Apocalypse (18 page)

CHAPTER EIGHT

“I didn't know him that good, what I mean,” one middle-aged woman was saying to another, “but he was my neighbor and all, and when his Sunday paper laid on the porch three days I called the police. I didn't go over there myself because he had that shotgun, what I mean, and run them teenage boys off his yard with it that once, forgot he wasn't sheriff of Lower Salamander Township no more, and went and pulled the trigger on them.”

“Goodness,” said the listening woman obediently. “I hope he didn't hurt nobody.” She was permed, with aggressive lipstick but such a homely face that she looked no prettier than her acquaintance, who wore a triangle of scarf tied over hair that hung relentlessly lank.

“He couldn't hardly see to hit nobody that far away, what I hear, but he might have close up. What I mean, that's why I didn't go over there myself to check on him. So anyways I called the cops, and when they come I went over and peeked in. And there he was, laying on the floor, been dead about three days, in this hot weather we been having, and the smell was enough to revolt a goat.”

“I can imagine,” said the permed woman as the other paused for dramatic effect.

“But that wasn't the worst of it,” the peasant-scarfed woman went on. “You know all them cats he kept, they'd got hungry, shut in the house with him dead for three-four days.” The speaker let her voice sink to a horror-movie whisper. “And they'd been eating on him. I seen his face, where they'd been eating on him.”

“Oh!” The other put her hands to her mouth in appreciative shock. “Don't that beat all.”

“Isn't nobody talking about it,” said the woman with lank hair in the same low tones, “but I know, because I seed. This here is shaping up to be a bizarre year, what I hear. Did you hear about that baby in them apartments down on Eleventh Street got chewed at by rats? Poor little thing's mother had gone off and left it in the crib. What I hear, they taken it from her, for neglect, but it ain't never supposed to be right. Its lips is gone.”

Cally, eavesdropping, put syrupy canned pears (for the children) in her grocery cart and moved on before the conversation was done. Generally she loved to drift along the aisles of the store, a supermarket specter, so thin and so rootless in Hoadley that she had become nearly invisible. Hoadley women astonished her; in the supermarket they greeted each other with cries of joy and thick-armed, stumpy embraces that blocked the aisles for moments at a time, while other shoppers waited patiently—even if they had seen each other only a week before, nevertheless they embraced. Though hardly anyone ever thus accosted Cally, she liked grocery shopping; she loved to buy cartloads of belly-filling food for her family, dreaming of food as she did so, vicariously eating, and she loved to nibble at the edges of the community as well, listening to Hoadley women talk. The flood of their words and the trickle of their intellects invariably left her awed and aghast.

But this time, this shopping trip, the chitterings of the women in the supermarket aisle reminded Cally too strongly of the conversing of the bizarre bugs in the woods just beyond the town. Bizarre, yes, it was indeed shaping up to be a bizarre year, so much so that Cally felt she could not listen any longer to the stout women with their casual tales of the routine horrors of Hoadley. These people, though perhaps not evil, were on familiar, shrugging terms with evil. She had heard them discuss the details of a rape-and-mutilation and the price of margarine in much the same tones. As if the devil himself was no more than another neighbor to keep an eye on. Cally knew that the tale of the man whose face had been eaten by his cats was true. Mark was in the Perfect Rest basement workroom as she shopped, intent with wax and photographs, trying to restore the man's features for the burial. He considered this particularly decrepit corpse, gnawed and decomposing, the greatest challenge of his career, and Cally, though she was scarcely on speaking terms with him, had left the children with his mother so they would not disturb him—with Ma Wilmore, who had once told her one of those by-the-way tales of Hoadley's incredible cruelty: how when she had been a young wife and pregnant with her first child, when she and Elmo were still living with the senior Wilmores on the farm, she had felt the labor pains start and wanted to go to her bed, but her mother-in-law wouldn't let her; there were twelve pies to be made on that torrid August day for the field hands haying. Not until the pies were baked and the dinner served and the dishes steamily washed was the young mother-to-be allowed to lie down and the doctor sent for.

The baby had been born dead.

