World's End (8 page)

The bait? What was it? Fish gone high, covered with flies. Bones. Marrow. Chicken backs so rotten your hand would stink for a week if you touched them. When people drowned in the river, when they lay pale and bloated in the muck, pinned beneath a downed tree or the skeleton of a car, when they began to go soft, the crabs got them. His father never talked of it. But the neighborhood kids did, the river
rats did, the bums who lived in the waterfront shanties you could see from here—they did. Anyway, maybe the 6:20 went by with an apocalyptic roar that felt as if it would rip the trestle from the pilings, maybe it didn't. But Walter pulled at the line and the net was stuck, wouldn't budge. His father, smelling of alcohol, a cigarette clenched between his lips and eyes squinted against the smoke, set down his beer to help him. Work it easy, he grunted. Don't want to snap the line. Then it was free, rising toward him, as heavy as if it were filled with bricks.

There were no bricks. There was no trap. Just Walter's mother, she of the soulful eyes, her hair in a cloud and the crabs all over her, nothing from the waist down. Nothing but bone.

Next thing he knew the nurse was there. A big woman, middleaged, with something extra stuffed into her uniform about the hips and thighs, she took the room by storm, hitting the overhead light, the blinds, flourishing bedpan and syringe, plying the rectal thermometer like a saber. Sunlight screamed through the windows, she was whistling some martial tune—was that Sousa or the “Marine Corps Hymn”?—and he felt a brief fluctuation in the calculus of pain as the IV was jerked from his arm and clumsily reinserted.

The dream—horrible enough—was letting go its grip and Walter was waking to an insupportable reality. Everything came on him in a rush, the voice of waking rationality hissing in his ear like a bulletin from the front:
You're in the hospital, your ribs on fire, your arm a scab. And what about this: you've got no foot. None. Nothing at all. You're a cripple. A freak. A freak for life.

Next came breakfast. Reconstituted orange juice, powdered eggs, simulated bacon. Brought by a nurse so incommunicative she might have taken a vow of silence, and a lush sixteen-year-old candy striper who discovered a bird on the far windowsill and cooed to it the entire time she was in the room: “Oooh, the wittle widgeon, oooh the wittle wittle.” Walter wasn't hungry.

When they left, he sat up and tentatively examined his leg. There was a dull throb in his kneecap, a slice of pain where he'd taken twenty stitches in his calf. His fingers roamed lower, creeping down his shin, reluctant, skirting disclosure. He felt bandages—gauze and tape—and then, touching it as he might have touched a hot iron, the
flat hewn stump of his leg. He threw back the sheets. There it was. His leg. Or no, this was somebody else's leg, truncated and ravaged, obscene, alien, inert as a log. He thought of bread, French bread, hacked across the beam. He thought of liverwurst.

Then he was asleep again. Out cold. Tugged down by the morphia and Demerol, he substituted one nightmare for another. Sleeping, he relived the accident. There was the shadow, the marker, the feeling of helplessness and predestination. And then he was an old man, stooped, white-haired, beslobbered with his own spittle, selling pencils on a street corner in the Bowery or stretched out on a pallet in some charity ward with a hundred other cripples and half-wits. Sleeping, he saw his grandfather's corpse and the cloud of killifish closing over it. Sleeping, he saw his father.

The old man was sitting in a chair beside the bed. His hair was cut, parted and freshly combed; he was wearing a mohair suit and silk tie, and his eyes were serene. But here was the odd part: he wasn't wearing any shoes. Or socks. And as Walter turned his head to gaze at him, Truman made a point of lifting first one foot, then the other, and depositing them on the edge of the bed as if they were on exhibit. Then he wriggled his bare toes and held Walter's gaze.

“But, but I thought—” Walter sputtered.

“Thought what?” the old man said. “That I was a cripple too?” He flexed his toes, then dropped both feet to the floor. “But I am, Walter, I am,” he said, shutting his eyes and rubbing the bridge of his nose, “—you just can't see it, that's all.”

“On the boat, the ship—” Walter began.

Truman waved his hand as if he were deflecting smoke. “An illusion,” he said. “A warning.” He leaned forward, elbows pressed to his knees. “Watch your step, Walter.”

