. And he made me sick.”

I didn't remember about her poem, and I probably wouldn't of understood even if I did. I thought she meant, like, the flu or something. “You ain't feverish or nothing,” I says.

“You can't see how I'm sick. Bar, I never told you. I never told anybody.” She ain't looking at me while she talks, she's just staring, and I begun to get a bad, crawly feeling about what she was going to say. “All those times my mother called me a whore, said I was a filthy sinner, said I was fornicating whenever her back was turned, whenever she was out of the house—it was true. Except it was him doing it to me. And there wasn't a damn thing I could do about it.”

It was so awful I didn't understand for a minute. And while I was setting there like a dummy she kept talking, just looking at the board floor and talking like there was a machine inside her making her talk. “I wasn't any older than ten when he started. I know I wasn't, because when I first got my period, I saw all this blood on my panties, nobody had explained it to me, the first thing I thought was that my father had hurt me.”

“Jesus,” I says.

“I tried to tell her a few times what was happening to me, but she called me a liar. Slapped me so hard she knocked me over, then prayed at me. I got pregnant three times. There's a woman back Railroad Street I went to for abortions. The first time I was only thirteen, I almost died.”

It was all finally sinking in, and I was on my feet with my hands all balled into fists, and I says, “Why didn't you tell me? I would've killed him. I'll kill him now. I'll go do it right now.”

She says in a funny, soft voice, “That's why.”

“You don't want me to kill him? You want me to, I'll kill him all right!” I was so mad my chest was pumping. “I'll do him any way you want. You just tell me what you want.”

“That's the problem,” she says, real soft, real calm. “I thought I wanted him dead. I thought I wanted them all dead except the misfits. This whole reeking Hoadley town. Screwed me just like my father screwed me. That's why I did what I did. I thought I wanted my mother dead, too.”

Then I began to get it, what her problem was, and cooled down some, and set down on the floor beside her again.

“It worked on me too,” I got to admit, “what you done to your mother.”

She nodded at the floor between her knees. “Now I'm not sure what I want anymore.”

Wasn't sure she wanted her father dead, she meant. “Well,” I says, “let me go beat him up, anyways. I can tell him why from you.”

“Barry,” she says, sort of desperate, and I got cool all the way and looked at her and listened hard for whatever it was she had to say.

“I'm not sure I want anybody dead anymore,” she says.

“Well, that's all right,” I says, not really getting the point. I just knowed whatever Joanie wanted was all right with me. But she jerks her poor bashed face up and yells at me.

“It's not all right! Don't you understand what I've done? I've called up the Devil. The hell god. The fire lord. Satan himself.”

Then I finally understood. It took all the brains I had, but I understood, and I knowed she was in deep trouble. We all was.

She says, “I offered him souls. Lots of souls. A world's worth. I don't think just a town's worth would have convinced him. He's greedy. But I invited him to begin the end days right here in good old Hoadley, and he sort of sniffed the air and tasted it with his tongue, like a hunting dog.” I heard the shiver in her voice. She was finally telling me the truth about that day, and she was talking like it was a bad dream she had to get out. “His tongue was a lick of fire. And he smiled like a dog showing its teeth, and said it was as good a place as any. ‘Much evil has been done here,' he said. And that's when he made this place the hub, and he pulled my mask off and made me look in the mirror and gave me this face.” The way she said it, you would've thought he'd made her into a toad. But there wasn't nothing I could do about that.

She says, “I promised him every son-of-a-bitch normal in Hoadley to take and burn.”

“He ain't going to stop with Hoadley,” I says, because that's what the real problem is.

“No. He doesn't like to quit.”

Oh, God. My ma, my pa, my brothers—but that wasn't what worried me the most, not right away, anyways.

“Joanie,” I says, “Joanie,” joggling at her leg with my hand, I was so scared. “Joanie, he got your soul?”