Somewhere in the underbrush just beyond Hoadley, babies with the bodies of cicadas wailed.…

Cally loaded her grocery cart with bananas, cinnamon buns, toaster pastries. School was out, and the kids were home for the summer, which gave her plenty of opportunity to offer them treats and watch them eat. When she had filled the cart to above the level of its steel-wire sides, she turned toward the checkout, pushing hard, a featherweight waif trundling a world-size load, a breaker boy struggling with the coal trolley.

Old Luther Wasserman, who cleaned the church, limped painfully in dank or chilly weather, of which Hoadley had plenty. He had told Cally once that his father had started him in the mines when he was twelve, and the first year a car full of coal had run over him, smashing his legs against the rails. And his father had refused to have the doctor set the legs, because of the expense. The boy had lain in bed until the legs mended on their own. “With no more care than if I was a barn cat,” old Luther had told Cally. “And they ain't right to this day. I got pain all the time, and I hold Dad to blame. But he died coughing his insides out with the black lung. Maybe he done me a favor. At least I couldn't go work in the mine no more.”

Cally paid for her groceries and motioned away signs of assistance from the bag boy, wondering why the pimply kid offered; she wasn't old, pregnant, ill or feeble—was she? The store bulletin board, along with for-sale notices and empty refund pads, carried a poster for home nursing care. By the doors, next to the video games, stood a blinking red machine that declared, “Check it out! How's your health? Heart/stress analyzer measures basal cardiovascular rate and electrodermal response. Insert quarter, grasp handles.” Cally wheeled her overloaded brown bags past it and past the thin man who stood outside panhandling for the cancer association.

She took the groceries home, and if home smelled of death, she did not notice. All of Hoadley smelled much the same.

Commotion in the night, sirens, people in the street, woke Sojourner Hieronymus, and she sat up, swung her desiccated old feet over the edge of the narrow bed and stayed that way for a moment, letting the blood come to her head so she would not be dizzy and fall when she got up. The people from the hospital had been to see her, wanted her to wear one of them new inventions, a sort of electronic bracelet that would take her pulse all the time, and send them a signal if anything went wrong with her, and dose her with something to keep her alive till they got there. Century meter, they had called it, and they had a slogan: in the next millennium, everybody could live to be a hundred. She had sent him away. When it came time for her to die, she would die, and meanwhile she would live the way she always had, by the rules.

Rules. People were such fools; if only they would follow the rules they would be safe, they could lead long and orderly lives such as hers. But they failed to follow the simplest rules. The young girls played ball like the boys, and got their new breasts bumped, and what happened? Thirty, forty years later they got breast cancer, sure as sunrise. Sometimes cancer of the ovaries, too. And it was their own fault.

Sojourner said a quick prayer. After a seemly interval had passed she shuffled her feet into her waiting slippers, stood up and put on her dressing gown, buttoning it up to her neck, with the two nighttime braids of her long, gray hair inside; it would not do to have people see her with her hair down her back, even at midnight when they were all roused from their beds by fire. It had to be fire of some sort. In her darkened room she could see the orange glow on the black window glass.

Holding on carefully, first to the handrail and then to the doorjamb, Sojourner went down her steep, narrow stairs (innocent of smoke detector; she would not have such a cowardly device in the house) and out onto her front porch. From there she could see what everyone was gawking at. In fact, it was in plain sight of all the town.

Under the water tower, swinging from one of the horizontal struts, a limp thing all in flames—in spite of herself, Sojourner pressed her hand to her mouth. It looked like a human, hanging by the neck and burning up there.

“Who is it, Mommy?”

“I don't know.”

“Is it really a person, Mom?”

“I don't know. We'll have to wait and see what the police say.”

