Apocalypse (15 page)

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 black 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?

“Cal,” he told her huskily, “look. I got you a doctor's appointment.” He stepped back enough to hand her the card. “I want you to go, get yourself fixed up. You're not well.”

“What the—” She jerked away from his touch. “Mark Wilmore, you louse, how dare you? I don't need any doctor! Who the hell do you think you are? Stop trying to run my life!”

A shouting fit. It proved his point. “You're not yourself, Cal.”

“Which fucking self is that!”

She was overreacting worse and worse. Gentle, kind, patient, and feeling better about himself, he tried reasoning with her. “Cal, just look in the mirror and see. You're nervous as a cat, and you're way too thin. When's the last time you ate?”

She quieted, or so he thought; he did not recognize her parody of his reasonable tone. “I'm on a diet. See? People don't eat as much when they're on a diet.”

“You've dieted enough. You're turning into a skeleton.”

She flinched as if he had struck her, then flared at him, “Fuck you, I am not!” She had never said anything that harsh to him. He could not help reacting almost as loudly.

“Quit the damn diet!”

“I will not! Since when do you tell me what to do with my own body?”

“Cally, go to the doctor, he'll tell you! You're anorexic.”

“Right. Thank you, Hawkeye Pierce.”

She didn't believe him. Maybe she wouldn't believe the doctor either. Mark felt fear start to gnaw. “Cal,” he said softly, “anorexia can kill you.”

She looked at him.

He said, “I'm really worried about you.” He meant it, and made sure she could tell he meant it. Then, movie-star-style, he tried to lighten it into a joke. “Hey, Cal, I've got corpses enough downstairs. Got no desire for one up here.”

“Mark,” she told him, wearily but gently, “I'm fine. I'm not going to die. I just like being slim.”

He said, “I've got no desire for a skeleton up here either.”

It was the wrong thing to say, seemed to set her off for some reason. She glared at him, then stomped out. Dammit. A minute before, he knew, he'd had her almost talked into going to the doctor to reassure him.

She came back an hour later, with an armload of library books. That evening after dinner (of which she ate a little, grudgingly, to please him) and after the kids were in bed, she brandished one of the books at him.

“Read this. You'll see I don't fit the profile of an anorexic at all.”

“You shouldn't try to diagnose yourself from a book, Cal.” Immediately and guiltily realizing that he had done worse; he had diagnosed her from a comment of his mother's. Better never let her know that.

She went on, ignoring him. “It says here that an anorexic thinks about food compulsively. And I think about plenty of things beside food. And the encyclopedia entry says that anorexics don't feel hunger. But I'm hungry all the time.”

“Shouldn't that tell you something?” said Mark mildly, immediately recognizing a mistake. Patient. He was going to have to be very patient, and practice his active listening skills with her, if he was going to get her anywhere at all.

She shot a sharp look at him, but continued. “Every one of these books says that an anorexic is stuck in childlike thinking and behavior. I am certainly not childish.”

The heck you're not
. But Mark restrained himself from saying it.

“Insecure. Attention-seeking. And overly compliant. I'm not any of those things.”

He wished she were, in fact, a bit more compliant.

“The bottom line is, all these books say an anorexic is a browbeaten adolescent in hidden rebellion against her family. And I'm not an adolescent any more, my dad is dead and my mom is hundreds of miles from here.”

“Cally,” Mark said, “just go to the doctor. Please.”

“Why waste my time?”

“Cal, please! Something's wrong.” He humored her by deferring to her research. “If it's not anorexia, maybe it's something else. Something just as bad.” He let his voice shake. “Cancer, maybe.”

She had always yielded to him when he begged.… She stared at him, and he saw that he had scared and touched her. Then he saw a struggle he did not understand tightening the muscles of her lank face.

Face he no longer felt that he liked any too much … She was going to be stubborn again.

And he saw her decide against him. Just sheerly obstinate, like a kid. She wasn't going to do what he wanted her to. He knew it even before she said “No. It's my body, and I think it looks nice even if you don't, Mark Wilmore.”

Tears, hot and angry. At least there were still tears in her.

CHAPTER SEVEN

My family always joked that when I was little my Ma tried to clean my ears with one of them Kirby vacuum cleaners with all the attachments and it sucked the brains right out of me. I thought it was true for a long time, but I didn't hold it against my Ma none. She was always good to me. And she didn't do that with the Kirby, I figured out when I was in high school. I could figure things out if I cared. I had brains. They was just real slow.

So the next time I go to hear Ahira, a couple nights later, I was still waiting for whatever it was I was trying to think about her.

So I was standing there with all them other misfits, bighead Garrett and the twitchy men who smelled like garbage and the old women with mustaches and the old guy they tooken to the hospital once for something weird and the girl with green skin and all the rest of them. We was all waiting for Ahira, just like we was regular people who had a right to get together and do things.

So Ahira come like she done before, in a long white dress and all, and starts to talk to us like she done before, and her voice is silky warm, telling us we're her people and she loves us, and I'm standing there half believing her or at last wanting to believe her and half waiting and watching for something strange to happen, the bandstand to go around or something like it done last time, but what happens is that another different kind of misfit comes butting in from somewheres behind me and shoves his way to the front, and Ahira sees him and stops talking and gets this strange, quiet smile as if her lips ain't ever going to move again, and looks more beautiful than ever. It was that big-bellied, white-shirted asshole, the Reverent Culp.