Dangling the dead cat by the tail, she went out to the shed where the manure spreader and tractor and lawn mower were kept, and the cans of gasoline. It did not take much gasoline to soak the small carcass. Shirley was a trusting sap; Shirley had never missed even the huge amount it had taken for the bear. Elspeth felt in her pocket for the matches, found them—she had kept them there lately, like a Boy Scout, prepared—and headed toward the farmhouse. She would hang the cat from the fence. Her lips, the soft, faintly pouting, exquisite lips of a consummate lover, thinned into a grim smile. Shirley would be surprised. Had been already, and would be surprised some more. Shirley knew nothing of the secret Elspeth, the real name, the court records: prostitution, malicious mischief, cruelty to animals, assault with a switchblade.… As long as she had been with Shirley, as long as she had felt sure Shirley loved her and only her, she had been able to keep that ice-black aspect of herself under control, under wraps, hidden. For the most part. But lately there had been Cally to contend with … and Ahira, that Ahira woman, scared her. Something in that Ahira woman called to her. The worst in her. Brought it out of her so that she had gone and done what she had not done in years.
The memory of the smell of burning fur would sicken her once the mood passed, she knew. But she could not or would not desist. She couldn’t think what might stop her.…
Coming past the farmhouse, she found out.
Still outside the fence and just past the porch corner Elspeth stared, hearing the roar like cicada roar only louder, coming nearer, seeing dimly in the night the swirling of the approaching swarm—Elspeth reacted within an instant. There was enough of a black person’s instinct and training in her that Elspeth knew a hostile mob when she saw one. Or heard one.
She dropped the dead cat and ran forward, rounded the fence corner—the plastic ponies floated at her eye level on their posts—sprinted toward the gate, Shirley’s gate that swung perpetually open, and reached it and closed it before the Hoadley natives blundered up against it. Then she stood at guard just inside, panting, waiting, one hand on the pommel of her sword.
The borough council, as Gerald Wozny had made clear in the parking lot after the formal meeting, intended nothing more than to go out and talk with “this here Wertz, or Danyo, or whatever” and see what was what, “see if he can’t call off the damn bugs, what I mean.” The very next evening had been agreed upon, despite a conflict with summer reruns of “Family Ties.” The fact that the council members did not hesitate to make the necessary personal sacrifice showed the depth of their dedication to public service. Indeed, their zeal made them forget discretion; they spoke with their families and neighbors and co-workers while the orange-eyed bugs with the black faces of babies hummed and whined and incessantly wailed … and the idea that the cicadas and all the other perversities that plagued their beloved town could be blamed on one unnatural person was too much for the average Hoadley person to stomach without strong action. The logic was simple, seductive, infuriating: drive out the witch and the world would be well. Half of Hoadley, hoarsely shouting as if at a softball game, accompanied the council to confront Danyo that evening.
Through the frail wire fence Elspeth faced men—and some women, stalwart old farm wives, the black-jacketed young women who lifted weights and clung to the backs of motorcycles—Elspeth faced a mob armed with lead pipes, baseball bats, lengths of heavy chain, the biggest wrench in the tool box, blunt instruments of all sorts. These were not gang warriors or knife fighters, Hoadley people. Their stabbing was generally verbal and in the back; up front, these were blunt-force folk, verbal or otherwise.
“What do you want?” Elspeth demanded through the fence.
The young exotic in pseudo-medieval garb, hand on sword, made them uneasy enough by her sheer wild-eyed oddity that they stopped and found something to laugh at. “Not you, sweetie!” one man yelled.
“Why not?” someone retorted. “She’s just as much of a queer as the other one.”
“Not by a country mile, she ain’t!” With a bark of hard laughter.
Elspeth had no time to wonder what that last meant. She had grasped the essentials: that the mob wanted Shirley for some reason, and that only she, Elspeth, and a chicken-wire fence stood in their way. Already some of them were banging and prying at the flimsy barrier with their weapons. “You call this here a fence?” one lifelong farmer yelled. “What fer kind of fence is it? Wouldn’t hold a chicken in!”
Elspeth said fiercely, “It’s meant to keep Hoadley out.”
