Apocalypse Page 3

  Elspeth looked merely bored and annoyed, and Gigi returned to her grooming of Snake Oil, but Cally edged away. In no way could Cally know how Elspeth’s faintly pouting pose hid dismay, how Elspeth, also, had brushed elbows with the unaccountable that day. “I’d better get home,” said Cally in a pallid voice, and she fled.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Because she had cut her ride short, Cally got back to Hoadley’s Perfect Rest Funeral Home, which was her home also, in time to say hello to the funeral director, her husband, before she had to go pick up the kids at school.

  Mark Wilmore, already in his sober-toned three-piece suit for the evening’s proceedings, was standing in the Blue Room, one of the viewing rooms, trying to get a corpse to assume the perfect rest position. The man, or quondam man, was stout, and his thumbs, which had stiffened straight, refused to hold his hands clasped atop his ample belly. They kept sliding down to his sides. “Glue,” Mark muttered, his handsome brow creased. “These people aren’t going to want to cuddle him.” The grieving family was too civilized to want to hold the deceased’s hands, Mark meant, or climb into the coffin with him, as sometimes happened. Sometimes it was a real problem to keep the mourners from mussing the deceased, especially a deceased who had died in a tragic accident and had needed to be patched together with wax. But with a stately, peaceful paterfamilias such as this one, nobody was going to pull at the hands. “Cally, go down cellar and get me the glue out of the embalming room, would you please?” Only then did Mark look at her. “Cal!” he complained. “Do you have to come in here in your riding boots?” Mark was meticulous about his deep-carpeted premises. “You’ll get manure on the rug!”

  “No, I won’t,” Cally lied. “I checked.” She would have worn the boots all day if she could have gotten away with it. She hated low shoes, women’s shoes, skimpy, flimsy, flabby, insubstantial flats, crippling heels; she hated it when she had to put on a dress and dressy shoes to go to church or a funeral or viewing. Women’s shoes made her feel helpless, susceptible to cold and weather, unable to run from danger; flat or not, the things were designed so that she would twist an ankle if she so much as tried to stride out in them. And the heels made all women walk like waterfowl, in her opinion. Cally loved boots. She could stride and swagger in boots. She fantasized of men, muggers, rapists, foolish enough to attack her when she was wearing boots. One hard booted kick to the crotch, or a crunch of a heavy leather heel on an instep, and she would show them.

  She fetched the glue, running downstairs and up again. She always ran wherever she could to use up calories. She wanted to be thin, youthful-looking, and loved.… She watched, belly growling, as Mark positioned the dead man’s hands. Deceased, rather. Never say dead.

  She wished Mark would thank her, notice her, maybe kiss her, but he was preoccupied by his work.

  “He looks nice,” she said, doing the duty of a good wife. Mark took pride in his business. He pinked out his bodies well, applied cosmetics to them with artistry, displayed them in beautiful layouts (arranging the flowers himself), and he could even sculpt convincing facial repairs with wax when necessary. These accomplishments were not such that he could brag of them at Rotary meetings, so only Cally knew how much of him was artist rather than businessman. How he had struggled, for instance, with the body of a manic-depressive who had jumped off an overpass onto the concrete four-lane in front of a tandem truck. Most funeral directors would have simply closed the casket, but Mark had made the man look nearly as decent as a church deacon for his burial. Though the ungrateful corpse had ruined the effect by leaking. No matter how well you patched up jumpers, they always leaked.

  No glue showed when Mark had finished with the stout body’s hands. “Very dignified,” Cally approved. “His own manicure?”

  “I freshened it.”

  “Very classy.”

  Mark nodded in acknowledgement, and Cally felt her heart hunger like her aching gut. He was such a good-looking man. She wanted to take that monkey suit off him and put him back in jeans, the way he belonged, the way he had been when they met—or better, just take it off him, and take him to bed.… How long had it been? Far too long. Funeral directors (never say “undertaker”) often had to work at night.

  “Go on over to Peach,” Mark suggested, “say hi to Barry, see what he’s doing.”

