Apocalypse Page 10

  She rode to the mine tipple first. As she had hoped, Mr. Zankowski was not at the shack; he spent most of his time down in the mine, puttering with his unreliable machinery. But the black snake lay on its sunlit stone by the door, near a chipped china bowl of yellowing milk. With irrational sureness Cally got down from Dove and picked up the snake—her hands for once quiet, steady, soothing, for she was going on her own to do something, an action more calming and buoying than any drug a fatherly Hoadley doctor could give her. She draped the snake around her shoulders as she mounted Dove, then rearranged it so that it rode on her left arm, where she could best observe it. All of this the snake placidly accepted, for there was a hypnotic confidence in her touch. She had had a dream, or a half-waking insight in the very early morning, to tell her how this project had to be carried out.

  She said to the reptile, “Show me where he is,” and it lifted its lean black head and pointed the way.

  She rode. The snake guided her. Down in a valley-bottom hollow hidden by maple saplings (their bark thinly striped like mint candy), amid the parasol leaves and white-cup blossoms of mayapple, she found him.

  He sat naked, partly hidden by the mayapple leaves and nearly as buttercream-white as its flowers. She looked down on him from Dove’s back and said to him, “I want you to tell me what’s going on.”

  He said, “That is not all you want, or lack.”

  His voice, dusky and liquid and prickly, like the taste of whiskey. On Cally’s arm, the snake raised its head. Under the mayapple (lime-green luncheon-plate leaves), another blunt head roused, raised. Without seeing Cally knew, for she felt the liquor of his voice warming its way through her.

  He said, “Come here.”

  She got down, let Dove wander off to browse, let the snake slither off her arm to disappear into the ferns surrounding the hollow. The one with a body too beautiful for words awaited her. He was right; this was what she had come for, in part. Mark … she remembered how only a few years before Mark had devoured her presence, her conversation, her availability, sometimes mouthing her body inch by sweet inch with the same concentrated attention he now gave to devouring peanuts in front of TV football on Sunday afternoons. If Mark would no longer eat of her, would no longer give her what she wanted, needed, hungered for, then by damnation, by whatever force was moving in her world, she knew one who would.

  She turned, looked at him. Calm and confidence left her, and she shook. Just to look at him was to feel the tingling whiskey-rush from her breasts to her crotch, feel wet, feel the black hole that was Cally yearn for him. He was the white thing that might fill her, white as sunlight, white as half-sucked Christmas candy. He was—what was he?

  “Where did you come from?” she whispered to him. “What is your name?”

  In an easy movement he stood up to talk with her, muscular and unblushing, a parody of parlor courtesy. She stared. He—or the part of him that defined her perception of him—it was colossal, magnificent, fit for a god. Her mouth moved, spasming. She felt herself ready to implode with desire for him.

  “You name me,” he said.

  “You don’t have a name?”

  “She wouldn’t name me. She made me and she is frightened of me. She will not come to me. You come to me.”

  She went; she could not wait any longer or think any longer of the answers to her questions. She went, and he opened her shirt, caressed her only briefly before he pulled down her riding breeches and laid her in the mayapple. Vivid spring-green shade on her face, sweet cream in her mouth, in her mind taste of crème de menthe, no, absinthe. By midsummer, the milk-white blossoms would bear pepper-red, plump round poisonous fruits.… It was very quick, over in the duration of one deep kiss. She did not care. She knew she was too achingly empty, too hungry, too starving, for anything else, even had he wished to play. Which she doubted. He serviced her, nothing more.

  She looked up at him, clear-eyed, a moment after the climax. “Eros,” she named him.

  “As you wish,” he said. He got up and slipped off like a wild thing into the scrub woods, leaving her there.

  An hour of searching later, she knew to her heartfelt chagrin that Dove, also, had gone back to the stable and left her stranded. Wobbling up the steep trails in her riding boots—not meant for hiking, those boots, they chafed both at heel and behind the knee—passing cicadas in the underbrush, hearing them snickering at her, she knew herself for a pitiful, wantlove object. True, she had been filled by the phallus of a god. She felt—replete in body, one small, dark portion of her body—but ravenous as ever, elsewise, wailing like the hungerbugs.… Eros could not fill her. He did not—he did not care about her. She knew somehow that what this—this bizarre stranger had done for her, he would have done for, or to, anyone of her gender.