Glad of neighbors to disapprove of, Sojourner turned her pewtery old eyes away from the burning horror on the hilltop and toward the voices in the street. There stood that little fool Cally Wilmore, with her two youngsters, letting them look at what was happening in the night. Irresponsible. Didn't she know that the children should be in bed, no matter what was going on, unless it was their own house burning down? Cally wasn't from Hoadley, hadn't been raised right, but that was no excuse. The parents these depraved days were all alike; they let their children run wild. When she, Sojourner, had been raised, the child that gave trouble or disobeyed had its fingertips burned on the hot stove, a foretaste of hell fire, and cried for hours, and went to school with the pain and embarrassment of blistered hands to show that it had been punished. Children had been taught how to behave, back then. Sojourner would have raised well-behaved children had Mr. Hieronymus given her any. She had married him hoping to have a good influence on him. But the man had been weak, irresponsible; he had killed himself with rat poison after only a few weeks of wedlock with her.

Oona, in a wrap bathrobe sloppily tied, came out onto her porch next door, nodded her disheveled head and smiled and asked the questions appropriate to the occasion. Oona was a good neighbor, but lax in her housekeeping, letting the window curtains go unwashed year to year, and Sojourner believed she had spoiled her children. Certainly she spoiled her grandchildren. She hardly ever punished them, and punishment was the essence of learning what was right. Take toilet training. In Sojourner's day, a child that messed its pants was sat in a tub of scalding water to be cleaned and taught. It usually hadn't taken more than a few such lessons before the child learned, though now and then a child died. Its own fault, if it did.

An unmistakable, stomach-wrenching odor of burning fat and hair and flesh reached Sojourner from the thing on the hilltop. She did not let it trouble her. She stood straight, taking the posture her mother had taught her, strong against fire, fires of hell, fires of discipline.

“Phew!” yelled little Owen with boyish enthusiasm. “It stinks.”

“Quiet,” Cally told him without raising her voice.

“It does, Mommy! It smells like—”

She shushed him by putting one hand over his mouth, and she leaned down to whisper in his ear. Sojourner saw a flash of pale skin and took another look, cocking her head like an ancient bird of prey, reptilian eyes glinting. The chit was standing out in the street in a negligee nearly down to her bosom, and the peignoir she had thrown over it concealed nothing, being open. Sojourner smiled, suffused with a quiet, happy sense of scandal. She intuited why Cally was wearing the filmy, low-cut nightgown, and she suspected it was doing no good. Mark had not come out to watch the fiery spectacle with her. It was no secret to Hoadley, the town with a sixth sense for people's troubles, that Mark and Cally were quarreling. That was no reason, though, for Cally to show off what little bodily endowment she had to the whole town. She was likely to end up like the girl who had been raped. Not that frog-faced girl. Sojourner had heard whispers about the father doing it to that one, but that was not really rape; that was just incest. This girl, a pretty little goldilocks who had made the mistake of walking past the municipal building by herself, had been knocked down into the back stairwell by the parking lot and there beaten and raped. And once a woman got herself raped, she might as well brand a big black “R” on her forehead and have it done with. Nobody would ever look at her again without remembering what had been done to her. Sojourner knew what had been done to the girl who had been raped, in detail. She knew what three bodily orifices the rapist had used, and how often, and in what order. She knew the family. She knew how the girl had been hospitalized with a nervous breakdown afterward. She had half a notion to tell Cally what might cure her of wanting her husband. The girl who had been raped had not wanted the conjugal act with her husband since, so Hoadley said. Moreover, Hoadley said (with a romantic sigh) that the husband planned to wait for as long as it took. Sojourner expected he would wait until he died. Once a woman understood what men were really like, she wouldn't want “that” any more as long as she had an excuse. Sojourner had been honest to start with; she had never wanted “that” except insofar as it was unpleasantly necessary in order to procreate children (to be raised as a credit to the family, with all due discipline). And though the event had denied her the children, she had been just as glad when Mr. Hieronymus disposed of himself, especially as he had left her the house and wherewithal to live in it.

The blazing thing hanging from the water tower had been doused, first fading to an indeterminate shape glowing ember-orange against the smoggy nighttime sky, dull as coal; then blackening to a sizable cinder gleaming watery white in the light of firemen's lanterns. Cally, Sojourner saw, was talking to a man in a car, one of the firemen returning to the station, indecently stooping as she did so. Then she straightened, stepped back and waved and said to her children, “It wasn't a person. It was a bear.”