World's End

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  “That’s right,” Jeremy said, and he could feel the power growing in him as if he were a tree rooted to the earth, as if all the strength of the ancestral soil beneath him were suddenly his. He’d never spoken the words before, but he spoke them now. “I’m the last of the Kitchawanks.”

  It was the beginning of a friendship.

  For the next two years—until the Depression descended on them and Sasha was forced to move back with his parents on the Lower East Side, until the foundry foundered and Jeremy lost his job and left the boardinghouse to reclaim his birthright from Rombout Van Wart—they met nearly every weekend. Neither of them had a car, so Sasha would bicycle down from his grandparents’ place in Kitchawank Colony, and from there they’d hike out along the river to fish the inlets or climb one of the peaks of the Highlands and camp overnight in the old way, in a wickiup made of bent and interwoven saplings. Or they’d take the train into New York for the latest Pickford, Chaplin or Fairbanks, for lectures on the people’s revolution in Russia or meetings of the I.W.W.

  For his part, Sasha Freeman, city kid and future novelist, who in that fall of 1927 was three months out of N.Y.U. and teaching for a gratuity at the Colony free school, felt that in Jeremy he’d found a link to an older, deeper way of knowledge. It was as if the earth had opened up and the stones begun to speak. Jeremy didn’t merely teach him how to listen for the footfall of fox and deer or how to gather and boil herbs against poison ivy, impetigo and the croup, didn’t merely give him the means to walk out into the woods with nothing more than the clothes on his back and survive—no, he gave him more, much more: he gave him stories. Legends. History. Leaning into a campfire on Anthony’s Nose or Breakneck Ridge, snow sifting down out of the sky, Sasha Freeman learned the story of Jeremy’s people, a people dispersed like his own, crowded onto reservations that were like the shtetls of Cracow, Prague, Budapest. He heard the story of Manitou’s big woman, of Horace Tantaquidgeon’s treachery, heard about the reservation school and the delusions of the plum-faced preceptor in the starched collar. Smoke ascended to heaven. It was spring, summer, fall again. The Indian forced up every legend, every memory, giving up his history as if it were a last testament.

  Eight years later Sasha Freeman published his first book, a polemic called Marx Among the Mohicans. It took the redoubtable father of communism back in history, to the time of the American primitives, and allowed him to score points against the slave state of modern industrial society as contrasted with the simple communal fraternity of the Indians. So what if it sold fifty-seven copies, half of them at a meeting of the Young People’s Socialist League attended by six of his cousins from Pearl Street? So what if it was printed in a basement and had a paper cover that fell to pieces if you looked at it twice? It was a beginning.

  And what did Jeremy get in return? Companionship, for one thing—Sasha Freeman was the first white friend he’d ever had, and the only friend he made in Peterskill. But it went deeper than that. Jeremy too was awakened to a new way of thinking, a new way of perceiving the world that had chewed up his people as if they were lambs of the field: he became radicalized. Sasha took him to unadvertised meetings of the I.W.W., gave him Ten Days That Shook the World and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, gave him Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Proudhon, Fourier. Jeremy learned that property is theft, that destruction is a kind of creation, that the insurrectionary deed is the most efficacious means of propaganda. He was beaten by hired goons outside a shoe factory in Paramus, New Jersey, hit with truncheons, billy clubs, brass knuckles and two-by-fours in the streets of Brooklyn, Queens and lower Manhattan, and it hardened him all the more. His people had never owned the land beneath their feet, but had lived on it, with it, a part of it. They hadn’t bought and sold and expropriated the means of production—they’d lived in their clans, cooperating, planting and harvesting together, sharing game, manufacturing their clothes and tools from nature. Sure. And the white men—the capitalists, with their greed for pelts and timber and real estate—they changed all that forever, strangled a great and giving society, a communist society. Sasha Freeman wrote a book. Jeremy Mohonk climbed the hill to Nysen’s Roost, an ancient place that spoke to him like no other, and swatted down Rombout Van Wart—the very type and symbol of the expropriator—swatted him down like a fly.

  In prison he was recalcitrant, as hard and unyielding as the stones they’d stacked atop one another to build the place. Prison regulations, the guard told him the day they ushered him through the admitting gate and down the long gray corridor to the barber’s chair. He’d let his hair grow out till it trailed down his back in a coil as thick as his arm, and he wore the notochord cinched around his forehead like a strip of gut. And if he’d been thin and gangling when he first met Sasha Freeman, now he was forty pounds heavier—and still growing. It took four men to hold him down while they shaved his head. They tore the notochord from his brow and swept it up with the refuse. To improve his attitude, he was given three weeks in solitary.

