"Just shut up and watch," Libbie said.
And so you stood there on that hot cement slab in your bare feet, three schoolgirls in flimsy cotton pajamas huddled together inside the sweltering empty shell of a cinderblock bomb shelter, and you watched while Leo Spivak began to yank at himself.
"That's sick," Julia said. "Leo, stop it."
Libbie didn't take her eyes off him. "Shut up, Julia," she said.
"I'm telling my dad."
"Shut up, Julia," Libbie said again, louder this time.
Leo was playing it for all it was worth. He threw his head back and bent his knees and moaned. "Oh baby, oh baby..." He stuck out his tongue and wagged it at Julia. Her disgust seemed to inspire him. When she backed away, he stepped toward her, still pulling at himself, still moaning. "Oooh Julia, baby, baby, oooh..."
"Stop it, Leo. Libbie, come on. Meena, make him stop."
But Libbie had pulled off her pajama bottoms, too, and she was standing in her white underpants, wiggling next to Leo, ooh-la-la! Her body was straight and smooth—snowy-white above and below the grimy tan lines that marked the outline of her bathing suit, knobbed by the sharp jut of her ribs and joints and bones—and her pink nipples were as flat and round as Leo's. She turned to you, blowing kisses like Marilyn Monroe. "I love you! I love you!" And then, "Come on!" But you couldn't take off your clothes; that was impossible. You just stood there, grinning and gaping at Leo, while Libbie clutched at you, squealing with laughter, shivering with glee.
"Mmmm... Okay baby, come on baby, come on..." Leo had closed his eyes. He swiveled his hips and kissed the air in front of Julia, whose face was hidden in her hands, and he yanked at himself until finally his penis jerked as if it were alive and apart from him and then spit a spurt of gluey milk that hit the concrete floor and filled the air with what smelled like poppy seeds to you.
Libbie whooped and clapped her hands.
Julia scrabbled at the door, clawing at the lever to get it open until you took her by the shoulders and turned her around and shook her.
Leo was pulling up his shorts, grinning, his face on fire.
Julia was curled over herself against the wall near the door, and she was crying, which only infuriated you even more so you kicked at her, and she flinched away.
Libbie bent down to examine the puddle of Leo's semen. She dipped a finger in, held it up and sniffed it.
Leo lay back on Julia's cot with his hands folded behind his head and closed his eyes.
Libbie leaned over and kissed him.
You were dragging Julia up to her feet. You turned her around and raised the lever on the door, leaned against the steel panel until it swung away. And then you pushed her out of Foreverland and into the night. She faded into shadow as she fled the safety of the shelter and gave herself up instead to the uncertainty of the world.
Julia Bell is alone, shivering in her pajamas, outside in the open air of a late summer night, when the first fall chill has wafted in. The woods crowd toward her on one side, the street is silvery and barren on the other. When a car does pass, she cringes in its lights. She hurries, anxious to be home, only three more houses down, and her steps echo, her hands work at her sides. She's not afraid anymore, now she's only angry. Her face is pinched with outrage and determination—she'll tell her mother, she'll tell her father, she'll tell everybody what you and Libbie and Leo have done.
She passes one streetlight and then another, moving from pool of light to pool of light as if there might be some kind of safety there. Only one more house to go.
Did he jump out of the shadows and grab her, drag her off into the cover of the trees? If so, wouldn't she have screamed, and struggled against him? And if she had screamed, wouldn't someone surely have heard? Or did they mistake her for a peacock?
Did he step out of the trees and stand before her, singing? "Catch a falling star and..."
Did she come upon him sitting on the curb and stop to wonder whether he needed help? And then he stood up and he had a rock in his fist and he knocked her on the head and lifted her up and held her against his filthy body, with one hand on the back of her head, as if to cradle her, tenderly, in his arms.
It wasn't until the next morning, when you were safe and sound in the Grandons' kitchen eating breakfast like it was any other day, when Mrs. Bell called to tell her daughter to come home, that you knew there was anything wrong. Libbie looked at you. "Julia?" As if she had forgotten all about her. Or had never known her in the first place. "Julia who?"