It was then that Walter was seized with inspiration, then that he understood what it was he'd meant to ask on the ghost ship. All his life he'd bought the story handed down by Hesh and Lola as if it were chiseled in granite on Anthony's Nose—his father was a traitor, a conscienceless fiend who'd betrayed them, sold them out, and his mother had died because of it. And yet no one, not even Hesh, knew for sure. “Nineteen forty-nine,” Walter said. “The riots. Tell me, what did you do to her? What was it?”

Truman said nothing.

“It killed her, didn't it?”

His father's eyes had hardened, the look of the mad prophet come to dwell there once again. After a moment, he said: “Yeah, I guess it did.”

“Hesh says you're no better than a murderer—”

“Hesh.” Truman spat out the name as if he'd bitten into something rotten. “You want to know?” He paused. “Go back and take a look at that sign.”

“Sign? What sign?”

The old man was standing now, an odd composite of what he'd been eleven years earlier and the man who'd made his way in the world since. He almost looked dapper. “You tell me,” he said, glancing down at Walter's leg, and then he swung around and strode out the door.

It was the ghost ship all over again. “Come back here!” Walter shouted. “Come back, you son of a bitch!”

“I'm right here, Walter.”

He opened his eyes. At first he didn't know where he was, couldn't focus on the pale white field hanging over him, but then the smell of her—creme rinse, My Sin, tutti-frutti gum—brought him back. “Jessica,” he murmured.

“You were dreaming, that's all.” Her hand was on his brow, her breast in his face. He reached up, still groggy, and as if it were the most natural thing in the world under the circumstances, began to fumble with the buttons of her blouse. She didn't seem to mind. He fumbled some more, his brain numb, fingers like breadsticks, and then he had her breasts in his hands, weighing and kneading them, pulling them to his lips as if he were an infant in the cradle. But no, wait: he
was
an infant, his mother leaning over him with her depthless eyes, the world as pure and uncomplicated as a dapple of mid-morning sun on the nursery walls. …

Jessica pressed her lips to his forehead, whispered his name. In that instant, the whole great busy chattering institution fell silent—the TVs were dead, the intercom mute, the hallways under a spell. Every doctor, every nurse, orderly, newborn babe and jittery blood donor held his breath. No hypodermic slid into arm or buttock, no
dog-bitten child cried out. There were no footsteps in the corridor, no birds in the trees, no recalcitrant engines in the parking lot. Only silence. And at the very hub and center of that silence that was like an ocean deep lay Walter, with his abridged leg, and Jessica. In his fear, his solitude, his abandonment to grief and despair, he clutched gratefully at her, fastening himself to her like something half-drowned clinging to a rock in the midst of a torrent. Had he been crazy that night? To be hard, soulless and free was one thing, to be cut adrift from comfort and the community of man was another. He was a cripple, a pariah. And here she was, Joan of Arc, Calypso and Florence Nightingale all rolled into one. What more could he want?

“Jessica,” he whispered as she swayed above him, the gently undulating blond arras of her hair shielding him from the oppressive walls, the intolerable flowers, the bedside table with its tattered copies of
Argosy
and
Reader's Digest,
the sickness and the hurt, “Jessica, I think … I mean … do you think we ought to get married?”

The silence held. A fairy silence, oneiric, magical, the moment suspended and refined out of all proportion to the myriad moments that comprise a life. It held until she broke it—with a murmur of assent.

Lucky, lucky, lucky.

Jeremias was not so lucky. He withdrew into himself, gathered the meager skins about him and sat rigid as an ice sculpture while Van Wart's agent fidgeted in the saddle, blustered, cajoled and threatened. The agent tried to reason with him, tried to beat him down and strike fear into his heart—he even tried appealing to the boy's better nature, singing “Plead my cause, O Lord, with them that strive with me” in a high reedy tenor that belied his bulk. The wind howled down out of the mountains. Jeremias wouldn't even look at him. Finally the agent swung his horse around and thundered off to fetch the law.

