World's End (30 page)

“I seen him up around the bend there, up at the road into the Crane place.” The man who clutched the tire chains was speaking, the dry rasp of his voice punctuated by the clank of steel on steel. “We're going to make a run at the fuckers soon as it's dark.”

“Take me to him, would you?” Truman said, and the Indian, buried in the tall grass like a corpse, went cold with an apprehension that was like a stab in the back, that was like the hard-edged message his father had received from Horace Tantaquidgeon in a time past. “I've got news.”

“Kikes and niggers, kikes and niggers,” the dwarf sang, his voice pinched and nasal, echoing as if he'd poured himself into the bottle Truman had handed him. Then the five of them moved off through the trees that fringed the road. As soon as they were gone, Jeremy Mohonk pushed himself up from the grass. White men. They'd betrayed the Kitchawanks, the Weckquaesgeeks, the Delawares and Canarsees, and they betrayed their own kind too. It was on his lips: the taste of the shit they'd made him eat in prison. He thought of Peletiah, thought of the men he'd punished in the woods, thought of the women and children huddled around the stage with their pamphlets and picnic baskets. Thought of them all and rose up out of the weeds to trail the fink in the polo shirt.

Out on the road, all was confusion. Some of the cars parked along the shoulders had flicked on their headlights, and the pavement glittered with broken glass. In this naked white light, the Indian could see groups of men and boys hurrying in both directions, while dogs nosed about and people perched on fenders or sat in their cars as if awaiting a fireworks display or the heifer judging at the county fair. There was a smell of scorched paint on the air, of creosote and burning rubber. Somewhere a radio was playing. Jeremy squared his shoulders and emerged from the bushes between two parked cars. He sidestepped a cluster of young women passing a bottle of wine and started up the road. No one said a word to him.

The noise grew louder as he neared the entrance to the concert
grounds—yelps, cries, curses, screams of drunken laughter and the roar of revving engines. Groups of men with makeshift weapons stalked past him, and boys, some as young as nine or ten, hurried up the road with sacks of stones. A blackened car lay on its side in the middle of the road up ahead, and another burned furiously behind it. He quickened his pace, craning his neck for a glimpse of the Judas in the polo shirt and his obscene little companion. A man in an overseas cap and a chest full of medals shouted something at him, an old woman in rolled-up blue jeans waved a flag in his face, there was smoke in his nostrils and the blood had dried beneath his eyes. He was about to break into a trot when he saw him, Truman, leaning in the window of a late-model Buick. In the same instant he spotted the dwarf too, propped insouciantly against the fender and leering with apparent satisfaction at the conflagration around him.

The Indian kept walking, and as he passed them, he caught a glimpse of the man behind the wheel of the Buick. He knew the face, though he'd never seen it before, knew the humorless mouth and outthrust chin, the eyes like branding irons: it was the face of the man who'd sent him to prison, the face of a. Van Wart. Fighting the desire to glance over his shoulder, Jeremy felt the dwarf's eyes on him and kept going. He was about to double back—if only he could get this red-headed fink alone—when a horde of vigilantes, led by Truman's pal with the tire chains, came streaming past him.

Under cover of the diversion—all heads turned, even the dwarf's, to watch them hurry down the road toward the undefended pasture—Jeremy ducked between two cars, crouched down and waited. A moment later, Van Wart emerged from the Buick, said something to Truman and started up the road toward the barricade at the entrance to the concert grounds. Truman and his
pukwidjinny
fell into step behind him, and the Indian, after counting to ten, rose up out of the gloom to bring up the rear. He was taking a chance—the mob could fall on him any minute, his skin, his hair, his clothes like nothing they'd ever seen, like some nigger's or Communist's—but he didn't care. Hatred fueled him, and he snaked through the knots of angry men as if he were invisible.

