World's End (39 page)

He knew now that all along he'd wanted to hurt her, alienate her, test her—did she love him, did she
really
love him? No matter what?
If he was bad, if he was worthless—the worthless son of a worthless father—then he would play his role to the hilt, scourge himself with it, scourge her. He wanted her to come home with the blender for Aunt Katrina and walk into that dark connubial bedroom, her cheeks abloom with good will to men, the golden foil of the gift-wrapped packages crepitating against her chest, sacred hymns and timeless carols on her lips, and see him there, naked, thrusting away at Mardi Van Wart. He must have wanted it—else why would he have done it?

They couldn't hear the car, it was true, but the front door was unmistakable. Bang. “Walter?” Footsteps across the floor, the rustle of packages, “Walter?”

But it was Mardi too. On top of him, surging against him, pinning her mouth to his with all the frantic haste of resuscitation. She heard the door slam. She heard the footsteps and Jessica's voice—she heard them as well as he did. He moved to break away from her, to hide, run, dissemble—he was in the shower, Mardi had a headache and went in to lie down, no, that wasn't her car out front—but she wouldn't let go of him, wouldn't stop. He was inside her when Jessica came through the door. Then, only then, did Mardi look up.

Jessica's father came for her things two days later. Walter was passed out on the couch, drunk from hating himself. The door slammed and John Severum Wing, of Wing, Crouder & Wing, Investment Counsellors, was on him. “Get up, you son of a bitch,” he hissed. Then he kicked the couch. John Wing, forty-eight years old, Rotarian, Little League sponsor, churchgoer, father of four, as imperturbable as a box turtle drowsing in the sun, snaked out a Hush Puppy-clad foot and shook the couch to its particle-board frame. Walter sat up. John Wing, standing over him, delivered sotto voce insults. “Sleazeball,” he whispered. “Scum. Creep.”

Walter had the feeling that his father-in-law would have gone on indefinitely in the same vein, plumbing the lower strata of his vocabulary, driving the spikes ever deeper, but for the sudden appearance of Jessica. For at that moment, the hair swept back from her high pale patrician brow and a Kleenex pressed to her face as if to protect her from the odor of something long dead, Jessica darted through the door and disappeared into the bedroom. In the silence that fell over them like the aftershock of an artillery barrage, Walter, sitting, and
John Wing, standing, listened to the thump and scrape of drawers flung violently open, the screech of hangers jerked hastily from the rack, the clatter of knickknacks, perfume bottles, gewgaws, curios and all the other hard-edged odds and ends of life flung carelessly together in sack and box. And they listened to something else too, a subtler sound, pitched lower, a quirk of hypothalamus and larynx: Jessica was weeping.

Walter stood. He fumbled for a cigarette.

John Wing kicked the coffee table. He kicked the wall. He launched a pillow into the kitchen as if it were a football splitting the uprights. “Answer me,” he said. “How could you do it?”

Walter hated himself at that moment, oh yes indeed, and he felt bad to the bone. He lit that cigarette, let it dangle from his underlip like one of Belmondo's, and blew the smoke in John Wing's face. Then he lifted his leather jacket from the chair and sauntered out the door, shaky but somehow serene too. The door shut behind him and the wind caught him in the face. Squinting against the smoke of the cigarette, he straddled the Norton, gave it a kick that would have wrenched the leg off a John Wing, and obliterated the universe with a twist of the throttle.

But now, of course, standing there in the hallway of a strange house in the waning minutes of the old year, aching to take a piss, surrounded by strange faces and bedeviled by fools and halfwits, he had his regrets. Jessica wouldn't talk to him. (He must have called fifty times, must have sat out in front of her parents' house on the Norton fifty more till John Wing stormed out and threatened to call the police.) Tom Crane wouldn't talk to him either. Not yet, anyway. And while Hector had sat down and shared a pitcher of beer with him, he kept looking at him as if he'd developed a case of twentyfour-hour leprosy or something. Even Hesh and Lola blamed him. He'd begun to feel like a character in a country and western song, lost the most precious thing in my life, o lonesome me, and all the rest of it. Now, of course, now that he didn't have her—couldn't have her—he wanted her more than anything. Or did he?

