Apocalypse (6 page)

“Can't you get no money saved up now?” I says. Her room couldn't be costing her that much.

“It's my mo-ther.” She said it like that,
mo
-ther. “Every time I get a little bit stashed away, she comes around and claims she's got no food in the house, she's hungry.”

“So don't give her nothing,” I says. “You don't owe her nothing.”

“I know! I hate her!” Joanie stamped. “But I can't—seem to—help it.…”

She stopped with a kind of sniffle. I stood with my mouth open, because I couldn't remember that I'd ever seed her cry, not with all the mean things people had said to her when I was around, and now she was going to cry about her mother? But she didn't cry. She stiffened up and looked at me straight.

“Can you loan me that much money?” she says to me.

“Sure I can.” I was living at home yet, didn't have no expenses to speak of except my car, I got plenty of money. Well, not plenty, but enough. “But it ain't for your mother, is it?”

“No,” she says, and she never did tell me what it was for.

I went to the bank after work and come by Joanie's place and give her the money. “One more thing,” she says. “Can I borrow your welder's mask?”

“Sure.” I didn't use it no more. I was going to be working full time at the funeral home soon. Reason I didn't ask her what she wanted the welder's mask for, I knowed she'd always liked it. She used to play with it and put it on sometimes and say she ought to wear it on the street, people would stare at her less. I just figured she was going somewhere she wanted to hide her face.

I keep a lot of my stuff in the trunk of my car, and the welder's mask was in there too. I got it and gave it to her. “Thanks, Bar,” she says, and she looked at me kind of strange. Like she was taking a picture of me with her eyes. “I'll get this thing back to you,” she says.

I didn't have no reason to disbelieve her. I never took notice till afterwards that she didn't say she'd give it back. She just said she'd get it back to me.

“Well, I got to go home and get my supper,” I says. Dumb. Here I'd just loaned her enough money to leave me and that mean little town behind, and I says I got to go home and get supper. Dumb! She just nodded, still looking at me funny, and I went on home.

And like a moron I watched the feature movie on TV, then went to bed, then went to work in the morning. And I guess she took the noon bus. Because when I stopped by that night she was gone. All the way gone. Took her name off the mailbox even. I never heard no more about Joanie Musser, not by that name. Me or anybody else in that town.

Anybody who asked, her mom told them she guessed the girl had run off to be a prostitute. The girl had always been bad news.

A few weeks later I got a box in the mail with that dumb welder's mask in it. The thing looked like it had been through a fire. There wasn't nothing else. No letter, no nothing. And no return address.

CHAPTER THREE

When Cally got to the school, a bit early, to pick up Tammy and Owen, the children were undergoing the weekly lice check. It was a small, informal school; Cally walked in and chatted with the teachers and watched as the nurse, who resembled a white sausage, lifted the neck hair of one youngster after another, each time with a fresh popsicle stick. Never did she touch a child with her hands.

Cally kept up a wincing smile, scratched herself reflexively, and watched. Odd, how children always managed to look sweet and pretty, no matter where they came from. In all the assembled children there were no truly ugly ones, except perhaps the boy called Slug, the hefty one with the buzz haircut—but even he had petal-fresh skin on his pudgy cheeks. And the girls, the little Irish or Polish or Italian girls in their long soft beribboned or barretted hair and their sweet petulance—knowing their parents and their older sisters, Cally understood that they would grow into breathtaking young beauties, all dark eyes and boyfriends and bone structure, until they married and turned nearly overnight into cows, beefy, bovine, dull and beautyless cows. Hard to believe it, looking at the ethereal little girls, one of whom the nurse was screening for lice at that moment.

The child sat in the designated chair, head bowed in a semblance of penitence, while the nurse pushed her heavy hair to one side and combed with her wooden implement the fine strands at the nape of her neck. The nurse wore white plastic gloves; they glistened on her strong, bulging hands like gut on fresh pork.

“There's nits,” the nurse announced. “Look here.”

All the teachers and waiting parents stepped forward—the community, validating the find—but not too near, stretching their necks to look at the small thickenings, like specks of bread dough, adhering to the hair strands. They nodded and murmured agreement, and several started to scratch.