  When the three weeks were up, he was assigned a cell on the prison block. His cellmate was a white man, a housebreaker, skin the color of raw dough and blemished all over with tattoos like grape stains. Jeremy wouldn’t talk to him. Wouldn’t talk to anyone—not his fellow prisoners, not the guards or trustees or the sorry fat-assed preacher who poked his head in the cell door every month or so. He hated them all as one, the race that had polluted his blood, stolen his land and locked him away, the race of money grubbers and capitalists. He was twenty years old, and for every year he’d lived he had a year to serve: twenty years, the judge had intoned, his words as harsh as the thump of his gavel. Twenty years.

  During the second month, one of the guards—soft and pockfaced, an ignorant Irish from Verplanck—singled him out and taunted him with all the old sneers: chief, Hiawatha, squaw, dog eater. When Jeremy refused to respond, the Irish went further, dousing him with a pail of slops, spitting through the bars at him, waking him in the dead of night for meaningless inspections. Jeremy might as well have been deaf and mute, carved of stone. He never moved, never spoke, never expressed surprise or alarm. But one morning, early, when the lights had begun to go soft against the gray of dawn, he was there, in the shadows against the wall of his cell, waiting. The Irish was on wakeup, moving along the cellblock with a baton, rapping it on the bars to the sound of curses, groans, the thump and wheeze of men tumbling out of their beds. “Rise and shine!” he called with malicious joy, repeating it over and over as he worked his way toward Jeremy’s cell, “Up and at ’em!” The Indian crouched down, motionless, as intent as if he were stalking deer or bear. And then the Irishman was there, the baton rattling the bars, his voice punishing and sadistic: “Hey, Geronimo. Hey, asshole. Roll out.”

  Jeremy got him by the throat, both arms thrust through the bars. They’d been working him in the quarry, and his grip was like the grip of all the Mohonks through all the generations gone down. The guard dropped the baton with a clatter, snatching desperately at the Indian’s wrists. His face was a blister. Swelling. Red and swelling. Inches away. If Jeremy could only hold on long enough he’d burst it once and for all. But there was someone behind him—his cellmate, the tattooed idiot—shouting and tearing at his arms, and now there weretwo, three more guards, their billies raining on his hands, his wrists, the whole cellblock in an uproar. They broke his grip, finally, but he seized on the soft fat hand of one of the others and squeezed till he could feel the bones give. Then they were in the cell, they were all over him and they administered their own kind of justice.

  When it was over, he got three months in solitary and two more years tacked onto his sentence.

  So it was throughout his career at Sing Sing. He fought them each minute—each second—of each day. When the war came and they released muggers, second-story men and arsonists to fight the Fascists, he wouldn’t yield. “You’re the Fascists,” he told the warden, the recruiter, the guards who stood over him in the warden’s office. “The Rev
olution will bury you.” It was the first thing anyone could remember him saying in years. The cell door clanked shut behind him.

  For all his resolve, though, for all his toughness, prison finally broke him down. He knew prisoners who were executed, saw men who’d spent their entire lives behind bars, their backs stooped, faces sunk in on themselves. He was a young man still. Last of his line. His business in life was to reclaim some of what his tribe had lost, to seek out a woman of constant blood—a Shawangunk, an Oneida, even a Seneca, as his father had done—and keep the race alive. He was meant to roam the woods, to remember the old ways, to honor the sacred places—there was no one else to do it, no one among the pulullating hordes that blighted the earth like locusts. The knowledge of it mellowed him. The war years slipped past, Sing Sing was quiet, underpopulated. He stayed out of trouble. In 1946, five years short of the full term of his sentence, they set him free.

  He walked out of the gate at 8:00 A.M. on a chill and windblown December morning, wearing a cheap prison-issue suit and overcoat and with the token recompense for his seventeen years’ labor tucked deep in his breast pocket. By nightfall he was back at Nysen’s Roost, huddled over an open fire with a can of corned beef hash and the knife he’d picked up at a pawn shop in Peterskill, a knife exactly like the one Horace Tantaquidgeon had inserted between his father’s lumbar vertebrae in a time that seemed as distant as the first moment of history.

