The Apocalypse Reader (11 page)

I SAID THEY were always there, but actually there were times when nobody knew why-the crane left its post to rove through the city. When we saw that black arm raised above our shacks, our nerves trilled, but whether in fear or welcome we didn't know. If we dreaded the sight of the crane, why did we strain so hard to make out the silhouette of the operator in his cab?

The operator and the hook often appear merged in our dreams, as a familiar stranger with one deformed hand, or a page of type on which one word is misspelled.

FROM Loss's HUT comes a scream: "Oh-Oh-Oh!" Travis looks at me apprehensively, but when I don't react, he goes back to playing. When we go out later we see Loss outside her hut, upending bottles on wires stuck in the ground, to dry. Travis stops in his tracks, looking at her, then starts running around like crazy.

Next time we hear Loss scream, Travis says, "What's Loss doing?"

"Fucking," I say. Why not tell him? He will be fucking someone himself before long. I can't say I like the idea, but it's so. But then I regret saying it, because he looks so miserable. Did he really not know what Loss was doing? Or did he hope that I didn't know? I wonder what "fucking" means to him. Should I explain it? Or will that just make things worse?

I'M NOT Loss, but I get lonely too. One night, I went to the hook. On the embankment above the lot, I found a slit in the fence, one of several I knew of. Nobody bothered to repair them: the fire did not need protecting, though the gate was kept locked all the same. On the other side, I banged my ankle on what my fingers informed me was a jutting slab of asphalt rubble. "
Hook
," I ejaculated, and proceeded at a stoop, waving my hands gently before me. I descended a creaking slope of corrugated fiberglass roofing on my butt. Rising, I booted something light that my hands had missed, and heard it
boing
off into the blackness, and almost saw it, a pale bounding form, probably a plastic jug. Then the ground leveled out to a gritty pavement, glinting with tiny fires. Finally I looked at the fire directly, and stopped. I couldn't go on; the fire was so bright, I couldn't see anything else. I was like a dark planet, suspended in groundless blackness, in eternal contemplation of a sun.

The fire was emitting a continuous throaty groan. Skeins of dark vapors unspooled from a thousand sources in the mound and swirled in the middle air, gathering themselves only reluctantly into the larger body of smoke that rose, leaning slightly, from the fire. Underlit with orange, it seemed an almost solid body, a never-ending turd of giant proportions. Where the light gave out, though, beyond the huge, hieratic shape of the hook and the faintly outlined geometry of the crane's arm, it disappeared into the night sky whose blackness elsewhere seemed transparent. It seemed that the night was all smoke, that this was how night was made.

Eyes a little accustomed to the darkness again, I looked down. A silhouetted dog, invisible before-or maybe simply not there; startled by my approach, she had just now returned to her post-was pacing back and forth in front of the blaze, long teats swinging despite her thinness, skinny tail clinging to her flanks, as if protecting her from a blow so long anticipated that reflex had become habit. Sometimes she stopped with paw raised, considering something at the very edge of the fire, then shied, eyes kindling as she wheeled.

I took a few steps. As I approached she got agitated, looking back and forth between me and the fire, her forelegs high-stepping. Finally she pawed at the fire, letting out an almost simultaneous yelp. Something at which I didn't want to look too closely rolled a little way out of the flames. Hunching, she closed her jaw on it, released it, shaking her jowls, rolled her eyes at me, then clamped her jaw on it, and cantered with it, whining softly, into the shadows under the crane.

I followed slowly. I did not want to seem like I was chasing her, laying a rival claim to her treat. I felt for her, and anyway, she looked hungry enough to fight me for it.

The shadow of the crane made a black pool in which I could barely make out the step up to the cab. I saw the dog's illumined eyes, farther under. They watched me steadily. "Betsy?" I said experimentally. The two lights burned clear.

I felt for the handhold I knew was there and swung myself up onto the step. I tapped on the door, but it was already opening. The crane operator welcomed me wordlessly, as if he had expected me. There was a strong smell in the cab, smoky, meaty. I shuddered and forced myself to breathe freely. The crane operator opened his stinking coat and took me under it, and we went down, awkwardly, to the floor. His body was surprisingly smooth and hot. I thought of Travis, the only body I ever touched now, though less and less often these days.

Even inside the cab, I could feel the heat of the fire. The roof was redly aglow. Light crazed the smeary windshield. Finally, I was warm.

OUR CONGRESS WAS satisfactory, save for one moment, when a sudden chill on my slobbered pussy made me open my eyes. He had lifted his head, the cables of his neck ashine. I looked at him with surprise. I had forgotten he had a face. "What's your name?" he said.

I thought a minute. "Rose," I said.

His face began to have the businesslike expression of a man who is introducing himself. I heaved up my hips to confront his mouth with what he had forsaken, at which his eyes crossed. Then, perceiving that was not enough, I heaved up my knees and clamped my thighs on his head, so that he fell forward with a surprised huff into my pubic hair, where whatever he might have told me became hot air. He went back to his good work and I lazed my eyes up to the corrugated roof and then closed them again, thinking I did not want to know his name, or whether I might have known him before he became the crane operator. I wanted the crane operator, that's all.

IT WAS NOT yet even close to dawn, but a bluer light began to fill the cabin. Through the windshield I could just make out what had been invisible at night, the smoke. Actually, when I looked at it directly, I could not see it, but when I looked away there it was, black against the blue. I lay and watched it become visible as the sky paled. It rose straight up through the windless air.

The crane operator was a silent hot weight on my shoulder. I drew my arm slowly out from under him. He didn't wake. I sat up and looked at him, pulling the end of his coat over my knees. I was afraid I might see something disgusting, in the cool light, a scab at the hairline, or something gummy stuck in his hair, but there was nothing like that. He looked peaceful. I got dressed and climbed over him to get out. The cab door cawed and cool smoky air flowed in, but he didn't wake up, so I just left. I didn't see the dog.

My feet seemed very loud as I crunched and rattled through the rubble past slumbering huts. A lone dog woofed once.

I lifted the flap of our hut and came into the sweet smell of Travis sleeping.

A DEAD MAN and woman are draped together over the hook. As first the woman, then the man, is draped over the hook, I feel the cab adjust slightly to their weight; slight as it is, it changes the balance of the whole system, as my presence in the cab must also. The crane operator throws a lever, shifts into reverse. The cab bucks. Despite the operator's violent movements, the grinding of gears, and the lurching of the cab, the movements of the hook itself are smooth and languorous, all abrupt movements damped by the long, heavy cable. The crane operator seems to know where the hook is without looking, as if it were part of his own body.

The couple rise, swinging in a smooth arc over the pyre, where the smoke conceals them. He brakes before they are quite over the pyre, lets the momentum of the crane, the hook, its burden carry them into the smoke. They are engulfed, but a moment later reappear below the smoke, descending through the silvery miasma of the incandescent air. They are sheeny, quicksilver.

Her dress is on fire. One minute it wasn't, the next, she is burning. Her hair is a torch. His too. I don't want to watch anymore.

I look at the operator. He is absorbed. The cab settles as the hook lowers some of its weight onto the pyre. He jiggles two levers at once, his face unreadable. Then, though I detected no change, he throws one back, and the hook soars free.

"My name isn't Rose," I said. "It's Rebecca."