Soft Apocalypse

by Will McIntosh

  “There is no such word as ‘jerkin.’ I’ve never heard or seen the word ‘jerkin’ in my life,” Phoebe said as she jumped from the roof of an SUV, crashed through bamboo stalks and onto the hood of a sedan.

  “There is,” I said. “It’s from back in Conan the Barbarian times—it’s like a leather vest. You can store your quiver of arrows in it.”

  “I’m going to find a dictionary. You want to make a bet?”

  “It won’t be in a little pocket dictionary, but if you can find one of those giant dictionaries that could fell a charging ox, I’ll bet you. I wish there was still an Internet. We could just Google it.”

  I caught a glimpse of color in the distance, felt the stirrings of a thrill deeply conditioned in me from childhood. Bright multicolor flags, red-and-white-striped awnings. A Ferris wheel, stretching high above the bamboo. “Oh my,” I said. “The carnival is in town.”

  Phoebe looked confused for a moment, then she saw what I was looking at and broke into a big smile. “Oh man, do I love a good seedy carnival.”

  “Me too,” I said. “You think the owners left any good salvage when they abandoned it?”

  “Probably not. They were probably traveling light, moving from town to town.” She slapped at something behind her ear, looked at her hand. “Then again, the only way to know for sure would be to make a quick trip over there.”

  “Good idea,” I said. “Yes, maybe a quick reconnaissance trip is in order.”

  “And maybe one quick trip down that gigantic slide.”

  There was indeed a gigantic slide, with three progressively bigger swells. “Let’s go,” I said.

  We started at a squat snack stand that promised candy apples-cold drinks-popcorn-cotton candy-soft serve, but it was cleaned out. Most of the games were shuttered. We opened the Baseball Toss: prizes still hung from the ceiling, and all the hairy but deceptively thin trolls were lined up to be thrown at. I vaulted over the counter, and Phoebe followed. A huge crate of worn rubber baseballs sat beneath it.

  “Looks like they took off in the middle of the night,” I said. “Cost too much to transport the show, so they just ditched it.”

  “Yeah,” Phoebe said, holding a baseball in each hand, not sounding particularly interested in what I was saying. She climbed back over the counter. “Get out of the way.”

  Phoebe could throw hard. Her arms were long and as thin as twigs, but sinewy. A little knot tensed on her triceps as she drew the baseball back and fired it, brushing the fringe of hair but missing the elusive meat of the troll.

  “Damn!” she whispered.

  “You’re an athlete,” I said.

  She smiled. “Track and softball in high school. I sucked at softball, but I was good at track.” She grabbed another ball, tossed it in the air and caught it, getting a feel. “You’re all going down,” she shouted at the trolls. “I have plenty of baseballs here, and they aren’t costing me a dime. You can’t run, because you have no feet, and you can’t hide, because, again, you have no feet.” She whipped the ball, laughing. It sailed right between two of them. “Crap!” she shouted, still laughing. She wiped a tear from her cheek.

  “You cry when you laugh,” I said. “Not just when you laugh really hard, but whenever you laugh.”

  “Shut up,” she said, laughing harder. “I do not.” More tears welled up in the corners of her eyes and rolled onto her cheeks.

  “You do!” I pointed at her cheek. “I’ve never seen anything like it, it’s like those birds who can’t help but make a peeping sound with every flap of their wings.”

  She laughed harder, and more tears came.“ Liar,” she said, swabbing her cheeks with the sleeve of her sweater.

  “Shall we to the slide?” she said when her laughter had settled down to intermittent bursts.

  “We shall,” I said, motioning ladies first. It felt so good to be laughing, to be having fun and goofing off. Phoebe was so quick-witted; I didn’t remember her being like that when we met all those years ago. Of course, we’d only spent a couple of hours together.

  “Did you go to traveling carnivals a lot when you were a kid?” I asked as we picked our way across what had once been the midway.

  “All the time. It’s hard to imagine a time when things were that easy. You worked, you bought groceries, you took your kids to the carnival.” She shook her head. “It’s like some fairy tale world.”

