Apocalypse

by Nancy Springer

  And she’s standing next to me, shaking with hate and hurtness. Hurting for love.

  “Joanie,” I whispers to her, “I can love you like that. I can love you good as that guy. You give me a chance sometime. Joanie.”

  She didn’t hear me at all. She’s glaring off at her mother laying in front of Our Lady of the Bathtub. And I looks that way too, and the slantwise light has gone flashy red, so I seen them two white bodies in front of the plaster Mary in flickers, like in a bad movie. A cop car is pulling up the curb. Course it would. Decent people in Hoadley was asleep, but a Hoadley cop would find his way to a show like this like a dog to a bitch in heat.

  Joanie smiles and sort of blinks, hard, her whole face tight for a second—and that bridegroom guy is gone like he was never there. Joanie’s mother is laying naked on the ground in somebody’s back yard, in front of their lawn shrine, with her feet up in the air fishy white and a crucifix hugged up to her flabby old breasts.

  I started forward, I was so surprised, but Joanie grabs me and pulls me back in the spruce hedge and through it out the other side, and her and me walks away up Hoadley, and that cop was so tooken up by what he was finding I don’t think he ever seed us.

  They put Norma Musser in a hospital mental ward, and the story was all over Hoadley what she done, except nobody had never seen the reason. So when Norma Musser come home from the hospital in a few days, she didn’t stay long. She couldn’t hardly walk for shame in that town. She just put together a box full of clothes or whatever and got on a bus and left. Didn’t nobody know where she went, not even her husband. Least he never made no sense whenever anybody asked him. Probably was too drunk when she left to care or pay attention.

  So Joanie had got back at her mom for all the times her mom had called her a whore of Babylon. Them times her mom had accused her of fornicating in the house was nothing compared to being caught making love naked with a Jesus cross in front of a Mary shrine. I didn’t like what Ahira done. It was the meanest trick I had ever seed. Next time I seen her I couldn’t look at her straight no matter how beautiful she was, I was so ashamed of what she done and shamed I had been there to watch. But when I thought about it, it sort of made sense. Getting driven out of town was the same like what her mom done to her.

  Then I thought, Now Joanie’s mother is out of Hoadley. Now she won’t go down to hell when the rest of the town does. She got showed up bad, but she’ll be alive after the rest of them is dead.

  And maybe that was what Joanie intended all along.

  Plus I remembered Joanie on her knees, begging that blessing.

  Plus I got to thinking about that bridegroom. Something about him being my double and all bothered me. There was lots of questions I wanted to ask him. The main one was about him and Joanie.

  Next night around dusk when I knowed Ahira would be down the park I didn’t go there. I went up to that merry-go-round place of hers instead. It was the only way I could think of to try to see the guy.

  I started walking up the hill right after work and it was still pretty light by the time I got there, but it was dark inside the building. I found Joanie’s matches and lighted some candles she had setting around stuck in Mogen David bottles she’d picked up somewheres. I lighted them until there was enough that I could see myself in the mirror. Him, I mean.

  There he was looking back at me all right, and he smiled kind of a shit-eating grin. “Come out of there so’s I can talk to you,” I says.

  He don’t come out, but he answers me right back. “Why are you so worried?” he says. “I am only your shadow. You know that.”

  I didn’t like being told I was worried. It was true, but I didn’t like him saying it. “Where’d you come from?” I says.

  “Where do you think?”

  “Did she make you?”

  “Who?”

  “You know who.”

  “Yes, she made me. Out of her dreams of you.”

  The way he said it, dirty like, didn’t make me feel no better. Only later I got to thinking, dreams of me? And then I figured he lied. No way would Ahira dream about me.

  I says, “How did she make you?”

  He just grins. Now I know I’m more jealous than worried. I says, “Did she do it with you?”

  He laughs. I didn’t take that to mean she done it, not really, but something about the way he laughed, like he was making fun of me or Joanie or maybe both of us together, it made me mean-dog mad. Quick I picked up one of them wine bottles to heave it at the mirror. I figured if he was just my shadow, I had a right to get rid of him.