“Makes me itch just to think of lice!” exclaimed the kindergarten teacher.

“Hey, we found a live one on a kid last week!” The fifth-grade teacher, a man, seemed to have acquired some of the bumptious volume of his students. “We put it on a slide, put it under the microscope. Want to see?”

“No, thank you!”

“I'd like to see,” Cally offered. She did not want to watch the nurse give the child the requisite paperwork to take home, quarantine her from the other children, call her parents. Lice were a shame on the family, no matter how the propaganda tried to say they had nothing to do with poverty and dirt.

She climbed (rapidly; use calories) the steep old stairs to the fifth grade classroom on the second floor. (Put the bigger kids up there, she imagined some teacher saying, Hope they'll be responsible enough not to push each other over the railings splat on the foyer floor. And some other teacher saying, I can think of a few we can splat.)

She found the microscope set up on a windowsill. She looked at the louse.

And gasped, a small sound, quickly stilled. And gawked. She had expected something like a flea, some sort of insect, but this was like nothing so easily apprehended. Under the microscope it seemed to come at her, looming out of a black porthole, swimming, translucent, and entirely too leggy. Though she was not sure whether the numerous long protuberances were legs, or hairs, or feelers of some sort, or … Something like the clinging tendrils on a squash plant, but many, many, and Cally did not look long enough to entirely decipher what she had seen. She turned away with a shudder, remembering the dish of cold spaghetti in the Boy Scout Halloween House of Horrors—“Feel here, these are his guts!”—remembering the long tentacles of a childish old nightmare, feeling the memory as she sometimes felt the bloodsucking touch of Hoadley.

Or of family.

Cally's father, a frozen-meat salesman, had made a modest success of himself, had grown prosperous, supported his wife and children in a manner to be proud of, and died before his time of heart failure. He had been a decent, hard-working man, entitled to rest and be let alone when he was home. He and Cally's mother had slept in twin beds. She had never seen her parents argue, never seen them kiss. Cally's mother, clinically depressed all her adult life, had perturbed her adult children by regaining her mental health with alacrity shortly after her husband died. She lived in the Finger Lakes district of New York state, wintered on the Gulf coast of Florida, and devoted her days to cards, clubs and luncheons as she had once devoted them to doctor's appointments, self-help books, counseling, isometrics, religion, aerobics, health-food catalogues, psychiatry, bee pollen pills, revival meetings, astrology, and the I Ching. There had been little time and no energy in her for her children beyond the basics of their physical upkeep. Though adequately fed, Cally had grown up hungry for her parents. Her hunger for them was their hold on her. That grip clung, leeched, threw out long tentacles around her even at the distance of death and time and place.

Cally's childhood daydreams had been of beatings and torments. Sometimes, in the fantasies, her father and mother had been the perpetrators of torture. The dreams had been pleasant, because after suffering she had felt that she deserved love. The imaginary abuse had its bittersweet pleasures; the real neglect had none.

Suffer, her Cinderella mythology had said, and someone will rescue you and love you and take care of you forever. And make you happy. And there had been Mark, and he had brought her to Hoadley. Her new family.

And she turned away from looking at the louse and shivered, for the new family had much the same slithering feel to her as the old.

In the evening Cally took the children to her in-laws for supper because of the viewings. When mourners were in the Home, no cooking odors could intrude their tactless presence from the apartment upstairs, no childish thumpings and scamperings and vociferations were allowed overhead, and even ordinary footsteps were discouraged—when she had to be around, Cally laid old pillows on the floor and walked on them. But generally she and the kids cleared out.

On this May day, warm at last after the long Hoadley winter, the beautiful day the omens began, there was no hurry; they walked. Ten-year-old Tammy and her younger brother Owen, full of the pent-up energy of schoolchildren, careered ahead. Even in boots Cally could not keep up with them. And she could not keep up her usual rapid calorie-burning stride; she felt dazed, dizzied, either by the events of the day of her own end-of-day hunger. Warily she watched everything around her, half expecting the sparse traffic on Main Street to turn into an invading army, the plastic bunnies and flat-ceramic kissing Dutch kids and wooden propeller-wing ducks on the lawns to change before her helpless eyes into something horrific.