  Phoebe grasped a rung of the ladder, looked up. “I didn’t realize it was so high.” She craned her neck to look back at me, hand still clutching the rung. “I’m afraid of heights. We could have just as much fun sitting on the merry-go-round horses, don’t you think?”

  “They won’t move, they’ll just sit there,” I said.

  “That’s okay. They’re pretty, and I’ll make horse noises.”

  I pointed at the ladder, laughing. “You promised we’d ride the slide, and it’s the only ride that works.”

  “I didn’t promise, I just suggested.”

  “The promise was implicit.”

  Phoebe huffed. She grasped the rungs and looked up. “All right, but you may have to call the fire department to get me down.”

  I laughed. “They’d get you down, all right. With a high-powered rifle.”

  I caught a glimpse of Phoebe’s white calf as she climbed, remembered her long legs, how perfect her knees were when I’d seen her in shorts that first day in the motel. Phoebe never wore shorts around us, always jeans.

  It took a bit of coaxing to get Phoebe to slide down. At first she clung to the sides and braked herself every few feet, but the first steep drop made that impossible, and gravity ruled the day.

  Phoebe clung to her hat so it wouldn’t blow off, which, along with her auburn hair snapping in the wind, made her look like a woman in a Jane Austen novel.

  There was something about her very proper, demure nature that was extremely sexy. There was no denying it. But the thought of the emotional part, the thought of love, the negotiation of what the physical part meant… I had no stomach for that, so better not to try to cross that bright red line between a hug and a kiss.

  Phoebe shrieked her way down the third and steepest drop. So strange. Wasn’t this what I’d always hoped for? I was with a funny, attractive woman, and we got along effortlessly. We’d met only a few weeks ago, and already we were close friends.

  I slid down while Phoebe shouted an undecipherable mix of encouragement and taunts. I hit the steep drop, and felt that tingly falling-feeling in my intestines. It felt great, simulating emotions I hadn’t experienced in a long time.

  “What say we check out the World’s Smallest Woman exhibit?” Phoebe said as I climbed back to solid earth. “My parents would never give me the extra three dollars to go in. They said it was a scam.”

  “I doubt she’s home,” I said.

  “Still, I’d like to go through her tiny dresser and look at all her tiny shoes.” She led the way.

  The World’s Smallest Woman’s tent was a bust. It was an empty husk—no tiny dresser, no tiny kitchen appliances.

  “Well damn,” Phoebe said, letting the tent flap fall.

  I wondered if, given a different past, this afternoon, in this abandoned carnival with Phoebe, could have been one of those magically romantic days that you never forget.

  “You okay?” Phoebe asked. “You got quiet suddenly.”

  “I’m fine. I just got thinking about something that happened to me a long time ago,” I said, covering my trail.

  “What was it, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “Why don’t we stop and eat, and I’ll tell you?”

  We ate wild mushrooms and nettle in the merry-go-round, in a chariot. Cherubs in silver diapers and women in flowing burgundy robes were carved into its sides. The carvings were exquisitely detailed, though the fingers on one cherub’s hand, which was reaching toward the sky, were missing. While we ate I told Phoebe about my first encounter with Rumor, at the art gallery. It was the first thing that came to mind to m
ask what I’d really been thinking.

  Phoebe reached out and stroked the hoof of the horse closest to her. Its front legs were curled under it in mid-gallop, its mouth open, tongue jutting out between square teeth.

  “I can see how that would haunt you, even after all these years. The bad things get tattooed on your brain, don’t they? Even though they’re in the past, it’s like they’re not, like they’re still happening somewhere.”

  “They do,” I agreed. “I wish I could take just three or four days of my life and cut them out. I would feel so much better.”

  Phoebe continued absently stroking the hoof. “I know what mine would be.” She looked off into the carnival, her face turned away from me.

  “Which would they be? Unless you don’t want to say.”

  Phoebe didn’t say anything for a long time.

  “I haven’t told anyone,” she finally whispered.

