Abigail Augenbaugh does not dream the whittled history of Joy, PA, the only town she has ever known. Abigail sleeps, and Joy continues its plodding industry despite the impending Apocalypse. The paper mill—its stink of sulfur filling the town—keeps churning out envelopes in three sizes. The tired third-shift employees at Allegheny Candy continue packing chocolate crosses and Last Suppers, Easter Bunnies and Santa Clauses into cellophane-wrapped boxes. Farther down the hill, at the foot of Scald Mountain, the railroad tracks and the Little Juniata River carry nothing of value into or out of town.
Nor does she dream of her own ragged and hollow few decades on the planet, an endless plodding toward—what?—nothing. Abigail Augenbaugh perches along the edge of the hand-me-down double bed— her side, despite the fact that her husband, Burns, hasn’t slept there in years—trying even in sleep to hold on to the Bible teacher’s syrupy, bitter promises—Apart from Salvation, we are worms and maggots. The lamb shall lead them to living fountains of waters. In just a few days, God’s elect, two hundred million people, will join the wedding feast, will be married to the Lord Jesus Christ. Will be forever the Lamb’s wife. Throughout eternity. But the torpor will not be denied. The boy prayed with her. She’s done all she can. She sleeps.
≠
The world somersaults. I can’t move. I can’t get off the floor. My feet are trapped in the WrestleMania quilt. There is thunder and lightning. There is screaming. And, as if coming down from Heaven itself, that song. Bip bop bop. The Mario Bros. theme song. Bip bop bop, ticka ticka … It’s everywhere at once. I can’t escape. I wear my Spiderman pajamas. I am brave. Nothing can hurt me. My bed shakes. The windows rattle. The thunder comes from the lips of holy God. I creep to the window, peel back the WrestleMania curtain. I am brave. My heart will not explode. I take a deep breath and peek out. There is fire in the sky. Black birds the size of cars sweep the sky, carrying away people in their talons. I look across the street, I see the graveyard. I see the ground split, peel, and roll away. I see the dead—all the dead—stand up in their trenches. They wipe the mud from their empty eye sockets, crawl out of their graves. I see the dead—all the dead—stumble and trip and begin to roll down the steep hill. I see the dead—flinging their dead arms, kicking their dead legs, screaming their dead screams—begin to pile up higher and higher beneath my window. Thunder. Lightning. That music. Faster and faster. Louder and louder. I am brave. The dead reach up for me. I am brave. Blood pours from the open graves, floods the street. Bip bop bop … ticka ticka. Blood pours beneath my bedroom door. I am brave. I wear my Spiderman pajamas. The dead reach up. I can’t stop them. I am brave. My heart will not explode. The blood soaks my feet, soaks my legs. I am brave. I scream, but there is no sound. I kick, I hit, but my arms and legs refuse to move. The dead pile up and roll into my bedroom window. The blood soaks my pajama bottoms. Thunder. Lightning. I am brave. The dead crawl across my floor, reach up to me. I am in my bed. I am brave. Thunder. Lightning. The hands of the dead take hold of my ankles, my wrists and I wake up. And I wake up. Wake up. And I wake up with my lie.
They’re all out to fuck you over. And they’re all in it together. You’ve got to keep that in mind. You’ve got to keep your eyes open. You’ve got your basement. You’ve got the Xbox and the porn. You’ve got Big Bertha. But the whole night lays itself out before you. The whole night. You’ve got the pills. Will they last? What if they don’t? The basement walls, are they substantial enough to withstand whatever comes? Whatever comes. Are you substantial enough? You try to remember the last time you talked to another human. You can’t talk to the wife. What would you say? Dumb bitch. I’m sorry.
Dumb bitch. I’m sorry. I am. Sorry.
They’re all in it together. Together. You try to remember. It may be that you’ve never had a real conversation. Ever. You used to see people talking, at the mall, in the grocery—watched their faces, their bodies—and you could tell that something passed between them. Back and forth. How does that happen?
