How I Spent the Apocalypse (12 page)

“So… you get a little last night?” Billy asked, grinning like a shit-eating dog.

“No I didn’t. The girl had a boyfriend. She’s straight. Now you or your stupid brother…”

“Mom!” Billy held up his hand and made a face like I’d told him to kiss a pig. “She’s really old.”

“Old?”

“Yeah she’s as old as you are.” He made that face again.

“Oh she is not, she’s maybe thirty-five,” I said. I was forty-five at the time. “And thanks a whole fucking lot. Old! Why don’t you do me a big favor and go check the power in the batteries and if it’s dropped below half crank up the methane generator?” He nodded and, chuckling, went off to do my bidding. I was blissfully alone for all of three whole seconds and then there was Lucy. I could tell because when she walked in the barn the billy goat bleated, telling me that he had decided that she was one of his girls. She guessed I was in the milk room and of course couldn’t get in without letting Spot in and I wasn’t done milking Harriet so there was a little goat scuffle, but no spilt milk.

“Sorry,” she said. I was thinking that she needed to be smarter than the goats to handle them, but I didn’t say it just shrugged and kept milking.

“So what is this insurance you were talking about?” she asked.

I was so glad she didn’t want to talk about God and fate and shit like that, that I gladly answered. “One of them is filled with toilet paper…”

“Yet you’re making us wipe with four sheets.”

“I’ll tell you what. When you build a bunker and I crash on you just before the apocalypse you can make all the rules. Until then I make them, you got that?”

She nodded, looking dully chastised.

“Listen, I don’t mind hard work, and I don’t mind roughing it or doing without certain comfort items, but I want to wipe my ass with something I can throw away. Now you’re thinking that’s a hell of a lot of ass wipe out there, but I’ve done the math and it will only last three people about forty years. Now you’re here and I’ve got to go pick up two more—and girls wipe every time they pee and… Unless someone starts up a toilet-paper factory, when the smoke clears we’re going to run out of paper eventually. Then I’m going to have to do without something I didn’t ever want to do without.”

Lucy nodded. I put Harriet out and Spot in and started milking her. “So what’s in the other ones?” she asked.

“Lots of different stuff. Dry goods, animal feed, beans, rice, flour, corn meal, seeds—lots and lots of seeds. All sealed in plastic wrap. Literally tons of nails and screws, nuts and bolts. I’ve got six four-wheelers in boxes. Twenty chain saws. Every kind of hand tool you can think of by the gross. Anything that won’t get hurt if it freezes. Books and chain and rope, prescription drugs, other medical supplies…”

“How did you…”

“You have enough money you can get anything,” I answered. “Clothes, lots of clothes of every kind, blankets, cast iron pots and pans. If a civilization can be cultivated from the ashes, it’s going to be a very different economy with very different values and wealth. And I’m going to be the richest person on the planet.”

She looked at me through squinted eyes suspiciously. “What is your IQ?”

“Don’t know,” I answered. It was mostly a lie I hadn’t had an IQ test since I was thirteen. My IQ had been one forty-seven then. It had immediately caused me nothing but trouble—teachers expecting me to do better in school than I was. Parents who thought I was acting all uppity because I was smarter than they were. Hell, there are loud farts that have more intelligent things to say than they ever did. Besides, it’s a stupid-assed test, and I knew a guy with a higher IQ than I have who believed climate change was a hoax and that Jesus was the son of God… Such stupid shit as that.

“I bet you’re off the charts,” she said, as if I was committing a capital offense by being smart, and I knew why. I have a Southern accent and walk around in animal shit and build things. I’m not supposed to be able to have intelligent thought. Let me tell you something; it takes some brains to build stuff, not just any idiot can do it, not just any idiot can even learn how to do it.

Hell, Jimmy still can’t hammer a nail straight or level a board.

Poor Jimmy.

“Well, sorry to disappoint you,” I said with a smile. “If it helps, I am crazier than a shit-house rat.”

Lucy laughed then. It was the first time I’d ever heard her laugh, and it wasn’t a bad sound at all. “Why do you keep saying that?”

“Because it’s true.” I shrugged. Having finished milking Spot I stood up, hung my milk bucket on it’s hook on the ceiling, and waited for Spot to finish her feed. When she finished I took her out of the head gate, opened the door, and said, “Out damned Spot!”

When Lucy laughed at my joke I was in love.

It doesn’t take much for me, and let’s face it, she was the only woman besides me and she has an amazing rack.

“You don’t strike me as the sort of person who reads Shakespeare,” she said. No doubt again because I had a Southern accent walked around in animal shit and built things. However her statement did explain why my boys had never laughed at my really great joke.

“Yep, I kin read an’ even wipe my own ass on occasion,” I said, making an idiot face and trying to sound like the “special” kid who used to pump gas down at the general store even though it was self-serve and no one paid him to do it.

“That’s not what I meant,” she said quickly.

“Yes it is,” I said, grabbing the milk bucket and starting back for the house. “It’s exactly what you meant. You’re surprised that I’m smart and surprised that I know Shakespeare because I look and sound like a hick. The whole damn world all caught up in how things sound and how they look, what makes things high class and low class. You know in his day Shakespeare was not celebrated as a literary genius. He was considered the worst sort of hack.

