The Book of Fred

by Abby Bardi

  The sermon went on like that for a while, and then the choir sang a few more songs. Then Cyrus asked us to come down and receive the sacred seal. Row by row, we filed down to the front, where Cyrus put a dab of something red on our foreheads. I thought it was probably wine, but later someone told me it was turkey blood. When he saw me, he smiled like he remembered who I was.

  As we walked out of the church, a few of the girls with big stomachs squeezed past me, giggling and looking important. Iasked Mama why there were so many pregnant women around, but she didn't answer me. We went down to the Bunker and made everybody a late lunch, since by now it was nearly two. Cyrus had gone on talking about the seals for a long time, though he never really got to the seventh one. I figured he'd talk about it some other time.

  As I worked, I thought about how odd it had felt being in church again. I thought of all the times I had wished I could be in church, and now that I was there, it was both familiar and terribly foreign. All the colors were wrong, and there were too many people, but some of the words were the ones I knew, words I had been hearing all my life. I used to love them, but now I had to admit that they sounded different to me. Maybe because I had actually been in my own accident, now suddenly all those things, earthquakes and mountains of fire and eagles crying “Woe, woe,” seemed real. They seemed like they would hurt. I had always thought of death as a beautiful thing, but now I knew something I had not known when my brothers died, I knew how your body just goes dark inside as death starts to spread through you. It wasn't even the pain that I found scary, but that darkness. I thought of Dr. Greenberg in his white coat, and it was the first time I had thought about anyone from back there in some days, because I generally wouldn't let myself. But today I could just about see Dr. Greenberg in my mind like he was standing right in front of me, with his arm around Alice and a little smile because I was doing so well. Right then it came to me that I wanted to grow up and be a doctor like him, but then I thought no, of course I can't do that, I'm not even in school anymore.

  As I considered this, my mind started to get all confused. Whenever I thought about what I was doing now, or what I might do for the rest of my life, I felt like I was trying to see thefuture in a crystal ball like the witch had in the video of The Wizard of Oz that Heather and I had rented. But whenever I looked, it was all cloudy, and if I tried too hard, all I would see was those winged monkeys carrying Dorothy through the sky.

  For the next few days, time passed in a blur while I was running around in the kitchen, and I liked the blurriness, it made me feel like I was spinning and couldn't see anything, like my brothers and I used to do when we were little, just turn around and around and then fall down on the floor while everything kept on whirling in circles. On Thursday, Mama and I finished lunch but instead of going back to our cabin, she said she was supposed to take me back up to see Cyrus again. I went into the ladies' room and washed my hands and splashed water on my face, which had a tendency to get a bit greasy from the grill. My hair looked all flat from being inside a hair net but I fluffed it up a little the way Heather used to do for me. I looked in the mirror and saw that I still looked grubby and dull, but I figured there was nothing I could do about it, so I came back out and found Mama talking to some tall man with a mustache. I waited for her to introduce me to him, but she didn't, and we walked up through the trees to Cyrus's house.

  When we walked in the front door, I looked off to the side and noticed a living room with a bunch of the same pregnant girls I had seen at church sitting around on couches, drinking Cokes. Mama led me up the stairs and through the double doors, and there was Cyrus, on his throne. This time he was wearing a long white shirt that was almost like a robe, and when I got close enough, I could see that there were tiny purple stars all over it. I stepped up to him and said hello. He looked over at Mama, and she nodded at him and left the room. I just stood there waiting for him to say something.

  “I wanted to know how you were getting on,” he said,standing up and leading me over to a leather couch on the side of the room.

  “I'm very well, thank you,” I said. We sat down, and he picked up one of my hands and held it.

  “I know you've been through a lot of trials, little girl, and we want to make everything easier for you here. We want you to be comfortable in your mind so you can do the holy work.”

