1987 - Swan Song v4

by Robert McCammon

  Sister stepped between them, tense and ready for anything. But she caught no repulsive, dank wave of cold coming off him—just body odor. His eyes were almost the same color as the keloids. He wore a thin cloth coat, and his head was bare; tufts of black hair stuck up on a burn-scarred scalp.

  “Mr. Caidin’s been waiting to see Swan,” Paul said. “He’s all right.” Sister immediately relaxed, trusting Paul’s judgment. “I think you should listen to what he says.”

  Caidin turned his attention to Swan. “My family and I live over there.” He motioned in the direction of the burned-out church. He had a flat Midwestern accent, and his voice was shaky but articulate. “My wife and I have three boys. The oldest is sixteen, and up until this morning he had the same thing on his face that I understand you did.” He nodded toward Josh. “Like that. Those growths.”

  “The Job’s Mask,” Sister said. “What do you mean, ‘up until this morning’?”

  “Ben was running a high fever. He was so weak he could hardly move. And then… early this morning… it just cracked open.”

  Sister and Swan looked at each other.

  “I heard that yours did the same thing,” Caidin continued. “That’s why I’m here. I know a lot of people must be wanting to see you, but… could you come to my place and look at Ben?”

  “I don’t think there’s anything Swan can do for your son,” Josh said. “She’s not a doctor.”

  “It’s not that. Ben’s fine. I thank God that stuff cracked open, because he could barely draw a breath. It’s just that—” He looked at Swan again. “He’s different,” Caidin said softly. “Please, come see him. It won’t take very long.”

  The need in the man’s face moved her. She nodded, and they followed him along the street, into an alley past the charred ruins of Jackson Bowen’s church and back through a maze of shacks, smaller shanties, piles of human waste and debris and even cardboard boxes that some people had fastened together to huddle in.

  They waded through a muddy, ankle-deep pool and then went up a pair of wooden steps into a shack that was even smaller and draftier than Glory’s. It only had one room, and as insulation old newspaper and magazine pages had been nailed up all over the walls until there was no space not covered by yellowed headlines, type and pictures from a dead world.

  Caidin’s wife, her face sallow in the light of the room’s single lantern, held a sleeping infant in her thin arms. A boy about nine or ten years old, frail and frightened-looking, clutched at his mother’s legs and tried to hide when the strangers entered. The room held a couch with broken springs, an old crank-operated washing machine, and an electric stove—an antique, Josh thought—in which chips of wood, embers and trash yielded a cheerless fire and little warmth. A wooden chair sat next to a pile of mattresses on the floor, where the eldest Caidin boy lay under a coarse brown blanket.

  Swan approached the mattresses and looked down into the boy’s face. Pieces of the Job’s Mask lay like broken gray pottery around his head, and she could see the slick, jellylike stuff clinging to the inside of the fragments.

  The boy, his face white and his blue eyes still bright from fever, tried to sit up, but he was too weak. He pushed thick, dark hair back from his forehead. “You’re her, aren’t you?” he asked. “The girl who started the corn growing?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s really great. You can use corn a lot of different ways.”

  “I guess so.” Swan examined the boy’s features; his skin was smooth and flawless, almost luminescent in the lantern’s light. He had a strong, square jawline and a thin-bridged nose that was slightly sharp at the end. Overall, he was a handsome boy, and Swan knew he would grow up to be a handsome man, if he survived. She couldn’t understand what Caidin had wanted her to see.

  “Sure!” This time the boy did sit up, his eyes glittering and excited. “You can fry it and boil it, make muffins and cakes, even squeeze oil out of it. You can make whiskey from it, too. I know all about it, because I did a science project on corn back at my elementary school in Iowa. I won first prize at the state fair.” He paused, and then he touched the left side of his face with a trembling hand. “What’s happened to me?”

  She looked over at Caidin, who motioned for her, Josh and Sister to follow him outside.

