World's End (20 page)

So what if he had?—he was angry. He thought he was done with all this, thought he'd left the dreams and visions in the hospital or along the road, thought the sacrifice of a foot was enough. But he was wrong.

She was smiling now, fat and glowing with the health of the indiscriminate eater, the woman who'd breakfasted every morning of her life on kippered herring, jelly doughnuts and sugared coffee as thick and black as motor oil. “Walter,” she murmured in her crackling voice, “I just wanted to wish you the best on your wedding day.” And then, with all the finesse of a backyard gossip: “So how's the foot?”

The foot? Suddenly he wanted to scream at her:
Did you have anything to do with that? Did you?
But he was staring at the stump of a tree taken down by Jeremy Mohonk on his release from prison in 1946. His grandmother was gone. More history. All at once he felt weary. Nostalgia filled him, wine turned to vinegar, and the birds
railed at him from the trees that crowded in on him like a mob. He'd tried to put it all out of his mind, tried to remember that he hated his father and didn't give a damn where he was, that he had a life and being of his own that transcended that of the abandoned boy, the motherless boy, the boy who'd grown up among strangers. He'd tried to concentrate on Jessica, on the union that would redeem him and make him whole. And now here it was again: more history.

He plodded up the hill and his incorporeal grandmother was whispering in his ear, retelling one of his favorite stories—one he liked better than the betrayal of Minewa or the hoodwinking of Sachoes—the story of his parents' wedding. What did they wear? he would ask her. What was my mother like? Tell me about the lake.

Your mother was like royalty, she told him. And your father was the handsomest man in the county. An athlete, a prankster, full of jokes and high spirits. He was married in his uniform, with the medals on his chest and the sergeant's stripes on his shoulder. Your mother was an Alving. Swedish. Her father was Magnus Alving, the architect—he drew up the plans for the free school in the Colony, did you know that?—and her mother was of Dutch descent, an Opdycke. She wore her mother's gown—peau de soie, trimmed with seed pearls and Madeira lace. Her hair was up and she was wearing white heels like she just stepped out of a fairy tale. They held the ceremony outdoors, on the beach at Kitchawank Lake, though it was late in the year and turning cold, and when the justice said “You may kiss the bride” and your father took your mother in his arms, all the geese around the lake started honking and the fish threw themselves up on shore like pieces of tinfoil. Hesh was best man.

He'd almost reached the top of the hill when another voice began to intrude on his consciousness. He looked up. There before him, pale, bowlegged and naked as a wood sprite, stood Tom Crane. The saint of the forest clutched a bottle of baby shampoo in one hand, and in the other, a towel as stiff as a sheet of cardboard. He was grinning and saying something about getting cold feet, but Walter couldn't quite make it out, the buzz of his grandmother's voice murmuring in his ears still.
Walter, Walter,
she said, her voice dolorous and fading now,
don't blame him. He loved her. He did. It's just that in his heart … he loved his country … more. …

“Hey, Walter—Van—snap out of it.” The naked saint was two feet from him now, peering into his eyes as if into the far end of a telescope. “You still zonked from last night or what?”

He was. Yes. That was it. He focused on Tom Crane for the first time and saw that the saint's skinny frame was maculated with boils, blemishes and insect bites. Tom was scratching his beard. His ribs were slats in a fence, his feet so white and long and flat they might have been molded of dough that wouldn't rise. His lips were moving now and he was saying something about waking up, a dip in the creek and hot coffee and bourbon up at the shack. Walter allowed himself to be led back down the hill, across the footbridge and into the ferns at water's edge.

The stream was low this time of year, but the saint of the forest, looking to his toilet, had dammed it up under the bridge—the resulting pool was about as deep as a bathtub and three times as wide. Pausing only to wedge his towel in the crotch of a tree, Tom stepped into the pool, exposing the flat pale nates that hadn't felt the embrace of cotton briefs since his mother had stopped doing his laundry when he went off to Cornell four years earlier. He eased himself into the creek like a mutant water strider, ass first, hooting with the shock of it.

