Apocalypse

by Nancy Springer

  The council indulged in a murmur of scandalized appreciation for a moment, until its blunt old German member brought it back to business. “Don’t make no sense to me,” he complained. “Didn’t none of this here locusts and stuff start until after that Ahira come.”

  “That’s what I say,” Wozny declared. But then he hastily mollified the opposition by adding, “Maybe this Ahira’s funny and we don’t know about it.” And at once, like any well-fed herd animal, the Council was off on the enticing scent of deviant sexual practices.

  “What about that one the cops found the other night?”

  “Oh, Norma Koontz! Musser. Wasn’t that something? But there ain’t no harm in Norma.”

  “What about that there fellow rides a bicycle, rings the bell at the children? I always did say—”

  “I got a better one than that for you,” said Zephyr. She kept her voice suggestively low, and the council came to immediate attention.

  Zephyr had been doing some checking other than in the encyclopedia. She started, as Hoadley storytellers generally did, at the outer rim of the topic, spiraling in toward the center. “Do you remember old man Witherow? Lived up Olp’s Dam Hollow.”

  Some of those present remembered him.

  “Had a daughter Blanche, run away with a fellow from Hoople. Remember? Then she come back, had a baby, finally married a Wertz.” The Wertzes were a solid, unassuming Hoadley family, Catholics turned Lutheran because of a mixed marriage. “Todd Wertz. And he adopted the baby.”

  Nods. “It was a boy,” volunteered the other female council member—women were in charge of keeping track of these things. Men participated in gossip, but women were in charge, the guardians and promulgators of Hoadley’s values. “Their oldest. Peter Wertz.” Her eyes took on a deep look as she dredged memory. “Seems to me he didn’t do too well.”

  “I remember that boy,” a man offered. “He was one of them didn’t—didn’t—he didn’t do sports, or—”

  “He didn’t fit in,” said Zephyr smoothly, “and he went away.”

  “To California!” The other woman pounced into the center of this circling dance, the nugget of information like a trophy between her teeth, a mouse in a cat’s mouth. “He was one of them hippies, like.”

  “Sure,” said Gerald Wozny. “I know his father at work. He says they don’t know what become of him. Don’t never hear from him no more.” This statement caused shock and smug pity for the parents; it was an unaccountable thing, such an ungrateful child.

  “Well, I know a woman knows his mother,” said Zephyr, “and I just today found something out.”

  Council gave her its most interested attention. Once again she prolonged the suspense by starting roundabout and spiraling in.

  “You know how them pesky bugs are getting on everybody’s nerves?” she asked rhetorically. “Well, they work on Mrs. Wertz something awful. Seems like she hears them reproaching her. And she got to crying and went and told her neighbor lady something she hadn’t never told nobody.”

  Zephyr paused until urged to go on.

  “They hear from Peter all right,” she said finally. “They heard he had him one of them sex change operations.”

  A gratifying hubbub followed this statement. Zephyr, with a seasoned performer’s sense of timing, waited (thinly smiling) to cap the story, to put the icing on the cake. And Wozny, of all people, served as her foil.

  “What’s all this got to do with anything?” he demanded, irritated that she had created such a sensation, suddenly aware that the council meeting had gotten out of his control. And Zephyr leaned forward, her spear-tipped fingers tapping and crawling on the tabletop, and opened her mouth, and spake.

  “Why, what it’s got to do is that this here Peter Wertz ain’t in California at all.” A pause, sufficient for effect but not allowing for interruption. “He’s back here, he’s right outside of town, only he’s a woman now. And he lives with another woman.”

  Uproar, topped by a common-sense blast from the German farmer. “Why, then what the hun did he have the operation for?”

  That no-nonsense question went unanswered, because Wozny, along with half a dozen other council members, was clamoring for the culprit’s name.

  “Well, he changed his name,” said Zephyr with tantalizing slowness.

  “We can figure that!” the other female council member snapped.

  “Uses his real father’s last name,” Zephyr divulged at last. “Danyo. Shirley Danyo, he calls himself now.”

