The Extinction Event (27 page)

She took and sent him a picture of her breasts. Sent a second, a picture of her cunt, spreading her lips—the labia majora, the labia minora. Her own private constellations. The Big and Little Dipper.

Her cell phone pinged.

Jack texted back,
Wanted to make sure Bix got away
.

Her phone pinged again—a response to the photograph of her cunt.

The universe in a grain of sand
, Jack texted.

Her phone pinged again.
As above so below.

Her phone pinged again.
Lie down
.

Naked, she did.

Jack opened her bedroom door. He crossed the room and knelt between her legs.

She smelled like rain water. And tasted like the sweet syrup Jack used to suck from wax straws when he was a kid.

From the hallway, Nicole called, “Caroline…?”

Caroline's breathing was hard, loud, throaty.

“Are you okay?” Nicole asked, close to the door.

Jack felt Caroline's solar plexus pump in and out with her breathing.

Nicole knocked.

Jack buried his face deeper between Caroline's thighs. Caroline gasped.

“You don't sound so good,” Nicole said, opening the door. She stood for a moment trying to understand what she was seeing, then quickly backed out, saying, “My bad,” and softly closed the door behind her.

*   *   *

After they made love, as they were curled in each other's arms, Caroline's head against Jack's chest, she said, “The universe in a grain of sand.”

Jack's sweat smelled smoky. Pleasantly acrid.

“He's my favorite poet,” she said. “Blake.…”

She could hear Jack's heart beating. She lifted her head slightly and pushed back her hair, so she could hear Jack's heart louder.

“When I'm old and married,” she said, “I want to be like Blake and his wife, sitting together naked in our garden, surrounded by angels.”

“In the sixties,” Jack said, “early seventies, there was a rock group, The Fugs, I used to hear in the East Village. They sang a song from Blake.…”

Softly, Jack sang, “Sunflower, weary of time…”

“In London,” Caroline said, “at the church—I think St. James's Church—where Blake was baptized, the base of the baptismal font is made up of a carved Adam and Eve and serpent, like a Blake print. I think when Blake was a baby and they sprinkled water on him, it must have been so cold, he opened his eyes and saw,
saw
the carved base, and Adam and Eve and the serpent were imprinted on his imagination.”

“The head of the Fugs,” Jack said, “Ed Sanders—he had a bookstore, the Peace Eye Bookstore, I hung out at. I used to wander through Tompkins Square Park, high on acid. Knowing most of the people I passed were high on acid, too. A lot of trust. No one worried about getting ripped off. Getting strung out. Getting old.…”

Jack kissed the top of Caroline's head.

“Why worry?” Jack said. “It didn't matter. Nothing mattered. We all thought the world was coming to an end.… Which meant, I guess, no consequences. Or our little consequences were swallowed up in Big Consequences! The Bomb. The Age of Aquarius. The end of reality. If you took enough acid, the whole world, everything, was going to change the day after tomorrow.”

“When Dixie's gone,” Caroline said, “you'll protect us. You'll protect me.”

“From what?” Jack asked.

“The day after tomorrow,” Caroline said.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

1

Fat drops plopped around Jack and Caroline as they hurried toward the county fair.

“I feel like I've been let out of school,” Caroline said.

“I figured you needed a break,” Jack said, “and Bix is right. The fair is the last place the Cowboy—or whoever—is likely to be. Too many people. Too little privacy.”

“Bix really wants you to be in the demolition derby,” Caroline said.

“I haven't missed one since my first, when I was nineteen,” Jack said. “Anyway, no one'll be crazy enough to try a hit here.”

Caroline was silent.

“What?” Jack asked.

“A crowd like this,” Caroline said, “is where I'd make my move.”

“You're not a killer, Five Spot,” Jack said, adding when he saw her expression, “I'll keep my eyes open.”

Dixie and Nicole lagged behind them.

Wind rattled the chain-link fence enclosing the field filled with the clunkers painted and numbered for the demolition derby.

From a radio in the Boy Scout encampment, Jack heard a report of the approaching storm:
Sixty thousand homes without power … dumping torrential rains … heading northeast at twelve miles per hour …

Before lunch, Bix had made two trips to bring his car and Jack's to the fair.

“You be back here by four, Jackie,” Bix said.

