World's End (2 page)

Well. White bread was laid out on the plate, tomatoes were sliced, a cellophane-wrapped tube of liverwurst produced from the refrigerator. He had a daughter, Walter's grandmother said, and her name was Minewa, after the goddess of the river who hurled thunderbolts. She pointed out the window and across the broad back of the Hudson to where lightning sprang like nerve endings from the crown of Dunderberg. Like those.

One lazy August afternoon, a Mohawk brave strode into the village, naked but for his breechclout and painted like death and the devil. Tribute, he demanded, in a tongue that sounded like the thrashing of adders, and then he fell down in a swoon, blood pouring from his mouth and ears, and the pockmarks standing out on his face. Minewa nursed him. If he died, there would be no more oyster eating, no fooling around in bark canoes and plucking the sweet white meat from the cavities of blueclaw crabs: there would be no more Kitchawanks. The Mohawk would see to that.

For a month he lay prostrate in Sachoes' hut, his head cradled in Minewa's lap while she assuaged his fever with otter musk and fed
him herbs and wild onion. Gradually he began to regain his strength, until one day he was able to stand without support and repeat his demand for tribute. But this time it wasn't beaverskins or
wampumpeak
he wanted: it was Minewa. Sachoes was reluctant, but the Mohawk blustered and threatened and cut open his chest in three places to show his sincerity. He would take her to the north country and make her a queen. Of course, if Sachoes preferred, the brave would go home empty-handed and then return one starless night with a raiding party and cut up the Kitchawanks like dogs. Sachoes, who was shortly thereafter to be hoodwinked by the Dutch trader who founded Peterskill on the sacred rock where the chief's forefathers had watched Manitou's big woman descend to earth, said “Sure, take her.”

Two weeks later a party of Kitchawanks was combing the adjoining valley for acorns, chestnuts and rose hips when they came across the smoke of a cooking fire. With stealth, with courage and curiosity and not a little audacity—Manitou knows, it could have been the devil himself cooking up a plague—they approached the clearing from which the smoke rose into the sky like a capnomancer's dream. What they saw, Walter's grandmother said, spreading mayonnaise, was betrayal. What they saw was the Mohawk and Minewa, what was left of her. She was nothing from the waist down, his grandmother said, setting the sandwich before him—liverwurst, the texture and color, the very smell of flesh—nothing but bone.

If the images of mother and grandmother had been summoned by a tickle of the olfactory lobe, the ghost of his grandfather was more problematic. Perhaps it was a matter of association: once the pattern is established, one thing gives rise to another and the mind plays out memories like beads on a string. At any rate, in the heat of the afternoon, old Harmanus Van Brunt had materialized just to the left of the lathe, big-boned, big-bellied, and big-headed, hairy as a hog, with cutting oil and aluminum shavings caught in the hair of his forearms and a clay pipe clenched between his teeth. All his life he'd been a fisherman, hauling nets with the strength of his shoulders and the counterbalance of his belly, and he'd died as he'd been born: on the river. Walter had been twelve or thirteen at the time. His grandfather, too old at that point to handle the big gill nets weighted down
with stripers or sturgeon, had kept his hand in by netting killifish and keeping them in pens for sale as bait. One afternoon—and for Walter the recollection was like a hot cautery—the old man's face went numb and the stroke folded him up like a jackknife and pitched him into the bait pen, where the mass of killifish closed over him. By the time Walter could get help, the old man had drowned.

The Dutchman was something else. Something Walter had seen in a gallery in Amsterdam when the Solovays had taken him to Europe. Or maybe on a cigar box. He puzzled over it a minute, then chalked it up to genetic memory and indigestion, in equal parts. When the five o'clock whistle blew, he shook his head twice, as if to clear it, and then ran his bike down to the Throbbing Elbow to drain a sad pitcher of beer in honor of his twenty-second birthday.

But even here in the shrine of the present, with its neon glare, its thumping woofers and black lights, he suffered an attack of history. Clumping through the door in his new Dingo boots with the imitation spur straps, he could have sworn he saw his father standing at the bar with a girl whose dress was so short as to expose the nether curve of her buttocks. He was wrong. About his father, that is; for their part, the girl's buttocks were incontrovertible. She was wearing a paper miniskirt hand-dyed by the Shawangunk Indians on their reservation south of Jamestown, with matching panties. The man beside her turned out to be Hector Mantequilla, with ragged wild hair and eight-inch collar points. “Van,” he said, swinging around, “what's happening?” The girl turned around now too, hair in her eyes, a pout of makeup, nothing wrong and nothing right. Walter hadn't seen his father in eleven years.