  The Peach room, he meant: his ultimate in decorating achievement, with its heavy, fringed, gold-damask curtains and crystal-beaded lampshades and the three-tiered fountain mumbling nasally to itself like a priest. Business was good, if Mark had two layouts going at once. The funeral home (a term Mark preferred to “mortuary,” which had a cold ring to it), must have been one of the few businesses doing well in Hoadley, and no wonder. The town was full of old people who were busy dying. Generally at inconvenient times, Cally thought, thrilling herself: such a daring, such a cynical thought. Gigi would be proud.

  She was not yet daring enough to wonder why Mark seemed to be pushing her away, or to stop obeying him. Cally went to see what was going on in the Peach Room.

  “Hi, Barry.”

  “Hi, Mrs. Wilmore.”

  Another man of that age, early twenties, would probably have called her by her first name, but Barry Beal always called her Mrs. Wilmore. She was the boss’s wife, and Barry was serious about such things. About most things. He worked slowly with blunt white hands. She saw his face profiled over his work; the half she could see was as lump-sugar white as his hands, and ruggedly beautiful, like a weathered marble statue, scarred and pocked as it was from a past battle with acne.

  Then he turned toward her.

  She knew, of course, what she would see. But she could never entirely escape the shock. The other half of Barry’s face was mottled a livid bruise red varying from plum to purple grape to strawberry to screaming raspberry pink. The birthmark started above Barry’s hairline somewhere and spread downward like spilled jam, taking in eye, temple, cheek and jaw, as well as one nostril and the corner of his stoical mouth. It made him a man of two faces, one pleasing, the other hideous.

  “I still ain’t got it the way I want,” Barry said, but he stepped back to show Cally what he had been doing.

  Fine caskets (never called “coffins”) came with pastel-colored linings of tufted silk, and most often with a thin, soft blanket of matching dinner-mint hue to be laid over the “sleeper” within. Barry was slow of intellect if not actually retarded, but like many less-than-gifted people he possessed one inborn talent, and his was the knack of arranging these blankets. More than knack or talent: his was a genius and an obsession. With stubborn, relentless hands he formed the limp fabric into tucks, pleats, intricacies that let go into folds and draperies worth weeping over. He took hours about it, and Mark did not mind paying him for as many hours as cared to spend.

  The present sample of his work lay over the still form of a middle-aged woman with a ghastly hairdo, courtesy of Wobbles Enwright, the only hairdresser in Hoadley who would work on dead people. She made all her late lamenteds sport pompadours stiff with perfumed spray, regardless of what their former style had been. It took Cally a moment to shift her gaze from the horror of that rigid hair to the marshmallow-pink blanket, softly puckered and pleated à la Barry Beal.

  “Looks good to me,” she said. But though it was, in fact, impressive by any ordinary standards, she knew it was not quite up to the level of Barry’s best work. He had not been able to concentrate very well for the past week or two. Ever since the Musser girl had run off, in fact, he had been quietly, doggedly unhappy.

  His misery showed only in the quality of his work and in the question he asked every time he saw her. Which he asked now.

  “Mrs. Wilmore, you heard anything about Joanie?”

  Joan Musser. His girlfriend since high school. Cally had seen her a few times, and to her chagrin had found herself wincing away and staring back again, repelled and fascinated, just like a Hoadley yokel. Joan was incredibly ugly, far uglier than Barry, and all the more freakishly so becaus
e she was female. From the town grapevine Cally had found that Joan had been called “Frog Face” (mostly behind her back) almost since she was a baby. The consensus of Hoadley opinion was that she and Barry Beal had ended up a couple because nobody else wanted either of them. Maybe. Maybe she hadn’t cared for him. But it certainly seemed as if Barry had really loved her.

  “No, Barry,” said Cally, keeping her tone gentle and civil even though she had answered the same question a dozen times before. What could the poor innocent do but ask his gods, the adults in full possession of all the regulation smarts, to help him? “I haven’t seen her since I took you and her out to the stable that time.”