  “Oh, I like it here just fine,” I said. “I'm working hard in the kitchen, and everything is just fine. Just fine,” I said again. I noticed that my palm was starting to sweat and I wanted to take it back from him and wipe it off on my leg, but I couldn't figure out how to do that without just yanking it away and seeming rude. He started stroking my arm, and that just made it sweat worse. Then he leaned over and kissed me right on the mouth, grabbing my shoulders, as if to keep me from getting up and running away.

  I was so shocked, I didn't know what to do. I just sat there with my mouth hanging open like a fish, not really kissing back, since I didn't really know how, though I had seen it enough on TV, but just letting him rub his tongue all around my teeth and the insides of my lips. One of his hands was rubbing my arm, up and down, making a wider motion that seemed to take in my whole body at once, and then his other hand landed on my knee. I was wearing heavy black tights, and his hand slid along my leg smoothly, like an ice skater. I started to relax into the whole thing, and in my mind I was seeing how we would throw grease and margarine on the grill and it would melt and start swirling around, and that was how I felt, like melting grease. But then suddenly, he stopped and pulled his face away. I was still sitting there with my mouth open, too surprised to do anything but gape.

  “Has a man ever done that to you before, Catherine?” Cyrus asked, smiling at me. His wire-rimmed glasses had gotten a littlesteamed up, and it made his eyes look like they were far away.

  For a second I wondered who he was talking to, but then I said, “No, sir.”

  “Or a boy,” he added, like he was correcting himself.

  “No one. Sir.”

  “You can call me Cyrus.” He ran his hand through my hair, greasy though it was, and smiled at me some more.

  Now that just beats all, I thought, a preacher who kisses people and has them call him by his first name.

  “How are your injuries now?” he asked.

  “My injuries?”

  “From your accident. How are your insides? Healing well?”

  I was about to say that I felt fine, but that wasn't quite true, especially now, since being here next to Cyrus was churning things up again, and then something clicked in my mind, something that was much smarter than I felt at the moment, and I said, “It hurts a lot inside. In my female parts. Cyrus.”

  He drew back a little, patted me on the head, and said, “Well, we'd better give you time to heal, then.” He stood up, took my hand, and pulled me to my feet. “I want you to come back and see me soon. When you're better.”

  “Oh, I will,” I said, feeling giddy.

  “Bukulahara,” he said.

  “Bukulahara,” I said back to him, or something like that anyway.

  He opened the door and led me to the staircase, where a man with a gun came and walked me down to the living room. I found Mama sitting there waiting for me next to all the pregnant girls. They were wearing frilly flowered dresses, and some of them had their hair tied up in purple hair ribbons. As we walked down the hill through the trees, Mama didn't ask meanything about what Cyrus and I had talked about, but she seemed sad, and I thought well, jumping Jehosophat, she knows.

  From that moment on, everything seemed all funny, like when Cyrus kissed me my brain began to melt and just stayed that way, oily and slow, and the oil spread over everything the way it would on a window, so you couldn't quite see out of it anymore. I walked around looking as normal as a piece of pie, but on the inside, I was lurching around, bumping into a million things, all of them different. I would stand behind the grill, scraping it every now and then, and find myself thinking about the kiss, and it would seem t
o pierce me all the way from my mouth to my toes, passing through a lot of places in between, and then I'd feel like I couldn't wait until Sunday when I would sit in the pew again and watch Cyrus, and maybe have him splash whatever that was on my forehead again. But then other parts of me were angry. I was angry at my mother for bringing me there and leaving me alone with him, knowing what might happen. I was angry at Cyrus, and at myself for feeling the way I felt when he kissed me. I even felt angry at Alice for letting me go away to a place like this, where everything seemed inside-out and upside-down. I found myself being angry at Dylan Magnuson for driving his car into me, though I had tried hard to turn the other cheek, since I saw on the news that he was probably crazy and couldn't help himself, but still, one day when I was standing at the grill I found myself scraping it extra hard, clenching my teeth and pounding on it until Jeff said, “Hey, honey, ease up on that thing.”

