Apocalypse (23 page)

Cally wanted a reconciliation. The carousel of her personal agenda cycled on a constant hub of hunger for Mark. Other needs—for independence, adventure, growth, selfhood—loomed up from time to time and flashed by in a blur of mirrorshine and sky music and rainbow candy color, to cycle away again, but that one remained. Always before it had been possible; therefore Cally had thought she could go to Mark, duck her head, put her hand on his shirt, offer a few tears perhaps, and then their marriage would be all right again—or at least as right as it had been for some time—as long as she behaved herself, kept her mouth shut, did errands, cleaned the apartment and made good dinners. (How she was to maintain this Hoadley-woman facade while the world was ending, she did not question. She would manage somehow. The love hunger took priority, as it always did.) So she had presented herself to Mark the day before, contrite. But it had not worked as she expected. Mark had turned his back on her with a hard laugh she had never heard from him before. Mark had changed. Was changing.

Standing in the Blue Room next to the corpse of the girl who had been raped, Cally felt as always the tug of two urges. Wryly she knew she was like the house cat who, when let out, wanted to be in, and when in, wanted to be out. For the most part she wanted to be with Mark. He was around the funeral home somewhere; she had come into the place to be near him. But also she wanted to be away from him. Family was the thing that held a person down … she wanted to be far, far away, on her own adventure of living, free. Like a bird in the sky.

Neither seemed possible. Instead, she went riding.

“She good as killed herself,” Gigi declared to Cally, out on the trail. “No reason the cancer should have killed her. A person can live with cancer. I should know. I got six kinds of cancer.”

Gigi had known, of course, what had killed the girl in the Blue Room. Hoadley born and bred, Gladys Gingrich Wildasin knew what happened in and around the town as naturally as if she breathed in gossip along with the polluted air.

“I got more parts missing than a stripped car,” Gigi bragged. “Cancer took 'em. First thing was, I had to have skin cancers removed. Then I got both breasts taken off, right to the armpit. I got a kidney taken out, had a tumor in it. All my female organs are gone. I got a section of bone missing out of my arm, the one that had radiation when I was a baby. Now they're talking about taking the rest of the arm, so's I'd have to ride Western, left-handed. There's a shadow starting to show up on my backbone. By rights I ought to be dead, but here I am, walking around.”

“Riding around,” said Cally. She glanced at pale, dust-brown-roaning-out Snake Oil, no longer in envy but with covert satisfaction, knowing that she had one-upped Gigi in the stable hierarchy by riding Tazz Man. On the black gelding, she was indisputably more the daredevil than Gigi.

As if in acknowledgment, the black horse plunged his heavy head, without provocation, to buck. Cally pulled on the huge curb bit—there was not much strength in her starved arms, but the bit acted as a lever on the tender parts of the horse's head and mouth—and kicked hard with booted feet. Devil's head came up as he leaped forward, and Cally hauled him in several rapid circles until he condescended to walk on. Devil was never happy on a trail ride unless he was running away.

Gigi watched impassively. “How's Mark?” she asked, perhaps not entirely tangentially, as Devil began to come to order.

“Worse than ever.”

“Cicadas got him down?”

All around them the tar-baby bugs chorused in tragic soprano voices, lurched through the air, crunched under the horse's hooves, sighing Doom, Doom. The women paid little attention. They had accepted the cicadas and their glissando song. Doom. It was a given in the Hoadley summer, easily accepted, because it had been a tenor, a refrain in Hoadley conversation for years. Since forever.

The previous night another animal had burned, hanging from the water tower. A stray dog this time. At least so Hoadley hoped, that it was a stray and not someone's house pet. The carcass was charred beyond recognition. Gigi and Cally accepted the burning dog, also, and scarcely spoke of it.

Answering Gigi's question, yet not answering it, Cally murmured, “I don't know why I stay around.”

“I would never leave Homer,” declared Gigi cheerfully. “Kill him if I could get away with it, sure. Make him miserable, all the time. But I'd never leave him. He foots the bills.”

“Right,” said Cally, recognizing Gigi's familiar cynicism, wondering briefly what would happen if she got a better job, could support herself and her horse; would she leave Mark? The thought left within a breath, because it was no use making plans. The cicada song told her that.

