Apocalypse (17 page)

She was shining the flashlight on me, in my eyes practically, so couldn't see nothing, I felt half blind, but I looked anyways, and I could see one of them mirrored panels on the merry-go-round hub. And I could see a reflection in it.

It didn't look a thing like me. It didn't have no clothes on, and it was a really good-looking guy, like a movie star, except not so tight-ass, if you know what I mean. Not so squeaky clean. This guy looked like he'd been places movie stars never go to. He looked like he could have kissed a person or killed a person. He looked like he could have done anything.

But he was me anyways. I knowed he was the same way I knowed Ahira was Joanie Musser. There was something the same about us. With her, it was that voice, and the eyes. She still had the same eyes, them big greeny-brown sad-mad eyes. I knowed them eyes. I thought they was pretty even when everybody else was calling them frog eyes.

She was laughing somewheres behind the flashlight in the dark, and saying, “I knew it! I knew I got it right. Just right!”

“What you mean?” I says.

“Never mind,” she says, and she set the flashlight down and come and stood beside me, and I could see her in the mirror beside the movie-star guy, and she was Ahira in all them filmy floating clothes, but she was looking at him like she was daring him. And he turned and smiled at her greasy, just smiled, didn't even kiss her or nothing before he put his hand on her breast like the clothes wasn't there, and she slapped his hand away. I didn't see no more. I looked away, quick, and Ahira, not the mirror Ahira but the real one, was standing beside me watching me and ready to laugh.

“Barry Beal,” she says, “don't go getting any ideas.” She says it like she was joking, but she still sounded just like Joanie used to when I would come back between the library shelves with her.

I only got one idea, because I figured Joanie wouldn't want no jam-faced Barry Beal no more. I says, “How do I get to be the guy in the mirror?”

She says, “What makes you think you can do that?”

And I forgot I wasn't supposed to know about her getting herself a new face, and I says, “You got to be Ahira, didn't you?”

I didn't get no further, because she started to glow white hot. All over, like she was made of white fire. Since I knowed she was Joanie I'd forgot she was Ahira, sun child, and Estrella, daughter of the stars, and all the rest of it. I'd forgot the things she could do. I ain't too bright. But I was bright enough to be scared, and I stepped back from her.

“Barry Beal,” she says, the good old angry Joanie-voice coming out of that spook-fire stranger, “you're a stupid fool. You don't know me, and you don't know where I've been or what I've been through. You don't know the first thing about me.”

“So tell me,” I says.

She looks at me, and the angry fire fades out of her, just the way I was used to, except I wasn't used to
seeing
it happen. But she still can't tell me she's Joanie. “Some other time,” she says, like she's tired. “Barry, you'd better get on home.”

So I done it. But I wouldn't take one of them damn weird horses again. I walked down the mountain and back into Hoadley. By the time I got to my car it was real late.

At least I'd had a lot of time to think. But it didn't make me feel no better, thinking. Now I knowed where Joanie was, but it still didn't do me no good. She might as well have run away and stayed away. Now she was beautiful, she didn't need old Bar no more, not even to loan her lunch money. And she didn't want me. She didn't even want me to get beautiful like her.

Maybe if I was like the Barry in the mirror, if I wasn't ugly no more, maybe she wouldn't mind so much the way I wanted to be with her, the way I—

Loved her.

Boy, I was dumb. Of course I loved her. I should've knowed it a long time before. I should've told her a long time ago, when we was still really dating, before she left Hoadley. If I would've told her then, when she was still ugly, she would've knowed it was true. Maybe it would've made her feel better. Maybe she wouldn't of left. Now she was Ahira, now she was beautiful, I didn't know if I could ever tell her.

Hell.

Jesus shit, what could I say to her? Joanie, I love you? All them misfits loved her. Joanie, I want to be your friend? She had all the friends she needed now. Joanie, I'd do anything for you?

Joanie, I know who you are, and I love you anyways?

Hell, I should've told her that before, too.

Instead of keeping her doctor's appointment, Cally went to see Gigi.

