Apocalypse Read online

  The trail led past the coal mine, not running on that day, or she would not have been able to ride a horse past it, even so tame a horse as Dove. It made an appalling noise; it would have vibrated the woods like a gigantic purring cat. A huge beast hidden in blackness, buried and shaking the world.

  She turned Dove onto the black-gravel mine road, bound for the rough-timber mine tipple that reared above the scrub woods.

  The mine hermit was out as she came clopping through, Dove’s hooves striking crisp beats from the brickle. “Hi, Mr. Zankowski,” Cally called, because as a tenet of etiquette she was pleasant to everyone always, no matter what her own state of mind. But she spoke too early, because Mr. Zankowski made her nervous.

  She had seen him a few times before, and he had always answered her greeting with a shy smile and a tentative lift of the hand, nothing more. A small, scrawny man dressed in work clothes too big for him, he ran the mine alone, defying dozens of government regulations, and lived alone in the shack at the tipple. On its plywood walls and low, rusting roof he had spray-painted messages: “Repent!” and “Kilroy was here,” “Eternity Awaits!” and “Do Not Harm Snake.”

  “Hi, Mr. Zankowski,” Cally said again when she got nearer.

  He was standing on the mine road, apparently waiting for her, and he did not smile or lift his hand, but called out in a high, anxious voice, “Have you seen my black snake?”

  She started to shake her head. Then her eyes widened, and she halted Dove. Mr. Zankowski took a few impulsive steps toward her.

  “Keeps the rats out of the house,” he said. “Sort of company for me, too. Missing. Ain’t drunk his milk. You seen him?”

  Mr. Zankowski twitched all over when he talked. He had a sister named Rose, Cally had heard, and one named Lily, and one named Daisy, and his first name was Bud. Parents did awful things to their children sometimes. Cally sympathized.

  “I saw a black snake,” she said. “Might not have been your snake.” Mr. Zankowski was so much more on the fringe than she was, she forgot to feel insane. Maybe the twitchy little recluse knew something about the naked manifestation she had seen. “It was lying by a sort of wild man out along the logging road.”

  “What? What man?”

  Finding she could not admit how eerie he was, and how beautiful, she grew terse. “No clothes. Kept saying, ‘Prepare.’”

  Too late she realized she should have kept the details to herself. Mr. Zankowski turned ashen. His eyes rolled, and he folded to his knees on the hard black gravel and started to shout.

  “Arr-mageddon!” His scrawny face turned skyward and seemed to catch the high-heavenly color; it looked blue. “Prepare to be raptured! Oh, Lord have mercy on me a sinner, men gonna wail and gnash their teeth. The moon gonna turn to blood! The streams gonna run wormwood! It’s a sign, it’s a sign!”

  His shrilling voice blended into the cicada chorus. His wailing cries were of the same essence as theirs. That or his words jarred Cally’s already shaken nerves so badly that she hurried Dove away, foregoing etiquette.

  “It’s the Judgment coming! The horses gonna trample in blood up to their bridles on that day of wrath. And the Beast, the Beast—”

  Cally kicked Dove into a gallop and left the frail screaming voice behind her. She knew the words, even so. She was a churchgoer. The Beast was going to come up out of the bottomless pit.

  The cicadas she could not leave behind her. They were everywhere.

  Halfway up the next steep slope Cally let Dove slow to a walk, and found that her hands held the reins in shaking fists, and felt angry at herself for running away. It was because she had not eaten that she was hearing things, seeing things, that was all. Because of her rigorous diet, to which she would adhere no matter what. She would show some control of her own body, her own mind, her selfhood. She would never become like the napkin-tucking, narrow-minded, credulous, superstitious, omnivorous boors around her. Never.

  “Ignorant,” she muttered, turning her anger against Mr. Zankowski. The simpleminded man had a bad case of millennial fever, obviously, and saw the end days in everything. A lot of the uneducated people had it as the end of the century drew near, especially the people in Hoadley, and absurdly so: Hoadley seemed permanently mired in the 1950s.

  “Hysterics,” she grumbled, quieting and softening her hands on the reins.