Maybe it was the pharmacist? The one with the accent and the sexy mole on her bottom lip. When did you get your prescription filled? Last month? Two months ago? You watched her count out the pills and tried to imagine her little tits. She said something about the Pirates game, and you wanted to jump over the counter. But you’re too fat. Your hair is too dirty. Your breath, foul. The pharmacist with the mole and small tits talked about baseball.
“Titties,” you said.
It was the best you could do. The pharmacist backed away from the counter and asked if you were experiencing any side effects. You’re fat. You sweat constantly. You can’t sleep. You’re constipated. You’re impotent. There’s a nest of yellow jackets where your brain used to be, a snapping turtle in your belly.
“No,” you said.
Back in the basement, you stripped and tried to imagine her face onto the bodies in Big Round Behinds. Nothing. You stayed naked and struggled with Augusta’s twelfth hole.
How long ago was that?
How’d she get back in your brain?
Where are your pills?
Where’s the goddamn phone?
You want to call the pharmacy. You want to talk to the pharmacist with the mole and the small tits. You might tell her that the desert sand bubbles up from the floor drain in your basement. Sometimes the pills can stop it. You might tell her what actually happened. Over there. You might make up a better story. You might tell her that the boy is always stomping around upstairs, but that you’ve never beaten him. You might tell her that the last time you remember seeing your wife she was making biscuits. Canned biscuits, not homemade. You came upstairs—can’t remember why—just as she peeled the foil away and whacked the cardboard tube against the edge of the counter. The airy pop was too much for you. Like ordnance in the distance. You slammed the door and almost tripped on the stairs back down to your couch. You might tell the pharmacist this. Or you might ask what color panties she’s wearing.
But it’s the middle of the night. It’ll be dark for hours. The pharmacy is closed. The pharmacist with the mole and the little tits is not there. She’s somewhere else. The wife and the boy are sleeping. You hear the sand pumping through the sewer lines. Soon it’ll start filling the basement. They tell you to take the goddamn pills, so you take the goddamn pills. You tell them, just give me a blowjob and a bullet. That’s all you need. But nobody listens.
You pick up Big Bertha and lie on the couch. This is your life. A minute, a few seconds of clarity, then the thought-bombs explode in your head. It wasn’t always this way. But even back then, even before the Army, you had no real options.
You bought Big Bertha with your own money, money earned mowing the greens and fairways at Scald Mountain Country Club the summer before high school. “I’m thinking about joining the golf team, Daddy,” you said. It took you a while to say it. Years. He laughed at you. There was no way you’d tell him about the Golf Course Management program over at the community college. You knew well enough how Daddy felt about the community college. “Goddamn liberals!” He laughed. At you. He didn’t have a choice. You forgot all about joining the team, forgot all about the associate’s degree. For a while afterwards, you snuck out to the driving range to hit a bucket of balls. Then you gave that up too. In the middle of eleventh grade, you dropped out.
You never told anybody. You never told anybody that it felt like, even if you did your best, you didn’t deserve anything good. Joining teams and going to college and hoping for a different kind of life, that was for the boys whose fathers belonged to the country club. Those boys got the pretty girlfriends and the blowjobs. Those boys went to college. You didn’t deserve any of that. You deserved, if you were lucky, a job at the paper mill, like your daddy. Or work in the train yard, moving boxcars all day, every day. You deserved, at the very best, a lucky accident that would earn you a disability check every month. You’d learn to take something like pride in your misery and you’d defend it to the goddamn end. One thing was certain, nobody was goin
g to let you get too big for your britches.
You never told anybody that you thought these things. You’d tell that pharmacist, with the mole and the titties, next time you saw her. You sure as hell couldn’t tell the wife. You remember, when you got back from the Army, that bitch nurse at the VA insisting that you join her group. Therapy, she called it.
