Apocalypse Read online

  “People with regular faces. Girls with fluffy hair and nice clothes, think they’re pretty. Boys who think they’re God’s gift. Teachers who think they’re so smart, know all the answers. People who whisper behind their hands. The do-goody women in the thrift shop. The old farts loafing in the park. I hate them all.”

  “Yeah,” I says. I didn’t understand much, but I figured I better keep quiet about her greasy hair or she might end up hating me too.”

  She says, “Someday I’m going to get them.”

  She scared me, the way she looked. Like she might really do something. I kept quiet, and so did she for a while, like she was thinking.

  “I’ve stopped going to church,” she says then.

  I didn’t know much about church one way or the other. My folks was decent but they didn’t go to no church. All I knowed was most people in Hoadley was Catholic and the rest was pretty much all Brethren or Lutheran, and Joanie’s mom wasn’t neither. That place where Norma Musser went, a guy named Culp was the preacher, and some people said he was crazy. Preached hell and Armageddon all the time. My folks said he was crazy like a fox, had people under his thumb, taking their money from them.

  “I’ve had it,” says Joanie. “I don’t care what Mom or Culp do to me.”

  “Why, what would Reverent Culp do?”

  “Pray for me! Bar, it’s terrible the way he prays. He thinks I’m so bad—I might as well be the Antichrist.” She was talking funny. She looked a little crazy. “He better let me alone or I don’t know what I might do.”

  I says, “How would you know what he says if you ain’t there?”

  She says, “I’d know. That snake. I’d feel it. He’s been praying his poison over me once a week practically since I was born.”

  “Every Sunday?”

  “Every Sunday he has a go at healing me.”

  “You sickly?”

  “Lord, no! My face, Bar, my face! It’s supposed to be all my fault. God is punishing me. I’m stubborn in sin. Well, God can go to hell. I’m not going back. I don’t care if my mom kicks me out of the house.”

  Her mom didn’t kick her out, but she sure didn’t get no happier, neither, and Joanie changed after that. She started smoking pot, for one thing, when she could get it. She never had enough money to get much, but then along about tenth grade she had problems with boys. I guess some of the guys thought she was so ugly she’d be easy. They started hanging around her house, driving by and beeping their horns, hollering, stuff like that.

  I guess her mom thought the same. “Mom says I’m a whore,” she tells me.

  “I wouldn’t know it,” I says.

  “Shit,” she says and laughs at me. She’d got into a habit of saying swear words a lot. What with her sneaking reefers and all, she was getting into trouble in school, teachers sending notes home to her mom and like that. I think she liked making her mom mad. I think she even liked being called a whore. I don’t think she never done nothing with them guys though. I don’t really know. I just don’t think so.

  “The old lady says I’m the Whore of Babylon,” Joanie says. “Says I’m going to get struck down by God and go straight to hell. Someday I’d like to tear her tongue out and show it to her.”

  I was used to the way she talked, but that turned my stomach. “Joanie,” I says.

  “I would! She’s hateful. She thinks every time she goes out to church I’ve got ten guys in the house, fornicating on the kitchen table.”

  “How come the kitchen table?”

  “Bar … Just never mind.”

  “Well, don’t your dad say nothing about all this?”

  “Him? He’s no use.” She laughs again. “He’s a vegetable. Pickled. Even when he’s there, he’s not.”

  I should have knowed that. I’d seed him.

  It really bothered her, what her mother said. “Shit, she thinks I’m rotten to the core. Whore, whore, rotten to the core. I might as well make her happy,” Joanie says. “I sure could use the money. And some people say it’s fun.”

  “Don’t do that,” I says, and she got mad.

  “Don’t you try to tell me what to do now!” she yells at me, and she stomps off. So I went home in the bus that night and got three of my brothers and we come back in town. Her house was the kind with them asphalt shingles falling off the sides and the wooden steps with the paint gone. There set her father on them splintery steps with his bottle, and there was real rude guys hanging around, but Mr. Musser don’t mind none. Me and my brothers piled out of the car and started pounding away on them guys to send them off, and Mr. Musser set there grinning like a lit pumpkin. Me and my brothers got cut up a little bit but we sent them bastards on their way. My brothers give me a hard time about it but I felt we done right. Then we went on home.