  He stopped laughing and gave like a gasp, and before I could do nothing else he was out of the mirror and standing beside me among all them wooden horses, and he grabbed my wrist. His hand was strong, and he stood taller than me, and even naked like he was I knowed I couldn’t take him down. He held onto me until I dropped the wine bottle, and then he let me go.

  He says, “You should ask her, not me.”

  I was still plenty mad at him, and I says, “You’d do it with anybody, wouldn’t you? Anytime. Anyplace.”

  “That is my nature. Though with some it is more pleasure than with others.” He don’t act mad at me. He’s looking at me straight and quiet, and he says, soft, “You are my eidolon, my paradigm, my model and my mirror. You are my better self. With you, it would be the greatest of pleasures.”

  Good God, he was a homo too. And I ain’t never been propositioned by no homo before. But the weird thing was, for a minute I almost felt like it would be right. Good, even. I wasn’t mad at him no more. Him making love to me—well, who the hell ought to love me? He was me. I could love me, couldn’t I?

  Then he put one hand on my shoulder, and I seen the hungry look in them brown eyes of his, and I knowed if he was me it was just too bad. I didn’t like him very much. I pushed him away, and I started to shake at the idea of what I almost went and done.

  “There’s no need to be afraid,” he says, still looking at me the same way. “You are my master. I am as nothing without you.”

  “Go away,” I says, hoarse.

  But I guess I wasn’t so much of a master to him after all, because he didn’t. He just stood there looking at me with them eyes like a beagle dog’s, and I’m the one went away. I stumbled out of there, didn’t even blow the candles out, and I run down the hill in the dusk and didn’t stop until I was under the street lights down in Hoadley. Damn lucky thing I didn’t burn down Joanie’s merry-go-round, leaving the candles lit that way.

  Later on I noticed that guy never answered none of my questions, and I had a thought. Maybe he didn’t want to answer no questions. Maybe whenever anybody come near him with too many questions he made love to them. One way or another that would shut them up.

  Well, maybe that was part of what made him do it to me.

  If he done what he done to keep me from asking him stuff, it was working. I wasn’t going near him no more.

  And I felt sick, because I still didn’t know what was going on between him and Joanie. I dreamed at nights, sometimes, about him doing her the way he’d done her mother, and I’d wake up shaking mad.

  Cally Wilmore heard about the poor woman who had gone ga-ga. Some sort of religious frenzy, with wonderful overtones of sexual neurosis. Perhaps an exotic variety of millennial fever.

  But she was too preoccupied with getting her own children out of Hoadley to pay much attention to Norma Musser’s problems.

  Within a few days all the arrangements had been made. At about the same time as Ahira Estrella Amaris Anona Joanie Musser’s mother was disgraced, Cally Wilmore talked to her own mother over the cicada-buzzing long-distance line, and assured her that everything was all right, she just thought it a good idea that the children should spend some time with their other grandma for a change. And about the same time as Ahira’s mother left town, Cally Wilmore turned over to her mother a gift, or a burden, or a trust: Owen and Tammy.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The cicadas came to Hoadley on th
e day the girl who had been raped died.

  Cally was sitting with Gigi in that austere individual’s high-fenced back yard when a shadow came across the oleo-yellow sky, and stayed, and thickened before she could squeak, and engulfed her, and she saw the pudgy black-jellybean bodies, heard amid the humming din and the rattle of a million wings the now-familiar wailing cries.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Gigi remarked, getting up hastily.

  The two women fled into the house. The few baby-faced bugs that entered with them they carefully expelled, opening the door a crack to do so, then slamming it. Despite their efforts, one wailing mite got smashed in the door and gave a glassy scream as it died. Cally started to shake, but Gigi said angrily, “To hell with them.”

