Abigail spreads a thin layer of margarine on a piece of white bread, sits at the table waiting for the coffee to brew. There was a time, a while ago, when the pride Abby felt she had to show for Burns’s military service (a mandate handed down from on high, a decree enforced by by the uberpatriotic tele vision commercials, the billboards, and the hundreds and hundreds of tattered little American flags scattered throughout the town) outweighed any disappointment or embarrassment she felt over the real, daily, relentless aftermath of his experience. But disappointment and shame are powerful foes that have won nearly every battle in Abigail’s life. She has no idea what Burns thinks or how he feels, about anything. He takes all those pills. He rages. She used to wish he had a job. Then she wished he’d just come out of the basement. The husband. The man on the radio comes to her every night.
None of it matters, now. In just a few days, nothing will matter.
Abigail follows the nothingness into her brain, stares vacantly at the wall until heavy footsteps on the front stoop and the rattle of the mailbox startles her. Abby drops her buttered bread. It lands face-down on the floor.
The Slinky clock over the sink reads 8:15. Abigail wipes the mess from the floor, parts the curtain on the front door, looks furtively up and down the sidewalk, then quickly snatches the mail and rebolts the lock.
Bills. A cancellation notice from the phone company. Something official-looking from the VA hospital. They keep sending things. They pry. They make promises. They want to know things about Burns. Abigail opens the trash and shoves all the mail beneath the discarded bread and paper towels. None of it matters.
She looks at the clock. 8:45. Time for work. Time to box Slinkys. Where did that half hour go? Where does any of it go? All that time in a life. Abigail wonders if once she gets to Heaven with Jesus she’ll understand things better. Abigail worries that she won’t be any smarter in Heaven.
She laces up her thick-soled work shoes. She loops the Slinky Employee lanyard around her neck, turns the photo in so that it faces the smock. What Abigail feels about her job cannot be called hate only because she cannot conceive of deserving the luxury of hatred. Years and years of demeaning, mindless jobs have rendered Abigail numb and obedient. Sheeplike. She moves through the routine of her days without expectation, without hope, unseeing and unseen, unquestioning and unconsidered. Like her mother. Like her grandmother. Until now. Until the man on the radio. Until the coming Judgment.
Abigail takes her worry and her empty coffee cup to the empty sink.
Abigail doesn’t understand strong women, women who stand up straight and speak loudly enough to be heard, women who get ahead in the world. She fears them. When the three sharp knocks at the door penetrate Abigail’s muddlement, she has no choice but to drop the cup. It shatters in the porcelain sink. Abigail sucks in a sharp breath and falls to her knees.
She’s done this before. This hiding. This cowering. Instinct will not be denied.
Three more knocks, louder this time.
“Hello,” a woman’s voice calls through the door. “Mrs. Augenbaugh?”
Abigail doesn’t recognize the voice.
The caller, no doubt, heard the cup shatter.
Abigail crawls across the kitchen floor, her own kitchen floor, to the window. She slips a trembling finger between the blinds and peeks out. She sees a long gray skirt, pattern-less, pressed and neat. Thin legs. A delicate butterfly tattoo, one blue wing draping the anklebone, disappears into a shoe that, though scuffed, is nicer than any Abigail has ever owned.
“Mrs. Augenbaugh?”
The voice is quieter. As if the speaker knows Abigail is close.
“My name is Carole. Carole Onkst. I’m the guidance counselor at the middle school. Mrs. Augenbaugh, I want to talk to you about William.”
William? Hearing her son’s actual name called confuses Abigail for a moment. Her knees hurt. She tightens her focus onto the worn flecked linoleum, and into the pain. She can hear the clock ticking in the other room. She’ll be late for work.
“We can help, Mrs. Augenbaugh.”
Willie. The woman is talking about the boy. Her son. But it’s too late. The man on the radio says so. Abigail Augenbaugh thinks to give the woman a Rapture tract. It would explain everything. The tract. Abigail loves the word. She got it from the man on the radio. She trusts him. Carole Onkst, the guidance counselor, would read the tract, would under stand, would come inside, would kneel there on the floor with Abby, and pray. And pray.
But Abigail doesn’t move. She doesn’t even pray. She waits. She listens. She hears the screen door open, hears a faint scratching sound, hears Carole Onkst speak softly, just on the other side of the curtain.
“I’ll come back later,” she says. “I’ll come back again. Call, if you need to. Anytime.”