  Cally Fayleen Anderson Wilmore, intellectual, neurotic, and aspiring anorexic, was one of the few people in Hoadley who had not lived there all her life. Mark Cornelius Wilmore had brought her there after they were married, and for the ten ensuing years she had hovered, in her own perception and that of the townspeople, she had floated on the surface of Hoadley, moored only at the one point of marriage. She was a naught, a cipher; how was anyone to read her and comprehend her when they had not known her parents and grandparents and what vices ran in her family, her original church affiliation, her brothers and sisters and what pattern they had set in school? She was an oval zero-face in a slot labeled “Mark’s wife.”

  She rode past two junked cars and thought, I graduated with honors in English Literature from the University of Pittsburgh, and now my mind is becoming like this woods, full of people’s garbage, their junk, their leavings, and I am seeing their ghosts. She rode past an inscrutable, yawning structure of concrete built into the hill, its gape full of coffee-black water. On clumps of mountain laurel the new leaves looked succulent, substantial, meaty to her, like little green steaks. She rode past a pile of twisted sheet metal, a slag heap, a springhouse buried in poison ivy, a ruinous stone farmhouse, all pierced by reaching trees.

  She had seen an apparition, and all she remembered clearly was its sexual equipment. Very well. No one had to know.

  Her back and thighs relaxed, surrendered to the rhythm of Dove’s walk. This was why Cally rode horseback: this pleasant lassitude, this sense of letting go. Self lost in journey, even though journey circled and came back where it began, going nowhere—it didn’t matter. Very little mattered. Cally began to hum as if a small mine worked in her innards, and after a while she began to whisper words remembered from the Yeats unit of Modern Poetry 201:

  “Turning and turning in the widening gyre

  The falcon cannot hear the falconer.…”

  Elspeth lay amid the grazing horses, sketching a picture and not unconscious of the picture she herself made, lounging there in the pasture in her vivid dashiki, her bare legs taking on umber shadows from the spring-green grass. After a month’s sun her tea-colored body would darken to raisin brown, but her face always stayed ecru and exotic. It pleased Elspeth that she looked like an artist, that people turned their heads when they saw her. She had her sense of individual style and her mixed blood to thank for that. Her mother was native American and Black, her father Chinese, Irish and Hispanic. Out of this mulligan stew Elspeth had somehow emerged with a dainty, graceful body, lustrous dark hair and eyes, a strikingly beautiful, full-lipped face, a confused mind and a blazing temper.

  She sketched, not the grazing horses or the Pennsylvania hillsides or anything so pretty—a pejorative word—but scenes from her mind. Often scenes of warfare, primal warfare, hard, bloody and honorable, with the sword.

  Overhead the Hoadley sky spread mottled with vague, inchoate clouds. Yellow ochre, Elspeth thought (her thoughts hazy as the sky), a watercolor wash of yellow ochre overlaid with a mottling of Payne’s gray. Nearby, a butterfly bright as her dashiki alighted on a pile of fresh horse dung and clung there, sipping sustenance. Elspeth gazed, pleased not by the beauty but by the irony, the conceit. She was the butterfly, she considered, and everyone knew what Hoadley was. But to Hoadley she clung, and in Hoadley she somehow found what she needed to nourish her, because Shirley had brought her there.

  Shirley had repaired the farmhouse, put up the fences and the prefab stable. Shirley had torn down the sagging old barn but built a castle: to the glazed-brick silo she had added flat roof and floors and spiral stairs and small, slotlike windows, crenellating the to
p, all because Elspeth wanted it that way. It was Elspeth’s own tower keep now. It was her private retreat, her recompense for being brought to this place of horse dung, and sometimes, with Shirley, her love nest.

  Elspeth signed her sketch with a flourish copied from the signature of Queen Elizabeth I, the powerful and pseudovirginal virago who had influenced her choice of a name. Elspeth used no surname. As it had taken her practice and artistry—if not artifice—to settle on the signature, so it had taken her some thought to settle on the name itself. Trying to belong in a WASP world, perhaps—though her motives were mostly hidden even from herself—she had discarded the name her parents had given her and called herself Elspeth, a quintessentially British appellation, when there was not a jigger of British blood in her. She used no other name, no family name, since she could not use Shirley’s.