She walked. In any event she would have walked for the exercise (burn those calories), but this day she had no choice; Mark had taken her car to the dealership for service. With ulterior purpose, she felt sure. He had said nothing, but the message was clear: she could not get to the stable that day, but the medical center was within easy walking distance. That air-conditioned Hoadley mecca, that much-frequented place where entire families, cousins and grandparents included, gathered in the communal waiting room and discussed symptoms, was centrally located for the convenience of everyone in the town. Why not join the crowd? Why not use the nice appointment he had made her?

She did not. Instead, she walked downslope toward the creek (the color of dark urine in its concrete flood-control embankments) a couple of blocks until she came to Railroad Street, then turned and trudged past blocks of wooden mine-company houses utterly without architectural distinction to Gigi's similar house near the other end of town.

She had phoned; Gigi would be there. Gigi, liked by scarcely anyone else in Hoadley, was therefore, like Sojourner Hieronymus, one of the women Cally admired. But Cally went to Sojourner to listen, not to talk. With Gigi she could talk. Sojourner disapproved of everything. Gigi scarcely seemed to disapprove of anything.

Approaching, Cally saw Gigi's typically sparrow-brown mine-town house as toffee, the high chain-link fence (not so typical) that stockaded her back yard as white chocolate lace. Lord, she was so hungry all the time the whole world looked good to eat, even Hoadley, even the candy-bar-brown dog poop on the sidewalk.… Gigi was on her knees, puttering in her garden. Odd, Cally thought; she had not considered Gigi the gardening type. Yet most of the hard old woman's yard was in flowers, and they grew lush and thick and tall, even the five-foot fleshy-leafed canna root. A primitive tropical beauty which disliked Hoadley's thin soil, it nevertheless grew strong and barbaric in Gigi's garden. Soon it would bloom, blood red.

Gigi saw Cally, called a greeting and came through the house to let her in at the front door.

“I thought maybe we could talk outside.” Gigi sounded rather formal for her; she seemed not as much at ease in her home as in the stable. “It's such a beautiful day.”

“Yes, it is. Good day for riding, right?” Sullen, Cally tried to joke; her bitterness tinged her voice so clearly that neither woman smiled, though Gigi might have felt, as always, her sour and private amusement.

“Have something to drink? Diet cola?”

“Well … okay.” Glad the older woman had diet soda on hand, should have known Gigi would. Though not fat, Gigi had the blocky, thick-waisted body fated on her by her German genes, and it was a minor heartache to her that even in stretch-fabric riding breeches (which she wore as commonly as other women of her age wore housedresses) she could not achieve a truly deep, legs-down-long-around-the-horse riding seat.

Cally trailed after Gigi to the kitchen.

She had been in the house before, and thought of it as a comfortably neutral sort of place, exhibiting neither the worst of Hoadley decorating taste nor anything Hoadley would find offensive. Homer's hunting trophies, an eight-point buck, an antelope head from some long-ago western foray, hung on the living-room walls, staring with sorrowful glass eyes. A ripple-stitch Afghan (an African, Ma Wilmore would call it) in candy-corn colors lay tidily on the back of the cracker-tan nubbly sofa. There was little else to look at. The place was sparsely furnished and very clean, almost sterile; some of Gigi's nursing training must have taken hold, that she kept her place so clean. Not until that day, waiting while Gigi clinked ice into glasses and poured beverage brown and limpid as deer eyes, not until then did Cally realize how Gigi (out of character in ham-pink Jamaica shorts) undertook the protective coloration of a secretive animal in her own home. Despite the old woman's passion for horses, there were no equine knickknacks on the end tables, no photos of Snake Oil on the walls. Nor was there any sign of Gigi's cynical sense of humor about the place. No hang-in-there posters or scatological pronouncements or plaques proclaiming, “A woman's place is on a stallion.” Nothing to say “Gladys ‘Gigi' Wildasin” about the place at all. Except, perhaps, that in one corner, almost as if on display, stood a huge vacuum cleaner, a Hoover upright.

“Homer got taken to the hospital with that attached to him once, years back,” Gigi remarked when she saw Cally looking at it. She handed the younger woman her glass and led the way out into the flower-thick air of the back yard.

“Attached to him?”