  As Swan started to turn away from the mattresses a headline on a newspaper plastered to the wall caught her eye:

  ARMS TALKS CRASH AS ‘STAR WARS’ GETS A-OK. There was a photograph of important-looking men in suits and ties, smiling and lifting their hands in some kind of victory celebration. She didn’t know what it was all about, because none of those men were familiar to her. They looked like very satisfied men, and their clothes looked clean and new, and their hair was perfectly in place. All of them were cleanshaven, and Swan wondered if any of them had ever squatted down over a bucket to use the bathroom.

  Then she went out to join the others.

  “Your son’s a fine-looking boy,” Sister was telling Caidin. “You ought to be glad.”

  “I am glad. I’m thankful to God that stuff’s off his face. But that’s not the point.”

  “Okay. What is?”

  “That’s not my son’s face. At least… that’s not what he used to look like before he got that damned stuff on him.”

  “Swan’s face was burned when the bombs hit,” Josh said. “She doesn’t look like she did then, either.”

  “My son wasn’t disfigured on the seventeenth of July,” Caidin replied calmly. “He was hardly hurt at all. He’s always been a good, fine boy, and his mother and I love him very much, but… Ben was born with birth defects. He had a red birthmark that covered the entire left side of his face. The doctors called it a port-wine stain. And his jaw was malformed. We had a specialist operate on him in Cedar Rapids, but the problem was so severe that… there wasn’t much to hope for. Still, Ben’s always had guts. He wanted to go to a regular school and be treated like anybody else, no better and no worse.” He looked at Swan. “The color of his hair and eyes are the same as they always were. The shape of his face is the same. But the birthmark’s gone, and his jaw isn’t deformed anymore, and…” He trailed off, shaking his head.

  “And what?” Sister prompted.

  He hesitated, trying to find the words, and then he lifted his gaze to hers. “I used to tell him that real beauty is deeper than skin. I used to tell him that real beauty is what’s inside, in the heart and soul.” A tear trickled down Caidin’s right cheek. “Now Ben… looks like I always knew he did, deep down inside. I think that now… the face of his soul is showing through.” His own visage was stretched between laughing and crying. “Is that a crazy thing to think?”

  “No,” Sister answered. “I think it’s a wonderful thing. He’s a handsome boy.”

  “Always was,” Caidin said, and this time he let himself smile.

  The man returned to his family, and the others walked back through the muddy maze to the road. They were quiet, each occupied by private thoughts: Josh and Sister reflecting on Caidin’s story, wondering if and when their own Job’s Masks might reach the point where they began to crack—and what might be revealed underneath; and Swan remembering something that Leona Skelton had told her a long time ago: “Everybody’s got two faces, child—the outside face and the inside face. A face under the face, y’see. It’s your true face, and if it was flipped to the outside, you’d show the world what kind of person you are.”

  “Flipped to the outside?” Swan recalled asking. “How?”

  And Leona had smiled. “Well, God hasn’t figured a way to do that yet. But He will…”

  “The face of his soul is showing through,” Mr. Caidin had said.

  “But He will…”

  “… face of his soul…”

  “But He will…”

  “Truck’s comin’ in!”

  “Truck’s comin’!”

  Approaching along the road was a pickup truck, its sides and hood pitted with rust. It was coming at a crawl, an
d around it surged a tide of people, hollering and laughing. Josh imagined it had been a long time since most of them had seen a car or truck that still actually ran. He put his hand on Swan’s shoulder, and Sister stood behind them on the roadside as the truck rumbled toward them.

  “Here she is, mister!” a boy shouted, scrambling up onto the front fender and hood. “She’s right here!”

  The truck came to a stop, trailing a wake of people. Its engine sputtered, popped and backfired, but the vehicle might have been a shiny new Cadillac from the way folks were rubbing the rust-eaten metal. The driver, a florid-faced man wearing a red baseball cap and clenching the stub of a real cigar between his teeth, looked warily out his window at the excited crowd, as if he wasn’t quite sure what kind of madhouse he’d driven into.

  “Swan’s right here, mister!” the boy on the hood said, pointing at her. He was talking to the man on the passenger side.