  The doughty Germanic, Anglo and Slavic folk among whom she found herself were not impressed by her pseudonym. No matter what she called herself, Hoadley people could not take kindly to a racially unclassifiable young woman who rode cross-country to the post office on horseback.

  Yet Shirley, whose name and provenance were no less open to question than Elspeth’s—these same tight-assed people seemed to like Shirley well enough. Elspeth tried to appreciate that irony, and succeeded only in feeling bitter. It did not trouble her so much that everyone liked Shirley as that Shirley seemed to like—

  Cally Wilmore on horseback crossed the artist’s field of vision, coming back to the boarding stable from her ride. Elspeth did not wave, though it pleased her that there was someone now to see her, to see the picture she made in the meadow amid the horses with her private castle rising in the background.

  Without conscious thought she turned to fresh paper and sketched in all its poignant agony the head of a crying baby, then attached to it the clumsy winged body of a cicada.

  “Yo, Cally!” hailed Shirley from a straddle-legged stance atop a small mountain of manure, where she had just emptied the latest barrow load from the stalls. Her voice rang out, as always, and her short, bleached hair, the color and often the texture of binder twine, caught the eye even against the yellow-smogged sky. Everything about Shirley Danyo was big and golden; brassy, almost. Big, bell-like voice. Big, clever hands, shins like two-by-fours, big work-booted feet. Six-foot body, strong enough to shovel stalls to the bare clay, fling bales of hay, string fence wire, muscle horses. Big, plain-featured face. Big grin.

  She abandoned her wheelbarrow and came down to help Cally with Dove, not because she had to, or even to keep a boarder happy, but because she liked horses and people who liked horses. All her life she had wanted nothing except to have a place with some horses on it, and if running a boarding stable was the way to do it, then that was what she was going to do. Even though Hoadley was hardly the place to do it. Not many people who lived here could afford to keep a horse, even at her rates.

  On the other hand, the land was cheap. Though in fact Shirley had other reasons for coming to this unlikely place to try for her dream. And it had been time to try. She was nearing forty. Not getting any younger.

  “Good ride?” she asked Cally, swinging the saddle off Dove.

  “Okay.”

  “You ran her a lot.” Shirley was feeling Dove’s hot, wet chest and neck, looking at her wide-open nostrils. Cally just nodded, and Shirley looked closely at the younger woman instead.

  “Somebody bother you?”

  “Not really.” To say something, Cally added, “The cicadas are out.”

  “Yo! I thought I heard them locusts!” Shirley seldom lacked for enthusiasm. “Well, ain’t that a kicker! Lots of them?”

  “Scads. Everywhere.”

  “Ain’t that something. Is this the year for the seventeen-year locusts? Can’t be.” Shirley’s generous mouth veritably flapped when she talked, as if vibration of the lips was necessary to maintain her customary volume. “They was out in seventy and eighty-seven, and this here’s only nineteen-ninety-nine.”

  “Well, they’re out.” Cally shuddered.

  Cally, Shirley knew without censure, was wired too tight. Without reason, for she was not an unattractive woman. In a town where most women turned fat, Cally was still slim, had a body like that of a prepubescent boy, in fact. There was no need for her to be so hard on herself, to fuss and diet. Cally was okay if she’d just know it. Had a pretty little cat-face, pale now—had the cicadas given her the creeps, was she phobic about bugs? Sure, she was nervous, squeamish about blood and danger, and not a very good rider, not always in control of her horse, though she usually managed to stay on. But none of that made Shirley think any of the less of her. They were women who rode horses in a town and a culture where women were supposed to outgrow their own dreams and desires as soon as they bore children, if not before. Shirley and Cally were two who had kept hold of something the others had given up. It was bond enough.

  “Dove go okay for you?”

  “She acted up for a change. It was almost fun.”

  They took the mare into the cool, shadowy stable, where cats lolled in clusters, like mushrooms. Gladys “Gigi” Wildasin was in there, in the aisle, grooming her expensive appaloosa, Shoshone Snake Oil. The thick-bodied Pennsylvania Dutch woman nodded but did not speak, and Cally and Shirley accepted this in her. They knew Gigi. A gray-haired rebel, that was Gigi, an aging adolescent with a frothy nickname. Gigi patronized no beauty parlor, attended no church, sat in no coffee Matches, and watched Hoadley with cynical pebble-tan eyes that spared no one. She would converse or not converse, just as she chose, and this day she chose not to chat.