“Yep. You've heard the expression, ‘beating the meat'? Well, Homer took it into his head one night to use the beater bar on the Hoover.” Gigi sat down on a lawn chair and gestured Cally to another. “He got his penis sucked right up inside and couldn't get it out. They took him to the hospital on a stretcher with the Hoover sitting on top of him like a giant dildo. Bet he's never felt so big.”

Gigi chuckled, deep and astringent, as she told the story, but Cally blushed cherry-red.

“Used to embarrass me too,” Gigi added, observing her.

“I should think so!”

“I couldn't look anybody in the eye, there for a while. But then I figured it was Homer's problem, and I let that be known. He could go his way and I'd go mine.”

And that was when she stopped loving him
, Cally thought. Flower gardens crowded all around her, wildly thriving and choking thick. Even Oona's cosmos and snapdragons and salvia never grew half as rank. Cally wondered what in the world Gigi did to her gardens.

“So how's Mark?” Gigi veered with shrewd insight to the substance of Cally's visit.

In church, on the street, anywhere else in Hoadley Cally would have said, Fine, Well he's worried about things in general, There's a lot of pressure on him from business, He's a good man. And she would have felt a pang of misery at their estrangement. But to Gigi she said, “Mark is a pain in the butt.”

“Still doesn't believe the things you tell him?”

“Worse.”

“What'd he do now?”

“Wants me to go to the doctor.” With both bony hands Cally gripped her cold, chemically-sweetened glass. “Says there's something wrong with me. Guess he thinks I've got ‘nerves,' like his mother. Asshole.” Cally had never spoken of her husband so harshly, but Gigi nodded as if at merest self-evident truth. In another moment Cally burst out, “If he'd just take me—if he'd just accept me the way I am!”

Gigi said, “It's not Mark making you starve yourself.”

Cally goggled. Gigi, disagreeing with her on the infamy of a man? “But that's part of it, don't you see? That's me! The way I want to be.”

“But that's it, see. That's the problem. There's no point being the way you want to be, not in this town. What you got to do is be the way Hoadley wants you to be.”

Something sere as cicada husks in the old woman's voice. Cally stared. Gigi stared back with her hard little grin, teeth edge to sharp edge.

“And Mark's Hoadley,” she added. “Hoadley born and Hoadley raised. You can't forget that.”

“Aren't you the same?” Cally reminded.

“I'm a special case. Been different since I can remember.” She was convinced of that, and she blamed it on the radiation somehow. Radiation did things to people. “Mark's more what I would call normal for Hoadley.”

In her thoughts Cally sprang to Mark's defense. How could this arrogant old woman think she knew him? She remembered a time not so long ago when Mark had worn a spaghetti colander on his head, clowning, and pulled tendrils of his hair through the tiny holes so that he looked like a Martian. She remembered the cadaver jokes from embalming school. She remembered Mark down on his hands and knees on the living room carpet giving horsie rides to the children when they were smaller. But also she remembered that she was angry with Mark, and said nothing but, “So what are you saying I should do?”

“Go along with him! That's all. Just play along. It isn't hard.” Gigi's grin spread and narrowed into a tight-lipped smirk. “I been doing it for years. It's fun. You keep up an act that you're like the others, but underneath you got your own little secrets, see?”

Cally eyed her, wondering what were the secrets in this blunt-spoken, tree-tough old woman, then shook her gaunt head hard. “I'm not giving up my diet.”

Gigi shrugged, not caring enough to argue long. “Well, hell, Cally, what does it all matter anyway? You know what they say. Tomorrow we may die.”

Another ear would have heard “Eat, drink, and be merry.” But Cally knew at once that Gigi was not speaking of the universal human condition, but of a threat more specific and imminent.

“Especially if nobody does anything,” Gigi added dryly.

Thinking of a naked fetch in the woods and of hungerbug wail, Cally burst out, “That's another thing. Why do I feel like I'm the one who should do something? I feel like I'm to blame somehow. For everything.” Her hands started to shake, disturbing the brown liquid (clear as Eros's eyes) in her glass. “Is that sick? To feel like everything depends on me?”

“What sort of everything?”

“Everything! The heavy air. The hungerbugs, even.”

“The cicadas?” Gigi smiled thinly amid the dense perfume of her many flowers. “Now how could you or I or anyone else be to blame for them?”