  Well, days passed like this, and then Sunday rolled around again. I put on the prettiest dress I could find, though I wished I'd had one of the really nice ones Alice had bought me, and Mama and I went off to church. It was a beautiful sunny day,truly spring now, and the mountains around us were all waking up with green, and the air smelled good, like there was suddenly life in it. We arrived early enough to get a seat pretty close to Cyrus, and at one point during the sermon I thought he saw me. I smiled at him just in case, but then I felt stupid.

  This time he was talking about the seventh seal. He talked about the silence of heaven, the hail, fire, and blood, and the stars dropping down from the sky, and the turkeys crying out for justice. He said, “Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great,” and again he mentioned April 15. I liked it when he talked about things that were familiar and I jumped on those things when I heard them and tried to feel like everything was the same as it had always been. But this April 15 business sounded just like the Big Cat to me, and we all know how that turned out. I was still hoping for life to go back to normal, and the last thing in the world I needed was another false apocalypse.

  On the way out of church, Mama took me to the side door and we said hello to Cyrus. It seemed funny to see him after having been alone with him. In church he was like a different person—he seemed much taller and grander, like a rock star or the president. I said hello and he put his hand on my shoulder again. I didn't want him to remove it, but he did, and we left, and afterward, while I was frying a bunch of lunch stuff on the grill, I felt all grumpy and bad, like now I was going to have to wait another whole week before life became interesting again. At the same time, part of me hoped that Mama would not get it into her head to take me up to see him again during the week, since who knows what might happen.

  But the week just dragged on, and we didn't visit Cyrus. I was partly relieved and partly irritated. Everything seemed flat and ordinary. Sometimes I'd see Cyrus's car drive past, a brown Mercedes, and I would look up and feel excited for amoment, but then I wouldn't even wave at him like everybody else was doing, since what was the point, he was going away in a car. I found myself imagining that he would pull up beside me, stop, open the door, and ask me to get in with him, and we would drive away somewhere, but he didn't. I'd watch his car wind away down the road, past fields full of turkeys with the hazy purple mountains behind them.

  Finally it was Sunday, and I made Mama leave for church even earlier than usual so we would be closer to the front. We made it into the fourth row, not too far behind all the pregnant girls, who were still whispering and giggling together. Cyrus came out from behind the curtain and started talking, but this time it wasn't so much a sermon as a meeting. Some other men got up and started talking about what was going to happen on the fifteenth.

  Unlike Cyrus, who made the day seem dreamlike and glorious, they made it sound like it was going to be hard, and there wasn't going to be much fun in it. One man held up a big map of the whole property. The Bunker was circled in red, and he said that was where we were going to have the standoff. He said we had enough supplies for a year stored in the warehouses. I had been to the warehouses in the second cellar beneath the kitchen and I knew this was true. He said we were hoping it wouldn't take a whole year, but it might, and we had to be prepared to live that way the whole time. He said the Bunker was just about readied up, and now we just had to wait.

  Cyrus thanked him and then got up and said a bunch more stuff about olive trees and lampstands, lions and dragons, moons and serpents. Then we all went down and he put the seal on our foreheads, and this time he was so busy blessing everybody and laying his hands on them that when he put his hands on my shoulders, he didn't even seem to recognize meand just stared right through me. As we walked away up the aisle, I found myself looking back at him and thinking how weird it was that I had ever been close to him, that his tongue had hunted all around my mouth like it was looking for something. I felt sad and backwards, like I was going in the wrong direction, and I had to practically drag myself out of the church and away from him. Mama and I walked over to the kitchen and went back to work, and I tried to think about other things for a while.

  When lunch was over, I noticed Mama talking to the man with the mustache again, so I started walking home alone. Sarah caught up with me and started chattering away about this and that. She said she was excited about the fifteenth, and that everyone was, it was what we had all been waiting on for so long. I guessed that her former church had never had to go through any Big Cats. She asked if I was all packed up, and I said no, and she said I had better get my suitcase together, that we were only allowed one, and that I should remember to bring a lot of underwear because we weren't going to get to wash much. I thought to myself that not washing was not going to be good for Sarah's pimples, but I held my tongue.