  The hungerbabies clung to the melba-brown, nurtureless walls of Gigi’s house and cried and cried and cried. The two women sat in the kitchen and found that they had nothing to say to each other. Later Cally, who was afoot, had no choice but to walk home amid the cicadas. She found that at first they had come solely to Gigi’s house, but they followed her, spreading throughout the town. They rode in her hair like half-grown opossums riding on a milk-swollen mother’s back; they crawled along the gaunt line of her collarbone and explored the dark hideyholes of her blouse. Outside the Perfect Rest Funeral Home they clustered in the laurel and azaleas, singing their strange slide-flute song.

  They swarmed the small town as if it were a grove of sumac, clutching with their orange claws to clothes on the clotheslines, to children in the sandboxes, to wooden siding and yellow brick house walls and the black shirts of clergy on their way to monthly fellowship. They zinged through the air on orange-edged wings or clung black and pudgy to porch railings, sighing, crying. Because they were everywhere, the fact that they had the faces of babies could not be ignored. The town hummed louder than they with talk of them. Some people seemed to recognize departed loved ones in the black faces of the cicadas and were afraid to kill them; a woman burst into tears in front of the Handi-Mart because she stepped on one by mistake. Other people perceived them as an affront and bought out the local supply of insecticides. The Lutheran, Methodist, and Brethren pastors were inclined to interpret them as a plague, a punishment sent by God, but among the fundamentalists and the Roman Catholic majority there was talk of demons. Special ecumenical community prayer meetings were called, and a special meeting of the borough council. Talk of witchcraft reached a new height, and quarrels erupted for small reason, even among the men, who were not as exhausted by the hunger-babies as the women.

  No woman in the town who had ever mothered a baby could sleep properly those days. The sound of those weak, yet ever-continuing, dying cries put their nerves on constant emergency alert. A salient exception, Sojourner Hieronymus, who had never borne a child, took broom and did battle with the cicadas invading the sanctity of her tidy yard and front sidewalk. Oona Litwack, who had mothered many children and hugged many grandchildren to her cushiony bosom, shooed the black-and-orange bugs gently off her peonies, her plastic chipmunks and wooden propeller-winged ducks and the potted impatiens hanging from the edge of her porch. Ma Wilmore cowered in the heart of her house, the kitchen, talking nearly all day on the phone, though she would not open a door or a window. The talk was of the hungerbug onslaught. Amid that phenomenon, the death of the girl who had been raped went undiscussed and almost unnoticed by Ma Wilmore and Sojourner Hieronymus and the others.

  The girl who had been raped—or rather, the young woman, though women in Hoadley remained “girls” until they were in their graves—the young woman was not hospitalized, but died at home while her solicitous and unsuspecting husband slept at her side. The coroner easily determined the cause of death to be a cancerous tumor nearly the size of a basketball pressing on her internal organs. Undressed, she gave the appearance of being perhaps three months pregnant with death. Her husband, who had not seen her undressed since the unfortunate occurrence which gave her her epithet in the town, had known nothing of what she was carrying. The doctor who signed the death certificate clicked his tongue, for the cancer was of a slow-spreading sort and would have been operable if caught even so much as a few months earlier.

  Barry Beal, who arranged the blanket over her at the Perfect Rest Funeral Home, was probably the only person in Hoadley more than ten years of age who did not think of her as the girl who had been raped. He knew her only as the pretty blond girl from the drugstore, the one who black-lacquered her eyelashes into spikes and curled them so that they stood up above her eyes like a wrought-iron fence. The one he had seen a few times amid Ahira’s misfits. He checked the side of her face for Ahira’s mark, but it was not there. This one of Ahira’s people had chosen not to be healed.

  Cally Wilmore knew she was the girl who had been raped, and was surprised to see her young body lying in a casket (a sixteen-gauge steel Perma-Sealer casket, top of the line) in the Blue Room, the color of which matched that of her palisaded eyes. She wondered if the girl had somehow died months later of the rape, but couldn’t ask Mark. Though she and Mark were occupying the same apartment, with no kids around to keep them from talking out their problems, they seemed farther apart than ever.