Mr. and Mrs. Bell talked to news reporters, tearfully begging someone to come forward with any inkling of information about where their daughter might be. Dogs were brought in to help the uniformed men search the woods and the park and the wilderness of Hollow Hill. On that first day, they found an encampment by the river, but it had been abandoned. That Deep Eddie was gone, too, was what made Libbie say that he must have been the one who took Julia Bell, and did something to her. Something unspeakable, but what? That he'd undressed her and made her dance naked for him? That he'd touched her and held her in his filthy arms, kissed her and rolled with her on the ground? That he'd slit her throat and cut her into pieces, stewed her body in a pot, cooked her on a spit above a fire and then gnawed the meat from her bones?
Or maybe she just fell into a hole, some cosmic tear that sucked her in and took her away to another dimension altogether, a Foreverland of another kind. This was what John suggested, later. In his imagination, Julia Bell was trapped in a parallel world behind the thin membrane of matter that defines reality, screaming to be let through again, but forever unheard and forever gone.
Or, you suggested, maybe Deep Eddie really was the King of the Wood. And, maybe Julia went with him willingly, and with her whole heart. Because of who he was and what he promised her if she did. She recognized him and she believed in him and so she followed him into the woods and there in the deepest shadows of the trees he revealed to her his true and secret self—he was not an old raggedy smelly crazy bum after all, but a handsome young man, a knight, a prince, a king. And then, when Julia saw him as he really was, she fell in love and gave herself to him. She put her arms around his neck and let him lift her up and carry her away with him into the river; she lay down beside him in the water, he held her close and she clung to him as together they tumbled over the dam and down into the swirl of the deep eddy itself.
You and Libbie told the police almost everything—skipping only the part about Leo and the music and the dancing and the beer. You agreed that Julia had got scared when you started talking about the bombs and the blasts and the end of the world, that she'd complained and cried and so finally you'd had no choice but to open the door and let her go home, because that was what she said she wanted you to do.
At last Mrs. Grandon stepped forward and told the police to leave you alone. You and Libbie were only children, she said. You'd done nothing wrong, you were the innocent victims of a world gone mad, and everybody had been traumatized enough, without the police harassing you too.
Meanwhile, you two were in lockdown, not allowed to even go outside without a grownup keeping an eye on you. Mrs. Grandon herself came across the driveway every morning to get you before your father left for the store, and all day long she kept you inside, with the air-conditioning turned up and all the windows shut and locked. You played board games and read comic books, baked cookies and made lemonade, staged puppet shows and acted out clues for charades, put records on the hi-fi and belted out show-tunes, from "The Sound of Music" and "My Fair Lady" and "West Side Story." Mrs. Grandon weeping over that one at the end.
This went on for a couple of weeks, and still nobody knew what had happened to Julia Bell, whether she was alive or dead, or who had taken her or why. Summer turned to fall, school started, and after a while there didn't seem to be anything else to do, so they just stopped looking for her. She was given up for dead. Mrs. Bell had had a breakdown and she was in the hospital and her baby, Julia's little sister, was away with relative
s somewhere. Mr. Bell still went to work downtown every morning, and he came home alone to his empty house every night. For a while the church ladies brought over their Tupperware casseroles and cakes for him, but then eventually even they gave up, and that was the end of that.
"It wasn't our fault, was it?" you kept asking. And Libbie kept telling you, No. If it was anybody's fault, it was Julia's own. "She was dumb, that's all."
And when you're dumb, you die.
July 2006
If it hadn't been for the old dog, likely Meena would not have stopped where she did for any longer than it took to fill the car with gas and squeegee its windows, and surely she never would have stayed there overnight. Because she was headed for the ocean, wasn't she? At least that's what she had decided by then, and she felt firm in that choice. She was on her way to California; she was only passing through the mountains on her way to starting her life all over again there, reinventing herself as someone new and unknown and other than who she'd been. Hadn't she been set free?