“Won’t keep nothing out for long! Least of all us!”
Elspeth’s dark hand shook briefly on the pommel. Then, slowly, she drew the sword. That unmistakable long, downsliding metal sound, glassy-smooth as a cicada’s wail … The sound sliced through the rah-team shouting so that it subsided to a mutter, a near silence, and into that uneasy lull Elspeth thrust words meant to cut.
“It’s to keep out windbags. Bigots. Slogan shouters. Hypocrites. Narrow-minded old bitches. Judgmental old farts. Pompous assholes. Backwoods, thick-skulled, no-neck shitheads. It’s meant to keep you all out.”
A fence topped with bright-colored little horses, some with silver-painted shoes on their plastic hooves … Muttering crescendoed to an angry shout. Blunt weapons loomed high as the horses. Like a huge snarling dog the mob pressed against the fence so that the wire stretched.
Elspeth stood erect like a warrior of old, waiting for them with the sword.
Odd, thought Shirley, watching through her limp and dusty curtains, odd how Hoadley had called her and called her and called her home from so far away, even though once she had hated it. Even though she knew it would never accept her. A clutching, clinging place, Hoadley, its tendrils deep in her heart. She pitied it, but even now, facing the worst Hoadley had to offer, she could no longer hate it as she had when she was young.
Elspeth had drawn her sword. Shirley knew she could put it off no longer; she had to face them. She made her body move; she went out, letting the front door slam behind her so that Elspeth would hear her coming and not slit anyone open, not yet.…“Hey,” she called to her fierce little lover, “watch what you’re saying to my relatives.” Shirley tried to sound jovial, voluble, at ease. She did not quite succeed, but her appearance diverted the mob for the moment from action into invective.
“Fag!”
“C’mere, queer!”
“He-she,” declared the councilwoman with the lethal-looking glasses, Zephyr. She carried a heavy flashlight; a weapon, or a tool? She shone the powerful beam in Shirley’s face.
“Hey, Peter! What did you do with it?” Laughter at the shouter’s wit. “Did they throw it in the garbage after they cut it off?”
Shirley felt her smile slide away, leaving her wide mouth naked, indecent. She squinted in the flashlight glare, knowing she was ugly when she squinted—and homely even when she did not—knowing she was pale in that white spear of light, knowing she was sweating. The flashlight beam followed her as she moved to stand beside Elspeth. As best she could, she ignored it.
“What do you people want?” Shirley asked the mob with a conscious effort to keep her voice calm and quiet, as if she were a storekeeper trying to please a difficult customer. But a roar and a babble assaulted her in answer.
“We want you out of here, Peter Wertz!”
“Pervert!”
“Bringing this, what I mean, evil on us all—”
“Get out of town and take your bugs with you!”
Shirley said, “Whoa! I never done no harm to none of you.”
“Weirdo!” They seemed not to have heard her; the voices had grown angrier. All laughter had ceased. “Get out, witch!”
“Oversexed sissy whore!”
“Did you let them cut off your balls, too?”
And Elspeth, listening, had turned to stare at her, had started to shake, and the tip of her sword drooped until it dragged on the ground. And the mob, sensing that it no longer needed to be afraid of the jig with the knife, roared
and surged against the fence to trample it down.
“I wouldn’t, if I was youse.” Shirley could speak calmly, for she felt numb, wooden. This was her worst-case scenario, and she was living it, and in a way she had planned for it, in nightmares, in her instinctive fears whenever she had thought of her home town throughout the years of her self-imposed exile. She knew what to say. “Youse don’t want to splatter my blood around. I got AIDS, what I mean.”
Her level voice had carried throughout the crowd. Roar dwindled to an uneasy mutter, and the mob stood still. Elspeth had not stopped staring at Shirley, but Shirley was looking at the others, many of them her former neighbors, people she had known since she was a little boy.
“What’s more,” she reminded them gently, “last I heard, things were getting so’s AIDS could take regular, upstanding people like youse. Not just deviants like me.” Shirley glanced at Elspeth and smiled, a flat smile that strained her mouth; it was the best she could do. “We both got AIDS,” she declared. “Both us queers. Right, Elspeth?”