  Cally and Shirley talked while they groomed Dove. After a few moments in the dim light Shirley hugely yawned. “Lord, I’m tired,” she apologized. “Didn’t sleep worth a shit.” This with great cheer, as if it were a blessing. “God damn coal mine pounded on my ear all night. Shook the bed, it was so loud. I swear, the fucking thing sounds like it’s right under the house.”

  “Probably is,” Gigi put in, suddenly unbending enough to speak. Shirley turned to her without missing a stroke of the brush in her hand.

  “Not supposed to be.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Gigi did not look up from polishing Snake Oil’s speckled flanks. Her words, while never sharp, were as blunt as the nose on her dry old face. “The mine owners don’t care. They go where they want with the mines. And those fat-ass politicians won’t pass a law against it.”

  Of course Shirley knew this, but she showed no annoyance. “What I mean,” she explained, “Zankowski told me it wasn’t.”

  “Zankowski isn’t any different from the others. I remember when I was a youngster, day after day and night after night how the mine noise would shake Hoadley. They were mining right under the town. Nobody slept for years. Windows broken, houses going crooked, foundations cracking, and the mine owners didn’t do anything about it. And then they never fill in, you know. Ground under the town is wormy with mines yet. It’s a wonder the whole town doesn’t fall in.”

  “Might be a good idea,” Cally said.

  “Aw, Cally!” Shirley protested, laughing like a big bell. And Gigi barked out quite a different sort of laugh, the hard, brief laugh of a woman with a secret.

  A slender, jealous shadow drifted in out of the sunlight: Elspeth. Shirley saw her coming without surprise. Having seen Shirley go into the barn with Cally—though Elspeth was not jealous of the older woman, Gigi—having heard Shirley laugh, of course Elspeth would pry herself loose from her sketching and come, prickly, to stand guard. Elspeth rode horses, but perceived them only as an extension of her own ego. She would never understand the bond between women who loved horses; she could not understand that her lover’s friendship with Cally was no threat to her, and Shirley did not know how to reassure her.

  Shirley said, “Yo, Elspeth, how’s it going?”

  The artist glowered and did not answer. The little, spoiled, self-centered, high-breasted brat, how could she be so exquisitely, incredibly beautiful, a
nd know it, and still not know it? And still not know how Shirley loved every droplet of sweat on her fawn-colored forehead?

  Good Lord, Elspeth. Cally’s so straight she probably thinks we live together to share expenses.

  “Hot out there,” Shirley tried again.

  Elspeth shrugged, no more.

  Cally was as accustomed to Elspeth’s silences as to Gigi’s, and neither liked nor disliked the strange artist, and trusted her as she trusted Gigi and Shirley, simply because they were women. Nevertheless, in the still air of the stable aisle she sensed a tension she did not understand. She threw down her brushes and put Dove in her stall. “Old man Zankowski says his black snake is missing,” she blurted into the smog of her own discomfort.

  “Just so it don’t come here,” Shirley retorted without blinking. “He can keep his damn snake.” An awkward pause. “Hey! I gotta show you people what I got for the barn.” She strode to the tack room, anxious to put the three alarmingly disparate women at ease with each other.

  “One of them guys was pulled up along the road,” she explained as she came back out carrying a large paper bag. “Selling them hex signs, like. Lookie what I got.”

  With a flair she revealed a circle of masonite. Crudely pictured on it in oil paints was a thick-bodied black insect with orange wings outspread and hard clawed feet groping at air.

  “Lord,” said Elspeth, utmost disdain causing her to break her silence. “What did you get that for? I could do you something better with my eyes closed.”

  “I should hope so,” said Gigi.

  “Now you know you don’t want to waste your time doing barn signs,” replied Shirley with great good humor. Then she glanced down at what she was holding, and her wide, flexible mouth pulled into nearly-comic dismay. “Whoa! What the hun? This ain’t the one I bought!” She turned the barn decoration toward her and glared at it. “I got me one of them distelfink luck birds setting on a heart. Somebody tell me I ain’t going crazy!”