She had begun to allow the thought to cross her mind that she was on her way to finding herself reborn. She had begun to concoct a vision of herself in California, living in an apartment near the sea, turning tan and thin and wearing gauzy pastel-colored clothes. She might be following in the footsteps of a man like Ralph Wendell, for example, who as far as she could tell seemed to have figured out how to run away from his life in Linwood and maybe even successfully start it all over again elsewhere. That he might instead have come to harm was not a possibility that Meena felt like entertaining anymore, never mind whatever other people thought they knew.
And so as far as she was concerned Meena was only crossing over this big range of mountains because she had to do it if she was going to be able to get from here to there. Those craggy peaks were a presence that at that moment seemed to hold no more meaning for her than any shut door or bent fence had ever had, just another obstacle that happened to be where it was, a barrier rising up from the plains to block her view of the ocean and of her new life nearby it—something to be got by, pushed past, climbed over, overcome and then left behind, forgotten.
But then there it was, that dog. It wasn't anything special, really just a geriatric mutt, a nuisance to its owner and good for nothing much, its better days behind it and more trouble than it was worth: unwanted and unloved, arthritic and incontinent, toothless, deaf, and blind.
This incident was nothing that Meena had asked for, then. It was nothing that she'd dreamed of, or in any way hoped to have happen, and it wasn't something that she'd been expecting either. But there are no accidents in this world, according to what Matka knew. This was osud, destiny, and all that happens, it happens for a reason, she would insist. It is all connected, and so one thing leads to another just as surely as the daytime will dawn upon the night and the winter will melt into the spring and a young woman will grow into an old one, over time. She will age and fatten and fail and falter toward what is bound by every natural law to be her death. And there is going to be no stopping that, is there?
And so here it is: that dog. He's hobbled out of the sunshine to seek some comfort in the shade, and then he's curled up in that cool place in the dirt behind the Jetta's back tire to take a nap. Meena has filled up at the pump of that little gas station in the middle of nowhere, and she's gone inside to pay for it at the counter. And then it so happens that when she comes back out again there is a battered yellow pickup truck pulled in so close in front of her car that the bumpers kiss.
Which means: before Meena can go forward, first she will have to go back.
Later she will be able to clearly recall the odd amber tint of this singular moment of afternoon light, as it looks to her just now. The color of this light seems somehow familiar, and at first what it brings into Meena's mind is an image of Libbie Grandon modeling a buttercup-colored miniskirt in the Teen Department Fashion Show on-stage at Fairchild's downtown. She restarts the engine on the Jetta, glad to see its gas gauge swing around to full again, and then looks up, annoyed by the matronly wide-hipped presence of that old truck's back fenders looming over its broad chrome bumper here in front of her and in the way. On the left side a bumper sticker reads, Jesus is Coming: Look Busy, on the right, GODISNOWHERE, and in the middle, From death he did rise and will come again.
Meena closes her eyes. She is feeling a little dizzy, a little short of breath, but she figures this must be the effects of the altitude which, she thinks, she'll be down from again soon enough.
She shifts into reverse. She takes a look in her rear view mirror, then turns half around as well, to be sure that the way behind her is clear, which it does seem to be. She takes her foot off the brake, and the car rolls back a bit before rocking to a gentle stop again. She gives it a little gas and feels the tire meet with a soft resistance that in the next moment has been easily overcome.
That wasn't Meena's fault, was it? It was an accident, wasn't it? Something that might have happened to anyone? And Meena knew this and she might have argued about it later, in her own defense, but how could she forget that bump beneath the tires, or that sound: a peacock's scream?
What will soon turn out to be an old yellow dog, at this moment doesn't look like much more than a worthless bundle of rags here in the shadows underneath the body of the car. It struggles for a moment—eyes rolling, tongue lolling, paws scrabbling at the dirt—and then is still. The gravel on the ground is white-gray, bluish even, like bleached bones. An oil stain glistens, rainbow slick, or is it blood? Meena is seeing all of this as if in a roll of film, snapshot by snapshot, one frame at a time: the deep treads of the black tire, the dusty tangle of blond fur, gravel, oil.
