I smell pee. It’s mine. I am strong and brave. My pajamas are mostly dry. I get a cup of water from the sink. I look out my window, into the stupid neighbors’ window. I see their kitchen table, where they sit and hold hands and pray before they eat. Stupid dead rabbit. I wonder if they know about the end of the world. I am happy that their world is almost over. I see their kitchen table and the plates from breakfast. I see a couple slices of bacon. Some scrambled egg. I see half a glass of milk. In a flash, I know exactly what to do. I am a genius.
∀
She tries to focus on Mr. Jinx. On his mouth. But nothing like words registers in her ears. The man is somewhere between forty and sixty years old, Abby can’t tell. He’s been the packaging supervisor for as long as she can remember. Mr. Jinx follows rules, and she likes that about him. Abigail stands in his office doorway. The conveyor belt rattles hurriedly behind her. The box-and-tape machine beats a syncopated rhythm: schkkk-chick-chicka. Schkkk-chick-chicka. Schkkk-chick-chicka. A forklift sputters by—with its insipid safety beep—leaving a stinking diesel cloud behind. Somewhere amid cacophony the radio plays, barely audible. Tuesdays and Thursdays the radio plays contemporary country. The other days, AM Top Ten. Abigail cocks her ear, but can’t tell what day it is.
Abigail wants to get to work. She wants to box the Slinkys. There is order and predictability in the job.
“You ought to be ashamed,” he says.
At least that’s what Abigail thinks he says.
Mr. Jinx has an oversized pie-shaped face. A big, wide forehead— capped by a fringe of short, kinked, spiderweb-thin hair—looms over his watery eyes, those bugged out by thyroid problems. Mr. Jinx’s nose hangs like an upturned spade, a shovel about to excavate his little, lipless ditch of mouth. Mr. Jinx follows rules.
Mr. Jinx’s skin, all that can be seen, is freckled. Rust-colored splotches tinged with a pale green, some as big as fifty-cent pieces, others small as a tick. It’s like he’s draped in camouflage and paisley. Until his mouth opens and a small shadowy hole breaks the pattern, Abby gets lost in his face. She moves a step farther into Mr. Jinx’s office.
“I worked with your pap at the paper mill. Uncles too. Worked with your mama over at Gospel Hill Chocolates. You ought to be ashamed, acting like this. Acting a fool.”
“Yes sir,” Abigail says, sincerely, though she has no idea what Mr. Jinx is talking about. It is very likely that the packaging supervisor knows more about Abigail’s family than she herself does.
Abigail is a good worker. She does as she’s told. People say things about Mr. Jinx; there’ve always been rumors. And people make fun of him. Other people. Not Abigail.
Mr. Jinx opens his desk drawer, reaches in, comes out with a stack of pamphlets. No, not pamphlets. Abigail sees that what he holds pinched between his thick freckled thumb and forefinger is a stack of her Rapture tracts. She can make out the twin humps of the Mosaic tablets drawn on the front page. From the few visible letters, Abby knows the title is “Does God Love Me?” But she doesn’t remember leaving a whole stack of these anywhere. The day before, she left a couple tracts in the employee bathroom, on the back of the toilet, but that was all. And the color of the print isn’t quite right.
Mr. Jinx splays the stack on the desk, fans them like a deck of cards, plucks one out and hands it to Abigail. Right away she sees the problem. They’re not official Rapture tracts. Not real. There’s no text inside, and the folds are careless and crooked. But that isn’t the worst. On the front, someone has made two additions to the Ten Commandments. One written with a draftsman’s precision; the other in a childish scrawl; both gross and obscene and involving Mr. Jinx. Someone, some wicked Slinky employee, no doubt got hold of a real Rapture tract, made the blasphemous alterations. Someone with access to the Xerox machine.
“What do you know about these?” Mr. Jinx asks.
Abigail’s face burns with shame. Her whole body heats up. She doesn’t know where to fix the violation. Where is the highest degree of wrong? Who is to blame? All she can do is shake her head. No. Nothing. No.
“Mrs. Augenbaugh.”
Mr. Jinx pauses for a long time. Something new hangs in the balance. Abigail’s stomach heaves. Bile stings the back of her throat.