Walter was slower. Fumbling back down the path had left him winded and sweat-soaked. His leg suddenly felt as if it had been rubbed with jalapeño oil from the knee down and his eyes were still playing tricks on him. It was nothing major—the trees didn't transform themselves into claws or lollipops and his grandmother was nowhere in sight—yet everything seemed skewed and out of focus, the visible world in intricate motion, as if he were examining a drop of pond water under a microscope. The leaves that overhung them, the peeling footbridge, the bark of the trees and the grain of the rock: they'd all been reduced to their components, to a grid of minuscule dancing dots. It was last night, he figured. The cooking sherry. That had to be it. He lowered himself down on a rock and began to tug at his left boot.

Tom was thrashing his limbs spastically and deep-breathing like a seal coming up for air.

“Cold?” Walter asked.

“No, no,” Tom said, too quickly. “Just right.” He averted his eyes as Walter removed the boot from his other foot.

Walter pulled the Nehru shirt up over his head, dropped his pants and undershorts and stood there naked among the ferns and saplings. He could feel the mud of the bank between the toes of his left foot; the right foot, the inert one, planted itself like a stone. No one had seen him like this, not even Jessica. And Tom Crane, his oldest friend and intellectual mentor, wasn't looking.

“You know something?” Tom said, glancing at Walter as he lowered himself into the water, and then looking away again. “Cars. Automobiles. They were originally going to call them electrobats.” He was snickering with the idea of it. “Electrobats,” he repeated.

The water was cold as glacial runoff. Walter didn't cry out, didn't catch his breath, didn't curse or thrash. He just settled there on his back, the current lifting his genitals and subtly reconstituting itself to accommodate his neck and shoulders. After a moment he lifted his right leg from the water and propped the plastic foot on a rock at the edge of the pool.

“Oleo locomotives,” Tom said. “That one was in the running too.” But the levity had gone out of his voice. “That's it, huh?” he said. And then: “How does it feel?”

“Right now it hurts like a son of a bitch.” Walter paused, contemplating the plastic sculpture at the nether end of his leg. “The doctor says I'll learn to live with it.”

The sun was climbing through the trees now, firming up the shadows and suffusing the undergrowth with a rich golden light that clung to the leaves like batter. Walter counted the fronds of the fern beside him, watched the minnows drop down with the current and settle between his legs, listened to the rap of woodpecker and the call of vireo. For a moment he felt a part of it all, creature of the forest primeval that antedated macadam, case-hardened steel and the plastic prosthesis, but then the stutter of a motorcycle out on Van Wart Road brought him back. “All right,” he said, rising from the pool in the slow groping way of an octogenarian. “Okay. I'm all right now.”

“Use my towel if you want,” Tom said. He was sitting up, blowing and puffing still, the long wet queue of his hair trailing down his pimply back like something that had clung to him and drowned.

Walter flayed himself with the stiff stinking towel while mosquitoes whined around him and mud worked between his toes. He was feeling better, no doubt about it. The headache had receded, the leaves and twigs that reached out to him seemed to have consolidated once again, and the pain had gone out of his numbed leg. It was then, standing there on the mud bank and shivering in the early morning light, that he had a revelation. All at once he realized that the whole business of daily life was irrelevant to him, that he didn't want to make small talk, didn't want to discuss electrobats, last night's party, drugs, nerve gas or revolution in Latin America. No: what he really wanted to talk about was his father. He wanted to open himself up to the quivering, abject, bony mass of gooseflesh that now stood dripping beside him and tell him that he'd been fooling himself, tell him that now and always he did give a damn where his father was and wanted nothing more—nothing, not Jessica, not the flesh and bone that had been torn from him—than to find him, confront him, wave the bloody rag of the past in his face and reclaim himself in the process. He didn't want to talk about his wedding or about music or health food or UFOs. He wanted to talk about the mothball fleet and genealogy, about his grandmother, about a ghost in the scent of a pancake and the trouble with his eyes that made the past come alive in the present.

But he never got the chance.

Because the saint of the forest, blue in the face and chattering with the cold in every molar and ratcheting joint, the ratty towel working furiously at his splayed shoulders and bald scrotum, suddenly said, “What did you do to Mardi, anyway?”

Mardi. She was a shadow, a fragment of memory, a stain on his consciousness—she was another ghost. “Who?”

“You know: Mardi. Mardi Van Wart.”