  The next morning in school Joanie come up to me steaming. I was surprised. I thought I done good.

  “Who the hell do you think you are!” she yells. “You don’t own me!”

  I was real surprised. “You want them guys back?” I says. “Shoot, I’ll round them up and send them back.”

  “Heck, no!” She cooled down a little. “I’m just trying to figure out how that—that saurian mind of yours works, that’s all. What’s your right? You’ve never even asked me for a date.”

  “I’m asking you now,” I says. I never even thought of it till then, but I should’ve done it before. It worked out good. She was my girl, so the wise guys let her alone after that.

  We went to a movie. It’s dark in movies. But we still had to put up with some stares and snide comments from ignorant people. “Why would they come out in public!” some lady says. So we didn’t go to movies much after that. We dated two-three years, once a week every week regular because nobody else wanted neither of us. We went different places—out to my house to watch TV, or for a drive in my Chevy when I got it, or to the library. The library, for cripes sake! Joanie made me drive her to every library for miles, and she got a card at each one.

  Little libraries ain’t no use, but I got to admit, big libraries are nice private places, especially back in the shelves.

  Sex was something you got to do when you’re in high school. My brothers was all after me about what base was I at with Joanie. I didn’t say nothing and I didn’t really care, but after a while I figured I better give it a try. Joanie didn’t really attract me that way and I didn’t want to mess with her because of all that Whore of Babylon business, I didn’t think she’d like it, but then sometimes she’d step close to me to talk and I didn’t think she’d mind after all. Like I say, sex was kind of a duty, so one night back among them library shelves I tried kissing her. Right away I knowed she wasn’t no better at this than I was. We both bashed our mouths together, and I wondered why that was supposed to feel good. I got excited anyway, it was the idea of the thing, and I rubbed against her and got hold of her jug in my hand, and all of a sudden she pushed me away.

  “Bar, you are gross!” she says, and then she was mad and wouldn’t talk to me. But next time I seed her, damned if she didn’t start standing close to me again.

  We went on like that for a while, fumbling around and bruising each other’s lips and me getting slapped off. Joanie couldn’t seem to make up her mind whether she liked sex or not, and after a while I give up, like I figured my mom and dad done a long time ago. It just didn’t seem worth the bother. We never got no clothes off or nothing. I didn’t hold it against Joanie, that she didn’t have no more enthusiasm, because the girl was suppose to try and stop you. After Joanie got her own place I guess maybe we could’ve tried again, but that was later and I was comfortable the way we was by then.

  Joanie dropped out of school soon as she turned sixteen. It didn’t surprise me none, because I done the same. Course she was better at school than I was. But she couldn’t wait to get a job and her own apartment and get away from her mom. She couldn’t get no good job—even the normals couldn’t get no good jobs in Hoadley—but she got a job selling by phone and done okay
at that. She always had this really classy voice. So she had her phone and her room over the Tropical Beauty, and she didn’t hardly ever go out of it, except she still wanted me to drive her to libraries. She was always reading, long as I’d knowed her, poetry and storybooks and like that. Once she got her job, she made just enough money to live on and the rest of the time she’d read, and when I looked over her shoulder I could see she was reading some real strange stuff, with pictures of stars and snakes and eagles and horses and strange letters and naked people in it. But the naked people wasn’t having sex, usually.

  Like I said, maybe good old Joanie and me could’ve had sex better after she got her own place. But I’d been to some real whores by then and I knowed what they did and I liked Joanie and I didn’t want to bother her with them things. I figured she was a nice girl and wouldn’t be interested, and she never done nothing to show me different. Maybe I was wrong, though.

  I was doing construction work for my uncle then, and just about every night after work I’d stop by Joanie’s place. Just like when we was in school, her nose was always in a book. I’d ask her what she was reading, trying to get some sense out of her, but she said I wouldn’t understand. Said it was mostly all about magic and witchcraft and spells. Pretend stuff. She didn’t hardly seem to take no interest in real stuff at all.

  “You’re going to wear out your eyes reading all the time,” I told her.

  “Right, Bar.”

  “Don’t you never go out of here?”

  “After dark.”

  “That ain’t no good for you. What you been eating?”

  She didn’t answer me. She wasn’t paying no attention.