“I know you didn’t do this,” he finally says. “But you have to keep your mind on the work, Mrs. Augenbaugh. On the job. Or we’ll find someone who can.”
Abigail hears the we, and it registers. It goes without saying that there is, and always has been, some group of others keeping tabs, pulling strings, opening and—more often—closing doors of opportunity. Abigail is afraid of all of them. Mr. Jinx rakes the false tracts back into his open desk drawer. The boss man looks at her. She can’t tell if he is sneering or smiling. Abigail backs toward the door.
“Pull yourself together, Mrs. Augenbaugh. Stop all this foolishness before it’s too late.”
Too late. Abigail works to reconcile the phrase.
“You know the Fourth of July parade is coming soon. Be here before you know it—”
Mr. Jinx flicks the tip of his tongue back and forth across his teeth. Abigail can’t remember ever seeing him do this. The man talks and talks. Abby loses focus.
“Slinky Queen,” he says.
“No promises,” he says.
“—a good word,” he says.
Abigail goes to her station. Over the staging table she can see directly into Mr. Jinx’s office. His freckled face, seen through the wire mesh in the safety glass, looks like a monstrous jigsaw puzzle come to life. Abigail confronts the mountain of stiff brown shipping boxes. She flips the switch to begin the endless regurgitation of Slinkys and the colorful boxes that will contain them.
≠
I’ll eat just a little. I’ll build my strength. I’ll go find Mama, and we’ll pray at Slinky. I’ll eat just a few bites. I am brave. I know what to do. I suck a tiny piece of paper from between my teeth, spit it out, cross the skinny walk to the neighbors’ house with lightning speed. I put my hand on the knob of their back door. I command the door to be unlocked. I turn the knob. The door opens. I am powerful. Superhuman. I go inside. I look in the garbage. It’s full of empty cat food cans and eggshells. I know these people. I know their secrets. I saw them. I saw them do it one time. The sex. I sit at the table. I eat everything they left behind. I am still hungry. I go to the refrigerator, chug all the milk, and put the empty jug back on the shelf. Chug all the Sunny D, put the empty jug back. I don’t mean to. I decide to stay a while. I don’t mean to. I do mean to. I am a dangerous criminal. I do what I want. I know these people. Their secrets. She talked to me. One time. Something stupid. “If anything ever—” she said. “All you have to do—” she said. These people. In their stupid living room, I turn on the TV, sit on the couch and flip channels. The stupid white cat jumps into my lap. I take the cat to the front door and throw it out onto the porch.
∀
Abigail works through the morning break. She thinks about the adulterated Rapture tracts in Mr. Jinx’s desk drawer. She thinks about the legitimate Rapture tracts, the real Rapture tracts in her purse. It is her responsibility, as a True Believer, to distribute them. To get the word out. The man on the radio told her so. Abigail wants to go to Heaven. But Mr. Jinx talked about the parade, about the Slinky Queen. Abigail wants to go to Heaven. In Heaven everything will be different. But what about the Slinky Queen? There is very little time left. The man on the radio says only two million people will go to Heaven and spend eternity as the bride of the Lamb. The others, billions of them, won’t. They’ll die. They’ll be shamed by God. Abigail spends much of the morning trying to understand the man’s message. She can’t. She has no concept of millions, and less of billions. Her notions of eternity have sadly human limitations. What does it mean to be the bride of Christ? How will it differ from being the bride of Burns Augenbaugh?
All morning long, Abigail boxes. She boxes the endless conveyor of Slinkys. She boxes the details of her life. Her husband. The boy
they made, with preparation. No real decisions. No choice. She boxes her doubt. She boxes her shame. Her fleeting moments of hope. She boxes her thoughts about the coming Judgment. But they all come back. It all comes back, again and again. Joy, PA, Abigail’s whole world, is an endless conveyor of predictable uncertainty.
