How I Spent the Apocalypse (35 page)

These people still occasionally needed help, but more and more they had the same problem our group did—they were all going stir crazy, too.

One night as Lucy and I lay in bed after doing it till our brains were numb I said, “You know what’s saving us?”

“Huh?” Lucy didn’t understand what I meant.

“The reason we aren’t all trying to kill each other. I mean it’s tense but nothing like the people we’ve been on the radio with.”

Lucy laughed and wrapped herself around me. “Tell me ole sage of the apocalypse. Why aren’t we all trying to kill each other?”

“None of us really knew each other till this thing started. I mean there are three couples in this house and none of us were couples when this started. We aren’t bored with each other because everything is still new and we still have lots to talk about. Imagine if we were like Fred and Belva.” A couple we’d talked to that morning who were on the verge of killing each other and who said the only thing keeping them going was listening to the books on tape we broadcasted. “They’ve been married thirty years. They don’t even like each other any more and they know every damn thing about each other. They’ve heard each other’s stupid-assed stories and jokes thousands of times already and now they’re stuck in an eight-by-sixteen-foot living space where they can’t get away from each other and they realize that they actually hate each other.”

“It could also be that we have more room than they do and… Well there are six of us so we aren’t stuck with just each other for company,” Lucy said. Then she made an unhappy noise and I would have almost bet she was about to talk about she-who-was-a-thorn-in-everyone’s-side. “Then of course there’s Evelyn.”

“That girl… She’s like a caricature of a human being.” I laughed without much humor. “I have never in my life met someone as… as…”

“Selfish, self serving, self centered and devoid of any redeeming qualities.” Lucy supplied with a smile.

“Exactly,” I said.

“But she gives us all someone to hate, which keeps us from maybe taking closer looks at each other.”

I looked at her with raised eyebrows. “What are you trying to say?”

Lucy laughed. “That maybe we’d want to kill each other, too, if we were stuck in an eight-by-sixteen bunker and we only had each other to talk to with no Evelyn to annoy us.”

“You have a point. Daily I think about just sticking that girl out into the cold.”

“I think everyone does, even Jimmy.”

“Maybe especially Jimmy,” I mumbled. “Of course the one thing that Evelyn accomplishes on a positive note is that she makes Jimmy look resourceful, bright and hardworking—by comparison of course.”

That was when the screaming started. Billy and Jimmy were fighting again, and then I heard something crash to the floor. I jumped up, pulled my pants and a shirt on, and ran out of the room. The boys had broken a bookshelf in the living room and were trying to break each other. Of course Billy was winning. “Knock it off!” They didn’t listen to me, so I picked up the fireplace shovel and knocked them each in the head. They went reeling away from one another, rubbing their heads and said at once.

“Ow, Mom!”

“Stupid little pecker heads tearing up my shit!” I was pissed, too. It was just a shelf; it could be fixed easily enough, and none of the books looked damaged. That didn’t matter not to me. “What the hell could be so important that you’d risk fighting in here? Maybe break something important, something we can’t replace fucking around like idiots!”

“He started it!” they both screamed at once.

“I don’t give a shit who started it. Don’t you get it? We’re, stuck in this house together. There is no place else to go. We
have
to get along; it isn’t a choice, not a suggestion. You think you two fuckers and those two air-headed girls don’t get on my last nerve? I built all of this by myself. You dumbasses didn’t help me do it. Hell, you thought I was as crazy as everyone else did. Jimmy even wanted to have me committed at one point just so he could clean out my bank account… Oh don’t look so surprised, Jimmy. You guys didn’t take a dump that I didn’t know about it ’cause I had you followed by detectives. Yeah, that’s right. Why? Because I could afford to and you’ve always been a couple of dumbasses, that’s why. What the hell were you fighting over anyway?”

“He was flirting with my woman!” Jimmy accused.

So… he started it. He decided his brother was flirting with his “woman,” and so he hit him and then Billy had to kick Jimmy’s ass.

“He’s a retard!” Billy screamed at his brother.

“Yeah I know,” I said with a sigh. I noticed Cherry and Evelyn were just sort of standing there. Cherry looked mortified, like she couldn’t believe the huge idiots would actually hit each other, but Evelyn she had this look on her face that I knew meant there had been flirting but it wasn’t Billy who was flirting with her. No, Evelyn had been flirting with him—no doubt because she wanted the big, good-looking one not the little, scrawny ugly one. Cherry wasn’t worried. She knew where Billy’s heart was. He was totally and completely in love with her and she with him.

I glared at Evelyn, who I would come to refer to as the fly in the ointment of my life—well actually that was a bit of a mouthful so I just called her fly girl which she never understood and which made Lucy laugh every time I said it because she
did
know what I meant.

“Look, no one expects anyone as self centered and egotistical as you are to like the way we have to live right now, but this could literally go on for years and we’re all just going to have to get along. I don’t have the time and none of us have the patience to put up with all your little game playing, drama bullshit. Now I realize you’re used to whining your way through life and getting everything you want by manipulating everyone around you because normally you hold all the cards. Well guess what? You don’t have any cards. Here you aren’t special at all, and we’re all tired of your crap. You know what I mean, all that crappy little passive-aggressive shit you keep saying about all of us and our home and… Well everything from the cheese we eat to the wood heat. Up till now we’ve all just sort of ignored your crap because you were so sick and sad, but from now on every time you say or do something that annoys me or anyone else I’m going to tell you.”

