More Bedtime Stories for the Apocalypse (3 page)

He steps closer. The woman opens her eyes,
turning her face to the green leaves and ripe, red fruit clinging
to the branches above. A tear glistens on her cheek. Jackson holds
his hands out to show her again that he means no harm. He
approaches tentatively. She continues to slowly shake her head, as
if trying to escape a bad dream.

He steps beneath the leafy canopy of the
apple tree and notices a chain circling her waist, holding her fast
to the rough trunk. He stops, confused. She opens her mouth and
grunts. Her tongue is missing. She shakes her head faster, and
glances into the canopy once again.

Jackson’s eyes follow hers.

They are there, waiting.

Before he can move, three pairs of rotting
hands shoot out from above, grabbing him by the head and shoulders.
Branches shake. Apples fall. Three desiccated, disfigured creatures
drop from their perches, their teeth tearing into the rind of
Jackson’s skull, searching for the fresh fruit of his brain.

The woman closes her eyes and grimaces at
the sounds of crunching bone, waving her Frisbee faster and
faster.

* * * * *

* * * * *

I’m the new guy here. Divorced last year and
had to get away from St. Louis. My daughter Angie’s all grown up
and married, and though she was pissed at me for a while, she
finally got around to understanding – or at least accepting. Plus,
I was tired of the traffic and the rush of everything. I grew up in
a small town, and now that I’m nearing fifty, I found myself
craving that small town life once again. So long story short,
that’s how I ended up here in Adolphina, Iowa working as a mechanic
at Morton’s Service Garage. Sure, small towns have their problems,
but they’re small town problems. I’ll take them over big city
problems any day.

The first time I noticed something odd about
the calendar was the day Cal Johnson wandered into the break room
at Morton’s looking for his daughter Jenny. Jenny’s our weekday
cashier, and Cal was here to pick her up to visit some relatives
over the weekend. I nodded at the employee bathroom, and he nodded
his understanding and joined me at the break room table.

The break room is located just off the
service garage. There’s a fridge and microwave, both in need of a
serious scrub down, and the square card table we sat at – the kind
you’d get out and unfold on Thanksgiving to seat the extra
company.

“
Want a Coke or anything?” I offered,
digging a dollar out of my wallet.

“
No,” he said. “Thanks,
anyway.”

I’d never met Jenny’s father before, and he
seemed like a nice enough guy. Not much older than me, I figured,
and Jenny had only good things to say about him.

“
You’ve got a hardworking daughter,” I
said. “She’s always done a great job around here.”

He nodded. “She’s a good kid.”

On the other side of the two-bay garage is a
little convenience shop that sells candy and soda, coffee and maps,
cigarettes and condoms. We take personal checks if you’re local,
and it’s up to the cashier to decide just how local you need to be
on a case-by-case basis.

Jenny’s main job here is to sit behind the
counter on a padded stool and make change. But she’s one of those
kids who goes above and beyond the call of duty; she also helps
keep the place clean and the coffee flowing. Like her father said,
she’s a good kid.

Cal Johnson looked from me to the bulletin
board. Back to me, and then back to the bulletin board. His eyes
narrowed. “Okay, please tell me I’m not losing my mind.”

I turned to look where he was looking, but
didn’t see anything amiss. “What do you mean?”

“
It’s a leap year, isn’t
it?”

I thought a moment and nodded. “Yep. Always
a leap year when there’s a presidential election coming.”

He shook his head. “Whoever made that
calendar must not have realized it. There’s only twenty-eight days
up there.”

I turned again to look. The box for February
twenty-ninth was right there at the bottom of the calendar, and I
was about to ask him what he meant when there was the sound of the
toilet flushing. Jenny emerged from the bathroom.

“
You’re here already,” she said,
giving him a big hug.

“
Right on time,” he said.

I wished them a safe trip and didn’t think
about his comment again for a couple of weeks.