You keep the pill bottles in an old tackle box, along with a fillet knife and a little pistol you bought for your wife—protection from Muslim terrorists—just before you were deployed. You never liked fishing, not a single one of the hundreds of times you went. Alone. With your own father. The woman, the wife, is afraid of the gun. Stupid. Bitch. At the bottom of the tackle box, beneath the bottles, and a handful of loose bullets, you find her business card, the nurse from the VA hospital. You don’t know what the pharmacist likes. You find the card is oil-stained, the 800 number worn nearly off. You’ve held this card before, trying to weigh its worth.
HELP AVAILABLE 24 HOURS A DAY.
You read it again.
HELP AVAILABLE 24 HOURS A DAY.
You’ve read it many times, over the years.
Bullshit.
You decide, for the moment, that it’s all bullshit. What do they know about your life? What kind of help could they possibly offer? Some nights are better than others. This is a bad night. Bullshit or no, you call anyway. Some nights are better than others. This is a bad night. It’s like a tape loop. You take a deep breath and jab at the number pad. After three rings, a flat, sexless voice answers your call.
“You have reached—” the voice says.
“Please listen carefully,” it says.
You are already doubtful of the outcome.
“Press one if you are having thoughts of harming yourself. Press two for behavioral health. Press three for—”
You slam the receiver against the concrete-block wall. The phone shatters and lands, gutted, at your feet, both the battery and tiny speaker dangling from wires.
“What do I press?” you say aloud. “What do I press if I want to come down there and jab your eyeballs with a toothpick?”
Sand clots your mouth.
“What do I press if I want to shove a funnel down your throat and—”
It’s not like you’d really do these things, right?
“What do I press if sometimes I want to push a wheelbarrow full of dynamite right through your front door and blow us all to Hell?”
It’s the Hell part you’re not sure of. Could things be any worse?
What do you press just to shut it all up?
How do you stop the pressing, the nothingness that crushes you minute by minute, day in, day out?
You try to remember if there is another phone upstairs. You don’t know what time it is, but you’re sure to have hours before sunrise, before you feel safe enough to sleep.
You go to the Xbox. The Xbox is your salvation. Help is available twenty-four hours a day. There are more than twenty-four hours in the Hell of your days. In your basement, your hole, there is no time. And time is running out. You tee up on the first hole. In there, the sky is always blue blue blue. Everything is beautiful. The azaleas. The magnolia trees. In the distance, the green shimmers like a jewel, its mustard-yellow pin flag flutters in an unreal wind. Everybody awaits your next move. Ready to cheer. The crowd hushes just before you swing.
≠
The curtain is closed. My pajamas are wet. My sheets, my WrestleMania sheets are soaked. I can smell the paper mill. My pee. I pull the earphones out; the Mario song leaves my head. I hear a train. Bip bop bop, ticka ticka. I peed my pants. I want my birthday. I don’t want Mama to go with Jesus without me. It’s dark. I’m wet. I don’t want to leave my room. I don’t want to leave my bed. I’m wet, but I don’t care. I wish. I wish I could stop it. I am brave. And strong. If I were braver, if I were stronger, maybe I could do something. I could stop the world from ending, somehow. Daddy would be so proud. I’d be a hero. Everybody would love me. Everybody would call out my name.
“That’s him! That’s the boy who stopped the Apocalypse! That’s Willie!”
DAY 2
One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen. Seventeen. Eighteen. Nineteen. Twenty. Twenty-one.
This is how many times we stab her.
∀
Abigail Augenbaugh wakes into a troublingly beautiful May morning. She looks out the window. A light shroud of fog climbs up from the foot of Scald Mountain; it greens by the minute. Dew, gathered on the silky caterpillar nests in the branches of the ash trees and box elders, sparkles in deceptive beauty. The daylilies in all their orange fury; the rhododendron and laurel unfurled to greet the sun; the yellow bells’ unkempt splay: these all lay claim to her sight. A garbage truck passes; a city bus goes by in the other direction. Both vehicles are stunning and glorious in their filth. Abigail Augenbaugh almost yields to the beauty.