  Go home to Mummy? Not hardly. It was in fact the last place in the world Cally wanted to be, with her indifferent, ever-preoccupied mother, even if Owen and Tammy had not been there to ask questions, which they were. She would go—she would go where her heart was: where her horse was. And where her friend was, her big-voiced, generous friend, the only person she could think of who seemed to like her just as she was, for herself, and not want anything of her, and not tangle her in any of the complicated meshes of sex and love and duty and role. And she would keep it from Mark as long as she could, where she was going. When he found out he would make something dirty of it somehow. Hoadley would make something dirty of it somehow. She sensed that.

  A good thing it was so late, very little traffic on the roads, because she could not seem to help driving like a crazy woman.… Cally started to sob and drove more recklessly than ever.

  Down, down, screeching around the sharp curve and rocketing through the single-lane stone railroad underpass, the dark and dripping tunnel … Around the hairpin bend and up the steep hill beyond. The night, the road were a mine tunnel flooded with stagnant tears. Tarry pavement melted seamlessly into dark forest unseen against a soft-coal sky. Headlights lit only blackness. Behind them, Cally jockeyed over the steering wheel and pressed, forcing her puny way over the hill and down again, down, down into the pregnant depths at an unreasonable rate of speed.

  Weeping, and observing herself from a small distance, Cally began to realize that she really was sick, that perhaps she should indeed have gone to see the doctor.…

  Shirley heard her coming—the wild whine of Cally’s overtaxed engine woke her up, for not many people came near the place at that time of night, and even fewer driving so fast. She heard the car plunge to a stop, got up (hearing the snick of the opening door), pulled on a bathrobe (the somewhat delayed clunk as the car door closed) and looked out to see Cally lugging her suitcase through the gate in the junk-horse fence. Shirley had her front door open before Cally knocked, and took the suitcase from her, hiding surprise, hiding consternation at how Elspeth would react to this particular houseguest. Elspeth would just have to go screw herself. It didn’t take half an eye to see that Cally was hurting.

  “I had to get away,” Cally explained, or tried to explain without telling too much. “Mark …” The name seemed to choke her; she tried again. “Mark … and … I …”

  “Sure thing,” Shirley hushed her. “No problem. You’re welcome to stay long as it takes. Cup of tea?” Her raucous voice had gone uncannily gentle, and instead of accepting the tea Cally clutched at Shirley’s sleeve with starved hands that scratched against the chenille with a sere, bony sound, like claws. Shirley embraced—there was hardly anything to featherweight Cally to embrace; it was like holding a Rice Krispie, a dry leaf ready to fly, a husk, the shell an insect leaves behind, something hollow-boned and brittle-thin and so fragile that a hug might cave it in. Nevertheless, Shirley hugged—cautiously—and Cally rested against her warm bosom, sobbed tenuously on her shoulder, and against that sturdy shoulder Cally’s wails sounded ghostly frail, like the wailing voices of the hungerbugs.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Elspeth found Cally in Shirley’s house in the morning, went back to her castle tower and did not come out again until suppertime. She had seen the pain in Cally’s face, and even, somewhat, felt it. She wanted, if not to befriend Cally, at least to avoid hurting her more. To be a good person, as Shirley was. Or at least to let Shirley sit and talk with the little twi
t. But it was a hollow effort. Though Elspeth laid out for herself a soft-hued palette and tried to paint, she felt always the sharp dark thing hard and restless just below the surface of her mind.

  Reporting to the house at sunset for something to eat, she found Shirley serving lasagna and Cally sitting at the kitchen table looking more literally like death warmed over than any living person Elspeth had ever seen. Cally had accepted a small portion of Shirley’s excellent homemade pasta. As Elspeth watched, Shirley’s houseguest took a corner of one noodle, hardly larger than a fly speck, on her fork, and lifted it to her mouth, then gagged as if it was indeed excrement. Shirley observed anxiously.

  “You’re all upset, is why you can’t eat that.” As her own portion of lasagna cooled on her plate, Shirley pawed at the contents of a cupboard. “Maybe something else would slip down better.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Cally thinly.

  “Soup? They say chicken soup is good for whatever ails you.”