  “Thin,” he had remarked to her at one point. “You are very thin.” That, at least, she could cling to; she took it as a compliment.

  Sleeping next to weary, indifferent Mark that night, Cally dreamed of the naked youth in the woods, at first of his effortlessly potent and pleasing body, vividly recalled, and later, more serenely, of his face.

  To which she had paid little attention at the time.…

  She awoke with a gasp and a shock of recognition. The face, handsome, no, more than handsome; strong-featured and poignant of pale skin and eerily beautiful: it could have been, in some unblemished other-world, the face of Barry Beal.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Elspeth thought of herself as a small animal peering from the thickets with wide eyes, a butterfly drifting on the winds with sensors fully extruded, nothing more. Therefore it did not trouble her that she did not know how to side in the holocaust Ahira was brewing. She had never in her life chosen a position or a direction. She was the artist, all eyes, focus, observation and waiting; neutral, like a small country in a great war. If she wore a sword, it was for—for …

  For blackberries.

  She turned her mind away from the uncomfortable thought of the sword (a thought often lurking in her mind, just beneath consciousness, just beyond seeing, as if under the shimmering surface of deep water) to watching. She was herself all shimmer and shine, she thought, a polished shield reflecting the world back to itself, of the one who crouched behind the shield showing nothing; she did not perceive how much she revealed through her art and her own silence.

  Observing, she stood in the stable aisle in swordbelt and indigo tights and leather jerkin and a tunic of her favorite color, crimson: ready to ride, holding Warrior by the reins and watching the way the slanting sunlight through the doorway struck the hay-colored stable dust and the gray cobwebs, and watching the others. Principally watching Cally, as always. Something about Cally … Not sexual, either, for sure not in the least, not in that toothpick, but there was something.… Most of the time Elspeth wondered why she bothered thinking about Cally. But the skinny wimp was worth watching today. Cally was mad.

  “I could kill!”

  “I always said,” Gigi remarked, “when it came to Homer, I never considered divorce. Homicide, often, but never divorce.”

  “Does Homer treat you like you’re stupid?”

  Gigi retorted, “Was there ever a man who didn’t kiss himself?” At Gigi’s elbow, Shirley stirred uncomfortably. Uncomfortable about the quarreling tone of the conversation, probably. But Elspeth didn’t mind. Cally, the little nerd, it was fun to see her so furious. Her bony hands were shaking so that she could not tighten her saddle girth. She gave it up and stood gesticulating.

  “I don’t know. I thought when we first talked about it—Mark wasn’t too bad. I just thought he didn’t understand. But now he as much as tells me I’m feeble-minded. Me, the lame brain, the airhead, the dumb broad who got him A’s in all his courses, did his reading and his papers as well as my own. Finally this morning I really got mad—”

  Cally choked up and couldn’t talk any more. One of her windmilling hands hit Dove in the face, and the gentle, dun-colored mare spooked, rearing against her tie ropes.
Shirley stepped forward and caught her, quieted her and stood as silently as before.

  “Don’t that make you mad,” said Gigi with wry tenderness, “when you cry?”

  Cally found her voice. “It sure does! I could scream. When they’re mad men can make all the noise in the world, but when I want to yell I always go and bawl.”

  “I used to do that too,” said Gigi. “It’s because you still love him.” She spoke matter-of-factly, as if saying to a youngster, It’s a phase, it’ll pass.

  Cally gawked at her a moment, then turned and ran, awkward in her high black boots, her small ass bobbing, ran outside and behind the barn to hide. Not in the least discomfited, Gigi turned and continued to tack up Snake Oil, and after a moment Shirley began to tighten Cally’s girth for her.

  “What do you think he called her?” Gigi addressed the silent barn. “Irrational? Hysterical? I know.” She snapped her fingers with a dry sound, as if bones instead of flesh had clicked together. “He told her she was cute when she was angry.”