Was there ever an alternative? Abigail can’t remember. The details she remembers from childhood are not her own. They come from the lives of the Joy, PA, elite. The sons and daughters of local royalty. The Yoder boys, heirs to the Yoder Gravel & Stone empire. They were legendary. Lumines-cent in their glory. Even the crippled one, Danny Yoder, who broke his neck—naked and drunk at a keg party—diving into Yoder’s Quarry. Even he shone. Made even more heroic by his handicap. Abigail remembers a kid, not the name, not the gender, only that the kid came from railroad money, only that the kid choked to death on a thick white disc of hardboiled egg one Easter. Abigail remembers that Bonner Chocolates girl who handed out chocolate penises and vaginas one Valentine’s Day. The school was rife with scandal and rumors for weeks, months, years.
Abigail’s father had a running joke. “Yeah, Abby went to college.” Then, after a pregnant pause, he’d make her explain that her first job was washing dishes in the campus cafeteria. Abigail got the joke, and the joke got her.
Those children of Scald Mountain Country Club members—who spend their days wearing suits and ties, and doing things Abby cannot begin to imagine—where are they now? How are such children raised?
Mr. Jinx said something about the parade and about the Slinky Queen. Didn’t he? Abigail imagines herself up on the Slinky float, imagines herself into the Queen’s regalia. She looks down from her throne into the faces of the people lining the streets to see her. The throng. Sees there the Yoder faces, the Bonner faces. All the rest. Abigail waves, reaches out. And the gesture is full of love. Understanding. Forgiveness.
≠
Stupid cat. It runs into the street. I close the door. It’s not my fault. I don’t mean to but I go upstairs. I do mean to. I’ve never been in this stupid house, but I know where every room is. I go upstairs. There is a Slinky on the stairs. I crush it under my powerful foot. There are pictures on the walls. The stupid little boy’s room, I don’t even bother with. I look in the parents’ room. Maybe there are jewels. I’ll steal all the gold and diamonds. I open the laundry hamper instead. I see the mother’s dirty panties at the top of the pile. I pick them up. My pecker gets hard in a flash. Pushes against my Spiderman pajamas. My friend Travis told me about this.
I hate everybody but Travis. I wish Travis was here. I wish Travis was still here. Travis lived on the corner. He had superpowers. Travis’s house had plywood in some of the windows. Travis had a BB gun. Me and Travis used to shoot carp and turtles in the pond. One time me and Travis set a turtle on fire. We stole hairspray and a lighter from Mama’s bathroom cabinet. It was like a blowtorch. One time me and Travis shot Mr. Sprankle’s dog. Mr. Sprankle lives across the street. Travis’s daddy whipped him and smashed the BB gun around a telephone pole. Travis’s dad whipped me too. That was before my daddy stayed in the basement so much. I was scared my daddy would whip me too. I wanted my daddy to beat up Travis’s daddy. My daddy didn’t do anything. When we shot that dog, you could hear it yelp all up and down the block.
Travis taught me everything. He showed me what to do. He called his The Beast. Me too. I unleash my beast. There’s some yellow stuff and a little poop stain in the underwear. I jam the panties to my face. My beast roars. But I can’t spooge like Travis. Travis spooged better than anybody. I’ve never spooged. Not yet. If the world ends in two days, I’ll never know what it feels like.
“Goddamnit,” I say, like Travis taught me.
I can feel my heartbeat through my beast. I stuff the underwear into my mouth and pee into the hamper. The head of my pecker burns. The beast won’t sleep. I put the panties back and close the lid.
∀
Abigail knows, because she’s seen pictures, that there is geography and architecture beyond her cramped enclave of Allegheny Mountains. Land, buildings, and people that look different from anything she has ever known. Something beyond the shadow of Scald Mountain.
Heaven, maybe.
She went, just once, to the Joy Public Library. The stacks and stacks of books and movies and newspapers written about people with other kinds of lives overwhelmed Abigail. Terrified her. There is nothing worth exploring, much less documenting, in an Augenbaugh life. She’d gone to the library on a (terrified) whim after overhearing Darnell Younce, the Slinky Quality Control Checker, talk about a recent Oprah Winfrey show dedicated to self-help books. Darnell Younce joked about a book called The Joy of Sex for so long that it gave Abigail nightmares.