The calendar is one of the pinup kinds; a
photograph on the top half, the days of the month on the bottom.
When a new month arrives, you flip the bottom half up, re-pin it,
and voila – new photo, new month. It’s also a pinup calendar in the
sense that the photos feature famous pinup girls of the
mid-twentieth century; the forties, fifties, sixties. I grew up in
the sixties, and back then it wasn’t unusual to see one of these in
a working class break room. But at some point they fell out of
fashion. Considered sexist. Still are, so I was surprised to find
one here at Morton’s Service Garage, especially in this day and age
of mandatory sexual harassment classes and hostile work environment
lawsuits.

It looked vintage, the photographs
sun-faded, the white borders yellowed with cigarette smoke. The
small break room where it hung had been non-smoking for years. If
you had a nic fit, you had to step outside and cross the parking
lot onto a small grassy area the size of a postage stamp. Some
industrious hunyuk had placed a tree stump there for sitting before
I arrived on the scene, so if you needed to park your butt while
smoking a butt, you were covered – although perhaps not in the most
comfortable fashion.

I hadn’t smoked in over twenty years. Damn
glad I quit, too, and even though I look on with longing at anyone
sucking on one of those cancer sticks, I’m not nearly as tempted as
I once was. Straight black coffee is my poison of choice. That, and
an occasional stick of peppermint gum. But if the weather’s
favorable, I’ll go out onto that smoker’s stump on my break to
read. Nothing fancy. Mysteries mostly.

I learned the auto mechanic’s trade with my
father, who ran his own small shop up in Minnesota’s iron range.
After Dad died and cars became more computer-driven, I attended
technical college over in Duluth and did my best to relearn the
trade. I still prefer older cars, though; the ones where you can
diagnose a problem with your eyes, ears and hands. I like to get
down under the hood and delve into the guts of the beast. Those old
cars, you know what’s going on with them. But these newer ones –
you hook ‘em up to a laptop that tells you what’s wrong and what
parts need replacing. It’s all computer chips; magic dust for all I
know. And if you can break open a new car part and tell me just by
looking whether a chip is good or bad, then you’ve got a hell of a
lot better eyesight than I do. And these eyes of mine are in good
shape. Never needed glasses, and I can still read the doctor’s eye
chart from top to bottom with no pause.

But back to the calendar. I keep veering
away from the topic, and I think it may be one of those
unintentionally intentional things your mind does. You know – on
the surface, you don’t mean to do it, but the deeper part of your
brain does it for you whether you intend to or not.

See? There I go again.

The calendar in the break room.

Jenny didn’t show up for work on March
1
^st
, and we couldn’t reach her on her cell. Me and Ben
Kinsley – fellow mechanic and oldest of our crew – took turns
running the register. It wasn’t a big deal since it was a slow day,
but then Maggie Franklin, the postal carrier, came in asking if
we’d heard.

“
Heard what?” I asked.

“
About Cal Johnson.”

“
Jenny’s dad?”

“
Had an aneurysm yesterday. Happened
while he was taking a shower. His daughter found him, called 9-1-1,
but he didn’t make it.”

Well, that explained why Jenny hadn’t shown
up.

I told Morton, the eponymous founder of the
garage, what I’d heard, and he said he’d head over to the Johnson
house to make sure Jenny was doing okay.

An aneurysm. Shit, that’s one of those
things that can just bring a body down with no warning. Maybe a few
bad headaches, but you never really think that means
aneurysm
, do you? Poor guy. Poor Jenny. Her mom died when
she was twelve, and now here she was, seventeen, with no folks at
all. Well, that’s one way to grow up fast. I wondered what she was
going to do now. What about those relatives she’d gone to
visit?

I remembered the calendar, remembered how
Cal Johnson somehow hadn’t seen the leap year. February
twenty-ninth. It sort of made sense now. An aneurysm meant
something
was going on in his brain, and maybe it had been a
warning sign. You become forgetful, you say things that don’t
necessarily make sense. You miss things right in front of you.
Then, boom – a vessel bursts in your head and you’re down for the
count.