A red cloth sign tied to a wooden fence said:
Budweiser Welcomes You
. Next to it was another sign:
Seventh-Day Adventist Church at Kinderhook—Sabbath Services—Saturday—Salvation Is Free—No Strings Attached
. More signs:
4-H Archery; Olde Chatman Kettle Corn; Verizon Wireless Zone; Fresh Cold Cider Here; Face Painting; Chair Massage—10 Min = $10.
… Yellow diamond-shaped gag traffic signs warned:
Cattle Xing, Donkey Xing, Tractor Xing, Llama Xing, Pussycat Xing, Marines Xing, Snow Mobile Xing
.…

The midway was crowded. People wore Cowboy hats, baseball caps, held newspapers over their heads, used plastic garbage bags as makeshift ponchos, ignored the rain.…

But no Cowboy, Jack thought.

A burly man with red hair on his arms wore a blue shirt with cut-off sleeves. His daughter? Girlfriend? Wife?—it was hard to tell which—wore a T-shirt that said
Jeter 2.
An older man wearing a bright-orange slicker and a large Canon camera bellied up to the
Free engraving while-u-wait tent: Baby bracelets—anklets—Dog tags.
A woman with fat arms wearing a lime green top and white pants examined the ABATE of New York motorcyclists display:
Dedicated to the Freedom of the Road.
An elderly biker with a graying ponytail wore a shirt with a cartoon of a Hells Angel on a Harley and the motto
Ya Hated Us—Now Ya Wannabe Us
.

Down the way was another biker stand:
The National Coalition of Motorcyclists. NCOM. Region VIII.
A sign proclaimed:
A UNITED VOICE FOR ALL BIKERS
with a map of the United States overlaid with two shaking hands. A biker with a beer belly was handing out business cards.

Next to that was a tent with American flag bunting and a black POW-MIA flag, which whipped in the wind so hard it sounded like gun shots.

Jack scanned faces: No Cowboy.

State troopers strolled by in twos—as did county sheriffs, local police, and fair security. Guys and gals wore matching camo pants. Towering above the crowd were kids on fathers' shoulders, faces smeared with ice cream and red dye from the candied apples.

At the Columbia County Sportsmen's Federation booth, a stuffed fox with an old man's narrow, withered face gazed across the path at a four-foot-tall, fanged, cross-eyed, and goofily grinning stuffed bear. A chimney sweep—Dr. Soot-n-Cinders—advertised a free exorcism for sick houses with every job. Everyone passing was reflected in the lenses of a hundred sunglasses arrayed on a long table.

The air smelled of frying sausage and onions, deep-fried dough, spun sugar candy, mud, and manure. Under a glass window, ruby heat lamps glowed over pizzas. A tall woman with perfect features shot out her lower jaw to catch the sauerkraut dripping from her hot dog roll. A seven-year-old boy gnawed on a turkey drumstick almost as large as his fist and forearm. A jarhead in a muscle shirt wore spaghetti sauce like war paint.

Two men in kilts, sporrans, with mud-spattered knee socks played bagpipes and paraded through the crowd, followed by three more men in kilts, one carrying crossed swords, one carrying a bottle of scotch on a silver platter, and the third carrying a large tray with what looked like two damp, overstuffed maroon socks: Haggis.

“Have you ever tried it?” Caroline asked Jack. “You know how you sometimes bite your tongue and taste the blood? That's what haggis tastes like.”

A blue kids' plastic wading pool empty of water was weighted down by a cinder block. The wind snapped banners decorating the US Army recruiting stand. Behind one food stand were a dozen fifty-pound bags of potatoes. Two sheared sheep lay in their pen dressed in white robes and white hoods with nose holes, eye holes, and ear holes. They looked like bovid Ku Klux Klan members. The insides of their ears were pink.

Rustic chairs and gliders, whirlpool hot tubs, leather vests, vacuum cleaners, satellite dishes, strings of colored beads, teddy bears, and signed baseballs were ranged along the path for sale. So was the farm machinery, forklifts, big Cats, and small John Deeres.

“You're jumpy,” Jack told Caroline.

“I keep seeing cowboy hats,” Caroline said.

“You get that at a county fair,” Jack said.