As he approached the barricade, the crowd thickened, dark shapes moving in and out of the static glare of the headlights that flooded the
narrow dirt road beyond it. This was the omphalos of confusion and strife, rage stamped on every face, voices reduced to a collective snarl, the mob shoving first one way and then the other. Jeremy almost lost his quarry here—the faces all alike, shirts and shoulders and hats, the crush of bodies—but then he spotted Van Wart conferring with a bald-headed man in an open-collared dress shirt, and just beyond him, Truman and the
pukwidjinny.
Truman was conferring with no one. He was weaving through the crowd, a man in a hurry, heading up the road and away from the whole messy business of betrayal and bigotry; the dwarf was right behind him, visible only as a sort of moving furrow in the standing field of the mob.
He's getting away,
Jeremy thought, and he surged forward, heedless, shoving vigilantes aside as if they were so many straw men. “Hey!” someone shouted at him, “Hey you!,” but he never even bothered to turn his head.

By the time Jeremy managed to break free of the crowd, Truman and the drawf were a hundred yards up the road, clots of black against the richer texture of the night. They hurried past a line of stalled and battered cars on the darkened roadway, then angled off on an unpaved lane that wound through the woods in the direction of Peterskill. Jeremy broke into a run. He passed a pair of teenagers bent over a gas can in the dark, dodged a man who stood flatfooted and astonished in the middle of the road, and saw a frightened black face peering from the window of a stalled car; a moment later, still running hard, he was turning into the lane. Immediately, he saw that his luck had changed. The shouts of the crowd were muted here, the road all but deserted: this was the chance he'd been waiting for.

He came at Truman without warning, swift silent steps in the dirt, flinging himself at the shadowy form ahead of him like a linebacker going for the tackling dummy. He caught him in the small of the back—something gave: bone, cartilage, hinges that need oil—and slammed his face down in the dirt. At the moment of impact, the dwarf leapt aside with a squeal and Truman let out a gasp of surprise before the hard compacted dirt of the road sucked the breath out of him. The Indian knew then that he was going to kill this son of a bitch in the polo shirt, this back stabber, this white man, and he locked an arm around his throat and ground his face into the road. When he was done with him, he'd get up and crush the dwarf like an egg.

“Get off!” Truman choked, tearing at the Indian's arm. “Get… off!”

Shrill, manic, the dwarf leapt up and down in the dirt like a rodent in a cage. “Murder!” he piped. “Help! Murder!”

The Indian tightened his grip.

And so it would have gone—Truman, powerful as he was, taken by surprise, cut down and emasculated before his invisible adversary's rage, first fatality of the riots … so it would have gone, but for the dwarf. He screamed, and a hundred feet came running, vigilantes by the score, soreheads and rednecks and born-again racists with blood on their hands. That in itself would have been enough, but the little man was wickeder than the Indian could have guessed. He had a knife. Three inches' worth. Nothing like Horace Tantaquidgeon's gutting knife, but a knife nonetheless. And he slipped that knife from his pocket, sprung the blade with a soft evil click, and began punctuating the Indian's back. He dug a full stop first, then a colon; he slashed commas, hyphens and a single ragged exclamation point.

Half a second, that's all it took. The Indian reared up and slapped the dwarf as he might have slapped a fly, but the moment's distraction allowed Truman to wriggle free. In the next moment, he was on his feet, gasping for breath and flinging frenzied blows at his assailant, who rose up out of the darkness like a mountain in motion. Wordlessly, without so much as a grunt of effort or pain, the Indian returned the blows. With interest. “You crazy?” Truman gasped, throwing up his arms to protect himself. “You nuts or what?” Behind them, the thin white lances of flashlights and the slap of running feet.

Jeremy felt a weak fist glance off the side of his head, then another. He moved in closer. It was then that he got his first good look at the man he was about to kill. The onrushing beam of a flashlight played across the traitor's face, and again the Indian felt he somehow knew this man, knew him in some deep and tribal way. Truman must have got a good look at Jeremy too, because suddenly he dropped his hands in bewilderment. “Who the—?” he began, but it was too late for introductions. The Indian lunged for his throat and got hold of him again, both hands locked around the windpipe in an unbreakable grip, a death grip, the grip that leaves the rabbit twitching and the goose cold. Jeremy would have answered the half-formed question,
would have answered Truman as he'd answered Sasha Freeman and Rombout Van Wart and anyone else who cared to know, but he never got the chance. All at once the patriots were on him, swarming over him with their sticks and tire irons and chains.

