Apocalypse Read online

  He imagined she blinked; this was different. Usually he made a policy of keeping her and the kids out of the embalming room, as a safety precaution against germs. And also, he admitted in his more contemplative moments, to preserve the integrity of his private turf.

  She stepped to his side, silent, rather stiff; he knew she knew he was smoldering. Wordlessly he pointed at the dead man’s face, erubescent but still ghastly above the tubes in its neck. “Lehman,” said Cally. “I knew that.” The man had been president of the First Bank of Hoadley, chair of his church property committee, one of the town’s most solid citizens both physically and morally, an egg-shaped individual privately known in a few iconoclastic households as “pomposity on wheels” for his bicycle-riding proclivities during the past few years, his late-date attempt to strengthen a weakening heart. It would be a profitable funeral.

  “Just checking,” said Mark. “Look here.”

  He lifted Lehman’s drape, taking care not to expose the man’s genitals but revealing the swelling torso to below the waist. Cally gasped and clapped a hand to her mouth to stifle an undignified giggle. At least she wasn’t too far gone to have a sense of humor.… Around and incorporating the navel of that important belly, where for years it had jiggled under all the white, starched Brooks Brothers shirts, was a tattoo. A large tattoo. A wonderful tattoo. Despite her restraining hand Cally burst out laughing.

  “It’s a—it’s an asshole!” she cried.

  Mark did not laugh. He had laughed earlier, though not to the widow’s face when the woman had dolorously asked him if the work of art could be excised and preserved, by tanning perhaps, for her to frame and hang in her home as a memory of her departed Lester. He had excused himself and gone to laugh himself silly in his soundproofed private chapel. But now his straight, tight mouth felt no inclination to twitch, because he was angry with a very strengthening, satisfactory anger and it was time for the punch line, with a tough-guy Bogart delivery. “And an asshole,” he said, “is exactly what you are acting like.”

  Cally’s laughter stopped as if he had flicked a switch. She turned her back on him and pushed past the slab, out of the narrow room. Once beyond the door, she turned on him. “You aren’t even trying to understand,” she accused. “I need to do things on my own. I need to feel that I have some control.”

  “If the world is ending, the way you say,” he shot back, “what can it possibly matter?”

  She gave him a killing look and strode away in those damn black riding boots of hers, black as a wet coal pit in the dark of night.… Mark felt disappointed and uneasy; he had expected her to weep at him, but she did not cry.

  Cally looked out the next morning on a town that seemed somehow ineffably changed to her, as irksome and familiar and as inexorably strange and distanced as the face of a doting old aunt once she is dead and laid out in hairdo and rouge and wedding gown. The water tower, its blue paint clashing with the chicken-soup colors of the polluted sky, seemed to crouch over Hoadley like a huge bulbous insect on spindly steel legs. Or like a light-bulb-shaped cartoon of a fat woman trying to get into a girdle. Or like a horse’s behind, over its absurdly thin supports. Cally had seen it every day for years, and on that morning it looked incomprehensible to her. And the two old slat-legged women down on the sidewalk, their oversized black granny shoes nearly longer than their flat skirts were wide—every fair-weather morning she saw them, sometimes in their almost-matching coral-pink raincoats, sometimes in their lacy cardigans and beige-print dusters, sometimes in their fake-fur headwarmers, never an exact match for each other but always close enough so that she knew they had consulted. She did not know who they were. On that morning, she did not know what they were. They might as well have been something from the zoo to her, rare oriental fluffhead cranes, no, something even more alien. As alien as the woman she had read about in the newspaper, who had been told by an unidentified man on the telephone that he could diagnose cancer if she held the receiver to her breast, and who had done so, while on the other end of the line the man had hummed contentedly … or as alien as the weirdo who had so harmlessly duped her.

  For no reason Cally put on her best shirt, a polyester silk-look paisley print. “Mommy, you’ve got your fancy tadpoles on,” Tammy said to her over sugar-frosted corn flakes at the kitchen table. “Where are you going?”

  “To ride my new horse.”

  “New horse! What horse? When did you get him? Can we ride him?”