  The passenger’s door opened, and a man with curly white hair and a long, untrimmed beard leaned out, craning his neck to see who the boy was pointing to. His dark brown eyes, set in a tough, wrinkled old face, searched the crowd. “Where?” he asked. “I don’t see her!”

  But Josh knew who the man had come to find. He raised his arm and said, “Swan’s over here, Sly.”

  Sylvester Moody recognized the huge wrestler from the Travelin’ Show—and realized with a start exactly why he’d worn that black ski mask. His gaze moved to the girl who stood beside Josh, and for a moment he could not speak. “Sweet dancin’ Jesus!” he finally exclaimed, as he stepped out of the truck.

  He hesitated, still not sure it was her, glanced at Josh and saw him nod. “Your face,” Sly said. “It’s all… healed up!”

  “It happened a few nights ago,” Swan told him. “And I think other people are starting to heal up, too.”

  If the wind had been blowing any harder, he might have keeled flat over. “You’re beautiful,” he said. “Oh, Lord… you’re beautiful!” He turned toward the truck, and his voice quavered: “Bill! This here’s the girl! This is Swan!” Bill McHenry, Sly’s nearest neighbor and owner of the truck, cautiously opened his door and got out.

  “We had a hell of a time on that road!” Sly complained. “One more bump and my ass would’ve busted! Lucky we brought along extra go-juice, or we’da been walkin’ the last twenty miles!” He glanced around for someone else. “Where’s the cowboy?”

  “We buried Rusty a few days ago,” Josh said. “He’s in a field not too far from here.”

  “Oh.” Sly frowned. “Well, I’m sorry to hear that. I’m awful sorry. He seemed like a decent fella.”

  “He was.” Josh tilted his head, peering at the truck. “What are you doing here?”

  “I knew you folks were goin’ to Mary’s Rest. That’s where you said you were headed when you left my place. I decided to come visit.”

  “Why? It’s at least fifty miles of bad road between here and your house!”

  “Don’t my achin’ ass know it! God A’mighty, I’d like to sit on a nice soft pillow.” He rubbed his sore rump.

  “It’s no pleasure trip, that’s for sure,” Josh agreed. “But you knew that before you started. You didn’t say why you came all that way.”

  “No.” His eyes sparkled. “I don’t reckon I did.” He gazed at the shacks of Mary’s Rest. “Lord, is this a town or a toilet? What’s that awful smell?”

  “You stay around long enough, you’ll get used to it.”

  “Well, I’m just here for one day. One day’s all I need to pay my debt.”

  “Debt? What debt?”

  “What I owe Swan, and you for bringin’ Swan to my door. Throw it back, Bill!”

  And Bill McHenry, who’d gone around to the rear of the truck, pulled back a canvas tarpaulin that covered the truck’s bed.

  It was piled full of small red apples, perhaps two hundred or more of them.

  At the sight of the apples, there was a collective gasp that went back like a wave over the gathered onlookers. The smell of fresh apples sweetened the air. Sly started laughing, laughing fit to bust, and then he climbed up into the truck’s bed and picked up a shovel that was lying there.

  “I brought you some apples from my tree, Swan!” Sly yelled, his face split by a smile. “Where do you want ’em?”

  She didn’t know what to say. She’d never seen so many apples outside of a supermarket before. They were bright red, and each one about the size of a boy’s fist. She just stood staring at them, and she figured she must look like a dumb fool—but then she knew where she wanted the apples to go. “Out there,” she said, and she pointed to the people crowding around the tailgate.

  Sly nodded. “Yes ma’am,” he said, and then he dug the shovel into the pile of apples and let them fly over the heads of the crowd.

  Apples rained from the sky, and the starving people of Mary’s Rest snatched them as they fell. Apples bounced off their heads, shoulders and backs, but no one cared; there was a roar of voices as other people ran from the alleys and shacks to grab an apple, and they were dancing in the showers of apples, capering and hollering and clapping their hands. Sly Moody’s shovel kept working as more and more people came flooding out of the alleys, but there was no fighting for the precious delicacies. Everyone was too intent on getting an apple, and as Sly Moody kept throwing them into the air the pile hardly seemed to have been dented. Sly grinned deliriously, and he wanted to tell Swan that two days before he’d awakened to find his tree burdened down with hundreds of apples, the branches dragging on the ground. And as soon as those were picked there were already new buds bursting open, and the whole incredibly short cycle was going to be repeated. It was the most amazing, miraculous thing he’d ever seen in his life, and that single tree looked healthy enough to produce hundreds more apples—maybe thousands. He and Carla had already filled their buckets to overflowing.