  At Barry’s request. He had said Joan wanted to see the horses. And Cally had been astonished when placid Dove had kicked at Barry’s girlfriend. What in the world had the frog-faced woman been doing to the mare while Cally’s back was turned? Even when she was in heat, Dove was usually trustworthy.

  As Cally spoke to Barry, she faced the head of the pompadoured corpse, the dead woman; he faced its feet. Therefore he did not see what Cally saw. Afterward, she tried to tell herself that she had imagined what happened, that it was a trick of the light, a shifting shadow, something in her head, though she was not one to imagine things about corpses. She was accustomed to being around them. She brought Mark coffee to the embalming room when he was working late. She slept every night in the upstairs apartment without a thought for the sleepers-never-to-wake down below.

  “No, I have no idea where Joan can be,” Cally said.

  And the dead woman opened her eyes.

  Just a blink, a glimpse, a leer out of the blank implants that covered her sunken eyeballs to give their closed lids the appearance of peaceful repose. The eyelids had been glued shut; how could they move? But move they did, fluttering up to reveal lifeless plastic orbs more horrible than any skeletal stare. Then gone. And Cally stood ashen, wobbling in her riding boots, and Barry Beal was saying, “Mrs. Wilmore? Mrs. Wilmore? You okay? You remember something you heard about Joanie, Mrs. Wilmore?”

  I’m Barry Beal, and I knowed Joanie practically since we was born, and I didn’t like it when she went off that way.

  I didn’t know her that good till we was in junior high together. Thing was, we went to different elementaries. She lived in Hoadley, and I lived about ten miles out. Course I knowed who she was. Everybody in the county knowed who she was from the first time her mom brung her out on the street. You took one look at her face, you didn’t forget. She looked like a squashed frog instead of a little girl. A squashed frog with long yellow hair. Her mom used to comb that hair nice and put ribbons in it like to try and make people look at that, but it didn’t work. The face was what people remembered.

  The kids called her “Frog Face.” Kids was mean in junior high, meaner even than in elementary. These kids, their daddies worked in the steel mills or the coal mines, they all think they got to be big and tough. What I mean, they always called me Retard and Tardo and Jamhead and like that, and done Indian rope burns and noogies on me, but in junior high they stole my money and stuff, locked me in closets, tripped me in the hallway, like that. Them hallways in junior high, with all the kids punching and shoving no matter how much the teachers holler, they’re like hell.

  Even the girls was mean. They hit on me and scratched me when they got a chance. And them boys older than me, think they’re tough, they beat me up one day after school. It took a bunch of them, and they only done that once. I got big brothers, see, took care of them.

  But what I mean is, nobody in junior high wants nothing to do with a tardo or weirdo or a puke face. And there’s a sort of rule people who ain’t what they call normal get stuck together. The kids nobody much talks to talk to each other. I noticed that from little on up. So me and Joanie, we was the two ugliest kids in the school, we seen each other a lot, in lunch and in study hall and just around.

  Joanie wasn’t a retard like me, though. Joanie was real smart.

  I don’t think she showed it in class much. Times I seen her, she was always sitting kind of curled up, like she didn’t want nobody looking at her. And she didn’t hardly say nothing the first few times I set with her at lunch. But after I ate with her two-three times she started talking to me, and then I knowed she was smart.

  “That mark on your face,” she says. “I know what it is.”

  Thing is, I got this big purple splotch on my face. I’d be just average ugly without it, but with it I’m a damn freak. Plus I had zits on top of it back then.

  “I’ve been doing some research,” says Joanie. “It’s called a hema—hema something, a port wine stain. You can get it taken off, you know that? They can laser it right off.”

  “Don’t want nothing to do with no laser doctor,” I said.

  “That’s ignorant. I’d sure get my face done if my mother would let me.”

  Sentences like that I got to take one thing at a time. “Them laser doctors can fix your face?” I says. Her face didn’t look like nobody could fix it with anything.

  “Not laser doctors. Plastic surgeons. They can move the bones around, put new bones in, like that.”

  I guess if they would’ve done that, she could’ve breathed through her nose and been nicer to eat with. She was awful to eat with. Chewed with her mouth open and snorted air around her food. I didn’t care because I ain’t no winner when it comes to table manners myself.

