World's End (46 page)

Back at the shack, where rodents whispered in the eaves and delicate iridescent flies settled on unwashed plates, the larder was bare; though his vegetable garden was producing all the kohlrabi, bok choy and beet tops he could want, he was out of staples—out of pinto beans, brown rice, yeast powder and soy grits. He was out of soap and Sterno, hyssop and teriyaki. He'd awakened that morning to marmiteless toast, watery thrice-used tea leaves, to gruel bereft of
condensed milk, and felt he'd procrastinated long enough. And so here he was, shopping. Whistling along with a peppy version of “Seventy-six Trombones” rendered on glockenspiel and cowbell, startling watery-eyed widows in the meat department, squeezing grapefruit, trotting up and down the aisles jingling like a turnstile and exuding the peculiar odor of rotting leaves that seemed to follow him everywhere, as happy a soul as you could find between Peterskill and Verplanck.

Happy? Yes. For he was no longer the horny celibate monkish saint he'd been for so long—things were different now, radically different: now he had a roommate. A soulmate. A love to share his vegetable medley and mung bean casserole and hang his socks out on the line where the sun peeked through the sylvan umbrella to warm the mossy banks of Blood Creek. It was this love that made him blissful, rapturous, silly even, this love that made him want to cut capers in the parking lot like Herbert Pompey sailing across the stage in
La Mancha
or kiss old Mrs. Fagnoli as she dragged herself from the car at the post office. Tom Crane had passed from sainthood to ecstasy.

He was happy on other counts too. For one thing, he'd failed his draft physical for the third straight time. Too skinny. He'd fasted the whole month of June (no way he was going to be a tool of the capitalist oppressors and take up arms against his revolutionary brothers in Vietnam) and staggered off the Selective Service scale at six foot two, a hundred and twenty-three pounds. Now he wouldn't have to skulk off to Canada or Sweden or go through the trouble of faking a suicide. And to compound the joy, on the very day he'd failed his physical, the bees came into his life. Forty hives. Put up for sale by some decrepit old bankrupt redneck in Hopewell Junction for a pittance, a fraction of what they were worth. Tom had them now. Bees. What a concept: they did all the work, and he collected the profit. It was like the goose that laid the golden eggs. All he had to do was gather the stuff, strain it, pour it into the old mason jars he'd found in his grandfather's basement, and sell it by the roadside, each jar decorated with a twenty-five-cents-the-gross lick 'em and stick 'em label that read TOM CRANE CRANE'S GOLD in Jessica's handsomest script.

And then, as if all this bounty of bliss weren't enough, there was the
Arcadia.

Since he'd left Cornell, he'd led an aimless, commitmentless, dirt-bagging, pot-growing, goat-turd-mulching sort of existence, drifting from one placid scene to the next, like a water chestnut before it puts down roots. The
Arcadia
gave him an anchor for those roots. If there was a God, and He had come down from the portals of heaven to sort through all the world's employments and enthusiasms in order to match Tom Crane up with his true, his only, his quintessential métier, the
Arcadia
would have been it.

The first he'd heard of it was at the April meeting of the Manitou-on-Hudson Marshwort Preservationists' League. The speaker that evening was a tiny, bearded, lectern-thumping apologist for the Arcadia Foundation who, between thumps, gave a brief history of the fledgling organization, fulminated against the polluters and despoilers of the river, distributed membership applications and passed the hat (a porkpie cap, actually) for donations. What's more, he showed slides of the
Arcadia
itself, sprung full-blown from Will Connell's imagination.

It seemed that Will, the crusty radical folksinger and friend of the earth whose voice had rung loud and clear over Peletiah Crane's cow pasture on that infamous day back in 1949, had had a dream. A vision. One that involved gentle breezes, halcyon days, sails and rigging and teakwood decks. He'd been reading a dog-eared old tome
(Under Sail on Hudson's River,
by Preservation Crane, New York, 1879) that hearkened back to the days when the river was crowded with the low-bellied, broad-beamed Dutch sloops rendered obsolete by the steam engine, and suddenly the
Arcadia
rode up out of the misty recesses of some old chantey lodged in his brain. That very afternoon he strapped the mandolin to his back and hitchhiked down to the Scarsdale home of Sol and Frieda Lowenstein.