  Mark, silently standing and drinking coffee by the counter, took his cup and left the room. Cally didn’t care. He was a stranger, as inscrutable and out-of-focus as all the rest of the dying world, as alien as that other male, his fat-cheeked son Owen, sitting and making farting noises with his cereal-stuffed mouth. To Cally only Tammy seemed real: the little girl with a child’s ethereal pathos of profile and the watercolor blue-gray hues, sky hues, in the whites of her eyes.

  Because Cally was ravenous, she cooked a healthful scrambled-egg breakfast and made the children eat it. As soon as she had seen them off to school she went to the stable, far earlier than usual, leaving the breakfast dishes on the table, egg hardening on the plates and milk souring in the cereal bowls. With the same floating feeling, or lack of feeling, as when she had awoken she led the giant black horse from his stall, not reacting when he threatened her with bared teeth. Tazz Man, the seller had called him. Gigi had joked on the way home that it was short for Tasmanian Devil. Only the presence of the other horses had enabled Cally to ride him from one stable to the other. She had kept the name Devil for him. It seemed apt not merely for the black horse, but for her world and, indeed, her soul. The Devil had arrived.… She put the bridle on him, using the same snaffle bit, Dove’s mild bit, that she knew he had utterly disregarded the day before.

  As soon as she swung onto him he reared and lunged and rocketed into a headlong gallop, and with a rapt, faintly frowning look on her thin face she let him go. She was a passenger, nothing more. Perhaps mildly suicidal … but she would hang on, a child on a wild carnival ride, she would wait and see where he was taking her.

  Down the steep, wooded slopes at the same racehorse pace … Baby-faced cicadas screamed in the trees. The screw-loose gelding plunged as much as ran, and Cally felt herself falling blind into the pit, her bony shoulders hunched over the black devil’s neck and her head ducked to pass under tree limbs, her eyes shut, lids whipped by black mane; she didn’t mind. The horse lost his footing, rebounded over boulders (the Mafia car, run off the cliff in the chase scene, about to burst into flames), took to the air for a moment, then righted himself and ran on. He hit the valley bottom like a ton of coal falling into a chute. But then his demented plunge altered to a steady, thudding gallop, and Cally lifted her head slightly, opened her eyes to find herself already passing beyond the trails she knew into strange terrain.

  Devil ran like a black avalanche, black bowel-fire out of a volcano, a black sun exploding, and like the relentless passing of time he showed no signs of slowing down. Through a stony river, stream lifeless and rocks orange with mine waste. Up the steep rise on the other side, looking down at a tiny town Cally could not name, a cluster of houses trapped between river and wooded mountain, a place whose existence she had not suspected.… Atop the rise, shadowed by trees, the inevitable old cemetery, grass growing rank in hillocks, headstones leaning. Without hesitation the black monstrosity leaped the sparse ranks of bone-white stones, flying a man’s height above them, like a huge flesh-eating bird, and glancing down Cally saw a flash of eyes meet hers; the sepia-toned photographs inset behind oval glass atop the headstones looked up at her, at the massive dark presence shutting out their eternal view of the sky, as if at the black belly of hell.

  Then on in a flash of fear, through the heavy scent of white flowers, lovesick honeysuckle, plangent black raspberry, the white violets swooning amid the graves, the thick mock orange aroma wavering up like heat haze from the town below. Running … The black renegade hurtled Cally into wilderness aga
in, onto a road overgrown with briar and poison, pressed narrow by ever-groping trees, a raised road that had once been graveled, once been going somewhere.… A fallen tree blocked the way, trunk huge by Hoadley standards. The black horse leaped it. Cally felt the ropy, exhausted muscles of her legs give up their struggle to keep a grip, felt her body lurch onto the horse’s neck; in a moment she would hit the ground—

  Devil slowed to a gentle, rocking canter, then a soft trot, then stopped within a few strides, pulled the reins from Cally’s hand (fingers hardly thicker than soda straws) with a single casual jerk of his jaw, dropped his head and began to graze. Cally stared around her, then shakily got down and turned her back on the black horse without another thought for him.