  Shirley heated the soup. Elspeth snorted softly, like a horse in the stall, and stood beside her lover at the stove, getting herself a slab of lasagna. They did not speak. Elspeth sat down by Cally and ate, feeling the substantial pasta lump in her slim toast-brown throat and congeal to bulk heavy in her stomach; her gut had to be almost as tight as Cally’s. She forced herself to eat nevertheless, gazing levelly at the intruder.

  “Try this here.” Shirley set a small portion of soup in front of Cally. But Cally gagged even at the odor of the rising steam.

  “I can’t.”

  “Cally, you got to eat!” Elspeth had seldom heard placid Shirley speak with such obvious alarm. Though Shirley did not say it, they both knew what she was afraid of: Cally would die on her hands. “You ain’t still thinking of this diet of yours, are you?”

  “No. I want to eat. I ate last night. And then I threw it all up.”

  “You got the flu? Maybe we better get you to a doctor.”

  “It’s not the flu. I made myself throw up.”

  Shirley sat down and stared at Cally over her cold dinner, trying to comprehend. Her expression said, though her mouth didn’t, Why the hun did you do that? Cally met the look levelly and answered it.

  “I couldn’t help it. I know I’ve got to start eating, but I just couldn’t stand having all that food in me.”

  So starve, thought Elspeth, helping herself to more lasagna. It did not escape her notice that she was serving herself while Shirley hovered over Cally.

  “Mark’s right about just one thing,” said the latter in somber tones. “I’ve got anorexia.”

  “Well …” Shirley faltered, out of her depth. Elspeth, who considered that Cally should have grasped the just-mentioned fact months before, gave her lover a sardonic look and offered no assistance.

  “And Hoadley’s to blame for it,” said Cally.

  “How you figure?” Thrown off balance after having heard Cally blame Mark all day, Shirley wore the troubled, patient look of a horse on slippery footing. She still had not touched her lasagna. Disgusted, Elspeth took it. And Cally, she noticed, was looking down at her hands, hesitating, making a heart-touching show of what she was about to say, as if she was confessing her previous sex life to a fiance. The nose-picking dork.

  “You know, I loved Hoadley at first. Everybody was so nice, I felt like—you know, my family wasn’t that close.” Cally’s hands twitched at her paper napkin, clawing it apart. “I mean, I never really felt like my parents—cared much. But Hoadley—even people I hardly knew seemed—so warm.”

  “Hoadley’s like that,” Shirley promptly agreed.

  Not in Elspeth’s experience. But then, she had not married a Hoadley boy.

  “It was like I had family,” said Cally with weary amazement. “I mean, I never put it to myself that way, I just now realized, but it was. It was as if I had real family for the first time in my life.”

  “Well, that’s good, ain’t it?” said Shirley. Shirley had patience and goodness the way some people had social diseases. Elspeth had neither, not when it meant having to listen to this sort of thing. She could not sit by Cally and look at Cally any longer; she got up to find herself something to drink.

  “It was, until I—I guess that’s why I started starving myself. I saw the writing on the wall. I learned the score.”

  No cola, no fruit juice, no milk in the fridge, only a glass jug of water. Damn. Elspeth felt the sharp knife of anger nudging inside her ribs. She had not spoken a word to Cally since she entered the kitchen.

  “I found out how much this family really—really loved me. Oh, they loved me to pieces—as long as I behaved. As long as I did just what they wanted me to. Dressed the way they dressed. Went to the right church. Said the right things.” Cally was gaining volume. “As long as I was just the Cally they wanted to see, it was all hugs and kisses. But let me get out of line once, let me have a thought or a dream of my own …”

  “No go, huh?” Shirley sounded sympathetic, if somewhat bewildered. The system sounded normal to her. Naturally people liked you when you did what they wanted. Naturally they resented you when you didn’t. No big deal. “But why starve yourself?”

  “I was starving anyway.” Cally looked up with tragic eyes huge in her thin, thin face. “That’s what the books say,” she explained softly. “The anorexic comes from an oppressive family. The anorexic is starving for love.”

  Silence.

  “That’s me all right,” added Cally after a few dramatic moments. “Except I adopted Hoadley as my family, and it turned out to be just as abusive as the real one.”