“And Mordor,” the jerk was saying, “what do you think that shit stands for, huh?”

Just then the bathroom door swung open and Galadriel strutted
out, shooting Walter a withering glance and lifting her nose as if she'd stepped in dogshit. Her brother—if indeed he was her brother—was too wound up to acknowledge her. He tightened his grip on Walter's arm and leaned into him: “The good ol' U.S. of A.,” he said. “That's what.”

So small a pill, half the size of an aspirin, and Walter was rushing with light. Jessica. The upturned nose, the leggy leg, the martyr in the kitchen: who needed her? He had Mardi, didn't he? “Tell it to the gooks,” he said, staring the jerk down. Then he was in the bathroom, bolting the door behind him.

In the mirror he saw eyes that were all pupil, a mustache in motion, hair parading around his ears. Balanced on his good foot, he flipped back the toilet seat with the toe of the other, but then missed his aim when the toilet unaccountably sprang up and danced across the room. He was zipping up when he noticed his grandmother. She was in the tub. Wearing a shower cap decorated with leaping pink, green and blue frogs. The water, soapy, dark as the Hudson, rose to her big tallowy naked breasts, which she rubbed from time to time with a washcloth. She didn't say a word till he turned to leave. “Walter?” she called, as he shot back the bolt. “You didn't forget to wash up, did you?”

Out in the hallway, there was no draftee, no draftee's sister. There were no cowboys in the kitchen. From the living room, however, there arose a clamor of shouts and razzing party horns, and when Walter got there he saw that all the strangers in the house were grinning, tossing confetti and pitching themselves deliriously into one another's arms. “Happy New Yeeah!” shouted one of the cowboys. Blazing like an angel with the light, Walter strode into the midst of them, shouldering a smooching couple out of the way and arresting the arm of a guy in mirror sunglasses who was lifting a bottle of Jack Daniel's to his lips. “Hey!” he shouted above the clatter of noisemakers and tinny horns, “you seen Mardi?”

The guy was wearing a cutoff army jacket with pink suspenders and a Mickey Mouse T-shirt. He was older, maybe twenty-six, twenty-seven. He pushed back his shades and gave Walter a baggyeyed look. “Who?”

Walter fended off an assault from the rear—a big horse of a girl
with smeared lipstick and a conical paper hat raked over her eyes like a rhino's horn came down hard on his plastic foot, belched an apology and shrieked “Happy Noooo Year!” in his face—and tried again. “Mardi Van Wart—you know, the girl I came with.”

“Shit,” the guy shrugged, rubbing the bottle for comfort, “I don't know nobody. I'm from New Jersey.”

But the big girl was there now, lurching unsteadily before him. “Mardi?” she repeated in surprise, as if he'd asked for Jackie Kennedy or the Queen Mother. “She split.”

The horns razzed in his ears. Everything was moving. He tried to control his voice. “Split?”

“Uh-huh. Must of been an hour ago. With Joey Bisordi—you know Joey, right?—and I don't know who all. For Times Square.” She paused, watching Walter's face, then broke into a sloppy grin. “You know,” she said, with a shake of her uncontainable hips, “Noooo Year's!”

The year was about ten minutes old when Walter fired up the Norton, swung it away from the stoop and skidded back up the lawn. He was still rushing like a comet with the light, but there was a dark place inside of him too—as dark and forbidding as the back side of the moon—and it was growing. He felt like shit. Felt like he wanted to cry. No Jessica, no Mardi, no nothing. And fuck, it was cold. He dodged a diseased-looking azalea, rattled over something that scattered under the back wheel—bricks? firewood?—and then he was out on the road.

Fine. But where was he? He passed up the first intersection and took the next instead, swinging into a long dark tunnel of stripped and twisted trees. He'd driven a mile or so, going too fast, clinging to the bends and accelerating out of them with a twist of the throttle, when he clattered across an old wooden bridge and came to a dead end. An iron chain thick as a boat hawser stretched across the mouth of the road. There were red and yellow reflectors mounted on the trees and a sign that read PRIVATE. He cursed out loud, wheeled the bike around and headed back up the road.