Only after she was out of the woods and off her horse and had returned to Hoadley, to her house that happened to be a funeral home, to what should have been the bosom of her family, did the love-hunger return to her and she remembered, aghast, some of the things Gigi had said. That callous old woman, hard and hollow as a rotten tree, as Devil's black hooves—all her female organs were gone; had cancer taken her heart, too?

Cally found Mark in the apartment flipping through mortuary supply catalogues, contemplating the dry shampoos guaranteed to remove tobacco stains from moustaches, the New Improved Weldit Lip and Eye Sealer, the No-Mold crystals for use in humans, the Sur-Kill fungicide. Glowering, he did not look up when Cally came in. When, a moment later, someone rapped at the door, she answered it even though she had been on her way to change her clothes, rather than asking him to do so.

At the door stood Barry Beal. Darkly he stared at her from under heavy brows, and for a moment she expected him to ask her if she had seen Joanie. But he had not been asking about Joanie lately. He must have gotten over Joanie since he had been spending time with Ahira and her band of misfits. Maybe he had fastened his childlike devotions on Ahira instead. Had she put her mark on him? Who was to know one way or the other? thought Cally with skewed and sour humor. Ahira's mark would not show on Barry “Jamhead” Beal's pinto-patch face.

Barry's somber stare deepened. “Mrs. Wilmore,” he said with the unprefaced directness of the mentally slow person, “somebody messed up my layout.” He peered at her as though he thought she might have done it somehow, though she had been miles away at the stable.

“Huh?” said Cally, even though the words had been perfectly clear. The girl who had been raped, he meant. There was no other layout in the Perfect Rest at the time.

“Somebody messed up the blanket, and her dress and everything.” Barry shifted his suspicious gaze past Cally to Mark. “Mr. Wilmore, you was around all afternoon. You know who done it?”

“I wasn't watching, Barry.” Mark came to the door, and Cally moved away. “Probably some prankster,” she heard Mark tell Barry. As indeed it probably had been, especially since the deceased was the girl who had been raped. Certainly her funeral would bring out the worst in people—though after every funeral, even the least likely funerals, Mark had to make sure to search the guest book for sick-sense-of-humor entries before he presented it to the family. “Could have been anybody,” Mark was saying. “Some old gossip curious to see what she looked like under her things. Whoever. Just fix her up again before the viewing this evening, would you?”

Barry's mind was still stubbornly fixed on the injustice that had been done, not to the girl, but to him. “You mean I got to do her blanket all over again and everything?”

“I'm paying you to do it, right? I'm paying you by the hour. So what's the difference?” Mark's voice did not rise. He was really very good with Barry, Cally knew from many past occasions. He was kind to children, gentle with people in general, patient with the rambling mental processes of the elderly, supportive of the bereaved; he was really a very good man. She was surprised to remember how she had married him partly because of that goodness.

“Just pretend it's another blanket,” Mark was telling Barry. “A whole 'nother job. You don't have to get it back the same way again.” Mark went out with Barry to look at the damaged layout.

A good man. She knew he had always been faithful to her; he would have been paralyzed with remorse if he had slipped. She remembered his wincing guilt whenever he became annoyed with the children to the point of shouting at them, making them cry. Yet he had showed no such guilt after hitting her that one recent time. And even a few months before, such a scene would have been unthinkable.

Outside the cicadas sang their dirge. The keening voices loudened to Cally's ears when the door opened and Mark came in again.

“The beast is hungry,” Mark announced to the air of the apartment. “The beast wants his supper.”

Making a mirthless joke of their estrangement.… Cally felt so starved for the sound of his voice that she didn't mind. “Would the beast perhaps care for some spaghetti?”

Made the day before, it could be warmed tomato sauce and all in the microwave without undue cooking odor to disturb the mourners who would soon be gathering down below. Anxious to please her husband, already moving toward the kitchen, Cally tried to speak lightly. But Mark did not answer.

She warmed the spaghetti and sat across the table from him, watching him eat. Even a few weeks before he would have offered her some, argued with her when she refused, coaxed or bullied her, trying to make her eat. But now he forked spaghetti impassively and did not speak.