  “Jesus shit!” Elspeth could stand listening no longer. “Jesus fucking knee-deep shit!” She slammed the ice-water bottle down on the countertop so hard that it shattered under her hand, never hearing Shirley’s protest. “You call that abuse?” She advanced on Cally, feeling her curling fingers tingle with her own rage, swordpoint inside her prodding hard. “You are a spoiled brat. You don’t know abuse; you never came close. Abuse is when they tease you with lighted cigarettes for fun, places the burns don’t show. Abuse is when they pinch your nose closed and pour hot tabasco sauce down you. Abuse is when they throw you in the dark closet and don’t let you out even to go to the bathroom, and then they punish you for the mess. Abuse is when they—when they—”

  Elspeth’s voice cracked. Cally curled up almost fetal in front of her, and Shirley sat with her mouth open soft and gawking, but Elspeth scarcely saw either of them; she was seeing the man, the one they called her father, coming at her with the leather strap—again.… Abuse was when you prayed to God they weren’t in fact your parents, that it was all a mistake somehow, that somewhere, someday, you would find the cradle from which you had been stolen, and your real father would be a prince with a golden crown.…

  “Elspeth,” Shirley was saying, “Elspeth,” and getting up, stepping clumsily in the broken glass, and ignoring it, coming over to put her big hands on Elspeth’s shoulders. “You?” asked Shirley gently. Because Elspeth had never told her any of this. Elspeth, the young beauty, the exotic, there had been no past to her except a discarded name.

  “Who the hell do you think?”

  Even the name under which Shirley had first met her, not real. The beautiful young people who came to California to find their futures often hid their pasts.

  From what seemed like a great distance Cally said, “I used to daydream that they did things like that to me. Then someday the prince would come and take me away. Somebody would—love me.…”

  “You are a goddamn asshole,” said Elspeth savagely, and she tore away from Shirley’s quiet hands and thrust herself out the door.

  It was nightfall. And Elspeth’s mood matched the night, so charcoal-black it could almost have been seen as a smoldering hot, feral aura around her in sunlight. Head thrust forward, she strode toward the barn. She wanted to kill something, right away; she did not want to take the time to stalk and shoot a bear, as she had done the first time the mood came on her, the cu
nning, chill, stealthy killer mood that numbed her like black ice. Killing the bear had been good, a long, leisurely self-indulgence; the mood had sated itself slowly throughout the days it took her to stalk and dispatch her prey. And killing the dog; that had been quicker, less satisfying. Her hatred for Hoadley had been more urgent by then, had not let her take the time she needed—but still her war had been merely with that kissing-itself town, not with anyone to whom she felt so tied, so tangled in meshes of shared passion as she did with Shirley. But this time her sneak assault was to be on her lover—her diatribe had been at Cally, but her rage was mostly for Shirley, Shirley, the one she loved, the one who would therefore, according to the pattern of her life, brutalize and betray her—and she lusted for a victim as she sometimes lusted for Shirley’s breasty, golden body, lusted so strongly that she could not withstand delay. She would kill. At once.

  The horses stood in their stalls, looking out stupidly at her past their own long noses. Horses were cherished, infuriating, feeble-minded animals. It would hurt Shirley if she killed a horse, Elspeth knew. But mere killing, mere hurting were not quite enough; her mood demanded manifestation in fire. And she would not be able to drag a horse to a hanging place as she had dragged the bear. It had worn her out, dragging and lifting the bear.

  She climbed to the loft and hunted out the stable cats much as they hunted the birds and rodents that inhabited the barn along with them. Atop the highest bale, looking rather like a perched eagle, sat the biggest cat. Not fat—no stable cat ever grows fat—but big, battle-scarred, bony, tough. He jumped away when he saw her coming toward him—he trusted no human except Shirley—but she had anticipated the direction of the jump; quick as a cat herself, she cornered him, grabbed him despite his hissing and biting, despite his vehement clawing, which tore her tunic and bloodied her arms. She throttled him with her slender sepia hands until he went limp, then swung him by the tail and bashed his head against the wall to finish him. Her sword hung at her waist, but she did not use it, did not think of using it, did not want to use it. Though she knew the day would come when she would use it.