Apocalypse (21 page)

“At least my mom'll give them room to breathe! Let them do some things on their own, let them grow a little. She'll be better for them than that—that octopus mother of yours, with her tentacles into everything.”

Mark flushed rage-red to his hairline. He forgot that he had ever professed to detest the narrow-minded woman who had given him birth. He clenched his fists, stepped to within inches of his wife, bulled his face into hers; playground and locker room had taught him the masculine arts of intimidation. “You leave my mother out of this,” he warned.

“I will not. She's an anal-retentive old fart. Kindly remember that Tammy and Owen have more than one grandmother! Where is it written that they must visit only your mother and never mine?” As if riding her black Devil in full career and out of control Cally rode the surge of her own rage, thrilled, exhilarated. “You've always been jealous of my mother because she's got some brains and independence. And because someday I might just leave you and live alone like her. Can't stand an independent woman, can you? Your mother spends all day nattering in her kitchen, crawling up her own behind, and—”

Mark hit her.

She was hysterical, he told himself afterward. He had slapped her to stop her shouting. And in fact the open-handed blow was little more than a swat. It knocked Cally sideward, but startled her more than hurt her. She took only two gasping breaths before she shouted again.

“Beast!” she screamed, echoing something she had once heard her mother shriek at her father in a late-night quarrel she was not supposed to have known about. (Theirs had not been a very good marriage, she had decided when she was grown. Chilly in the light of day, quarreling in the dark. Was hers any better?) “You brute! It's just like they say, all men are brutes. No better than animals. How can you be such a beast!”

“Cal, I'm sorry,” Mark said, contrite and furious; she could see in his face how red rage came and went, leaving pale shock behind. “Stop it. You're hysterical. I just want you to stop. You shouldn't shout at me like that.”

Before he was done speaking she had passed beyond shouting into action, and swung at him. He stepped back, ducking, and she missed. She glared at him like a Halloween skull, lurid—he had not noticed before how the small muscles were beginning to show around her eyes as if skin had melted away entirely, as if she were intent on becoming an anatomical chart. She bared her teeth, panted something inarticulate through that nearly-lipless rictus, and turned away, running out with a thud of boots and a crashing of the heavy funeral-home door.

She would go ride her horse, Mark knew. Briefly he hoped she would break her thin, stubborn neck. It bothered him that she had not cried. Not that he was fond of tears; Lord, no, not in his line of work. But he would have felt better, somehow, if she had cried.

Not knowing what else to do, he went back to his chandelier and its pretty swords of glass. “Beast,” he said bitterly to the glinting blades. “Great. Lose my temper once in ten years, and I'm a goddamn beast.”

“You know, Bar,” Ahira says to me, setting up in that merry-go-round house of hers one night, “I could really screw up a certain person's mind.”

I knowed she could, all right. She was really screwing up my mind, Ahira was. She knowed I loved her, I figured, cause it seemed like she knowed everything them days, and because sometimes she looked at me like she was laughing at me. But maybe she didn't know I knowed she was Joan Musser. I hadn't never let on. And she didn't seem to care that I loved her, not to let me touch her or nothing. The couple times I tried to touch her, she pushed me away and made fun of me. “Barry Beal,” she says, “I can tell, you never in your life did know how to make love to a girl, did you?”

Mostly I was scared to touch her, I didn't feel like I could never touch her or talk to her or nothing, because she was so beautiful and so spooky-strong and I was just ugly old Bar. Sometimes I wished she hadn't never come back, not like Ahira. I just wanted the old Joanie back, and course I couldn't tell her the way I felt. So that's why my mind was in a mess, because I felt like a stray dog hanging around. But what the hell. I knowed I was always going to be there for Joanie, no matter what. Come hell or whatever.

By this time I had figured out that hell was what Joanie had planned. She figured on sending Hoadley down into it. I couldn't blame her, but I was glad my folks lived outside of town.

I says, “What you mean, screw up a certain person's mind?”

“That self-righteous Norma Musser. You know her. Don't you think her mind needs something done to it?”

Then I knowed she meant her own mom. I didn't say nothing.