The Lowensteins were Communists who'd weathered the McCarthy era to make a killing in the recording industry. They were longtime friends and champions of Will and his music, known for their generosity in support of worthy causes. Will plunked himself down on the white linen couch in the Lowenstein drawing room, picked a song or two on the mandolin and wondered aloud why there were no big old work sloops on the Hudson anymore, the kind you saw in dim oil paintings and daguerreotypes in bars with names like
“The Ship 'N' Shore” and “The Spouter Inn.” You know, he said, the kind of big, quiet, white-sailed ship that would make people feel good about the river, and he showed them some pictures from Preservation Crane's book. Sol and Frieda didn't know, but they were willing to put up a piece of the money to find out. The result was the Arcadia Foundation, eight hundred and sixty-two strong, a nonprofit, tax-deductible organization dedicated to cleaning up the river, saving the short-nosed sturgeon, the osprey and the marshwort, and the
Arcadia
itself, all one hundred and six feet of her, a working replica of the sloops of old that would run up and down the river spreading the good news. The launching, from a shipyard in Maine, was scheduled for the Fourth of July.

Tom was electrified. It was as if all the disparate pieces of his life had come together in this one inspired moment. Here was something he could get behind, a slogan, a banner, a raison d'être: Save the River! Hail, Arcadia! Power to the People! Here was a way to protest the war, assert his extraterrestrial/vegetarian/nonviolent hippie credo, stick a thorn in the side of the establishment and clean up the river all in one blow. It was too perfect. The Will Connell connection went all the way back to the early days of the struggle that had consecrated the ground on which the shack stood, and the ecology thing tied up the loose ends of his job at Con Ed—with his experience, with his savvy and know-how, he could step aboard the
Arcadia
as a crew member, maybe even captain it! The fluorescent lights sizzled overhead, the little man raised his fist aloft in exhortation and all at once Tom pictured himself at the helm, champion of the lowly perch and sucker, foe to the polluters, the robber barons, the warmongers and orphan makers, the glorious high-masted ship cutting upriver like the great Ark itself, bastion of righteousness, goodness and light.

He joined that night. The next morning he quit his two-day-a-week job at Con Ed (no more formalin sniffing for him!) and gunned the Packard all the way up to South Bristol, Maine, where he found the
Arcadia
and volunteered his services as carpenter, fitter, pot scrubber and gofer. He was aboard for the launching, crewed on the trip down from New England, and in two weeks—was it only two weeks?—he'd be going aboard for a month as second mate.

Too much, too much, too much. The thought of it—all of it,
love, freedom, bees and the sloop—had him capering around the Grand Union like a fool in motley. In fact, he was juggling two oranges and an avocado, watching his hands and gradually expanding the perimeter of his arc, when he looked up and saw Walter standing there before him.

It was a shock. His mood evaporated, his concentration broke. One of the oranges skewed off to the right and vanished in a bin of bean sprouts; the other landed at his feet with a sick thump. Walter caught the avocado.

The saint let out a gasp, mumbled two or three nonsensical phrases along the lines of “Hi are you, how?” and inadvertently jerked the cart over the little toes of his right foot.

Walter said nothing. He merely stood there, smiling faintly, the sagacious professor with an awkward student. He was dressed, to Tom's amazement, in wingtip shoes, Arrow shirt, light tan summer suit and clocked tie. He was suntanned, handsome, big, standing up straight and tall on his inert feet like a man who'd never known the violence of the surgeon's blade. “Tom Crane,” he said finally, grinning wider to show off his strong white teeth, “so how the hell are you? Still living up in the shack?”

Tom was fine. And yes, he was still living in the shack. And though he didn't look it—and didn't feel it—he was glad to see Walter. Or so he heard himself saying, the words dropping from his mouth as though he were a grinning little wooden dummy and someone else was doing the talking: “I'm glad to see you.”

“Me too,” Walter said. “It's been a while.”

The two considered the weightiness of this observation for a moment, while strangely silent shoppers glided past them, each affixed to his or her own cart. Tom stooped for the smashed orange, and was surreptitiously reinserting it in the display pyramid, when Walter caught him with the question he'd been dreading: “Seen Jessica lately?”