  “I know you been eating junk. Here, I brought you some bananas. Have a banana.”

  “Bar,” she says, “let me alone.”

  “You’re alone too damn much.”

  “Barry,” she yells at me, “you don’t understand! I’ve got it almost figured out, how I’m going to—” Then she stops short and clams up.

  “Going to what?”

  She won’t tell me.

  It was a nice night out for tardos and puke-faces, nice and dark. “Buy you a Coke?” I says.

  She just shakes her head. I didn’t really expect no different. She didn’t hardly ever go out no more. So I says goodnight and left her alone.

  Couple days later, all of a sudden she came to see me out at work. We was pouring a new concrete porch for a house where the old wooden porch got rotten. Construction was real slow in Hoadley, and I’d started working part time at the funeral home, but this day I was working with my uncle. He didn’t mind when Joanie come to see me, though.

  “Bar,” she says, “I got to borrow five hundred dollars.”

  “What for?” She’d quit pot a couple years back, about the same time she quit school, said she didn’t need it no more, so I wasn’t worried about that. I just wanted to know what for.

  She didn’t say. She just says, “I’ll pay you back.”

  She would, too. I knowed that. She’d borrowed lunch money from me all through school. Her mom didn’t give her no allowance, so if she didn’t get no babysitting job she didn’t have no lunch money. And she didn’t babysit that often because her face scared the kids. But she always managed to pay me back somehow. She shoveled snow, scrubbed floors, stuff like that. My mom and other people would give her clothes. She always looked like hell in all them dumb old clothes.

  “Can’t you get no money saved up now?” I says. Her room couldn’t be costing her that much.

  “It’s my mo-ther.” She said it like that, mo-ther. “Every time I get a little bit stashed away, she comes around and claims she’s got no food in the house, she’s hungry.”

  “So don’t give her nothing,” I says. “You don’t owe her nothing.”

  “I know! I hate her!” Joanie stamped. “But I can’t—seem to—help it.…”

  She stopped with a kind of sniffle. I stood with my mouth open, because I couldn’t remember that I’d ever seed her cry, not with all the mean things people had said to her when I was around, and now she was going to cry about her mother? But she didn’t cry. She stiffened up and looked at me straight.

  “Can you loan me that much money?” she says to me.

  “Sure I can.” I was living at home yet, didn’t have no expenses to speak of except my car, I got plenty of money. Well, not plenty, but enough. “But it ain’t for your mother, is it?”

  “No,” she says, and she never did tell me what it was for.

  I went to the bank after work and come by Joanie’s place and give her the money. “One more thing,” she says. “Can I borrow your welder’s mask?”

  “Sure.” I didn’t use it no more. I was going to be working full time at the funeral home soon. Reason I didn’t ask her what she wanted the welder’s mask for, I knowed she’d always liked it. She used to play with it and put it on sometimes and say she ought to wear it on the street, people would stare at her less. I just figured she was going somewhere she wanted to hide her face.

  I keep a lot of my stuff in the trunk of my car, and the welder’s mask was in there too. I got it and gave it to her. “Thanks, Bar,” she says, and she looked at me kind of strange. Like she was taking a picture of me with her eyes. “I’ll get this thing back to you,” she says.

  I didn’t have no reason to disbelieve her. I never took notice till afterwards that she didn’t say she’d give it back. She just said she’d get it back to me.

  “Well, I got to go home and get my supper,” I says. Dumb. Here I’d just loaned her enough money to leave me and that mean little town behind, and I says I got to go home and get supper. Dumb! She just nodded, still looking at me funny, and I went on home.

  And like a moron I watched the feature movie on TV, then went to bed, then went to work in the morning. And I guess she took the noon bus. Because when I stopped by that night she was gone. All the way gone. Took her name off the mailbox even. I never heard no more about Joanie Musser, not by that name. Me or anybody else in that town.

  Anybody who asked, her mom told them she guessed the girl had run off to be a prostitute. The girl had always been bad news.

  A few weeks later I got a box in the mail with that dumb welder’s mask in it. The thing looked like it had been through a fire. There wasn’t nothing else. No letter, no nothing. And no return address.

