Apocalypse (5 page)

“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 back 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?”

“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.