By the time he returned with the
schout,
the weather had worsened. For one thing, it was snowing—big feathery flakes torn from the breast of the sky and mounting against the downed trees and bracken like the sign of some cumulate cosmic wrath; for another, the temperature had dropped to six degrees above zero. The
schout,
whose duty it was to enforce the law for the patroon, of the patroon and by the patroon, was a lean ferrety fellow by the name of Joost Cats. He came armed with an eviction notice bearing the mark of his employer (a V wedded to a W, VW, the logo utilized by Oloffe Stephanus to authenticate his edicts, identify his goods and chattels and decorate his undergarments), and the rapier, baldric and silver-plumed hat that were the perquisites of his office.

“Young layabout,” the agent was saying as the snow played around his jowls. “Slaughtered the livestock and let the place fall to wrack and ruin. I'd as soon see him hung as evicted.”

Joost didn't answer, his black staring eyes masked by the brim of
his hat, the sharp little beard clinging like a stain to his chin. Erratic posture bowed his back like a sickle and he sat so low in the saddle you wouldn't know he was coming but for the exuberant plume jogging between his horse's ears. He didn't answer because he was in a vicious mood. Here he was out in the hind end of nowhere, the sky like a cracked pitcher and snow powdering his black cloak till he looked like an
olykoek
dusted with sugar, and for what? To listen to the yabbering of the fat, red-faced, pompous ass beside him and bully a one-legged boy out into the maw of the great barren uncivilized world. He cleared his throat noisily and spat in disgust.

By the time they reached the naked white oak that in better times had shaded the Van Brunt household, the snow had begun to taper off and the temperature had dropped another five degrees. To their left, against the fastness of the trees, was the half-finished fieldstone wall begun by Wolf Nysen before he went mad, butchered his family and took to the hills. He'd cut their throats as they lay sleeping—sister, wife and two teenaged daughters—and left them to rot. When Joost's predecessor, old Hoogstraten, had finally found them, they were so far gone they might have been molded of porridge. People said that the Swede was still up there somewhere, living like a red Indian, swathing himself in skins and killing rabbits with his bare hands. Joost glanced uneasily about him. Dead ahead lay the charred bones of the cabin poking through the skin of snow like a compound fracture.

“Here,” puffed the agent, “see what they've done to the place.”

Joost gave it a minute, his horse picking through the drifted snow like an old man stepping into a bath, before he responded. “Looks like the patroon ought to give up on this place. It's nothing but bad luck.”

The agent ignored him. “Over there,” he said, pointing a thick finger in the direction of Jeremias' lean-to. Joost dropped the reins and thrust his numbed hands into his pockets while his horse—a one-eyed nag with an overactive appetite and dropsical mien—bobbed stupidly after the agent's mare.

“Van Brunt!” the agent called as they hovered over the empty lean-to and the snowy hummock that represented the corpse of the unhappy ox. “Show yourself this instant!”

There was no response.

The agent was blowing up a regular hurricane of exasperated breath, summoning up terms like brass, effrontery and cheek, when Joost pointed to a half-filled track in the snow at the rear of the lean-to. Beyond it was a similar print, and beyond that another. Upon closer examination, and after a full sixty seconds given over to reasoning in the deductive mode, the agent determined that these were young Van Brunt's footprints; viz., the mark of one shoe—the left—roughly paralleled by a shallow trough connecting a pair of pegholes.

Though the snow had stopped, the wind had begun to kick up and the sky was darkening toward evening. Joost was of the opinion that they should leave well enough alone—the boy was gone, that's all that mattered. But the agent, scrupulous as he was, felt obliged to make sure. After an exchange of opinion on the subject—Where do you expect him to go, Joost asked at one point, back to Zeeland?—the two set off at a slow plod to track the boy down and evict him properly.

The trail wound like a tattered ribbon through the forest and into a dense copse where grouse chuckled and turkeys roosted in the lower branches of the trees. Beyond the copse were hills uncountable, balled up like hedgehogs and bristling with timber, home to heath hen, pigeon, deer, pheasant, moose, and the lynx, catamount and wolf that preyed on them. And beyond the hills were the violent shadowy mountains—Dunderberg, Suycker Broodt, Klinkersberg—that swallowed up the river and gave rise to the Kaaterskill range and the unnamed territories that stretched out behind it all the way to the sun's furthest decline. Looking into all that wild territory with its unknown terrors, with darkness coming on and his toes gone numb in his boots, Joost spurred his horse forward and prayed the trail would take them toward the glowing lights and commodious hearth of the upper house.