Walter shrugged. He was feeling sorry for himself, feeling orphaned and martyred and strung out, full of the merde of human existence and sick with the idea of decay: feeling old. It was 1968. Sartre was front-page news,
Saturday Review
was asking “Can We Survive Nihilism?” and
Life
had photographed Jack Gelber adrift on an ice flow. Walter knew all about it. He was an alienated hero himself, he was a Meursault, a Rocquentin, a man of iron and tears facing the world in unhope and as riddled with the nausea as a Jarlsberg is with holes. There was no way, for instance, he was going home to the chicken cordon bleu, asparagus vinaigrette, and glittering chocolate mousse his adoptive mother had prepared for him. No way he
was going to thankfully tear open his sweetheart Jessica's gift—a new helmet, bronze like the sun and decorated with daisy decals that spelled out his name—and then tenderly undress her beneath the azalea bush out back with the night like a sleeper's breath whispering in his ear. No way. At least for a while yet.

“What you drinking, man?” Hector said, leaning into the bar for support. His shirt, which seemed to be fashioned from a synthetic fabric composed of Handi-Wrap and styrofoam, featured a pair of bleeding eyeballs and a slick pink tongue that plunged into the depths of his waistband.

Walter didn't answer right away, and when he did it was with a non sequitur. “It's my birthday,” he said. Though he was looking at the girl, he was seeing his grandmother again, the flesh of her heavy arms trembling over a mound of turnip peels, the look on her face when she told him she'd had the phone disconnected because her neighbor—a notorious witch—was sending witch lice over the wire. Superstitious in a way that connected her to the past as firmly as the gravestones rooted in the cemetery on the hill, she'd spent the last twenty years of her life making ceramic ashtrays in the shape of the trash fish her husband extracted from his nets and tossed on the riverbank to rot. They're the dispossessed, she used to say, glaring at Walter's hairy grandfather. God's creatures. I can see them in my sleep. Fish, fish, fish.

“Yes, yes!” Hector shouted. “Your birthday, man!” And then roared for Benny Settembre, the bartender, to set them up. Hector was a native of Muchas Vacas, P.R., the son of slaves and Indians who became slaves. The son of something else too: his eyes were as green as the Statue of Liberty. “I got something for you, man—something special,” he said, taking Walter's arm. “In the men's room, you know?”

Walter nodded. The jukebox started up with the sound of shattering glass and rocks against the flanks of buses. Hector took hold of his arm and started toward the bathroom, then stopped cold. “Oh yeah,” he said, indicating the girl. “This is Mardi.”

Six hours later, Walter found himself thinking about water sports. But only fleetingly and because the occasion suggested it. He was on the far side of the river from Peterskill, a mile and a half from home
as the fish swims, eleven or twelve by car, and up to his neck in the greasy Stygian drift of the nighttime Hudson. Swimming. Or about to swim. At the moment he was feeling his way through the bottom muck, planted firmly against the current, the rich organic scent of the river in his nostrils, a perfume that managed to combine the essences of aquatic devolution, orange peels, diesel fuel and, yes, merde. Ahead of him, in the dark, he could hear Mardi's laughter and the soft gentle swirl of her scissor kick. “Come on,” she whispered. “It's nice, really.” And then she giggled, a sound so natural it could have come from one of the lovelorn insects in the trees that rose up from the shore in a black unfathomable wall.

“Shit!” Hector cursed softly behind them, and there was a terrific splash—the sound of disporting porpoises, depth charges, beer kegs dropped from a pier—and then his high wild laugh.

“Shhhh!” Walter hissed. He didn't like this, didn't like it at all. But he was drunk—worse, he was stoned off his feet on the pills Hector had been feeding him all night—and past the point of caring. He felt the buoyancy of the water like the hands of the river nymphs as he lifted off and dug into the surface in a stealthy breaststroke.