(Though in fact she found Hoadley's lawn kitsch horrible to start with. She did not much care either for the massive concrete paired lions and urns and three-tiered fountains with which Mark adorned the outside of the funeral home, but she was grateful that his sense of the dignity of the place kept him from decorating it with plastic pinwheel daisies.)

A few doors up street from the funeral home Sojourner Hieronymus was sitting on her front porch waiting for suppertime. Cally stopped to talk. She could not have gone by even if she had wanted to. A strict though tacit porch etiquette prevailed in Hoadley. In emergency cases of extreme hurry a person could hustle past with a flap of the hand or a shouted greeting, but an explanation was due afterward, and such cases had better not occur too often, or their perpetrator would be suspected of unfriendliness, liver problems and subversive sympathies. The accepted behavior was for children to stop and say hello respectfully before escaping about their own business, and for adults to stop and talk for at least five or ten minutes from the sidewalk or leaning on the porch railing, depending on the degree and warmth of the acquaintance—but never to presume actually to come up on the porch and sit down unless invited. The porch was an extension of the porch-sitter's home, and was treated, like a foreign embassy, as a sovereign territory.

Cally would have stopped to speak with Sojourner Hieronymus in any event. She was interested in the old woman, if only because Sojourner kept no ceramic skunks, no whirligigs or cutout wooden tulips, no Mexican donkey planters or wire-legged flamingos or reflecting balls or pistachio-green seahorse birdbaths in her yard. She did not even plant petunias. The lines of her house, innocent of ornament, scrupulous and Heavenward-aspiring as the long lines of her face, rose austerely from her flat, clipped lawn. A broom and a shovel hung against the side of the house, on nails big enough to last. In front of the porch a small, smooth-raked, severely rectangular garden awaited three tomato plants in three tidy wire cages. The two porch chairs were of chilly metal many times painted. By the door stood a lean dapple-gray milk box. Cally appreciated Sojourner Hieronymus and her total lack of sugar-coating.

“Good evening,” she called.

The old woman looked gray all over, smooth prayer-bonneted hair, housedress—in fact the housedress was a faded, flowered blue, but it looked gray as old meat. Sojourner nodded and motioned toward the empty chair beside her. Cally came up and settled herself on the porch. The metal chair was of the sort with diamond-shaped cutouts and only two legs, in front, made of pipe bent to form a U-shaped stand rearward. It gave springily when sat upon, and could be jiggled to resemble a very staid amusement park ride. There should have been a metal glider to go with the chairs, but Sojourner had sold it.

“How are you?”

“How are you?”

Neither woman listened or answered. This ritual needed no response. Their eyes watched the children capering on the front sidewalk, clapping and calling to the friendly mutt who lived in the neighboring yard. Cally felt no temptation to tell Sojourner about the crazy perceptions that were troubling her. Sojourner would have listened; Sojourner was not self-centered on her own ailments and bodily functions as so many old people were. Nor, in spite of the prayer bonnet, did Cally think Sojourner would scream “Armageddon!” and fall down in a fit. Sojourner was far too tough and stiff-backed for that. But she knew Sojourner would not approve of her seeing strange manifestations. Sojourner scarcely approved of anything.

“Don't you know better than to kiss that dog?” the old woman called to Tammy. “You don't know where that dog's nose has been!”

Tammy smiled reflexively, her own snub nose confronting the suspect canine one, and paid no attention. At one point Mrs. Hieronymus had told her that if a cat gets into a crib with a newborn baby it would smell milk on the baby's breath and suffocate the baby trying to lick the milk out of its mouth. Tammy had repeatedly introduced various neighborhood cats to her baby brother as he napped, with no satisfactory results. Mrs. Hieronymus had also told her that a child who bit on a banana peel would get leprosy. At various times Tammy had tested this statement by inserting banana peel into her brother's mouth and forcing his teeth closed on the yellow, bitter skins. Again, she had observed no satisfactory results except Owen's passionate aversion to bananas. She now knew better than to listen to Mrs. Hieronymus.