  Elspeth, contentedly watching, saw how Shirley glanced up at Gigi with an uncharacteristically tense and grim and puzzled look, saw the fine lights in Shirley’s brass-colored hair, saw the soft line of Shirley’s big breasts, and of Shirley’s feelings understood only the puzzlement, which she felt herself. Was Gigi a normal or not? Elspeth comprehended in an artist’s slantwise way what a normal was. Enlightenment had come to her in the post office a few days before, as she had stood in line to buy stamps. Ahead of her, bullying the clerk, had been an overweight woman wearing a crocheted hat even in the warm May weather, a warty, whiny, gossipy older woman like hundreds Elspeth had seen before. Somebody loves this woman, Elspeth had thought unexpectedly. Her parents might yet be living and perhaps loved her. Probably her children loved her. Possibly even her husband loved her. If she had a dog, in all likelihood it loved her. According to the Christians, God loved her. The thought had caused Elspeth an astonishment which of course she could not show. So this was what it was to be normal! To be so sublimely unaesthetic, so far from beauty or perfection, so piggily wallowing in love …

  But did anyone love Gigi?

  Cally came back into the stable, face reddened and rubbed, looking nearly as repulsive as any woman Elspeth had ever seen in Hoadley. Perhaps Cally was a normal.

  She stalked, black-booted and limpkin-like, to where Shirley stood bridling Dove for her, and glowered, and refused the reins Shirley offered.

  “I loathe that horse!”

  “Dove didn’t do nothing to you,” Shirley said, more serious than usual, and Cally quieted somewhat.

  “What I mean is, Mark made me get her. She’s not the kind of horse I wanted. Look at her!” Cally windmilled again. “It’s a wonder she doesn’t crawl instead of walk. She’s a worm. And she’s the same pukey color as my hair.”

  Elspeth laughed, a baiting laugh flung into the angry air of the stable. No one looked at her to either approve or reprove the laugh, not even Shirley. Elspeth felt cheated. She knew none of Shirley’s stable boarders particularly liked her, but they all tolerated her because she was Shirley’s—friend. “Friend” spoken with a leer. Was Shirley a misfit? If so, did Shirley’s love count? Could it make her, Elspeth the exotic pet, a normal?

  Gigi, the aged adolescent, said to Cally, “I told you how to get the horse you want. If you don’t have cancer, I understand a nervous breakdown works just as well.”

  Shirley put in quickly, “What sort of horse do you want?”

  “Anything that’s not so damn safe.” With that disclaimer, Cally took Dove’s reins and headed outside. Gigi followed.

  “Cally! You want to see something that’s damn unsafe?” The older woman called.

  Gigi knew of a horse they could all ride to see, across the paved road, farther away than they usually rode but not impossibly far. There would be roaring coal trucks on the road, and the drivers would jake-brake and blare their horns and yell obscenities, deliberately trying to scare the horses and send the women ass-over-teakettle. There would be hostile dogs and other obstacles as well; in Gigi’s eyes Elspeth saw the manic sheen the old hot stuff always showed when she smelled a risk. And for once Cally’s mood matched Gigi’s. Shirley, who had some sense, mentioned the dangers, the uncertainties, but no one ever doubted she was coming. A misfit on horseback, she rode hatless, in jeans, in a western saddle on her big English-trained thoroughbred, and jumped fences like a wild Irishman, which she ineluctably was not. Shirley was—Shirley. She would come along to help the others out of whatever trouble they got themselves into.

  Elspeth took no part in the discussion. She watched, serene in her certainty that whatever was decided would make no difference to her. She would ride along wherever, like a bright brown-and-crimson leaf on an autumn gale. The end of the world would make no difference to her.

  So they rode off, the four horsewomen. The mount she wanted Cally to see, Gigi told them, was a renegade, and all the talk turned toward this rebel equine, this coal-black crossbred, this tall and hulking proud-cut gelding, utterly unreliable, with no further thought for the ominous events that had caused Cally to quarrel with her husband in the first place. No particular thought of danger from weird cicadas; it is the business of horsewomen to meet and overcome the dangers of the trail. No further talk of what action to take, how to resist or (in an uneasily remembered word) prepare. They were in a way powerful, in a way impotent. On horseback they would do what they had decided, on any given day, to do. Elsewhere and otherwise, they had done what was expected of women: they had spoken to their menfolk.