Walter didn't know. Didn't want to know. There was a screaming in his ears, a terrible unquenchable din that all at once rose up from the bloodied ground before him. He could hear the cries of the victims, his mother's caressing voice stretched taut, the rabid raging curses of the men with sticks and tire irons and fence posts in their hands. Kike, nigger, Commie: he was in the eye of the storm.
Van Wart?
Mardi
Van Wart?

“She says she was with you and Hector the night you, uh, had your accident, you know? Says she really needs to see you.”

He felt it tugging at him, something obscene, unholy, irresistible. “You … you know her?”

Tom Crane was ridiculous. Naked, dripping, the reeking towel clamped under one arm and a toothbrush nonchalantly dangling from his lip, he paused to give Walter a big meaningful goat-toothed grin. “Oh, yeah,” he said, the cries of the innocents echoing around him, “I know her.”

Jessica wore a lace dress laboriously tatted by underfed peasants on the far side of the world, a pair of unadorned white sandals and her grandmother's ivory cameo brooch. In her hair, which shone with a blonde brilliance that might have blinded the Vikings themselves, there were glimmers of baby's breath and primrose. Walter stood beside her in the late morning with its insouciant bees and butterflies, flanked by Hesh and Lola and Jessica's pink-faced parents, while Tom Crane read a passage from a science fiction novel about extraterrestrial propagation and Herbert Pompey danced around under the weight of the flowers in his hair and rendered the serpentine melodies of the Indian snake charmers on his nose flute. Then Jessica recited a couple of verses by an obscure scribbler on the subject of love and fish, and Hesh stepped forward to read the climactic lines from the civil ceremony (“Do you, Walter Truman Van Brunt, take this woman … till death do you part?”). “I do,” said Walter, and he kissed the bride in a surge of emotion—in love and gratitude and the fullest apprehension of life and youth—that lifted him for the moment from the trough of confusion into which the accident had thrust him. It was then that Hector Mantequilla set off a string of Arecibo firecrackers and the celebration began in earnest.

Jessica's family, Conklins and Wings alike, left early. Grandmother Conklin, a starchy old patrician with dead white skin, pendulous nose and tortoise eyes, had been carried up the hill in a blanket. She sat on a folding chair in the shade of the oak tree, surrounded by aged nieces from Connecticut, a conspicuous smear of cowshit on her black patent leather pumps, glaring her disapproval of the proceedings. Half an hour after the punch was served and the cake cut, she
was gone. The aged nieces soon followed, and then John Wing himself—as bland and awkwardly handsome as the star of a sitcom about the wisdom of fathers—was shaking Walter's hand in parting and telling him to take care of his little girl. By late afternoon, all the representatives of the elder generations had departed, scratching insect bites and dabbing handkerchiefs at sun-blistered faces. Hesh, Lola and Walter's aunt Katrina (three sheets to the wind and fighting back tears) were the last of them.

The storm began to kick up around four. Jessica, bright-eyed and thick-tongued, was giving Nancy Fagnoli an exhaustive biographical account of Herbert Axelrod, patron saint of tropical fish, Walter was swilling rotgut champagne and smoking a joint with Herbert Pompey out by the bee tenements, and Tom Crane was squatting on the porch in a cloud of smoke with Hector and half a dozen other epithalamial celebrants. Susie Cats, a big overwrought girl with soft-boiled eyes, had passed out on Tom Crane's cot after drinking fourteen cups of tequila punch and crying without remit for two hours. She lay there now, her faint rhythmic snores drifting across the clearing to where Walter stood with Herbert Pompey. Someone was strumming a guitar somewhere up in the woods.

Walter watched the low belly of the sky as it edged over the treetops, sank into the cleft of the hill behind him and billowed up to snuff out the sun. Within minutes, the sky was dark. Squinting against the smoke, Herbert Pompey handed him the yellowed nub of a joint. “Looks like it's going to rain on your party.”

Walter shrugged. He was feeling pretty numb. Champagne, pot, a hit of this and a hit of that, the bourbon in his coffee that morning and the excesses of the night before: the cumulative effect was leveling. He was married, and over there by the oak tree stood his bride, that much he knew. He knew too that in a few hours they would take the train up to Rhinebeck and check into a quaint hotel full of gloomy nooks and dusty bric-a-brac and that afterward they'd make love and fall asleep in each other's arms. As for the weather, he could give a shit. “What'd you expect?” he said, dropping the bottle in the grass. Then he took Pompey by the arm and went looking for another.