  “If you want to tell someone, I’m a good listener.” I waited, studied the red Tilt-A-Whirl choked with weeds.

  Phoebe laced her fingers together, looked down at her feet, and began a story.

  “After I left Stephan, the guy who wanted me to share him with a fifteen-year-old, I went off to find my parents. I hadn’t seen them in over ten years, since the day I left home to live with Marlowe, a black guy, and they effectively disowned me. It took me a month to reach my parents’ house, and when I got there I found my mother in worse shape than I. She had just carried on as if nothing was happening—planting flowers in her garden, watching crap on TV, until there was no more food or power. I took her out of there, but of course I had no idea where to go. We headed east, toward Savannah.

  “She hadn’t changed much in ten years. All she did was complain. Her feet hurt, she was hungry, why had I taken her out of her home to drag her across the countryside. All day long she complained.

  “Then one day we were walking through the main drag of a small town, and the McDonald’s had a cardboard sign up in the window that said ‘Open,’ so I left Mom in the shade, because I wasn’t sure it was safe, and I went inside.

  “The man inside was selling hamburgers made with some sort of critter meat, but he didn’t accept cash, only precious metals or guns and the like. I didn’t have anything like that, and I started to leave, and he suggested—”

  She choked up. I considered putting a reassuring hand on her back, or squeezing her shoulder, but sensed that wasn’t the right thing, so I just waited.

  “He suggested a trade: he’d give me the hamburgers if I’d sleep with him. I told him no and hurried out, but I was starving, and my mother was starving.” She wiped her eyes and sniffed; her nose was badly clogged. “So I did it. Behind the counter. I tried not to cry, but I couldn’t help it, and he said to me, ‘Just think about how good those hamburgers are going to taste.’” She laughed, although it was partially a sob, and now I did press my palm to her back and rub just a little to reassure her, and it seemed to work. She took a few deep breaths and calmed down.

  “Two times after that, I left Mom somewhere, telling her I was going to buy food. Then I would approach a man with food and offer sex for food.

  “The last time, the man did it, then called me a whore and threw me out without giving me the food.”

  Phoebe wiped something from the side of her nose with a trembling hand. I wanted her to look up, to see that I was hearing her, that I wasn’t judging her, that she’d done nothing wrong, but she kept her eyes on her sneakers.

  “When I went back to my mother that last time, she told me that she had figured out what I was doing to get the food. She said it was disgusting. When I asked her if she’d rather starve, she said yes, she’d rather starve.

  “The next time we stopped, I sat her in the shade under a tree…” Fresh tears rolled down her cheeks; her shoulders heaved. “I told her I was going to look for food.” She struggled to get the words out. “And I left her.”

  She looked up at me. “I left my mother.”

  I nodded, simply nodded understanding. I wasn’t sure how to respond, didn’t trust myself to respond, because it seemed like any response would be either trite or judgmental.

  She leaned back in the little seat, looked up at the wood-slatted ceiling, her cheeks wet with tears. “She walked so damned slowly. Each step seemed to require this huge effort. So I left her.” She sniffed, wiped her nose on the sleeve of her sweater. “Half a day later I couldn’t stand the guilt any longer and I went back to look for her, but she was gone.”

  I had to respond; I couldn’t leave her hanging there on those words, but I felt like I’d been struck mute. So I reached over and hugged her. She hugged me back, tightly, and we went on hugging until it wasn’t a hug any more, it was more like a seated slow dance. I rocked her ever so slightly while she cried into my neck.

  Finally, we separated, looking off into the mad decay of the carnival. I peered up into the steel framework of the Ferris wheel towering nearby, a series of shrinking Xs, thinking about the courage it had taken for Phoebe to tell me what she had just told me, and realized what my response should be.

  I took a ragged breath, and began my own story. “One day two years ago I got it in my head to steal a pig from a farm.” I choked up almost immediately. I wondered how I would get through the story if I couldn’t even make it through the first sentence.

  I did get through it, though. I told her what really happened to Ange, something I’d never told another living soul. I cried through most of it, but when it was out the relief I felt surprised me.