  Mark had just had a death call when Cally got home. The day was taken up with the stricken family, arrangements and legalities, and he didn’t get a chance to talk with his wife until late at night, down in the basement embalming room, where he had asked her to bring him some coffee while he processed the former Mr. Lehman.

  The late hour, plus the routine, soothing procedure of transferring bodily fluids through the carotid artery, always made Mark feel relaxed at this time. Some of his best memories were of long talks with Cally through the embalming room door while the electric pump ran and a corpse pinked out. This night he especially wanted to talk with her. He was beginning to be worried about her, and lately his worry had expressed itself in irritation. He had said some things he knew must have hurt her. Normally he would never have called her stupid; he knew for a fact that she was smarter and more level-headed than most women. He had never noticed her to get carried away like his mother did. Even so, if he had to choose between believing there were baby-faced bugs haunting the woods outside Hoadley and believing that Cally was imagining things, he much preferred to believe the problem was with Cally.

  Speak of angels. She brought his coffee to the door, and he had a look at how Mr. Lehman was progressing, then left the pump to do its work, stripped off his surgical gloves (a protection against AIDS and other diseases) and came and took the warm, steaming cup of affection from her, never guessing how she detested bringing it, how she perceived the act as servitude.

  He was trying to think of something both witty and conciliatory to say, some sort of smiling semi-apology, not abject, not unmasculine, a Humphrey Bogart line, and he was slow about it. Cally spoke first.

  “I got a new horse,” she said.

  Mark (only afterward realizing with disgust how much like his mother he had become) thought first of money. “How much?” he asked.

  “Traded Dove.”

  His next thought was as his mother’s would have been also. “Safe?”

  Cally said flatly, “No.” Echoes rang in that word as if in the depths of a mine pit, reverberations … Mark felt dizzied, as if facing a plunge. She was going off, Cally had slipped over the edge.… When he spoke—not for a few moments—it was softly, delicately, as if to a madwoman.

  “Why not?”

  “I want safe, I can go on a merry-go-round,” Cally said. “I got the horse I want, and I got a job to pay for his keep.”

>   “What!” This shook Mark closer to where he lived than the news of the unsafe horse. “What job?”

  “Church secretary. I can do the typing here, in the evenings, and it’ll pay for the horse board.”

  Mark knew what Hoadley would think: that Cally had taken a job because she mistrusted his ability to support her, she perhaps contemplated divorce. For the time being he stayed away from what he himself thought. Hoadley came first. “Honey,” he protested, “what did you do that for? Business is good! I sold a sofa!”

  (Though the days were gone when the sign over the door had read, “Funeral Parlor and Furniture Emporium,” the tradition since the days of the first cabinetmakers/casketmakers/undertakers had been that “diggers” sold furniture, and tradition still held. Mark was able to furnish his viewing rooms in the sumptuous fashion of his childhood dreams by ordering wholesale and affixing price tags discreetly to all pieces. Mourners coming to pay last respects to the dead could console themselves between bouts of sorrow by peeking at the costs of end tables and lamps. Mark sold furniture between, and sometimes during, viewings. Hoadley admired his taste. The living rooms of many of the town’s elite were furnished from his Blue Room, Peach Room and Rose Parlor.)

  “The aubergine plush camelback,” added Mark, watching anxiously for her smile, her pride in him. “More than makes up for what we didn’t realize on that shoe-box infant’s casket.”

  Cally said, “I don’t care if you sold the whole place. This is my horse, Mark Wilmore, and it’s going to be supported with my money so you can’t say you gave it to me and you can’t take it away.”

  Mark stared at her a moment, hoping he kept his face flat while the pyrotechnics popped and crackled inside his mind. Good God, what had he ever done but try to take care of her …! He handed her his emptied coffee cup and went back into the embalming room to manipulate Mr. Lehman’s extremities. He said to Cally, “Come here.”