And so it's now that all she's been holding inside herself finally breaks through. Maybe it's the ice that froze over her in the car outside the movie theater back in Linwood, after her father's fall. Maybe now that is what comes flowing out of her so fast and hard. Or maybe it's something older, something cold and hard that she's been fostering for years. She's crying, and in a way the pain of this feels very good. The snort and snuffle of it. Sloppy and wet and satisfying. And even if she wanted to, she's sure that she can't stop. Or, even if she had to, she isn't sure she would.
Somewhere in the middle of this Meena has become aware that someone has approached from behind and taken hold of her, and that this person is now drawing her up from her stoop to a standing position and is turning her around to face him so he can get a better look at her, it seems. It's likely that he only means to help her, but Meena lashes out at him with such fury that he doesn't have any choice, short of slapping her face, but to pin her flailing arms against her sides and bring her in close to his own solid self and hold her there before she hurts herself, or him. Then it is only a moment before she stops struggling and he relaxes his grip so that she can shake herself free.
"Christ." In a hopeless attempt at composure, she presses her palms against her clothes to smooth them.
He has flinched at her profanity. "Are you all right?"
His face is soft, even-featured and bland, and his brown eyes are flat and dull. He's a big man, fat, slow. She tries to duck away, but he fills the frame of her vision; she can't seem to see around him.
"Yes," she says. "I'm fine."
She takes a deep breath and swipes at her eyes with the back of her hand. She is hoping that she might still be able to keep this simple. Climb back into the safety of her car, start it up, and drive off, taking care not to run over the dog again. She thinks maybe she can just turn her back on this whole thing and keep on going, as if it hasn't happened. It wasn't her fault, after all. Was it?
Overhead the red and blue lights of the gas station sign flicker weakly in the daylight.
"Hey," he says, squinting at her. "It's going to be okay."
She can see that his fists are clenched at his sides. She's watching his fingers as his knuckles whiten and curl around his thumbs. She's had some experience with this kind of self-containment, and she recognizes it
at once. Hard to tell, though, whether his anger is aimed at her, for resisting him, or at himself, for having made the whole thing happen in the first place. He shakes his head, hard, the way a wet dog shudders water off its coat, and then with what seems to be an effort for him, he blows out a sigh and relaxes. Raises his hand and runs his fingers through the fine drizzle of his light hair. He seems to be embarrassed. Or at least apologetic. Even polite in a way, which is sweet.
"I'm sorry," he's saying. "It's just that you seemed so upset." His smile is crooked. "I hope you don't think..."
Meena bows her head. She thinks nothing.
He has thrust a hand at her. "Well anyway, I'm Will," he says with a smile. "Gidding. Will Gidding."
Meena looks away, wincing at the sky, as Will lifts the limp body of the dog up from the ground and carries it across the gravel, lays it down gently on the flat step, in the shade. Another man has come out of the garage. He's dark, Hispanic. A little boy in overalls, a girl in a plaid skirt. They stand in a huddle around the dead dog. The boy reaches forward and touches its fur, the girl slaps his hand away, and he begins to cry.
Meena turns away. She has her hand on the door handle, feels the fat man behind her again, his hand on her shoulder. "Wait," he says. Then he nods his head in a signal for her to follow, and without thinking she obeys, tagging along after him across the road and into a place that calls itself the Grizzly Grill.
Just inside the door a full-sized stuffed brown bear rears up on its hind legs with its huge front paws raised and its lips curled back from great yellow teeth. Meena reels away from this, caught by Will's hand at her elbow as he urges her onward, into the dimly lit room and over to a padded leather booth along the wall.
Behind the bar a young woman sits hunched on a stool, working a newspaper crossword puzzle. She looks up and smiles broadly at the sight of Will. Her hair is short and dark and straight, parted in the middle and hooked behind her ears. From here and in that light, she's pretty.
The Minor Apocalypse of Meena Krejci Page 9