Then nothing.
Abigail wonders what it would mean to open the door, to allow Carole Onkst in, maybe even to allow Carole Onkst to talk to Willie. To take Willie. To take the boy, her son, Willie, William, out of that house, away from the day. Would it make any difference? Would it help? Would it save the boy from the Judgment to come?
“Wait—” Abigail Augenbaugh says. Whispers. Is it too late? “Wait.” It’s all happening too fast. Is she doing the right thing? “Wait.”
But when Abigail is finally able to stand and open the curtain, Carole Onkst is gone. There is no sign of her presence. Maybe she was never there. Maybe Satan was trying to tempt Abby. To take her boy. To sway her commitment. Satan is everywhere, and he is powerful. The man on the radio says so. Then Abby sees the business card tucked into the doorjamb. The sign.
Carole Onkst has scribbled something on the back of the card, but Abigail Augenbaugh can’t bring herself to read it. She crumples against the door and tries to breathe. Is it too late? It is too late. Is it too late?
≠
I tried to tell her.
I wanted to tell her.
“I lied, Mama.”
That’s what I wanted to say.
It’s hot. I am wet. I look on the floor. There are no dead people. I get up and look out the window. There are no dead people. There is a woman. She’s alive. I’ve seen her before. From school. I’m not going back. Ever.
The woman knocks, then backs off the porch. Looks up. I drop to the floor. I’m not going back. I lied to Mama. She knocks again. I peel back the curtain. I could jump. Easily. I could land on her head. Break her stupid neck. She should mind her own business. I could kill her. I killed her once already. At school. No, but I planned it. There in her office. With her stupid pictures of her stupid family on her stupid desk. With her stupid soft nice voice. Stupid soft nice eyes. I killed her. No. I planned to. Then I saw the tattoo. A butterfly. I wish I had a tattoo. I wish Mama had a tattoo. My papaw has tattoos. He’s dead. We went to the nurse-home just before he died. The tattoos on his arms were all shriveled up. Skulls and snakes. Papaw didn’t talk to me. He coughed a lot. Mama made me dump out the pus basin. She took me for ice cream afterwards. She cried on the way. I kept thinking about all the stuff that came out of Papaw’s lungs. I wonder if his grave will open up too. I wonder if he’ll talk to me.
I hear a car door slam, an engine crank. I look out, watch her drive down the road. I am not going back. Ever. My mattress is wet. I flip it. I am strong. Powerful. If I wanted to, I could turn the house upside down. The whole house. If I wanted to.
∀
Abigail rises. There is work to be done. God’s work. And Slinky work.
The boy is upstairs. The man is in the basement. She can’t change either of these facts.
There is work to be done.
Abigail Augenbaugh hates being late, hates punching the ancient time clock after everyone else. The solitary chunk—that claims to mark the legitimacy of her day—reverberates throughout the entire Slinky plant, and it seems as if everybody watches Abigail make her ponderous way along the back (windowless) wall, down to the employee locker room, and back up past the supervisor’s fluore
scent-lit office to her place on the packing line.
But that scrutiny, that burden, is almost bearable. Less bearable is that when running late, Abigail is sure to encounter her next-door neighbors. The Augenbaughs park their decrepit Chevy Celebrity on a cracked slab of concrete abutting the alley, behind the house. There must’ve been a shed or garage on the slab sometime in the past. No more. Sometime in the past, Burns had a valid license and did most of the driving. No more.
Last month, Abigail stopped paying the insurance. Now, she drives the uninsured Celebrity to and from the Slinky plant, Monday through Friday. Abby prays that her luck (and the engine, and the transmission) will hold for the remaining few days. So far, these prayers have been answered. There is hope.
The Celebrity is parked in the alley, just through her small weedy rectangle of backyard. If Abigail went out her back door—across the unheated mudroom and down the two cement steps—she could hurry through the crabgrass and to her car without having to see, or talk to, Tim or Tina DeFonzie. But for Abigail to be able to leave the house through her back door, she’d have either to go back in time and change the past or overhaul her way of dealing with the present.