He was thinking that if he could find the high school he'd be all right. (Sleepy Hollow. He remembered the place from school, when
he'd played forward on the Peterskill basketball team—funky showers, a gymnasium that smelled of paste wax and sweat, a big old stone and brick building just off the main drag.) It was on Route 9, that much he knew. From there it was no more than twenty minutes to Peterskill and the Elbow. He was thinking he'd drop in and have a few beers with Hector maybe, or Herbert Pompey—drown his sorrow, bewail his fate, give them his side of the story over the pool table and a shot of something that would dim the raging light in his head—when, over the roar of the bike and the stinging rush of the wind, he became aware of a noise at his back. Deep-throated, whelming, omnipresent, it came at him like the rumble of toppling mountains, the blast of the hurricane. He turned his head.

There behind him, issuing from the nowhere of the dead-end lane, was a platoon of motorcycles. Their headlights lit the night till the patchy blacktop road and the screen of naked tree trunks blazed like a stage set. Almost involuntarily, he slowed down. There must have been thirty of them, the roar growing steadily louder. He looked over his shoulder again. Was it the Disciples? The New York chapter of the Hell's Angels? But what would they be doing out here?

He didn't have long to wonder, because in the next moment they were on him, cruising, the thunder of thirty big bikes beating like a fist in his chest. As he slowed to merge with them they came up on either side and he could see them now, raked back on their choppers, colors flapping in the dead night air. Two, six, eight, twelve: he was in the eye of the hurricane. The bikes stuttered and purred, they hammered, screamed, spat fire. Fourteen, eighteen, twenty.

But wait: something was wrong. These weren't Angels—they were hoary and decrepit, leather-faced, skin on bone, their raggedy yellow beards and piss-colored locks fanned back smooth in the glare of the headlights. It was coming to him—yes, yes—like the opening motif of a recurring nightmare, when an old geek swooped in ahead of him and the legend on his jacket leapt out at him like a face in the dark. THE APOSTATES, it read, in a band of hard block letters above a winged death's head, PETERSKILL. Yes. Walter turned his head to the left and there he was—the shrunken Dutchman, the imp, the sugarloaf hat clinging to his head in defiance of wind and logic both, the crude denim colors forced down over a baggy homespun shirt he might have
looted from a museum. Yes. And the imp's lips were moving: “Happy New Year, Walter,” he seemed to be saying over the din.

Walter never hesitated. He jerked his head to the other side—his right side—and sure enough, his father was there, riding in tandem with him on a chopped Harley with flame decals spread like claws across the gas tank. The old man's eyes were hidden behind antiquated goggles, the slick reddish fangs of his hair beat around his head. He gave Walter his profile, then turned to face him. There was a stink of exhaust, the rush of the air, the blast of the engines and a single attenuated moment in which the whole night was suspended between them. Then Walter's father flashed a smile and repeated the dwarf's benediction—“Happy New Year, Walter.” Walter couldn't resist—he could feel the smile tugging at the corner of his mouth—when all of a sudden, without warning, his father reached out and gave him a shove.

A shove.

The night was black, the road deserted. Caught in the sick slashing parabola of disaster, Walter went down again, went down for the second time. It would have been better had he gone down on his right side, nothing there but plastic and leather, after all. But he didn't. Oh, no. He went down on his left.

SIMEON:
Like his Paw.

PETER:
Dead spit an' image!

SIMEON:
Dog'll eat dog!

PETER:
Ay-eh.

—Eugene O'Neill,
Desire Under the Elms

This time the room was painted marigold yellow, and the doctor's name was Perlmutter. Walter lay sedated in the comfortless crank-up bed while Hesh and Lola kept watch at his side and the hushed voices of the intercom whispered in his ear like the voices of the incorporeal dead. His left foot, the good one, was good no more.