  Around her, what had once been a clearing, a park, studded now with half-grown trees. Silent. No hungerbugs up here. Rudimentary, boarded-up buildings stood among the treetrunks seemingly at random, shadowed by black locust, half-hidden by sumac. Shed-roofed edifices—Cally recognized them from country fairs, firemen’s carnivals. Hot dogs and popcorn and vinegar fries and waffle-and-ice-cream sandwiches had once been sold here—her tortured stomach spasmed at the thought. And funnel cakes thick with powdered sugar, and whoopie pies, and hot pretzels …

  And spins of a wheel of chance. She forced her thoughts and her wobbling, booted steps onward.

  Beyond the small ones, a much larger building, rags of white paint still peeling from its graying sides.…

  Cally walked closer. The building, round, or rather octagonal, rose to a single peak, like a circus tent. A sizeable padlock secured the door of the deserted structure, but it did not matter. Something had burst a hole in the nearest boarded-up side. Singed black, as if by an explosion, the wood lay splintered outward amid obscenities—vandals had at some time immortalized their obsessions on the plywood. “Bobie Jacobs eats cold weiners,” “Mary Utz was laid here,” and a detailed invitation to a lesbian act. Cally read it twice. It sounded good. Mark hadn’t done anything like that for her in a long time. And the big dick, Eros, hadn’t done it for her either. Though he might if she went back and asked him.

  She wasn’t going back. Her gut crawled with guilt at the thought, and all her anger at Mark blew away as if by a deep miner’s dynamite blast, along with all her drifting detachment; she felt ready to bawl and run to him.

  It was a baffling bond, marriage. She could not have sworn at that moment that she loved Mark. She knew only that he was mixed deep in her, deep, pretzeled into her insides, part of her, like bone marrow, like memories. That like sacramental wine on white linen he had stained her soul, never to wash out. That she would maybe hate him, but never be without him. He and she had long since become an us; he was always with her, a rider in her heart.

  He was with her as she stood and read the graffiti. In her mind she could hear his reactions, his impatience as, with the compulsiveness characteristic of a former literature student, she read them all, every message that was still decipherable. In much the same way as she had given herself over to the black horse’s ungovernable back she read them, looking for—something. Only when she was sure she had missed nothing, that there was nothing there for her, did she look onward again, set her booted foot through the shattered boarding and step—inside.

  And then she felt her face being taken over by a wide, childish grin, because of all the horses.

  In the shadows below that round roof, the bright-painted wooden ponies stood in ranks three deep, first the prancers, then the jumpers on their poles, motionless, yet always leaping, heads tossed high, mouths open in a soundless prophecy, eyes rolling, wooden manes always flying, hooves lifted. And the trappings, the delectable carved nonsense on their necks, their narrow bodies, their curving crests! Pomegranates clustering under the cantles of long, absurdly impractical saddles, cabbage roses cascading down brown flanks like confections on chocolate icing, and the candy-colored bas-relief ribbons.… As her eyes grew accustomed to the dim light and she could see where she was going, Cally stepped up onto the platform and moved from one carousel horse to another in delight, her bony hands reaching out to touch gilt angel wings clinging to shoulders, streaming manes, jeweled foreheads, the dusty carved stars and crescent man-in-the-moons ornamenting a caparison, a diabolical bat-winged gargoyle perched above a tail. Lollipop spangles, a delicious-looking pulled-taffy mane and another full of golden bells lured her from the chargers of the outer rank to the smaller, more graceful jumpers inside. Then she looked up, for her eyes, trained to read anything, saw words. On a panel of the inner cornice that covered the driving engine, at the hub of the machine, someone had fastened a sheet of heavy paper, hand-printed:

  So it must have been after the birth of the simple light

  In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm

  Out of the whinnying green stable

  On to the fields of praise.

  “Dylan Thomas,” said Cally in wonder, her soft voice echoing inside the carousel pavilion. “‘Fern Hill.’ Who the devil put that up there?”