The last day of April, I sat with Ben in the
break room while he played solitaire. I got up to flip the calendar
page to the next month – just trying to be proactive – but when Ben
saw me lift the bottom page and pin it up to reveal Ms. May, he
shot up so fast his chair fell over. He grabbed my hand and yelled
in my face, “What the hell you think you’re doing?”

I froze, staring at the veins bulging in
that scrawny little neck of his. “Just turning the page,” I
managed.

“
Put it back,” he said. “Ain’t time
for that, yet.”

“
Let go of my hand.” The initial shock
of Ben’s outburst quickly wore off, and I felt my anger rise.
“Tomorrow is the first of May. Today is April 30
^th
.
Seems like it
is
the right time.”

“
Put it back,” Kinsley
demanded.

“
Let go of my hand. What is
wrong
with you?”

That’s when Morton stormed in. “What the
hell’s going on?”

“
I was turning the calendar page,” I
said.

Ben gripped my hand as if his life depended
on it. “He’s turning the page and it ain’t time, yet.”

I shrugged at Morton as if to say
of all
the dumb things to fight over,
but he surprised me. “Jordan,
put the goddamn calendar back the way it was. It ain’t your
position to mess with it.”

Kinsley let go of my hand and backed up to
the card table, his eyes not leaving mine. Only after I put the
page down and re-pinned it back to good ol’ Hedy Lamarr did Morton
turn to leave and Ben go back to his game of solitaire. I didn’t
feel like hanging around Kinsley for the rest of my break, so I sat
out on the smoker’s stump and stewed. I was so pissed off that even
the spent cigarette butts lying around the stump looked
tempting.

The next morning, the calendar was turned to
May, and Ben came in, squinted at the calendar and visibly relaxed.
He even slapped me on the shoulder and apologized. “I didn’t mean
to seem so…” He fished for the right word.

“
Assholish?” I suggested.

Kinsley shrugged and chuckled. “Not quite
what I was going to say, but close enough.” Then he said, “I just
don’t like to rush things, you know? I want to enjoy April and not
worry about May until I have to.”

“
It’s just a calendar,” I said.
“Whether I turned the page or not, the actual days stay the
same.”

“
That ain’t the point. I wasn’t ready
to
see
May yet. I wasn’t ready to see what it might
bring.”

Whatever the hell that meant. I looked over
at the calendar, at Susan Hayward posed seductively in a one-piece
bathing suit. Beneath it, all the days of May, all thirty-one of
them, were there in black and white, the days of the week marked –
Sunday through Saturday – Memorial Day noted, and that was all.

I smelled bourbon on Kinsley’s breath. “A
little early to be drinking, ain’t it, Ben?”

He chuckled. “Don’t be getting all
judgmental on me. Just needed a bracer for the day.”

“
To face the first of the month?” I
joked.

“
Well…” He shrugged.

I left him there in the break room. A Honda
Civic and Ford Bronco waited for me in the garage, unwilling to fix
themselves.

July was a scorcher. Record temps with
correlating bad tempers – at least here at Morton’s Service Garage.
The cashier that took Jenny’s place was a nineteen-year old named
Cory. Not exactly the type to go the extra mile, let alone the
extra inch. I found myself changing the coffee filters more often
than not, and we practically had to glue a broom to his hands and
hold a gun to his head if we wanted him to do any cleanup.

I talked to Mort about this, and he just
said, “You got any other suggestions? Besides, he’s only temporary
until Jenny comes back. But if you know someone better, I’m all
ears.”

I’m not necessarily the best at making
friends. I keep to myself mostly, and the only folks I really spend
time talking to are Ms. Poppin at the library, Ben, and Mort. And
of course my daughter, Angie.

God, it felt like a long time since I’d seen
her, and I had a handful of vacation days burning a hole in my
pocket, so there I was in the break room, trying to figure out a
good time to visit.

I started flipping through the calendar,
turning the pages ahead to see what weekend Labor Day landed on, or
maybe even Thanksgiving, but I didn’t get that far.