How does it happen that a day so close to the end of the world can be so regular and so magnificent? Abby looks at her calendar. The calendar is from AMVETS. A smiling young black woman in a perfect uniform graces the May page. Donate Now, the text reads. A lopsided red circle marks a midmonth day. Abigail made the circle. She thinks it’s a reminder about Burns’s medication. It doesn’t matter. Abigail prayed with her boy last night. There are too many hard days to count, stacked up behind that pending date, that empty box at the end of the week. Tonight she’ll pray with the boy again. She is doing her part. She is helping the boy prepare for what’s to come. Abigail doesn’t have anyone, didn’t ever have anyone to help her prepare. She prayed with the boy last night. There is solace in that, and a little balm for a lifetime of maternal shortcomings. She never had anyone to show her the way. She prayed with the boy last night. Tonight she’ll make another mark. Today she’ll go to work and hand out tracts. She’ll do God’s work. Like the man says.
A sudden chill makes Abigail shiver in her thin nightgown. She folds her arms across her breasts, tiptoes into the hall, pauses at Willie’s closed bedroom door. Barely touches the knob.
“Mama!” the boy calls out.
She opens the door, and the smells of sweat and urine and preteen boy wash over her. She prayed with him last night. They beseeched the Lord together. These smells, they don’t matter anymore.
“I don’t want to go to school today, Mama.”
“Are you sick, honey?” The curtains are drawn, the blinds shut, but she can make out the boy’s hump-shape tight against the wall in the bed.
He doesn’t answer right away. He shifts beneath the WrestleMania blanket.
“Yes,” he says. “I mean, no. I don’t want to go to school. I want to stay home. I want to get ready. To be ready.”
For what, he doesn’t say, but Abigail knows what the boy means. She crosses the room, stands by the bedside, almost sits. Abigail reaches out, touches the blanket covering the body of her son. He flinches at the touch.
“Everything is all right,” Abigail Augenbaugh says. “It’ll all be over soon.”
She backs out of the room, watching, feeling motherly. When she reaches the door the boy calls out again.
“Mama! Are you still there?”
“Yes, Willie,” she says.
“Stay, Mama,” he says. “Stay home with me today. We can pray some more. We can beseech.”
Abigail pauses.
Abigail pauses.
Abigail pauses.
Abigail closes the door gently.
Abigail has work to do. God’s work.
Abigail works as a boxer at the Slinky factory. All day long she drops jiggly coils of metal or Day-Glo plastic into colorful little square cardboard boxes. She stacks those boxes neatly into larger, thicker shipping boxes, then sends the whole shebang down the conveyor to the loading dock. The toy has been losing relevance for years. The company tries to make up for that loss by trumping up the historic value, the cultural importance of their outdated product—to both th
eir aging employees and the toy-buying world at large. Once a year, the junior-and senior-high kids get a tour of the factory. There is a Slinky float in the Joy Christmas parade, the Fourth of July parade, the Veterans Day parade, the Thanksgiving parade. Sometimes there is a Slinky Queen on the float, sometimes not. Abigail has always wanted to ride the Slinky float. In Abby’s secret place, she wears the cloak and crown of the Slinky Queen. All the boys liked the Slinky Queen. The Slinky Queen rules Joy, PA, with beneficence and love. And love. And everybody in Joy, PA, loves the Slinky Queen. In her secret place, her deepest mind, Abigail Augenbaugh waves to her adoring townspeople from atop the Slinky Throne.
But none of it matters anymore.
She puts on her official Slinky Employee Smock and goes quietly downstairs.
It’s daylight, and though the basement door is closed, she knows Burns is asleep on the couch. She knows the opening credits of that golf game are looping on the television. She hears the irregular little bursts of polite and fake applause.
Burns is asleep. Burns does not work. Burns hasn’t worked regularly since coming back from Iraq. He tried, for a week, stocking shelves at Surplus City. But that was years ago. Now, her husband lies on a couch in the damp basement, growing heavier and paler, playing video golf and watching those disgusting movies. When she can’t hear the sounds of the golf game, Abigail won’t go into the basement, not even if all the laundry in the house is dirty. She used to go down. He used to come up. The man on the radio says it doesn’t matter.
Joy, PA Page 2