It was Sing Sing and the prison guard all over again. Jeremy held on like the swamp turtle that lent its name to his clan—pummel him, stab him, cut off his head, his grip was good to death and beyond—held on despite the wounds in his back and the fingers jerking at his wrists. Then someone brought a jack handle down across the back of his skull and he felt Truman slipping away from him. Just before he fell, desperate, guided by the turtle, he lunged forward and locked his jaws in the traitor's flesh—the ear, the right ear—and clamped down till he tasted blood.

All was quiet when he opened his eyes again, and he thought for a moment he was back in his cot listening to the crickets tick off the seconds till dawn. There were no shouts. No tires squealed, no engines roared, there were no cries of grief and rage. But he wasn't in his cot. He was laid out on his back in a ditch beside the road and his body was possessed by the demons of pain. He'd been clubbed, kicked, stabbed; his left arm was broken in two places. Lying there in the ditch, gazing up at the stars through the interstices of the trees, he listened for a moment to the chant of the crickets and let his mind touch each of his wounds. He thought of his ancestors, warriors who'd used their pain as a tool, mocking their torturers even as the blade bared the nerve. After a while, he pushed himself up and started down the road for Peletiah's place.

Jeremy Mohonk left the hills of Van Wartville six months later. The despair that had eaten at him in prison, the sense of decay and futility, drove him from his shack beneath the white oak as no man could ever have done. He returned to the reservation outside of Jamestown, looking for the mother of his twenty sons. His own mother was dead. Ten years earlier, while he was languishing beneath the stones of Sing Sing, she succumbed to a mysterious wasting disease that stole her appetite and left her looking like a corpse mummified over the centuries. Her brother, he of the perfidious knife, was hardier. Jeremy found him in a cluttered little house on the bank of the river. Snaggle-
toothed and wizened, with his white hair bound in a topknot and his suit of burial clothes draped over a chair in the corner, he stared at his nephew with eyes that could barely place him. As for Jeremy's coevals, the clean-limbed boys and efflorescent girls of his school days, they'd either sunk into fat so pervasive their eyes were barely visible or vanished into the world of the expropriators. Jeremy found himself a picking job—grapes at that season, apples to follow—and within the month had married a Cayuga named Alice One Bird.

She was a big woman, One Bird, with calves that swelled under the fullness of her and a broad open face that spoke of her good nature and optimism. Her two sons by a previous marriage were grown men, and though she claimed to be thirty-four, she was closer to forty. To Jeremy, her age didn't matter, so long as she was capable of bearing children, and her sons—both of them razor-eyed and tall—gave proof of that. He picked grapes, he picked apples. In the fall, he hunted. When the snow lay over the ground like a fungus and the larder was empty, he got a job as a stock boy in a supermarket in Jamestown.

A year passed. Two, three. Nothing happened. One Bird grew heavier, though she wasn't carrying a child. Jeremy was forty-three years old. He consulted a Shawangunk medicine man who'd known his father, and the old man asked him for a lock of One Bird's hair. Jeremy snipped the hair while she slept and brought it to him. With trembling fingers, the medicine man selected a hank of Jeremy's hair, clipped it close, and then rolled the two locks vigorously between his palms, as if he were trying to start a fire. After a moment he separated the strands, dropping them one by one on a sheet of newspaper. For a long while he studied their configuration in silence. “It's not you,” he said finally, “it's her.”

Jeremy left the next morning for Van Wartville and the tumbledown shack he'd deserted three years earlier. Save for the structure itself, there wasn't much left. The elements had taken their toll on the place, birds and rodents had used it as a dormitory and midden both, and vandals had smashed everything they couldn't carry. No matter. The Indian lived in the old way, silent and secretive, snaring rabbit and opossum, liberating what he lacked from the homes and garages and toolsheds of the wage slaves who pressed in on the
property from all sides. Over the course of the ensuing years, he drifted back and forth between Peterskill and Jamestown, drawn on the one hand to his ancestral soil, and on the other to his people. One Bird always welcomed him, no matter how long he'd been gone, and he was grateful to her. Driven by natural urges, he even came to her bed now and again, but it was an exercise without hope or meaning.