Six months prior, after a night of freezing rain, Willie slipped on the ice. The boy caught himself by hanging onto the mudroom’s screen door, which pulled the top hinge from its frame. Abigail couldn’t ask Burns to fix the door, nor could she call the landlord, so the screen door hung askew all winter and spring, and jammed so that the back entrance was unusable. The week before Easter, already preparing for the coming Rapture, Abigail propped her old ironing board in front of that door, thinking she might like to press her good skirt. She wanted to look her best for the Lord. But the ironing board became an easy place to deposit the recycling bins. Then, things for the yard sale she planned to have someday. Then, bags of trash. By this May morning, a few days before the Rapture, the mudroom is packed, floor to ceiling, wall to wall. Abigail Augenbaugh has no choice but to leave her house through the front door. She cannot reverse the clock and catch Willie before he falls. She cannot rescind that moment of hopefulness—in which she longed to look nice—that led her to set up the ironing board.
The man and the boy are in the house. The Lord is on his way. There is nothing Abby can do to make a difference.
Abigail stuffs her purse full of Are You Ready? Rapture tracts, closes the front door, quietly, and ducks into the narrow passage between her house and the DeFonzies’.
≠
The whole house.
I’ll tear down the whole goddamn house.
I will.
I’m just about to do it when I hear the front door.
“Mama,” I say. She’s walking between the houses. I will her to stay.
“Don’t go, Mama. Wait. Wait for me.”
∀
If she paused long enough, Abby could easily put her hands out and touch both houses. It’s cool there, between the homes. Always in shadow. And peaceful in fits and starts. Abigail regularly hears Tina rattling pots and pans in the kitchen, cooking dinner for her husband and kids. She hears the girl giggling and playing games in her bedroom. She hears the boy screaming in the tub. She hears Tim urinating. More. He disgusts her. He fascinates her. Those times when Abigail is sitting on her toilet and realizes he is right across the way, just over a thin transom of emptiness, close enough to reach out and touch, that realization makes her stomach heave, her heart clutch. Abigail wants only to stave off the wickedness from within, the wickedness from without, until the Lord swoops down and scoops her up into his arms, his Heaven.
Abigail hears Tim and Tina fight. She hears them, what, fornicate. There’s no other word: Fornicate holds the necessary judgment. Abigail always tries to pee quietly. And she and Burns haven’t argued, or anything else, in years. Once Burns saw her linger at the window, saw Tim DeFonzie lifting weights in the backyard. Glistening. Golden. They fought, Abigail and Burns. They may or may not have fornicated.
There is no pause this morning as Abigail rushes through the still shaft of emptiness and into the already blaring sunlight. Hurrying.
“Hey,” Tim DeFonzie says from his weight bench.
The neighbor works, part-time, at Joy Plaque & Trophy. He works, full-time and shirtless, doing bench presses and squats and dumbbell curls in the makeshift gym he set up beneath a blue plastic tarp in the backyard. Through the DeFonzie mudroom window Abigail sees a shelf full of trophies from lifting competitions. The miniature figures atop each trophy—faux-gold and perfectly featureless—are obscenely greedy in capturing the morning sunlight. She wouldn’t put it past Tim DeFonzie to have stolen some of them from work. He is a Catholic, after all.
“You had a visitor,” Tim says. He settles the barbell into its rack and sits up. “Some lady in a suit knocked on your door.”
There is substance to his chest and shoulders, girth to his arms, lean definition everywhere else. And the tattoo on his chest. The Sacred Heart. Crimson and dripping. Wrapped in thorns. A halo of flame. But Abigail Augenbaugh will not look. She will not. She knows, too, that buried in the sweaty thatch of black hair raging up what are surely his high-school gym shorts, all the way up to his throat, and dangling from a heavy chain around his neck, is a thick gold crucifix, with the suffering Savior rendered in exquisite detail. But Abigail refuses to look. She looks at her own feet, the sensible shoes. She looks across the DeFonzie yard to the Virgin Mary statue, sheltered in a sky-blue grotto Tim made by cutting a bathtub in half with a torch.
Abigail fingers the latch on her purse. She ought to just reach in, get a tract, and shove it in Tim DeFonzie’s face. She ought to look him in the eye. She ought to.
“Hey Abigail,” someone says. It’s Tina. She leans out of her back door, half-hidden by the screen.
Abigail Augenbaugh knows that Tina DeFonzie wears “lingerie.” That she has a tattoo as well. On her shoulder. Some words, and a child’s face. The tattoo is a near-photographic likeness of their other son, the boy who drowned last summer. Or was it two summers ago?