Be with me on this, Elspeth, she willed her. But Elspeth stared back at her without replying.
And from the crowd a voice shouted, “She’s lying!”
They all knew she was lying. The awkwardness of her voice and Elspeth’s lack of response told them that. A woman in the night yelled shrilly, “Get her!”
Like a single huge, many-legged and many-limbed beast the mob lurched forward, snapping the wire or trampling it. Shirley flinched and stepped back, one hand to her face—the nightmare response, to make her eyes stop seeing what was happening—the other reaching out to grab Elspeth by her left arm, dragging her back toward the house; Elspeth had not moved, did not seem to care what happened to either of them. Elspeth had not lifted her sword, and unless they could barricade themselves in the house, could fend them off that way for a while, it would all be over as soon as the roused representatives of Hoadley had cleared the fence—
Something else was roused.
The fence, the fence itself was moving.
Not the wire; the horses! Shirley blinked and stood gawking, and by the sudden stiffening life she felt in Elspeth she knew that Elspeth saw it too: the hooves, the dainty black-and-silver-painted hooves darting to strike, the handsome little heads snaking out, ears flattened, teeth bared. And swinging hard and heavy and biting as spiked maces—heavy? Was there weight in those hooves, those heads? Could not have been. These were hollow plastic horses on wooden posts, nothing more. Yet people were falling, people were screaming and struggling to push back against those behind them who had not yet seen—the weirdness.
And the posts and their ponies, the posts themselves were moving.
Drawing in, pulling down, tightening their line of defense until their rectangle had turned to a ring around Shirley and her house, until the painted ponies ran at chest height, the nose of one less than half a length from the tail of the next. They looked, Shirley thought profanely, like a fucking merry-go-round ride. When they began to move forward in their circle and bob, some up, some down, in alternation, she considered that she had had enough for one evening. She turned her back on the mob (which was retreating in consternation, as was she) and on the smoothly springing horses, and pulled Elspeth along with her into the house.
Cally was in there, looking out a window from behind a veil of curtain. Shirley did not hold it against Cally that Cally had hidden herself from the mob. No sense letting Hoadley call Cally a monster/deviant/witch too. Poor skinny kid. Came to find a friend, and found a lesbian transsexual instead. Shirley felt sure that until that evening Cally had seldom given a thought to what went on between Elspeth and herself. Cally was too smart, thinking about other, important things, to nose into people’s lives the way Hoadley did. Cally was a hilltop, sky-looking person, not interested in sniffing the crotches of life. And Elspeth would never understand that, how Cally could be innocent without being dumb. Elspeth was a jealous little cunt, practically primed to kill Cally. Keeping Elspeth around was in more ways than one like keeping a panther for a pet. Shirley hated to bring her into the room where Cally stood.
But Cally stared out the window at the fence-cum-carousel, only glancing at Elspeth, and said to Shirley, “How’d you make it do that?” The blank, staggered look on Cally’s face, Shirley knew, matched her own.
Shirley’s wooden calm cracked, and she said with unnecessary vehemence, “I didn’t have nothing to do with it!”
And Elspeth, at her side, spoke for the first time since Peter Wertz had emerged like a specter from the woman she thought she knew as lover.
“You didn’t tell me.”
Shirley looked. Elspeth’s sword, bare and dangerous, still dragged from her right hand. But Shirley could see that she did not need to worry about what Elspeth might do or say to Cally. Elspeth did not know where she was, and there was no room in Elspeth to think about Cally, or Hoadley, or the fence weirdly carouseling outside, or the weapon in her hand, or anything but this haunt, this fetch, this doppelganger, the ghost of Peter Wertz.
“You didn’t tell me you were a man.”
“I’m not a man.”
“But you didn’t tell me that you were.” Elspeth was worse than blank and staggered; she was a zombie. Worse than walking wounded. Elspeth was walking dead, and Shirley looked at this one whom she loved and blazed into vehement life.