Ahira says, “I know all her buttons to push. She knows I killed her precious Pastor Culp, and she's heard I'm the Antichrist, and she's heard I put the mark of the beast on the people I've healed. And I bet you even so I can make her do whatever I want.”

“Like what?”

She didn't say nothing, only smiled the same way she smiled at Culp that once. And Culp was dead. I didn't think she meant to kill her mom, not right away, since everybody in Hoadley was supposed to die pretty soon anyways. But I figured she had something planned that was maybe even worse, and I didn't really want to know what it was. Even though I'd just asked.

I says, “What you want to mess around with anybody for?”

Joanie didn't answer me right then, but her smile went away. I couldn't tell nothing from looking at that Ahira-face of hers, but I got the feeling something was bothering her. Finally she says, “We're going to see her.”

I says, “Not me.”

“Yes, you are.”

I says, “I got to get home.”

But I end up going along with her. I ain't never been able to say no to Joanie. She gets me on one of them weird wooden horses of hers, a black one, and it comes alive like her white one does, and the two of them takes us down the mountain and clear around Hoadley so we comes at the Musser place the back way, across Trout Creek, and probably ain't nobody seed us. It's past midnight by then, ain't nobody around.

Once we gets across the creek Joanie gets down and motions me to get down and the horses go off somewheres, and we go up to the Musser place on foot. Joanie don't go in right away. She stands at the bottom of them rickety steps looking up at the place, and she says something, like, to herself.

She says, real soft, “O rose, thou art sick. The invisible worm that flies in the night in the howling storm has found out thy bed of crimson joy, and his dark secret love …”

I says, “Huh?”

“Does thy life destroy,” she says, softer yet.

“Huh?”

She didn't look at me or say nothing more. She just goes in. She rooted around under the steps first and finds the key, acting like she don't know right where it is on account of I'm there watching her, but it turned out the door wasn't locked anyways. She just touches it and swings it open and goes in soft and wiry like a cat, and I follows her.

There was shadowy white light from the street coming in through the windows, but no noise except somebody snoring. It's old man Musser, old Roland, passed out on the kitchen table. Joanie don't look at him. She stands still in the middle of the front room and looks around her. It must have felt funny to her, coming back to that place. There was cracked floor-boards coming loose and old wallpaper coming down in drips and old furniture with the stuffing coming out through the rips in the goods like guts out of a road kill. Joanie, Ahira I mean, she was so beautiful in one of them floating blue-white gowns of hers, she looked like an angel got into the wrong place by mistake. She made that shack look even more like soot and nose snot than I guess what it really did.

On the old lumpy davenport lays Joanie's mother with one of them ratty knitted blankets over her, sleeping. She was a sort of skinny, worn-down-looking woman to see her on the street, but there on the sofa in the streetlamp light she has that special look people get when they're sleeping, like they're younger and better than what they really are. Mrs. Musser looked almost pretty like Ahira laying there sleeping, and Joanie just stands and looks at her for a while before she goes to her and takes her by the hand.

“Come,” she says, that's all, and Norma Musser sets up, startled, and Ahira still has her by the hand.

“Come, Mary of the Millennium,” Ahira says, low. “Prepare to be raptured. The bridegroom awaits.”

Norma Musser's mouth fumbles open, and she don't look pretty and holy no more. She looks like somebody in a horror movie gasping for air, and she hollers, “No!” only it comes out a croak. She says, “You—”

“I am she who is sent,” Ahira says, low and smooth, in that silky warm voice of hers. “Oh woman of little faith, if the devil can quote Scripture, cannot the Almighty speak through the mouth of a sinner? I tell you, you are the chosen one. You are she who is to bear the most holy son, the messiah of the Parousia.”

Joanie had spoke no lie, she knowed which buttons to push, all right. All her life Mrs. Musser must've wanted nothing but that Chosen One business. Her eyes got big and soft and watery, and she wasn't afraid no more. Not the same way, anyways. She looked scared, but it was holy scared. She says, “But—but why? Why me?”