  Then she startled like a deer, and turned to look behind her as if expecting to see someone between her and the way out, a distant oblong of light. But between her and it stood only the dusty, shadowy, looming horses, eerie in the old-barn filtered light from cracked wallboards, wedding-cake horses with flanks iced with white lime; birds had been nesting in the place. Birds and other things, rodents, snakes perhaps … Sojourner Hieronymus said that nests of rattlesnakes lived in the hollow wooden bellies of carousel horses, ready to come out their gaping mouths like tongues of poison—

  “Bullshit,” Cally muttered to herself. Sojourner Hieronymus also said that snakes came up garbage disposals to hide in kitchen pantries behind the home-canned succotash. Sojourner was full of it. Nevertheless, Cally touched no more painted ponies. She looked around her, looked at the posted Dylan Thomas poem again; the paper on which it was calligraphed looked new. Who had put it there? Something larger and more human than birds and rodents had been nesting in that place. At her feet Cally saw a stash of store-brand peanut butter, bananas and Stroehman’s Sunbeam bread. Blankets lay in a heap nearby. An old cardboard suitcase must have held someone’s few belongings.

  Cally saw the suitcase, took three steps to look closer. Her movement carried her in front of a mirrored panel, and the time-stained, glinting surface drew her glance—

  She saw herself. Yet not herself—she saw a virtual skeleton wearing her clothing, her rich-looking paisley shirt, her sleek riding breeches, her black boots. A skull-like head capped with her black riding hat and puke-colored hair peered out of the mirror at her. Her fingernails, painted Pepto-Bismol pink to please Mark, capped fingers gone nearly to whip-thin bone.

  She jerked away and started back toward the hole in the wall in a tightly reined panic, snaking at a rapid walk between horses, careful not to touch any. Without really seeing them she passed a warlike mount in pseudo-medieval fish-scale armor, a gaudy pinto with gravy-yellow mane, a white—

  Though nearly at her exit, she stopped and stared at the white, heavily-ornamented lead horse of the carousel, while a slow knowledge crawled through her. The maraschino-red caparison, the glass-jeweled breastplate with fringed and crenellated velvet flowing down, the spangled crupper, drapery upon drapery under the saddle—but it was not the trappings Cally recognized, or even the polished brass designation plate on the bridle, with its number—666.… It was the horse itself she knew. That straight, almond-eyed head, high-flexed neck, that short, level back and narrow body—she knew them. The horse she remembered had been warm, white hide over hard muscle; this one was white paint over wood. But they were the same.

  It was the horse she had seen on Main Street, under a woman too beautiful to be real.

  Slowly, calmly, almost dreamily, Cally turned and left the carousel, left the shattered building that sheltered it, walked out again into the late-May sunshine pooling like melted butter on the ground between cloud shadow and locust shade. The b
lack horse she called her own was still grazing nearby, placid as an old plow nag. She went to him without hesitation, pulled his head up unceremoniously and mounted. “Devil,” she said in the tone she used to her children when she expected to be obeyed, “get me out of here.”

  At a smooth, ground-covering walk he took her back the way they had come, down what had once been the trolley line, over the barricading tree in a high but easy leap, and along the steep ridge above the town: the town far from anywhere, huddled in its valley as if in a pit. As if the network of orange river, rust-brown railroads, slag dumps and potholed streets and power lines and drag lines and, underneath, deep mines—as if they had all snared it to hold it down, hold it fast. It still looked utterly strange to her from this unaccustomed vantage, but she knew it. The water tower crouched over it. In the winter the yellow cheap-coal smoke had hung heavy over the rooftops. Snow had sprawled black on the ground. Children had been beaten black as the snow. There might not be a winter to come.

  Cally knew the name of the place now. It was Hoadley.

  Mark knew he was getting old when he had to agree with his mother. When she put him onto something, even. But in this one isolated instance he had to admit she was right. “Anorexic,” Ma Wilmore had declared to him over one of the hot, heavy lunches with which she periodically plied him. “Cally is getting to be one of them there anorexic nervosities.” And looking back at his mother’s round, detested face over reheated pot roast, Mark had felt it all click into place. A nervous disorder. Of course. That was why Cally had been acting so strangely. She was sick with an insidious disease.

  It was imperative that she be made to get better.

  He canceled his afternoon golf game to make the arrangements. When Cally came home from riding, he was waiting for her, and he saw at once when she entered the apartment how tired she looked, and on edge, and so thin, so frail, and he felt guilt slosh through him; why had he not seen before that she was pitiable? Quickly he got up and went and hugged her, softly, carefully, as if hugging eggshell and not wanting it to break. She had been about to say something, but she blinked and accepted the hug instead. Surprised. God forgive him, how long had it been since he showed her he—he loved her?