Afterward he dressed for the evening viewing and went out into the cicada-chanting dusk. Hiding in the kitchen, Cally gobbled leftover spaghetti. She had meant to put it away in the refrigerator, but handling the food she found herself suddenly unable to keep control; hunger had gotten the better of her at last. She lifted gobs of cooling spaghetti to her mouth with her hands, licking the blood-red sauce off her fingers. It was not enough; would anything ever be enough for her hunger? There were iced sweet rolls in the cake saver. So much neglected food in the house since the kids were gone. She ate the rich pastries, all of them, then went on to assault the contents of the refrigerator. Cold gravy with the slab of congealed fat on top was as good as the cold chicken; cold soup and cold baked beans no more disgusting than the cold raw wieners. She bolted whatever food came to hand until she was gorged, until her stomach swelled as if she was pregnant with her own obsession, until she could not stand up straight. She sat on the kitchen floor amid droppings and splatters of sauce and juice and gravy, amid a devastation of greasy, empty Tupperware, with slimed face and filthy hands, and hated herself.

After a few moments she heaved herself up, walked bent over like an old, old woman to the bathroom, stood at the john and made herself vomit. She disgorged until nothing was left, until she felt light again, like a bird, as if even her bones were hollow. Then she rinsed her mouth, and washed, and went out to scrub the kitchen and all the evidence in it. She washed herself at the bathroom sink, then again in the kitchen while doing the dishes, then once more in the bathtub afterward, and still felt dirty.

When Mark came back from the viewing his wife was sitting on the bed, waiting for him.

“The beast is home,” he announced dourly to the apartment when he came in. Then, entering the bedroom with suit coat and tie in hand, he saw her.

The fragrance of her perfume covered the lingering odor of vomit. In an absurdly tiny black lace teddy, low below spaghetti straps to show off what Cally seemed to think were breasts, high-cut above her thighs—Mark saw picket-fence ribs, saw hip bones grotesquely jutting, angular as those of a concentration camp victim in some
Life
magazine photo. Her legs, coquettishly folded, reminded him of nothing so much as broomsticks. Yellow broomsticks; her skin had gone sallow as her hair. Muscles twitched transparently around her nervous mouth. Her nose had thinned to a beak, the juncture between bone and cartilage plainly visible. Wispy fuzz covered her broomstick legs, her dowel-rod arms, as her abused and frantic body tried to warm itself; and despite all that, the crazy woman was trying for a
Playboy
pose, thought she was attractive, when she was starving herself to death. The nut case. He was done shouting at her, worrying about her. His lip curled as he hung up his suitcoat.

“What wonderful timing,” he said.

She essayed a smile. Shy, it looked sweet and touching even on her hollow-cheeked, fleshless face. Despite the smile, or perhaps because of it, Mark saw that her bony shoulders and fiddlestick arms were shaken by a fine tremor, nearly invisible, her fragile body a violin under a rapid vibrato. He knew that she was always cold those days, always shivering. He knew that her trembling at this time might not be due entirely to her airy outfit and to chill. Neither fact moved him. The sight of her in no way pleased him.

“I know what you want,” he said to her. Her presence on the bed was not an act of sensual desire; it was an act of fear and desperation and raw need. She did not want sex; she wanted him. She wanted to wind around him, a parasite, to entwine him, possess him, to draw her strength from him. She would be his succubus if he let her, like all the rest of them with their tentacles on him, their despairs leeching away at his life. She would suck him dry, she would take his essence, his soul.

She interpreted his statement as playful, and he saw hope lift her bony head with its careful cap of permed hair the color and texture of dead grass. He had known plastic junk-store dolls with softer hair, and someday soon when she was fussing with it he would tell her so. But for now he would tell her what he thought of her idea for his evening. With his next words he swatted down her hope as surely as if he had swatted her flyweight body down to the floor.

“You stupid airhead,” he told her, quietly but with the joyous hardness that was new to him, that would protect him from whatever threatened to hurt him, that might yet deliver him from Hoadley's incessant demands; where had he gotten this wonderful hardness? “You total idiot. Look at yourself! Who would ever want to make love with you? You're like something out of a freak show! The walking skeleton; come see the walking skeleton girl! Who'd want to screw a skeleton? If I want to fuck a dead cunt, I know where I can find one.”