  Every time Sly’s shovel tossed the apples there was a roar of whooping and laughing. The crowd surged in all directions as apples bounced off them and rolled on the ground. Swan, Sister and Josh were jostled and pushed apart, and suddenly Swan felt herself being carried along with the crowd’s momentum like a reed in a river. “Swan!” she heard Sister shout, but she was already at least thirty feet from Sister, and Josh was doing his best to plow through the people without hurting anyone.

  An apple hit Swan’s shoulder, fell to the ground in front of her and rolled a few feet. She bent to pick it up before she was swept away again, and as her fingers closed on it someone in a pair of scuffed brown boots stepped to within three feet of her.

  She felt cold. A gnawing, bone-aching cold.

  And she knew who it was.

  Her heart hammered. Panic skittered up her spine. The man in the brown boots did not move, and people were not jostling him; they avoided him, as if repelled by the cold. Apples continued to fall to the ground, and the crowd surged, but nobody picked up the apples that lay between Swan and the man who watched her.

  Her first, almost overwhelming impulse was to cry for help from Josh or Sister—but she knew he expected that. As soon as she stood up and opened her mouth, the burning hand would be on her throat.

  She didn’t know exactly what she was going to do, but she was so scared she was about to wet herself. And then she clenched her teeth and slowly, gracefully, stood up with the apple gripped in her hand. She looked at him, because she wanted to see the face of the man with the scarlet eye.

  He was wearing the mask of a skinny black man, wearing jeans and a Boston Celtics T-shirt under an olive-green coat. A red scarf was wrapped around his neck, and his piercing, terrible eyes were pale amber.

  Their stares locked, and Swan saw a silver tooth flash in the front of his mouth when he grinned.

  Sister was too far away. Josh was still fighting the crowd. The man with the scarlet eye stood three feet away, and to Swan it seemed that everyone was swirling around them in nightmarish slow motion, that she and the man stood alone in a trance of time. She knew
she must decide her own fate, because there was no one else to help her.

  And she was aware of something else in the eyes of the mask he was wearing, something beyond the cold, lizardlike sheen of evil, something deeper… and almost human. She remembered seeing the same thing in the eyes of Uncle Tommy the night he’d crushed her flowers, back in the Kansas trailer park seven years ago; it was something wandering and longing, forever locked away from the light and maddened like a tiger in a dark cage. It was dumb arrogance and bastard pride, stupidity and rage stoked to atomic power. But it was something of a little boy, too, wailing and lost.

  Swan knew him. Knew what he’d done and what he would do. And in that moment of knowledge she lifted her arm, reached out her hand toward him—and offered him the apple.

  “I forgive you,” she said.

  His grin went crooked, like the reflection in a mirror abruptly shattered.

  He blinked uncertainly, and in his eyes Swan saw fire and savagery, a core of pain past human suffering and so furious that it almost ripped her own heart to shreds. He was a scream wrapped up in straw, a little, weak, vicious thing gnashing inside a monstrous façade. She saw what he was made of, and she knew him very well.

  “Take it,” she told him, and her heart was beating wildly, but she knew he’d be on her at the first smell of fear. “It’s time.”

  The grin faded. His eyes ticked from her face to the apple and back again like a deadly metronome.

  “Take it,” she urged, the blood pounding so hard in her head she couldn’t hear herself.

  He stared into her eyes—and Swan felt him probe her mind like a freezing ice pick. Little cuts here and there, and then a dark examination of her memories. It was as if every moment of her life was being invaded, picked up and soiled with dirty hands, tossed aside. But she kept her gaze steady and strong, and she would not retreat before him.