She didn't answer me. She wouldn't look at me. She just pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms tight around them and laid down her head on them with her face turned away from me, and she sort of rocked, back and forth, back and forth. And she sort of moaned to herself, like a baby does sometimes. Only there was words in what she was moaning. She's crooning to herself:

“… the invisible worm

Has found out my bed

Of crimson joy

And his dark secret love

Does my life destroy

My life destroy

My life destroy.…”

It did not take much for Mark to guess where Cally might be. He knew what was important to her; in fact, he had often thought that the damn horse was more important to her than he was. Certainly it was more important to her than his priorities: his death calls, his deep carpets on which she pertinaciously tracked manure, the dusting she was supposed to do in the parlors between viewings. He supported her, so certainly she ought to give him some cooperation and assistance with the business. She could never support herself, not in Hoadley, not at women's wages. Let alone support a horse.

Let alone the kids.

The kids; what could be wrong with the kids? Mark sent his vehicle—the Going Home To Perfect Rest Van, the one in which he brought the bodies to the discreedy-screened-off-from-prying-eyes back basement door by the embalming room—sent it swaying around a single-lane dogleg turn under a railroad bridge, one of those damn old redstone bridges built low and narrow, like a tunnel, with a redstone wall and a streambed tucked under it for good measure, just to make it more dangerous. He should have blared his horn going into it in case someone was coming the other way. But he hadn't. And he didn't at the next one, either, and going around the hairpin up the hill he pushed the accelerator to the floor, rocketing into the wrong lane.

At the stable he found Cally's car but not Cally. Not anyone else, either. Mark hammered angry-fisted at the farmhouse door, glaring at the plastic junkyard horses on their posts—these horse-crazy women, what overgrown children they were. Mark had heard something about this place, some sort of leer, some scandal, not paying much attention, as he had not been able to pay much attention to anything in the two days since Cally had left him. All he remembered was that the speaker had been frightened of these women and their horses. Ridiculous.

Not finding anyone at the farmhouse, he went and knocked at the door of the remodeled silo—a make-believe castle, might as well be a child's playhouse. Fine bunch of nuts Cally had taken up with. He blamed her recent stubborn rebelliousness on them; he blamed her thin, thin, reproachful death's head of a face on them, he blamed his failing marriage on them. Best to blame everything on them.

No one answered his pounding, though various vehicles stood parked nearby. Mark shouted into the barn and found no humans there. He scanned the pastures; not knowing one horse from another, he saw little to help him, but it seemed to him conceivable that Cally and the others had gone riding. How could she go riding at a time like this? Yet of course she would. It was just what she would do.

Too full of resentful energy to sit down and wait, or even to pace and wait, he set off with a long, hard stride down the trail that ran past the pasture toward the steep downslopes and valley bottoms of the woods.

A deep-throated vibration filled the woods to the treetops, seeming to catch on the myriad small branches as did the ever-present cicadas scoring the tender bark with their orange claws. The twigs minutely trembled. A massive organ, a huge rasping tomcat, a monstrous
basso continuo
beneath the treble chorus of the hungerbugs, the mine was roaring in the valley.

Even before he plunged into the woods Mark had almost forgotten where he was going and why. In fact it made no sense for him to be searching for Cally along this particular trail. She was just as likely to be riding somewhere else, across the road perhaps. And even if she had gone this way—Mark saw hoofprints everywhere, maybe recent, maybe not—even if she was somewhere ahead he was not likely to catch up to her. It would have been far more sensible to wait at the stable. But Mark strode on, veering off the trail, tearing his way through poison-green bramble patches, snapping branches, lunging down the steep side of the ridge between trees. The woods were lovely, dark and deep.… Crashing along in that wild place, Mark was able to forget who he was, what he cared about, or nearly forget; his relief was physical and immense. He reveled in the rush of air through his pink spongy lungs, the feel of his own elastic muscles, the hot pulse of his blood, the thud of his feet. His beeper sounded; he tore it off his belt and flung it against a rock. Black plastic smashed, tiny metal parts scattered, the insistent noise stopped; Mark felt as satisfied as if he had shattered a black hungerbug and silenced its babyish wail.