The Inhuman Condition

  There was an evasive quality to the light in the room. It distressed her, and she wanted to close her lids against its tricks. Only moments before, the light had conjured a mirage at the end of the bed; a moth-wing flicker of substance that had almost congealed in the air before flitting away.

  Over by the window, John was again reading under his breath. At first, she caught only a few of the words.

  "And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth..." She instantly recognized the passage; its imagery was unmistakable.

  "...and unto them was given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power."

  The verse was from The Revelations of St. John the Divine. She knew the words that followed by heart. He had declaimed them time after time at meetings.

  "And it was commanded them that they should not hurt the grass of the earth, neither any green thing, neither any tree; but only those men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads."

  Gyer loved Revelations. He read it more often than the Gospels, whose stories he knew by heart but whose words did not ignite him the way the incantatory rhythms of Revelations did. When he preached Revelations, he shared the apocalyptic vision and felt exulted by it. His voice would take on a different note. The poetry, instead of coming out of him, came through him. Helpless in its grip, he rose on a spiral of ever more awesome metaphor: from angels to dragons and thence to Babylon, the Mother of Harlots, sitting upon a scarlet-colored beast.

  Virginia tried to shut the words out. Usually, to hear her husband speak the poems of Revelations was a joy to her, but not tonight. Tonight the words seemed ripe to the point of corruption, and she sensed-perhaps for the first time-that he didn't really understand what he was saying; that the spirit of the words passed him by while he recited them. She made a small, unintentional noise of complaint. Gyer stopped reading.

  "What is it?" he said.

  She opened her eyes, embarrassed to have interrupted him.

  "Nothing," she said.

  "Does my reading disturb you?" he wanted to know. The inquiry was a challenge, and she backed down from it.

  "No," she said. "No, of course not."

  In the doorway between the two rooms, Sadie watched Virginia's face. The woman was lying of course, the words did disturb her. They disturbed Sadie too, but only because they seemed so pitifully melodramatic: a drug-dream of Armageddon, more comical than intimidating.

  "Tell him," she advised Virginia. "Go on. Tell him you don't like it."

  "Who are you talking to?" Buck said. "They can't hear you.

  Sadie ignored her husband's remarks. "Go on," she said to Virginia. "Tell the bastard."

  But Virginia lust lay there while Gyer took up the passage again, its absurdities escalating.

  "And the shapes of the locusts were unto horses prepared unto battle; and on their heads were as it were crowns like gold, and their faces were as the faces of men."

  "And they had hair as the hair of women, and their teeth were as the teeth of lions."

  Sadie shook her head: comic-book terrors, fit to scare children with. Why did people have to die to grow out of that kind of nonsense?

  "Tell him," she said again. "Tell him how ridiculous he sounds."

  Even as the words left her lips, Virginia sat up on the bed and said: "John?"

  Sadie stared at her, willing her on. "Say it. Say it."

  "Do you have to talk about death all the time. It's very depressing."

  Sadie almost applauded. It wasn't quite the way she would have put it, but each to their own.

  "What did you say?" Gyer asked her, assuming he'd heard incorrectly. Surely she wasn't challenging him?

  Virginia put a trembling hand up to her lips, as if to cancel the words before they came again, but they came nevertheless.

  "Those passages you read. I hate them. They're so..."

  "Stupid," Sadie prompted.

  unpleasant," Virginia said.

  "Are you coming to bed or not?" Buck wanted to know.

  "In a moment," Sadie replied over her shoulder. "I just want to see what happens in here."

  "Life isn't a soap opera," Buck chimed in. Sadie was about to beg to differ, but before she had a chance the evangelist had approached Virginia's bed, Bible in hand.

  "This is the inspired word of the Lord, Virginia," he said.

  "I know John. But there are other passages

  "I thought you liked the Apocalypse."

  "No," she said, "it distresses me."

  "You're tired," he replied.

  "Oh yes," Sadie interjected, "that's what they always tell you when you get too close to the truth. 'You're tired,' they say, 'why don't you take a little nap?"'