This would be when the stupid bitch started screaming at me like she had some right to do so. She was, of course, trying to turn my stupid-ass, already-looking-for-a-reason-to-hate-me son against me.

“Me, me! It’s you always pushing your weight around thinking you’re king. Telling Jimmy what to do all the time. Telling everyone what to do all the time!”

“You ungrateful little bitch,” Lucy said. “Katy saved your miserable life.”

“Shut the fuck up, Evelyn!” It was Cherry who shouted it. “I am so tired of your shit!” She looked at Jimmy. “Sorry, Jimmy, but she was all over Billy not the other way around. I saw what happened, not you.”

“That’s the truth, Jimmy, I swear it,” Billy said.

Cherry looked at me then. “You want the truth, Katy? Before everything went to hell in a hand basket I had every intention of kicking her out and getting a new roommate. All through the crap we went through I could hardly get her to help and she bitched non-stop, twenty-four/seven just like she has done ever since she got well enough to talk.”

Evelyn looked truly shocked.

“And you know why I wanted another room mate?” Cherry continued.” Because you’re never happy until you make everyone around you miserable. We would have all been way ahead if you’d just died.”

See I hadn’t realized it, but apparently the girl had been pressing Cherry’s buttons for a long time. I’d thought they were good friends. It had never dawned on me that they were just room mates thrown into this thing together not because of a bond between them but just bad luck.

I smiled smugly down at the girl. “Look, sugar, in the old days… You know a few months ago, people lived by a different code and people like you just did your shit and made people unhappy and no one ever put you in your place because they really couldn’t. You’d push people’s buttons and push them and push them and when they finally snapped and pushed back then to people who didn’t really know you
they
looked like dicks. You know how you
should
act because you do it in the beginning when you first meet people and don’t let the bitch out of the box till people are stuck with you in one way or the other. Society never allowed us to deal with nasty little pieces of crap like you because you always have a reason for what you’ve done, don’t you? A bad childhood or some other half-assed excuse for bad behavior. You always had a way to make it look like it was someone else’s fault and when you wore out one group of people or a boyfriend well you just said it was all their fault and you moved on. Well now there ain’t no place else for you to go except down to the church in Rudy and… Well, they killed their last troublemaker, didn’t they? Here in the new world—you know the one where I think I’m king—you’ll either start acting like a human being and quit trying to stir up shit, or I will put your ass out in the snow.”

She looked at Jimmy thinking he would come to her rescue because she was little and cute. But little and cute can only get you so far and Jimmy… Well Jimmy never liked to put up with any form of shit whether he deserved to or not, and he knew he didn’t deserve this. She’d just made him look like a jack ass in front of his whole family. While he often did this all on his own, he wasn’t about to let her do it to him. And while he could do or say, and often did, whatever popped into his tiny little mind to and about me, no one else was allowed to do so.

He curled his lip at her, laughed cruelly—something he did almost too well—and said, “Oh don’t even look at me, bitch. I’m sick of your shit, too.”

He looked at his brother then. “I’m sorry Billy.”

Billy just nodded.

Jimmy glared back at Evelyn and then right before my eyes Jimmy, whose balls had always been two sizes too small, grew six sizes that day. “You better apologize to my mother and my brother and Cherry and Lucy, and then you better start kissing my ass, or I’ll let Mama… Hell
I’ll
put your hateful ass out in the snow myself.”

I smiled proudly but stifled the laugh that wanted to come out of my head.

Evelyn’s face became a mask of hate, and it was obvious that she really wanted to spit out some more crap. See, she was a classic narcissist and as such she was never wrong and anyone who thought she was needed to be killed. She was totally incapable of caring for anyone else longer than it took her to realize they couldn’t make her happy. Of course nothing could ever make her happy because the thing that always brings people the most happiness is loving someone else. Loving yourself will only ever get you just so far physically or emotionally—if you know what I mean.

She really wanted to be able to tell us all to go to hell and leave to find other people to torture as was no doubt her habit. But of course there were very few other people to torture and no place she could get to before she froze to death, so she swallowed the ball of hatefulness that wanted to come up her neck and spill out of her mouth and apologized to all of us—including Jimmy.

“Go to our room and stay out of everyone’s face for a while. We all need a vacation from you,” Jimmy ordered her.

She obviously wanted to tell him to eat shit and die but instead she hung her head and went to his room.

At which point I heard Lucy chuckle at my shoulder.

“What?” I asked in a whisper.

Lucy got on her tiptoes and whispered in my ear, “I think that was the first ever bitch intervention.”

I laughed because it really was funny.

“I’ll clean up this mess and fix the shelf, Mama,” Jimmy said.

“Good boy.” I walked up and kissed him on the cheek. then I walked over and kissed his brother on the cheek, grabbed Lucy’s hand, and started back to our room.       

***

For the next couple of days things were mostly
peaceful. But then, of course, Evelyn started her shit again, just complaining about this and that and crying a lot and saying how everyone hated her, and all her friends were dead and… Well this time we all knew what we were dealing with so every time she said anything that stuck in anyone’s craw, no matter how small, we either just told her what a crock of shit it was or we told her to shut the fuck up. It was damn near as good as putting a shock collar on the bitch and within just a few weeks she actually started acting like a human, doing her fair share of the work, adding things to the conversation that had nothing to do with how bad she felt or sticking little pins in any of us. So it turns out that passive-aggressive, narcissistic behavior
can
be cured. You just have to remove them from all of the people who just let them get away with their shit because it’s easier than arguing with them. Then you have to be relentless in training them and not let them return to bad habits—just like you would a dog.