People tried to pop balloons with darts, shoot water into bull's-eyes, and toss rings around knives. They threw pennies into goldfish bowls, shot BBs at targets, and played Whack-A-Mole. There were rocket-ship rides, Tilt-A-Whirls, a haunted house, a carousel, bumper cars. A zoo designed like Noah's Ark with real animals that looked like worn-out stuffed toys.

Looking at all the rides, all the colored girders, Dixie murmured, “It's a Jules Verne world.”

All around the fair were scarecrows—farmer scarecrows, marrying scarecrows, sleeping scarecrows, even an alien scarecrow with almond eyes and a red bandana. A busty angel with a pouty porn-star's face hovered over the entrance to one of the exhibit buildings.

In one pen display chickens strutted, their crests like elaborate hats. Ducks quacked around a mud puddle dimpled by rain. Flop-eared rabbits glared red-eyed at the passersby. A nine-year-old boy led a cow through the throng toward the
Salute to Agriculture Tent and Dairy Birthing Center
.

A Culligan water purification salesman competed for attention with the woman behind the apiary booth. A man in a gold-colored jacket from the Pro-Life Booth—which displayed gallon jars with what looked like real fetuses—argued with a woman from the Pro-Choice Booth across the way.

“You're against slavery, aren't you,” the pro-life man said. “It's a moral issue.”

“But not a legislative one,” the pro-choice woman said.

“I've known you since I was a kid,” the man said. “You baby-sat me.”

“What's that got to do with anything?” the woman said. “And I think your display—those fetuses—is obscene.”

“You're like those people who eat meat,” the man said, “but don't want to know where meat comes from!”

“You're comparing fetuses to meat!” the woman said. “I'll tell you what, that's all I need to know, to know you're so wrong.”

“When I was nine years old,” the man said, “I had such a crush on you.”

“Get over it,” the woman said.

“I did,” the man said. “Long ago.”

As they argued, step-by-step they approached each other, leaving their displays behind.

“So,” the man said, “on your break, we'll go to Perozzi's stand and get some dinner.…”

“Let's go to the Legion tent,” the woman said. “They got platters.”

Next to them was a stand that sold bumper stickers—
Rehab is for Quitters
—and T-shirts—
This is your brain
with a Yankees logo;
This is your brain on drugs
with a Red Sox logo.
Get famous get $
.
I may not be Mr. Right, but I'll fuck you 'til he comes along
.

At a display of different kinds of apples from upstate New York, Nicole polished a Cortland against her shirt and handed it to Caroline, who took a bite and offered it to Jack.

“No, thanks, Eve,” Jack said to Caroline.

“Superstitious?” Nicole asked, grabbing another apple and polishing it before taking a bite. “If she's Eve, that makes me the serpent.”

“Nicole,” Jack said, “sometimes you can be a real pain in the ass.”

“So,” Nicole said, a fleck of apple sticking to her lower lip, “if Caroline is tossed out of Eden, you'll stay happy and comfortable inside? What a gentleman.”

Jack grabbed the apple from Caroline, took a bite, and made a face.

“Too tart?” Nicole asked with a smirk.

2

To get away from Nicole, Caroline pulled Jack over to the haunted house. A car emerged from the exit, snapped around the turn, and stopped in front of them. They climbed in, pulled the safety bar down. With a jerk, the car started along the track and entered the urine-smelling tunnel. Caroline leaned her head on Jack's shoulder—and jerked up when a skeleton fell toward them.

Laughing, she snuggled back against Jack, squeezing shut her eyes.

“You're missing the ghosts,” Jack said.

“Are there any vampires?” Caroline asked.

“Just one,” Jack said. “And a Frankenstein monster. And a werewolf.”

“I can hear it howling,” Caroline said.

A moon on a wire rattled toward them in a collision course. Their car made a ninety-degree turn just before the crash.

“Tell me when it's over,” Caroline said.

The car stopped at the entrance to the mirror maze.

“You can open your eyes,” Jack said.

Caroline did.

“Why did you want to go on the ride if it scared you so much?” Jack asked.

“I like being scared,” Caroline said. “Like a horror movie. When it's over, I feel safer.”

They got out of the car, which continued on its way toward the exit, and entered the mirror maze. They were alone, the only people in the maze. Within a few minutes they were separated by glass panels, confused by the multiplying images, unsure which Jack or Caroline they should turn to, talk to, which were the real bodies and which were the reflections.