  "Why don't you sleep for a while?" Gyer said. "I'll go next door and work."

  Virginia met her husband's condescending look for fully five seconds, then nodded.

  "Yes," she conceded, "I am tired."

  "Foolish woman," Sadie told her. "Fight back, or he'll do the same again. Give them an inch and they take half the damn state."

  Buck appeared behind Sadie. "I've asked you once," he said, taking her arm, "we re here to make friends. So let's get to it. He pulled her away from the door, rather more roughly than was necessary. She shrugged off his hand.

  "There's no need for violence, Buck," she said.

  "Ha! That's rich, coming from you," Buck said with a humorless laugh. "You want to see violence?" Sadie turned away from Virginia to look at her husband. "This is violence," he said. He had taken off his jacket; now he pulled his unbuttoned shirt open to reveal the shot wound. At such close quarters Sadie's .38 had made a sizeable hole in Buck's chest, scorched and bloody. It was as fresh as the moment he died. He put his finger to it as if indicating the Sacred Heart. "You see that, sweetheart mine? You made that."

  She peered at the hole with no little interest. It certainly was a permanent mark; about the only one she'd ever made on the man, she suspected.

  "You cheated from the beginning, didn't you?" she said.

  "We're not talking about cheating, we're talking about shooting," Buck returned.

  "Seems to me one subject leads to the other," Sadie replied. "And back again."

  Buck narrowed his already narrow eyes at her. Dozens of women had found that look irresistible, to judge by the numbers of anonymous mourners at his funeral. "All right," he said, "I had women. So what?"

  "So I shot you for it," Sadie replied flatly. That was about all she had to say on the subject. It had made for a short trial.

  "Well at least tell me you're sorry," Buck burst out.

  Sadie considered the proposition for a few moments and said: "But I'm not!" She realized the response lacked tact, but it was the unavoidable truth. Even as they'd strapped her into the electric chair, with the priest doing his best to console her lawyer, she hadn't regretted the way things had turned out.

  "This whole thing is useless," Buck said. "We came here to make peace and you can't even say you're sorry. You're a sick woman, you know that? You always were. You pried into my business, you snooped around behind my back-"

  "I did not snoop," Sadie replied firmly "Your dirt came and found me."

  "Dirt?"

  "Oh yes, Buck, dirt. It always was with you. Furtive and sweaty."

  He grabbed hold of her. "Take that back!" he demanded.

  "You used to frighten me once," she replied coolly. "But then I bought a gun."

  He thrust her away from him. "All right," he said, "don't say I didn't try. I wanted to see if we could forgive and forget, I really did. But you're not willing to give an inch, are you?" He fingered his wound as he spoke, his voice softening. "We could have had a good time here tonight, babe," he murmured. "Just you and me. I could have given you a bit of the old jazz, you know what I mean? Time was, you wouldn't have said no.

  She sighed softly. What he said was true. Time was she would have taken what little he gave her and counted herself a blessed woman. But times had changed.

  "
Come on, babe. Loosen up," he said smokily, and began to unbutton his shirt completely, pulling it out of his trousers. His belly was bald as a baby's. "What say we forget what you said and lie down and talk?"

  She was about to reply to his suggestion when the door of Room Seven opened and in came the man with the soulful eyes accompanied by a woman whose face rang a bell in Sadie's memory.

  "Ice water," Earl said. Sadie watched him move across the room. There'd not been a man as fine as that in Wichita Falls; not that she could remember anyway. He almost made her want to live again.

  "Are you going to get undressed?" Buck asked from the room behind her.

  "In a minute, Buck. We've got all night, for Christ's sake."

  "I'm Laura May Cade," the woman with the familiar face said as she set the ice water down on the table.

  Of course, thought Sadie, you're little Laura May. The girl had been five or six when Sadie was last here; an odd, secretive child, full of sly looks. The intervening years had matured her physically, but the strangeness was still in evidence in her slightly off-center features. Sadie turned to Buck, who was sitting on the bed untying his shoes.