Abigail knows the DeFonzies send their living children to Catholic school, and that the pending Rapture is going to leave them behind. Tim DeFonzie scratches roughly at his inner thigh, then contorts to stretch some specific muscle group. Still, Abigail refuses to look. She opens and closes, then opens and closes again, the flap of her purse.
“If she comes back, I’ll tell her you moved,” Tim says, smiling.
Abigail hurries to the Celebrity, pretending to unlock the door despite the fact that the lock hasn’t worked since they bought the car. The rectangular hole in the middle of the dashboard, where the radio was before Burns pawned it, gapes like a mouth. Vein-like wires spill from within. Just before starting the engine, she hears it speak. Or maybe it’s Tina.
“You want potted meat for lunch, Timmy?”
≠
No!
No!
No!
I hate them.
I hate everybody.
I’ll run. I’ll catch her. I’ll run all the way to Slinky.
I go downstairs. She’s gone. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid woman. I find her card. It says her name. Out loud. I hear it speak. I eat the card. I am hungry. I eat the card. I eat her stupid name. I choke. I swallow. I eat the card. I am still hungry. I remember her name. I want my mama. I’ll run and catch her. I’ll run until I find her. I will. I’ll run over the stupid neighbors. I’ll run over anybody that gets in my way. I’ll run so fast. So fast. The roads will melt under my feet. When I get there, I’ll tell her about my lie. She’ll put cool rags on my feet. She’ll kiss me. She’ll forgive me. We’ll start over.
∀
Abigail parks the Celebrity in the gravel lot along the side wall of the Slinky plant. She walks, head down and stoop-shouldered, beneath the rusted awning and through the windowless employee door. For years, for decades, she has made this same walk. She walks into the single-story, aluminum-sided behemoth of a building that all but consumes a flat parcel of
land pinched between the Little Juniata River and the eroding base of an unnamed, laurel-choked ridge that rises several hundred feet above the roofline.
She tries to leave her struggles, her worries, at the door. Slinky is about fun.
The railroad track and a narrow access road share the slender space along the front of the property. At the south end of the factory three chemical storage tanks rise over the roof; their blunt oxidized domes nudge at the sky. On the remaining land to the north, just beyond the loading docks, a salvage yard with its mountainous heaps of rusting metal, the prehistoric cranes that roam there chewing deep oily ruts with their rattling steel caterpillar tracks, commands the earth. For all Abigail ever knew, the Slinkys she spent her days boxing had former incarnations as Pontiacs, Schwinns, and Frigidaires.
Way back when Slinky was all the rage, the factory expanded, biting farther into the cliff to make room for increased production. Now, every so often, a chunk of the crumbling scarp will fall and half-bury the patio and a couple unstable picnic tables—used mostly by smokers—wedged between the rear of the building and the wall of earth. So far, no one has been killed.
Abigail enters.
Abigail pauses with her time card at the mouth of the punch clock. It feels like an eternity. All of it. Her pause. The years stacked upon years she’s punched that very same clock. It was not the plan. It was never the plan. To spend so much of her life clocking in and out at the Slinky plant. The length of the day stretching out before her. And the few days left until, until real eternity begins.
Abigail puts her purse in the break-room locker, then tries to sneak past the supervisor’s office window.
“Mrs. Augenbaugh,” he says.
≠
I’ll run all the way. Except that when I get to the door I hear the stupid neighbors.
I hate them. I hate them all. I hate everybody. I go back to the kitchen. I am quiet. Daddy sleeps during the day. There are little clots of paper in my teeth. I want to tell Daddy about them. He’s in the basement. I want to ask him about the end of the world. Is he going with us? Is he going with Mama? To Heaven. I hear no sound, but I know he’s there. I’m not going to school today. I’m never going to school again. I’m hungry. I have to catch Mama. The cereal box is empty. There’s some jelly in the fridge, one stale cracker in the cabinet. I hear the stupid neighbors slam their back door. The woman yells for them to hurry. Daddy calls her slut. She has a tattoo. I like her tattoo. I wish I had a tattoo. She waved at me, one time. One time, she gave me chewing gum. Slut. The man walks down the sidewalk out of sight. His wadded shirt hangs out of his back pocket. He’s an asshole. Daddy calls him asshole. I am strong. I can run him over, if I want to. I can destroy him. Stupid asshole. Stupid Jesus tattoo. They have kids. Stupid kids. One time we found a dead rabbit. We put it in a shoebox. We prayed. It stayed dead.
Joy, PA Page 3