  “Your mama has a new boyfriend,” she said. “That mustache man.”

  “No she doesn't,” I said, trying to walk faster to get away from her.

  As we reached my cabin, she gave me a sideways look and asked me if I had met Cyrus yet. I said I had, and asked why. She said he always wanted to meet the new girls, especially if they were blond. I said I wasn't really blond, that my hair was more of a light brown, but she said I was blond enough for Cyrus. “They say it's a divine gift if you have relations with him,” she said, giving me a sly smile like she was checking tosee if I already had. I didn't say anything. “I went to meet him one day, but nothing happened,” she said. We were standing outside my cabin, and she kicked a little stone with her shoe. “I think he's really good-looking, don't you?” I still didn't say anything, and she laughed a bit, like she had discovered my secret, and she tapped me on the shoulder and said, “You be careful now. When we're all in the Bunker, why, I guess you'll find out then what it's all about.”

  “What what is all about?” I asked, but she skipped away like a six-year-old. I felt an awful lot older than that all of a sudden. I went into the cabin, sat down in the straight chair in the living room, and sank my head in my hands. My head felt as heavy as a boulder, and my hands felt little and weak like I could barely hold them up. Mama came in then and I had to pull myself together and act normal, but it wasn't easy. I just felt strange and miserable, and I didn't know why.

  “We need to get ready,” Mama said. She bustled around the cabin as if it was going to take hours to pack everything up when the fact was, neither of us had much stuff. I didn't know where the rest of her belongings were, but alls I had was the suitcase I'd brought from Alice's, and I didn't really care about anything except for my cow pajamas. All the other things I'd really liked, my new clothes and my stuffed dog and my bowling ball and the Oz books, I had left behind. I had finished my medicine two weeks ago. There was truly nothing I wanted, but I went into the bedroom and filled the suitcase back up again. It looked exactly as it had when I arrived.

  For next few days, we cleaned the cabin so much that even the walls glittered, and we washed our clothes down in the laundry room in the Bunker, though they were already clean. We made everything just so, in between working three m
eals a day, and when we were finished, we did it all again. It seemedlike we needed to stay busy, maybe to keep from being nervous. You could tell something was going to happen, and happen soon. Everyone in the cafeteria seemed edgy and keyed-up, and when someone said something funny, everybody laughed extra hard, loud laughs that sounded like machine gun fire to me, but then I was sensitive about loud noises ever since the accident, which still roared in my head sometimes. “I guess we won't be paying no taxes this year,” somebody said, and everyone laughed some more.

  The moment I opened my eyes on the morning of April 14, things felt different. Mama and I got up and went to work in the kitchen, and while the same amount of cooking went on, the whole time we were serving up the food, men were carrying big boxes past us and going down into the lower floors to the warehouses, and the cafeteria seemed more crowded and frantic than ever. People were wolfing down turkey sausage and eggs like it was their last meal, and men were strolling around with machine guns cradled in their arms like babies. In the corner at a long table, some women were teaching a group of children to duck under the table when they gave the signal. Most of the children were ducking like it was a really fun game, but some of the littler ones looked frightened.

  Lunch was pretty much the same way as breakfast, but there were even more men with boxes. Truckloads of supplies were going into the cellars, and by midafternoon, it seemed like every man had a gun, and even some of the older boys. As I was walking back to the cabin alone, I saw the brown Mercedes coming up the road from the front gate. I neatened my hair a little and sucked in my cheeks the way Heather had told me models do. As the car passed me, it slowed to a stop and the back window rolled down. “Catherine, isn't it?” Cyrus said. I nodded. I felt like I couldn't speak. “Are you ready for the greatday, little girl?” I nodded again. His face looked big in the window, almost like a dog's. “I want you to come to me tonight. Tell Ed at the front to let you in.” He wrote something on a scrap of paper and handed it to me. It just said, “Permission granted, Cyrus.” I said I would, and he drove off without even saying good-bye, or “Bukulahara.” I still had no idea what that meant and decided I would have to ask someone.