I heard the generator start up and Billy came walking out of the hall that went to the shop. I handed him the milk and shook my head toward the kitchen. He took it and went without a question. He could tell I was mad. I started to fill the rabbits’ hay feeders; I had pellets for them, but I was already rationing those and that meant they’d need more hay.

“What makes someone who’s a professional—like say yourself—better than someone who's working class like myself? Money? Hell, I had more money than I could spend, more money than you, that’s for sure. Smart clothes, a house that’s too big, and a car that burns more gas than a semi? People like you who thought being green meant you changed the four-hundred bulbs in your energy-eating home from iridescent bulbs to compact fluorescents, who were willing to conserve only as long as it didn’t get into your comfort zone—what makes you better? What makes anyone better than other people? Really better. Is it how much money they have, what they think is entertaining, what education they have, what job, how they dress, whether they are respected by other people who only respect such things as money or power? Maybe what makes someone better than someone else is that they live within their means, that they are entertained by the things around them, what they actually know, whether their job pays the bills and they are proud of what they do, that they dress for comfort not to impress, and that they respect everyone until they prove they don’t deserve anyone’s respect.”

I had finished haying the rabbits, and I turned to face her. She looked startled, so I’m guessing she was starting to understand that I really was crazy, and I had one of those moments where I wanted to quit screaming at her. Where I knew that the things I was saying were just mean and irrelevant at the time, but I just couldn’t keep words from pouring out of my mouth.

“Maybe, Lucy Powers, the thing that makes some people better than other people is that some people actually
care
about something besides themselves and their stupid-assed shit!” I was screaming then, and Lucy seemed to be on edge like maybe she could see that I was capable of violence. Which I am, and… Well I don’t know why I was so mad right then. Maybe because I had just caught myself starting to have feelings for her and then she once again as much as called me an idiot or… Well she wasn’t calling me an idiot but she was saying that she was surprised that I wasn’t one, and now I think about it what pissed me off was that I
was
starting to have feelings for her and she represented everything that I hated about people.

“You judged me before you ever met me. Well, do I look like such a crack-pot now, do I?” I demanded.

“No,” she said. “I’m sorry, but you are way over-reacting. Do you think maybe you could stop yelling before you start a stamped?”

“No! Because I told you… I’m fucking crazy! And goats don’t stampede especially not in the barn when there are only six of them.” I turned on my heel, walked to the hall that went from the barn to the shop, and opened the door. I tried to slam it but Lucy was in my way. “God dammit! I’m trying to get away from you so that I can go somewhere and calm the fuck down. You want me to stop screaming, don’t you?”

“Yes… but I don’t want to be alone.”

“Then go help Billy in the kitchen or go crawl in bed with Jimmy.”

“But… I don’t know them.”

“You don’t know me!” I thundered in disbelief. If she had looked around at the animals right then, she would have known I was prone to such fits over seemingly nothing at all because the animals didn’t even take notice of my bad temper. Normally animals will run in terror when idiots start yelling, but mine were so used to it that they didn’t pay any attention to me unless I was yelling at them. And, yes, they do know the difference.

She started crying then, really crying. Even more than she had cried last night after she’d tried to call everyone and no one answered. Crying… Well the way I had expected her to cry all along. You know, like the world was coming to an end.

I know that women cry to get what they want. It’s manipulative, and do you know why they do it? Because it works. She threw her arms around my neck, rested her head on my chest, and just cried long, racking sobs. I hugged her and patted her back.

“I’m sorry Lucy.”

This only made her cry louder and harder. I scooted us back out of the hallway into the barn and shut the door because it was cold in there and I hadn’t really had any reason to go to the shop except to get away from Lucy and… Well it didn’t look like I was going to be getting away from Lucy any time soon.

The crying made my mad go away, so I guess it was a good thing. “Look… I’m sorry, Lucy. That was just me being me. Remember I told you I was crazy.”

She sobbed and then she was mumbling things into my chest that I couldn’t actually understand but that she obviously thought I could and something must have been a question because then she was looking at me, her eyes already red and puffy, and her nose running and I had to say, “I couldn’t understand a word you said.”

As I wondered how much of the wet on my shirt was tears and how much was snot, I pulled a handkerchief out of my pocket and wiped her nose like I would do a kid. It wasn’t exactly clean, but hey if she could put her snot on my shirt a little of my DNA on her nose wasn’t going to hurt anything.

“Do you hate me?” she cried, and then she was crying on my shirt again.

“No, I don’t hate you.”

“But you don’t like me,” she cried, and it took me a few seconds to translate it but I finally did.

“Sure I do… Well, at least as much as I like anyone. Hell, you’re my best friend.”

She laughed through her tears and then made those sounds that let you know someone is about to stop crying. She pushed away from me and held out her hand. I knew what she wanted so I handed her the handkerchief. “I’m sorry that I made you mad and sorry that I cried on you and I’m just… plain sorry.” Then she was making that sound that people make when they are going to start crying again.

“Now don’t start up again,” I begged. I pointed at myself. “I’m manic-depressive, obsessive-compulsive, all right? In short, crazy. And I don’t take meds for it. I tried it once—turned me into a zombie. So I live with it, and the people around me have to live with it, too. I try to control it, but sometimes… lots of times… it controls me.”