  Cally wanted a reconciliation. The carousel of her personal agenda cycled on a constant hub of hunger for Mark. Other needs—for independence, adventure, growth, selfhood—loomed up from time to time and flashed by in a blur of mirrorshine and sky music and rainbow candy color, to cycle away again, but that one remained. Always before it had been possible; therefore Cally had thought she could go to Mark, duck her head, put her hand on his shirt, offer a few tears perhaps, and then their marriage would be all right again—or at least as right as it had been for some time—as long as she behaved herself, kept her mouth shut, did errands, cleaned the apartment and made good dinners. (How she was to maintain this Hoadley-woman facade while the world was ending, she did not question. She would manage somehow. The love hunger took priority, as it always did.) So she had presented herself to Mark the day before, contrite. But it had not worked as she expected. Mark had turned his back on her with a hard laugh she had never heard from him before. Mark had changed. Was changing.

  Standing in the Blue Room next to the corpse of the girl who had been raped, Cally felt as always the tug of two urges. Wryly she knew she was like the house cat who, when let out, wanted to be in, and when in, wanted to be out. For the most part she wanted to be with Mark. He was around the funeral home somewhere; she had come into the place to be near him. But also she wanted to be away from him. Family was the thing that held a person down … she wanted to be far, far away, on her own adventure of living, free. Like a bird in the sky.

  Neither seemed possible. Instead, she went riding.

  “She good as killed herself,” Gigi declared to Cally, out on the trail. “No reason the cancer should have killed her. A person can live with cancer. I should know. I got six kinds of cancer.”

  Gigi had known, of course, what had killed the girl in the Blue Room. Hoadley born and bred, Gladys Gingrich Wildasin knew what happened in and around the town as naturally as if she breathed in gossip along with the polluted air.

  “I got more parts missing than a stripped car,” Gigi bragged. “Cancer took ’em. First thing was, I had to have skin cancers removed. Then I got both breasts taken off, right to the armpit. I got a kidney taken out, had a tumor in it. All my female organs are gone. I got a section of bone missing out of my arm, the one that had radiation when I was a baby. Now they’re talking about taking the rest of the arm, so’s I’d have to ride Western, left-handed. There’s a shadow starting to show up on my backbone. By rights I ought to be dead, but here I am, walking around.”

  “Riding around,” said Cally. She glanced at pale, dust-brown-roaning-out Snake Oil, no longer in envy but with covert satisfaction, knowing that she had one-upped Gigi in the stable hierarchy by riding Tazz Man. On the black gelding, she was indisputably more the daredevil than Gigi.

  As if in acknowledgment,
the black horse plunged his heavy head, without provocation, to buck. Cally pulled on the huge curb bit—there was not much strength in her starved arms, but the bit acted as a lever on the tender parts of the horse’s head and mouth—and kicked hard with booted feet. Devil’s head came up as he leaped forward, and Cally hauled him in several rapid circles until he condescended to walk on. Devil was never happy on a trail ride unless he was running away.

  Gigi watched impassively. “How’s Mark?” she asked, perhaps not entirely tangentially, as Devil began to come to order.

  “Worse than ever.”

  “Cicadas got him down?”

  All around them the tar-baby bugs chorused in tragic soprano voices, lurched through the air, crunched under the horse’s hooves, sighing Doom, Doom. The women paid little attention. They had accepted the cicadas and their glissando song. Doom. It was a given in the Hoadley summer, easily accepted, because it had been a tenor, a refrain in Hoadley conversation for years. Since forever.

  The previous night another animal had burned, hanging from the water tower. A stray dog this time. At least so Hoadley hoped, that it was a stray and not someone’s house pet. The carcass was charred beyond recognition. Gigi and Cally accepted the burning dog, also, and scarcely spoke of it.

  Answering Gigi’s question, yet not answering it, Cally murmured, “I don’t know why I stay around.”

  “I would never leave Homer,” declared Gigi cheerfully. “Kill him if I could get away with it, sure. Make him miserable, all the time. But I’d never leave him. He foots the bills.”