  I didn’t stop there. I told her about how Cortez had killed Tara Cohn, and my part in that, and the time we stabbed the men who were raping Ange, and got through both of those without any tears. I was all cried out, and besides, awful as they were, neither of those events tortured me the way Ange’s death did.

  We just sat for a while then. I felt drained to the point of numbness.

  “I love the word ‘calliope,’” Phoebe finally said, sounding far away. “It’s so festive.”

  “Mmm,” I said.

  “But it’s not a cheap, simple, primary-color sort of festive, like ‘confetti’ is.”

  “No. Never.”

  Phoebe fidgeted with a button on her shirt, her gaze far away. She had such beautiful, delicate wrists. “When we went on that date all those years ago, I was a virgin. I was a virgin until I was twenty-six,” she said. “That’s who I am.”

  “That not hard to believe, given the sweaters and all.”

  Phoebe laughed. “I can’t help wondering, though: is that really who I am? I never thought I was capable of doing what I did to my mother. Now that I know I am, how can I still think of myself as the person I thought I was?”

  I nodded understanding. “You wonder if doing something awful makes you an awful person, even if you didn’t have a choice,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m so afraid sometimes, that this world has turned me into a monster, capable of horrible things. Or it’s exposed me for the monster I am.”

  “Yeah, that’s it. Exactly.”

  Someone had gone through and smashed a lot of the mirrors in the Hall of Mirrors. Outside, the facade was painted with huge clown faces. One had a long, pointed head, another, a fat round one.

  We went on talking—about our fears, about the pain we felt for the things we’d done. It felt good to have someone listen without judging.

  We didn’t realize how late it was getting until the light began to wane. Phoebe raised her arms over head and stretched. As she did so one of her nipples was just barely visible through her shirt. It was like glimpsing a rare bird, obscured by thick foliage and then gone as she dropped her arms. She was a beautiful woman. I wondered if my capacity to love wasn’t as far from the surface as I thought. Maybe I was afraid of those feelings, or embarrassed by them, or felt guilty about having them. Or all of the above.

  “I can’t handle any more emotion in my life,” Phoebe said, as if reading my thoughts. “My tank
is empty. I can’t handle any more love, no more tearful breakups.”

  “Me neither,” I said.

  She looked at me with those turtle green eyes. I leaned over and kissed her, lightly, almost not at all. I didn’t intend to do it—I just did, without thinking. To my surprise, Phoebe didn’t protest. To my further surprise, a light spring breeze blew through me, lifting me just high enough to see beyond the despair I’d felt for so long I could barely remember ever feeling anything else.

  Neither of us said anything. We headed back as if it hadn’t happened.

  On the walk back I realized that in my entire life I’d never had a conversation like the one I’d just had with Phoebe. I hadn’t even been able to talk like that with Ange.

  I was staring at a wall of thick kudzu and suddenly realized that there was an entire house hidden in that tangle of green. A wren squeezed into a crack between the slats just below the roofline. Looking further off, I spotted another house.

  “Did anyone notice that there are houses right there?” I asked, pointing.

  Everyone turned and looked. Phoebe laughed. “I hadn’t noticed.”

  We’d spent the night sleeping outside, thirty feet from shelter. I finished rolling up my bedding, stuffed it into the duffel bag I’d salvaged at one house or another.

  Phoebe was putting away her knickknacks. Each night we seemed to lay out our bedding a little closer together.

  “How did your parents die?” Phoebe asked.

  “In the water riots in ’21,” I said. “I don’t know the specifics, just that they were alive before the riots and weren’t after.” I plucked a bamboo shoot off a stalk, twisted it between two fingers. “How did your father die?”

  “My mother said he choked on a chicken bone.”

  “Wow.” It seemed an anachronistic death. But even with all the awful ways to die these days, I guess some people still choked on chicken bones.

  “We should get moving,” Cortez called out.

  “Whatever you say, boss,” Colin called back. Cortez gave him a “don’t make me kick your ass” look.

  I shrugged on my pack. It felt a little heavier each day we continued on our survivalist diet.