Now, while the aforementioned love that had played so big a part in transforming Tom Crane's life has not, to this juncture, been named, her identity should come as no surprise. That love, of course, was Jessica. For whom else had the saint silently yearned all his miserable life—or for years, anyway? Whom else had he dreamed of
marrying even as Walter slipped the ring on her finger and the sky outside the shack grew as dark and turbulent as his own tempestuous feelings? Who else had sat between him and Walter at the movies while he burned to take her hand, kiss her throat, blow in her ear? Could he begin to count the times he'd sat transfixed with lust as she'd tried on clothes in a dress shop, licked at a double scoop of Bavarian fudge chocolate swirl ice cream or read aloud to him from
Franny and Zooey
or
The Dharma Bums
in her soft, hesitant, little-girl voice? Or the times he'd envisioned the sweet, tapering, blondpussied length of her stretched out beside him in his musty hermit's bed?

Jessica. Yes, Jessica.

Hurt, bewildered, disoriented, subject to sudden attacks of snuffling and nose-blowing, knee-knocking and sulks, she'd come to him, her dear old platonic friend, for comfort. And he'd plied her with fried okra and brown rice with shredded carrots and pine nuts, with the peace of a winter's night, a spring morning, the everlasting and restorative midsummer's eves at the cabin, with birds, fireflies, the trill of lovesick toads, the timeless tranquility that holds beyond the range of streetlights and paved roads. What could he say? One thing led to another. Love bloomed.

Walter was crazy. Walter was crippled. Walter was gloomy, angry, self-destructive. In his bliss, in his jealously guarded happiness, the saint of the forest forgot all about his old friend and boon companion. Walter had gone over to the other side now—working
with
that fascist Van Wart, not just for him—and it wasn't as if he hadn't rejected her, after all. Humiliated her, kicked her aside like a piece of trash. No, Tom Crane didn't feel any guilt, not a shred of it. Why should he? Of course, for all that, as he stood there puzzling over Walter's tight-cropped hair with the razor-slash part and vanishing sideburns, he couldn't help but think of Jessica, stuffing underwear, sheets and filth-stiffened jeans into the washer at the laundromat next door—or, more particularly, of the fact that she was due to join him any minute now.

“J-Jessica?” he stammered in response to Walter's query. “Yes. No. I mean, I quit that Con Ed gig, did I tell you?”

Walter's smile faded. There was something of it in his eyes still,
but now his lips were pursed and the lines of his forehead lifted in surprise.

“You know, with Jessica? At Indian Point?”

“No, I didn't know,” Walter murmured, turning aside to sift through a basket of plums, the dark bruised fruit like strange coin in his hand, “—I just … wondered … you know, if she's okay and all.”

The saint of the forest threw a nervous glance up the aisle, past the checkout counters, the slouching boxboys and impatient housewives, to the automatic door. It was just an ordinary supermarket door—one way in, one way out—but suddenly it had taken on a new and hellish aspect.

“So you don't see much of her anymore either, huh?” Walter said, dropping a handful of plums into a plastic bag. Tom noticed that he was bracing himself against the cart now, using it as an old woman with fused hips might use an aluminum walker.

“Well, no, I wouldn't say that. …” He took a deep breath. What the hell, he thought, might as well tell him—he'll find out sooner or later anyway. “What I mean is, uh”—but then, why spoil a beautiful afternoon?—“actually, you know, I think I left my wallet in the car and I think I better, um, well—”

But it was too late.

Here she was, Jessica, sweeping through the door like a poster come to life, like Miss America stepping over the prostrate forms of the second, third and fourth runners up, the light in her hair, her flawless posture, her golden knees. He saw the soft anticipatory smile on her lips, watched the graceful sweep of her head as she scanned the aisles for him, then the full flower of her smile as she spotted him and waved. He didn't wave back—he could barely bob his head and force his lips back over his gums in a paralyzed grin. His shoulders seemed to be sinking into his chest.

Walter hadn't looked up yet. He was fumbling with a recalcitrant bunch of bananas, a little unsteady on his feet, waiting for the sequel to what Tom had been saying about his wallet. Jessica was halfway down the aisle, caught between the eggplant and summer squash, when she recognized him. Tom saw her face go numb, then suffuse with blood. There was confusion—no, outright panic—in her eyes, and she faltered, nearly stumbling over a pudgy six-year-old from
whose mouth a Sugar Daddy protruded like a second tongue. Tom tried to warn her off with his eyes.