They'd left the Elbow at ten to sit out back in Hector's bumper-blasted '55 Pontiac and pass a pipe. Walter hadn't called home—hadn't done much of anything for that matter except pin beer bottles to his lips—and he thought of Jessica, of Hesh and Lola and his aunt Katrina, with a sort of perverse pleasure. They were missing him now, that was for sure. The chicken Cordon Bleu had dried up in the oven, the asparagus gone limp, the mousse fallen. He pictured them huddled glumly around the redwood picnic table, cocktails going weak with melted ice, toothpicks congealing in a puddle of grease on the platter long since denuded of Swedish meatballs. He pictured them—his family, his girlfriend—waiting for him, Walter Truman Van Brunt, creature of his own destiny, soulless, hard, free from convention and the twin burdens of love and duty, and took the pipe from the hand of a stranger. They were missing him now, oh yes indeed.

But then he felt a stab of guilt, the curse of the apostate, and saw his father again. This time the old man was crossing the parking lot alone, hands thrust deep in the pockets of his striped bell-bottoms, a mauve scarf trailing down his chest. He stopped even with the car
window, bent from the waist, and peered in with that mad, tortured look he'd brought with him when he appeared out of nowhere for Walter's eleventh birthday.

Out of nowhere. Like an apparition. Huge, his head cropped to a reddish stubble, pants torn and greasy, jacket too small, he'd looked like a cross between the Wandering Jew and the Ghost of Christmas Past, he'd looked like an ecstatic who's lost the ecstasy, a man with no future, a bum. So insubstantial Walter would have missed him altogether if it weren't for the shouting. Eleven years old, glutted on pink-frosted cake, root beer, chocolate marshmallow supreme and Mars Bars, Walter was up in his room knocking around with his new set of Presidents, Regents and Ministers of the World when he heard a tumult of voices from the front of the house. Hesh's voice. Lola's. And another, a voice that sounded as if it were inside his head, as if it were thinking for him, strange, magnetic and familiar all at once.

The front door was open. Hesh stood in the doorway like a colossus, Lola at his side. Beyond them, on the front lawn, was a man with a head like a pumpkin and colorless, rinsed-out eyes. He was wrought up, this man, nearly amuck, dancing on one foot with anger and chanting like a shaman, the litany of his hurts pouring out of him like vinegar. “Flesh of my flesh!” the man yelled, over and over.

Hesh, big Hesh, with his bald honest head and his forearms that were like hammers, was shouting at this man who looked like a bum—at Walter's father—as if he wanted to kill him. “Son of a bitch!” Hesh raged in a high agitated voice, each word cut clear and distinct. “Liar, thief, murderer! Get out. Get out of here!”

“Kidnappers!” the man bawled back at him, bending to pound the earth in his rage. But then all of a sudden Walter edged into view, puzzled and frightened, and the man fell silent. A change came over his face—it had been ugly and vehement and now suddenly it was as composed as a priest's—and he went down on one knee and spread his arms. “Walter,” he said, and the tone of it was the most seductive thing the boy had ever heard. “Don't you know who I am?”

“Truman,” Hesh said, and it was both a plea and a warning.

Walter knew.

And then he saw it. Behind his father, behind the pale, shorn, washed-out man in the bum's suit of clothes, stood a motorcycle. A
little pony Parilla, 98cc, red paint and chrome, gleaming like a puddle in the desert. “Come here, Walter,” his father said. “Come to your father.”

Walter glanced up at the man he knew as his daddy, the man who'd fed and clothed him, who'd stood by him through his traumas, there to throw the ball and catch it, to cow his teachers and subdue his enemies with a glance, to anchor and protect him. And then he looked out at the man on the lawn, the father he barely knew, and the motorcycle that stood behind him. “Come on, I won't bite.”

Walter went.

And now here he was again, come back after eleven years, come back the second time that day. Only now he was black, a solid presence, with a pair of red-rimmed eyes and a nose that looked as if it had been stepped on. Now he was leaning through the window of the Pontiac and lighting a cigarette off Hector's joint and reaching out to take Walter's hand in a soul clasp and inquire as to how the fuck he was doing, man. Now he was Herbert Pompey, denizen of South Street bars, poet, player of the cornet and nose flute, part-time
Man of La Mancha
hoofer, weekend doper.

Sick with history, the past coming at him like a succession of screaming fire trucks, Walter could only tug weakly at Pompey's hand and murmur something to the effect that he was doing okay but that he had a headache, he was feeling pretty stoned and thought he might be having a little trouble with his eyes. And his ears. And come to think of it, maybe his brain too.