  I taken the next thing. “Your mother won’t let you get your face fixed?”

  But she sort of scrunched up and wouldn’t talk to me no more that day.

  I can figure things out if I want to. It takes me a while, but if I decide I want to, I can do it. So I done it. I listened to the teachers in the hallway talking, people talking around town, my mom gabbing on the phone with her friends, and I figured out some. And then later, when she knowed me better, Joanie told me some more.

  Joanie’s mother was Norma Koontz. Them’s the Koontzes that sells insurance. They sent Norma to college and all that, and she married this sort of artist fellow named Roland Musser and come back to Hoadley with him. They was going to have an art gallery, but it didn’t do no good. Not hardly, in this town. Even I would’ve knowed that. People ain’t got enough to pay the bills, they ain’t going to buy no art. So the gallery went bust, and Joanie got born about the same time, and Roland started drinking. He been drinking ever since, pretty much, and after a few years Norma’s folks got tired of helping out. They moved to Florida and stopped sending money. Joanie’s mother worked different places, but it’s hard to find good jobs around Hoadley. And then she went and got mixed up with this cinderblock church outside of town. And they tooken all her money Joanie’s father didn’t drink. So Joanie never had nothing.

  I guessed it took a lot of money to get your face fixed. But then I found out even if she had money Norma Koontz wouldn’t have got no face job for her daughter. Joanie’s mother had some weird ideas.

  By ninth grade me and Joanie was good friends. My bus got to school early and she usually come to school early too. She wouldn’t of had to because she walked, but she come early anyways. We’d stand around and talk about all kinds of stuff. Sometimes I thought she liked me because she come to school early when she wouldn’t of had to. But mostly I knowed better. She come to get away from home. I knowed where she lived, in one of them trashy row houses between the river and the railroad tracks, right by the slag heap. It wasn’t the house Joanie was getting away from, though.

  “My mother gave up on me when I was ten,” she told me.

  “What do you mean, gave up on you?” I says.

  “She just gave up on me. She sat me down one day and told me I was bad, sunk in sin, had a devil in me, and that was why my face was the way it is. And she didn’t know what was ever going to become of me, but she was done with me. And she’s hardly talked to me since.”

  “Jeez!” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. To me back then it almost sounded kind of good, because my mom was always on my bac
k for something. “You mean she don’t care—”

  “She doesn’t care where I go or when I come home. She doesn’t fix food for me. I get myself something to eat. She washes my laundry because I put it in with the rest, but she doesn’t fold it. She just dumps it in a mess on my bed.”

  I guessed it wasn’t no good after all having a mom like that. No wonder Joan always looked like hell, and not just her face. I mean, I was no beauty myself and where I come from we ain’t picky, but Joanie didn’t take proper care of herself, I guess because she didn’t get no encouragement. Her hair was greasy and the rest of her was kind of flabby, not really fat but just sort of dumpy, and her clothes was ugly and sometimes she smelled. I didn’t know much about being a girl but I knowed there ought to be something she could do about the smell. She usually had food on her, too, on account of she couldn’t chew right because her face was bent.

  When we got to high school, tenth grade, we was in a different building and Joanie took Academic and I took General. Most of them bookworms hadn’t got much use for us farmers, and Joanie probably wouldn’t of been no different if it wasn’t for her face. But as it was, she still ate lunch with me every day.

  Them school lunches was awful, but she ate most everything because she wasn’t likely to get much at home. After a while I knowed what foods she really liked though. She loved bananas and I didn’t care much about them so I would give her mine. She would peel the whole thing at once and get all the hairy stuff off it and take the little black thing out of the bottom. If it didn’t come out she wouldn’t eat the bottom.

  “That won’t hurt you,” I says.

  “How would you know?” she says. “It reminds me of a worm or something,” she says. “Black. Ick.”

  Sometimes other kids would offer her the food they didn’t want, but not so much to be nice. Mostly they did it to make fun. She wouldn’t take their food.

  “I hate normals,” she says to me one day.

  “Huh?”