Abigail’s daddy said Oprah Winfrey was in bed with the Democrats, the communists, and Satan. Abigail’s daddy was always mad. Abigail’s mama thought what Abigail’s daddy told her to think. Abigail, influenced by her daddy, thought Darnell was a know-it-all bitch, probably a dyke (who actually did complete a couple semesters at the community college), but she couldn’t help watching that loud mouth open and shut. And she couldn’t help hearing every syllable that tumbled out. Abigail was confused by the words self-help. Nevertheless, she rode the rare wave (small swell, actually) of naïve, gullible (not quite hopeful) curiosity all the way into the library parking lot after work that day. But as soon as she stepped through the door, into the hushed, musty, overly organized space, Abby knew she was in over her head. She hurried to the restroom, wasted enough time there to make the visit seem legitimate, then hurried back out to the Celebrity. Back home, where the misery was snug and familiar, much like the packaging room at the plant. Abigail packs boxes all day long. She had her King James Bible. It’s all the book she needs. The man said so.
Abigail understands the parameters of her job, so it doesn’t terrify her. She has even come to semi-peaceful terms with Mitch and Andy, whom she knows mostly by their tattooed sinewy forearms. Mitch and Andy load the trucks that back up to the dock. Abigail packs and tapes the boxes, then nudges them down a short conveyor belt, where they roll through a curtain of thick rubber slats. Mitch and Andy smell of meat. More often than not, Andy or Mitch will reach in and yank the box out of sight before it reaches its destination. The boys—she thinks of them as boys—are rowdy and rambunctious. Goofy, even. They laugh all day. Andy and Mitch smell of meat. Abigail doesn’t mind, their laughter or their smells.
Every time Mitch or Andy parts the rubber curtain to reach inside of Abigail’s space with their dark arms—full of dragons and skulls, snakes and naked women—every time, a jagged shaft of sunlight and a diesely draft of air come with them. Sometimes they tease Abigail. Sometimes they give her things, scoot strange little gifts up the conveyor belt where only she can receive them. Once, in an empty Slinky box, she found the bleached-white skull and beak of a crow, and a single black feather. Another time came some pages from a porn magazine, wrapped around a sparkplug and held in place with rubber bands. There was some handwriting that Abby refused to read. Later, in another box, a long coil of honeysuckle vine in full bloom. She hides all the gifts from Mr. Jinx. But she keeps them.
All day the boys laugh and talk. Abigail occasionally thinks she hears her name. She eventually decides that they are just comfortable in their maleness. Basically good-natured and not much of a real threat, Abigail decides.
Andy and Mitch both ride muddy, unmuffled dirt bikes to work, load trucks all day, talk loudly and constantly about beer and “poon,” then ride away together at the end of their shift. Sometimes after work, while she sits in the Celebrity in the Slinky parking lot, watching those boys ride away—first one wheelies, then the other—something Doppler about the sounds of the high-pitched engines bouncing off the cliffs makes Abigail think of her husband, Burns, on the couch in the basement, getting fatter and further away. And of Willie, her son—William—who more and more seems to have come from some other womb.
Mitch and Andy, no ma
tter the weather or season, always eat lunch in the smoking area: two unpainted picnic tables crowded onto a concrete slab and sheltered by a pitched aluminum roof held up by skinny metal poles. Over the years, various people and/or things have come into contact with the posts, so the roof sits askew over the slab, sags at one end, and lists toward the mountain, toward the triptych of metal tanks and their rickety ladders. Andy and Mitch like it there. Mitch and Andy smell of meat. Jerky. The boys make jerky—beef, venison, turkey—in the cramped kitchen of their trailer. The boys are building a nice little black-market business selling at work, local bars, flea markets. The boys regularly bring free samples when they’re trying new recipes.
“Hey, girl,” Mitch says, waving a shriveled stick of jerky in Abby’s face. “Pineapple teriyaki.”
Abigail shakes her head no. Smiles, sort of. She sits at the picnic table. It is May, and the cherry and Bradford pear trees that grow up the side of the mountain are all in bloom, and it is beautiful, despite the caterpillar infestation. Despite, even, the coming Judgment. The end of the world. Abigail isn’t hungry. She sits at the end of a table occupied already by Darnell Younce (who operates the dye injection unit for the plastic Slinkys) and her archrival, Sue Grebb (who runs the extruder and cut-off saw for the metal toys). Something pings off the aluminum roof. A bug maybe. Or a pebble. Everybody looks up. Everybody looks down.
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