  "Remember the little girl?" she said. "The one who you gave a quarter to, just to make her go away?"

  "What about her?"

  "She's here."

  "That so?" he replied, clearly uninterested.

  Laura May had poured the water and was now taking the glass across to Virginia.

  "It's real nice having you folks here," she said. "We don't get much happening here. Just the occasional tornado..."

  Gyer nodded to Earl, who produced a five-dollar bill and gave it to Laura May. She thanked him, saying it wasn't necessary, then took the bill. She wasn't to be bribed into leaving, however.

  "This kind of weather makes people feel real peculiar," she went on.

  Earl could predict what subject was hovering behind Laura May's lips. He'd already heard the bones of the story on the way across, and knew Virginia was in no mood to hear such a tale.

  "Thank you for the water-" he said, putting a hand on Laura May's arm to usher her through the door. But Gyer cut

  in.

  "My wife's been suffering from heat exhaustion," he said. "You should be careful, ma'am," Laura May advised Virginia, "people do some mighty weird things-"

  "Like what?" Virginia asked.

  "1 don't think we-" Earl began, but before he could say "want to hear," Laura May casually replied:

  "Oh, murder mostly."

  Virginia looked up from the glass of ice water in which her focus had been immersed.

  "Murder?" she said.

  "Hear that?" said Sadie, proudly. "She remembers."

  "In this very room," Laura May managed to blurt before Earl forcibly escorted her out.

  "Wait," Virginia said as the two figures disappeared through the door. "Earl! I want to hear what happened."

  "No you don't," Gyer told her.

  "Oh yes she does," said Sadie very quietly, studying the look on Virginia's face. "You'd really like to know, wouldn't you, Ginnie?"

  For a moment pregnant with possibilities, Virginia looked away from the outside door and stared straight through into Room Eight, her eyes seeming to rest on Sadie. The look was so direct it could almost have been one of recognition. The ice in her glass tinkled. She frowned.

  "What's wrong?" Gyer asked her.

  Virginia shook her head.

  "I asked you what was wrong," Gyer insisted.

  Virginia put down her glass on the bedside table. After a moment she said very simply: "There's somebody here, John."

  "What do you mean?"

  "There's somebody in the room with us. I heard voices before. Raised voices."

  "Next door," Gyer said.

  "No, from Earl's room.

  "It's empty. It must have been next door."

  Virginia was not to be silenced with logic. "I heard voices, I tell you. And I saw something at the end of the bed. Something in the air."

  "Oh my Jesus," said Sadie, under her breath. "The goddamn woman's psychic."

  Buck stood up. He was naked now but for his shorts. He wandered over to the interconnecting door to look at Virginia with new appreciation.

  "Are you sure?" he said.

  "Hush," Sadie told him, moving out of Virginia's line of vision. She said she could see us.

  "You're not well, Virginia," Gyer was saying in the next room. "It's those pills he fed you..

  "No," Virginia replied, her voice rising. "When will you stop talking about the pills? They were just to calm me down, help me sleep."

  She certainly wasn't calm now, thought Buck. He liked the way she trembled as she tried to hold back her tears. She looked in need of some of the old jazz, did poor Virginia. Now that would help her sleep.

  "I tell you I can see things," she was telling her husband.

  "That I can't?" Gyer replied incredulously. "Is that what you're saying? That you can see visions the rest of us are blind to?"

  "I'm not proud of it, damn you," she yelled at him, incensed by this inversion.

  "Come away, Buck," Sadie said. "We're upsetting her. She knows we're here."

  "So what?" Buck responded. "Her prick of a husband doesn't believe her. Look at him. He thinks she's crazy."

  "Well we'll make her crazy if we parade around," said Sadie. "At least let's keep our voices down, huh?"

  Buck looked around at Sadie and offered up a dirty rag of a smile. "Want to make it worth my while?" he said sleazily. "I'll keep out of the way if you and me can have some fun."

  Sadie hesitated a moment before replying. It was probably perverse to reject Buck's advances. The man was an emotional infant and always had been. Sex was one of the few ways he could express himself. "All right, Buck," she said, "just let me freshen up and fix my hair."