“I’m not a man! I never was, I never wanted to be. Nobody asked me, dammit. I like women.” Shirley took Elspeth in her arms, hugged her, shook her, tried to warm some response back into her. “I wanted to be a woman. I always knew I was a girl, from little on up. Somebody goofed when they gave out the bodies, that’s all.”
Elspeth stood dead as a parking meter, except for her mouth, which moved, robotic. “I thought I knew you.”
“You do know me! You know everything that’s true about me.”
“Five years, and all a lie.”
“I’ve never lied to you!”
“Faking in bed …”
“No! What we had—have—is real!” Shirley made up in passion and volume all that Elspeth lacked. “Being a guy was a lie. That wimp Peter Wertz was a walking lie.”
“Did he like dressing up in his mommy’s clothes?” Elspeth came to sudden, vicious life. The long steel blade in her hand trembled, slowly lifting, hard lights glinting and slithering along its blood groove. “Did he like jerking off in her undies?”
Shirley felt her face tighten, her gut muscles tighten as if she had been punched, and in spite of herself she stepped back, just as Peter Wertz would have stepped back from the inevitable playground bully. “No,” she said. “El, you don’t understand. That thing was a piece of meat fastened on me by mistake, is all.”
Elspeth seemed not to hear. “Boys? Did he like doing it in his ass with other boys?”
“No. Elspeth.” Shirley backed a step farther away. Hurt, she knew she was going to be hurt, and her body wanted to avoid it even though her mind wanted to face it.… “Get to the point.”
“The point?” Elspeth raised her sword and laughed, if anyone could call such a cold sound a laugh. “This is the point.” The steel swordtip wavered in front of her face. She focused on it, nearly cross-eyed, seeming to examine it, to see it deeply, and she started to tremble. Shakily, needing both hands to guide the blade, she sheathed it.
“I don’t know,” she mumbled, not looking at Shirley. “I don’t know what to do or think.”
And still gawking out the window, seemingly unaware of what had been going on a few feet from her, Cally exclaimed, “Look! You’ve got to come see this!”
“I don’t give a shit!” Shirley had never spoken so savagely to Cally, and did not care. She went to Elspeth, tried to put her arms around her, but Elspeth shied back from her, almost whimpering, like a scared little girl with her cotton underpants down around her bony knees.
“Let me alone!” She pulled away from Shirley’s embrace. Shirley had been a man.
All Cally’s pain had le
ft her. Nothing about her erstwhile wife-and-mother life with Mark seemed real. She felt an exaltation, a sense of purification and moral superiority; she was moving on another plane of existence, only vaguely aware of Shirley and Elspeth quarreling behind her, and she knew herself capable of seeing visions. But the scene outside the tall farmhouse window was no vision. Its colors, its music, its lights were so vivid to her that she muffled her ears with her hands, wished for dark glasses.
“You guys,” she insisted, “you’ve got to look at this. I don’t believe it.”
Silent, Shirley came and stood by her side.
In the darkness beyond the windowglass sheen the little horses still bobbed in their defensive ring. Cally felt a vague sense of something wrong about the way they were circling, but did not pursue it; the truth would come to her in time, in the cycling fullness of time, as light came to the sky.… Rapt, she watched the wheeling spokes overhead, girders made of small amber lights sweeping past in synchronization with the majestic cavortings of the plastic ponies, spreading into an ornate rim, a cornice, over the fence posts. From the night floated the somewhat asthmatic treble notes of a Strauss waltz. A carousel waltz.
Shirley blinked and shook her head hard as if to clear her hearing. “Locusts?” she said, querulous, after a moment.
“And lightning bugs.” It had taken Cally an indeterminate span of time to realize that the lights were fireflies, the calliope music cicadas—or the all-too-human cicada creatures Hoadley called locusts.
A voice spoke. “How incredibly bizarre.” Elspeth, with some of her exquisite scorn back, had chosen her own window to look from.
Like an Apache boy fasting on a mountaintop, seeking truth, Cally turned her thin face and spoke to her across the room: “It’s happening because you told it to.”
“Me!” Elspeth was startled out of her scornful pose by Cally’s oracular tone. “I didn’t tell anything to happen!”
Apocalypse Page 20