  CHAPTER THREE

  When Cally got to the school, a bit early, to pick up Tammy and Owen, the children were undergoing the weekly lice check. It was a small, informal school; Cally walked in and chatted with the teachers and watched as the nurse, who resembled a white sausage, lifted the neck hair of one youngster after another, each time with a fresh popsicle stick. Never did she touch a child with her hands.

  Cally kept up a wincing smile, scratched herself reflexively, and watched. Odd, how children always managed to look sweet and pretty, no matter where they came from. In all the assembled children there were no truly ugly ones, except perhaps the boy called Slug, the hefty one with the buzz haircut—but even he had petal-fresh skin on his pudgy cheeks. And the girls, the little Irish or Polish or Italian girls in their long soft beribboned or barretted hair and their sweet petulance—knowing their parents and their older sisters, Cally understood that they would grow into breathtaking young beauties, all dark eyes and boyfriends and bone structure, until they married and turned nearly overnight into cows, beefy, bovine, dull and beautyless cows. Hard to believe it, looking at the ethereal little girls, one of whom the nurse was screening for lice at that moment.

  The child sat in the designated chair, head bowed in a semblance of penitence, while the nurse pushed her heavy hair to one side and combed with her wooden implement the fine strands at the nape of her neck. The nurse wore white plastic gloves; they glistened on her strong, bulging hands like gut on fresh pork.

  “There’s nits,” the nurse announced. “Look here.”

  All the teachers and waiting parents stepped forward—the community,
validating the find—but not too near, stretching their necks to look at the small thickenings, like specks of bread dough, adhering to the hair strands. They nodded and murmured agreement, and several started to scratch.

  “Makes me itch just to think of lice!” exclaimed the kindergarten teacher.

  “Hey, we found a live one on a kid last week!” The fifth-grade teacher, a man, seemed to have acquired some of the bumptious volume of his students. “We put it on a slide, put it under the microscope. Want to see?”

  “No, thank you!”

  “I’d like to see,” Cally offered. She did not want to watch the nurse give the child the requisite paperwork to take home, quarantine her from the other children, call her parents. Lice were a shame on the family, no matter how the propaganda tried to say they had nothing to do with poverty and dirt.

  She climbed (rapidly; use calories) the steep old stairs to the fifth grade classroom on the second floor. (Put the bigger kids up there, she imagined some teacher saying, Hope they’ll be responsible enough not to push each other over the railings splat on the foyer floor. And some other teacher saying, I can think of a few we can splat.)

  She found the microscope set up on a windowsill. She looked at the louse.

  And gasped, a small sound, quickly stilled. And gawked. She had expected something like a flea, some sort of insect, but this was like nothing so easily apprehended. Under the microscope it seemed to come at her, looming out of a black porthole, swimming, translucent, and entirely too leggy. Though she was not sure whether the numerous long protuberances were legs, or hairs, or feelers of some sort, or … Something like the clinging tendrils on a squash plant, but many, many, and Cally did not look long enough to entirely decipher what she had seen. She turned away with a shudder, remembering the dish of cold spaghetti in the Boy Scout Halloween House of Horrors—“Feel here, these are his guts!”—remembering the long tentacles of a childish old nightmare, feeling the memory as she sometimes felt the bloodsucking touch of Hoadley.

  Or of family.

  Cally’s father, a frozen-meat salesman, had made a modest success of himself, had grown prosperous, supported his wife and children in a manner to be proud of, and died before his time of heart failure. He had been a decent, hard-working man, entitled to rest and be let alone when he was home. He and Cally’s mother had slept in twin beds. She had never seen her parents argue, never seen them kiss. Cally’s mother, clinically depressed all her adult life, had perturbed her adult children by regaining her mental health with alacrity shortly after her husband died. She lived in the Finger Lakes district of New York state, wintered on the Gulf coast of Florida, and devoted her days to cards, clubs and luncheons as she had once devoted them to doctor’s appointments, self-help books, counseling, isometrics, religion, aerobics, health-food catalogues, psychiatry, bee pollen pills, revival meetings, astrology, and the I Ching. There had been little time and no energy in her for her children beyond the basics of their physical upkeep. Though adequately fed, Cally had grown up hungry for her parents. Her hunger for them was their hold on her. That grip clung, leeched, threw out long tentacles around her even at the distance of death and time and place.