  An uneasy truce had apparently been declared in Room Seven.

  "I'm going to take a shower, Virginia," Gyer said. "I suggest you lie down and stop making a fool of yourself. You go talking like that in front of people and you'll jeopardize the crusade, you hear me?"

  Virginia looked at her husband with clearer sight than she'd ever enjoyed before. "Oh yes," she said, without a trace of feeling in her voice, "I hear you."

  He seemed satisfied. He slipped off his jacket and went into the bathroom, taking his Bible with him. She heard the door lock, and then exhaled a long, queasy sigh. There would be recriminations aplenty for the exchange they'd just had. He would squeeze every last drop of contrition from her in the days to come. She glanced around at the interconnecting door. There was no longer any sign of those shadows in the air; not the least whisper of lost voices. Perhaps, just perhaps, she had imagined it. She opened her bag and rummaged for the bottles of pills hidden there. One eye on the bathroom door, she selected a cocktail of three varieties and downed them with a gulp of ice water. In fact, the ice in the jug had long since melted. The water she drank down was tepid, like the rain that fell relentlessly outside. By morning, perhaps the whole world would have been washed away. If it had, she mused, she wouldn't grieve.

  "I asked you not to mention the killing," Earl told Laura May. "Mrs. Gyer can't take that kind of talk."

  "People are getting killed all the time," Laura May replied, unfazed. "Can't go around with her head in a bucket."

  Earl said nothing. They had just gotten to the end of the walkway. The return sprint across the lot to the other building was ahead. Laura May turned to face him. She was several inches' the shorter of the two. Her eyes, turned up to his, were large and luminous. Angry as he was, he couldn't help but notice how full her mouth was, how her lips glistened.

  "I'm sorry," she said, "I didn't mean to get you into trouble."

  "Sure I know. I'm lust edgy."

  "It's the heat," she returned. "Like I said, puts thoughts into people's heads. You know." Her look wavered for a moment; a hint of uncertainty crossed her face. Earl could feel the back of his neck tingle. This was his cue, wasn
't it? She'd offered it unequivocally. But the words failed him. Finally, it was she who said: "Do you have to go back there right now?"

  He swallowed; his throat was dry. "Don't see why," he said. "I mean, I don't want to get between them when they're having words with each other."

  "Bad blood?" she asked.

  "I think so. I'm best leaving them to sort it out in peace. They don't want me."

  Laura May looked down from Earl's face. "Well I do," she breathed, the words scarcely audible above the thump of the rain.

  He put a cautious hand to her face and touched the down of her cheek. She trembled, ever so slightly. Then he bent his head to kiss her. She let him brush her lips with his.

  "Why don't we go to my room?" she said against his mouth. "I don't like it out here."

  "What about your Papa?"

  "He'll be dead drunk, by now. It's the same routine every night. Just take it quietly. He'll never know."

  Earl wasn't very happy with this game plan. It was more than his job was worth to be found in bed with Laura May. He was a married man, even if he hadn't seen Barbara in three months. Laura May sensed his trepidation.

  "Don't come if you don't want to," she said.

  "It's not that," he replied.

  As he looked down at her she licked her lips. It was a completely unconscious motion, he felt sure, but it was enough to decide him. In a sense, though he couldn't know it at the time, all that lay ahead-the farce, the bloodletting, the inevitable tragedy-pivoted on Laura May wetting her lower lip with such casual sensuality. "Ah shit," he said, "you're too much, you know that?"

  He bent to her and kissed her again, while somewhere over toward Skellytown the clouds gave out a loud roll of thunder, like a circus drummer before some particularly elaborate acrobatics.

  IN Room Seven Virginia was having bad dreams. The pills had not secured her a safe harbor in sleep. Instead she'd been pitched into a howling tempest. In her dreams she was clinging to a crippled tree-a pitiful anchor in such a maelstrom-while the wind threw cattle and automobiles into the air, sucking half the world up into the pitch black clouds that boiled