“Why Mary of Nazareth? Why Cinderella for the prince?” Ahira stood up, and Norma Musser stood beside her in a big old faded nightgown blue-white in the streetlamp light, and they almost looked alike.

“Why not you, foolish woman?” says Ahira with a twitch in her voice. “Are you not worthy? Are you not pious and humble and holy?”

“But—but—I am barren!” Norma Musser is holding onto her daughter's hand with both her own, tight, like she don't want to let go, no matter what her mouth is saying. But she never knowed it was her daughter.

“So was Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist,” says Ahira. “So was Sarah wife of Abraham and mother of the nation of Israel. Come, no more talk. Have you no faith? Do you not know the power of the One who has sent for you?”

Ahira leads her out the door by the hand, and I follow a little ways after, and I don't think Mrs. Musser ever seen me, she was so wrapped up in what was happening to her.

Up Hoadley Joanie takes her mother, up to the right side of the tracks, where some of the better houses starts, them yellow brick ones. Right along Main Street there's a big yard sloping up with one of them shrines of the Virgin Mary at the top, the kind people set up with a plaster Mary and an old bathtub sticking up half out of the ground. Our Lady of the Lavatory, Joanie and me used to call them when we was in high school. Joanie takes her mother right up to the plaster Mary and stops. Me, I stay by one of them big spruce trees around the edge of the yard, watching.

“The mother of our lord Jesus welcomes the mother of the new messiah,” says Ahira. She does a sort of bow in front of the plaster Mary, and Norma Musser does the same. Then Joanie looks at her mother.

“It is said that Mary of Nazareth was impregnated by a dove flying into her ear.” Ahira has that twitch in her voice again. I guess Mrs. Musser didn't know what it was, but I knowed. It was Joanie laughing at somebody inside herself. She done it to me sometimes. “Or by a sunbeam, or a shower of gold. But the mother of He Who Is To Come must do more truly. She must be impregnated in rapture by the bridegroom himself.”

And out from behind the bathtub shrine he steps.

“Oh, Jesus,” I says to myself, because it's him. Not Jesus, I mean. Him. Me. The one I saw in the merry-go-round mirror. Except I never knowed he was real, and I never knowed he went around buck naked from the waist down too. And I never knowed his thing don't look like mine. He ain't never been made civilized down there. Though no reason why that should surprise me. The rest of him ain't all that civilized neither, because he's gorgeous and weird, and even though I ain't no woman I can tell he's a real turn-on. I guess women dream about guys like him at night the way I dream about women.

I looked at Joanie, quick, to see if she's turned on by this guy, and she ain't even looking at him. She's looking at her mother, and there's something in that mask of a face of hers I can't figure out.

Then she gets down on her knees. “Mother,” she says, “your blessing.”

As soon as I heard her voice I knowed what it was in her face. I could always tell what was going on inside Joanie from her voice. There was two feelings in her, fighting, shaking each other, shaking her voice, and they was hurting and hate. Joanie Musser still hurted, still wanted her mother, no matter how much Ahira hated her. Joanie Musser wanted Norma Musser to put her hands gentle on her, say soft words, even if it was because she got tricked into it. And Norma Musser done it.

She put her hands on Joanie's head. Her face looked like she was already making love, because she knowed she was the mother of the whole new world. She never knowed what Ahira meant when Ahira called her Mother. “Bless you, my child,” she says in a whisper, and she ain't saying it to her own child at all. Except she was.

And Joanie bows her head, then gets up and comes over to stand beside me, half hid in the spruce trees.

Norma Musser is giving the strange guy a look like a deer about to get shot and go to heaven, and I see his hard-on start, and I know this guy can make love to anybody, anyplace, anytime.

“Jesus,” I says again, and I look away.

“All right,” says Joanie, real low but hard-edged. I tooken a quick look. Mrs. Musser had her nightgown off, she's standing there as naked as the bridegroom guy, and he's just starting to curl his hands around her saggy old behind.

I looks at Joan, at Ahira I mean, standing next to me, and she's beautiful, and she's watching what I'm too embarrassed to watch without her face even moving, but I can see her shaking all over like a steel engine housing, and them sweet hands of hers is clenched into fists.