  He lived there a year before anyone discovered him. He’d built himself a timber and tar-paper shack for half of what it had cost Thoreau to build his place a century earlier. Built it beneath the white oak, in the place that spoke to him, precisely where his first shack had stood so briefly twenty years before. What he didn’t have—nails, an axe, plastic to stretch across the windows—he appropriated from the suburbanites who crowded the verges of his domain with their blacktop driveways and brick barbecues. When the prison suit fell away to nothing he made himself a breechclout and jacket from the hide of a doe. For cooking, he had a clay pot, shaped, tooled and fired in the way of the centuries.

  The year was 1947, the season fall. Standard Crane, son of Peletiah, a sharp-nosed, round-eyed gawk of a man in his early thirties, was out hunting squirrel one morning when he blundered across the shack. Jeremy, in his stained buckskin and with the flight feathers of the red-tailed hawk braided into his hair, stepped out onto the porch and shot him a corrosive look. Puzzled, Standard dropped the muzzle of his shotgun, shoved back his cap and scratched his head. For a moment he was so disoriented, startled and surprised he could only make a series of throat-clearing noises that the Indian took to be a sort of rudimentary game call. But then, shuffling his feet, he managed to say “Good morning,” and went on from there to inquire as to whether he and Jeremy were acquainted. The Indian, remembering Van Wart, said nothing. After a moment, Standard tipped his hat and wandered off down the trail.

  But Standard Crane was no Van Wart. Nor was his father, Peletiah, who despite a head cold, rheumy eyes and a bad knee, hiked all the way out to the shack in twenty-five-degree weather to view this prodigy, this green-eyed Indian who was squatting on his land. Jeremy was waiting for them. On the porch. Ready for anything. But Peletiah merely greeted him with a nod of his head and invited himself to a seat on the rough-hewn step beside him. Standard, who’d served as his father’s guide, hung back and grinned in embarrassment. Producing a tinfoil pouch from the inner pocket of his red-and-black plaid hunting jacket, Peletiah offered the Indian a chew, and then, in the most neighborly way imaginable, explained how he’d acquired the land from the late Rombout Van Wart.

  The Indian was a tough audience. He refused the tobacco with a gesture so curt he might have been shooing flies, then made his face into a mask. Though his expression didn’t reflect it, he was secretly pleased to hear that the land had passed from control of the Van Warts and deeply gratified to discover that the son of a bitch who’d put him behind bars was no longer among the living. And so he listened, as mute as the peeled logs of the porch, as the wheezy white man went on about the history of the place and circled around the question of Jeremy’s identity like a mosquito looking for a patch of bare flesh. But when Jeremy cut him off in mid-sentence and began quoting Proudhon, when he insisted that property was theft and that it was his tribal right to live there beneath the hallowed oak and be damned to all thieves and expropriators, Peletiah surprised him.

  Not only could this runny-eyed, pointy-nosed, skeletal old white man outquote him, he agreed with him. “On paper, I’m the owner of this land,” Peletiah said, ducking his head to spit and then looking around him with a bemused little smile that barely parted his lips, “but in fact the land belongs to everyone equally, every man that walks the earth. You’ll find no posted signs here.”

  Jeremy glanced up at the trees as if to confirm the assertion and found himself staring into the reticent eyes of the squirrel hunter. Standard slouched against a tree at least twenty feet from the cabin, and he was picking his teeth meditatively. At the mention of posted signs, he made a noise deep in his throat that was meant to convey good humor and amusement but that sounded more like the death rattle of a drowning man.

  “I bought the land because I had the money when nobody else did and because I got it for a song,” Peletiah was saying. “There was something about the place. I thought I’d like to build on it someday, but you know how that is. …” He waved his hand in dismissal. His eyes were shrewd; the little smile clung to his lips. “You want it?” he asked after a moment. “You want to camp here, swim in the creek, tramp the woods—go ahead. It’s yours. More power to you.”

  Two years later, Peletiah extended the invitation to 20,000 likeminded people, and the field below, on the far side of Acquasinnick Creek, filled with them. That was a fine and triumphant thing, but it was the first night—the night of the aborted concert—that was the real test. No more than a hundred and fifty turned up that night, with their picnic baskets and blankets to spread out in the grass. Jeremy watched them from the trees. He had no idea that Sasha Freeman had organized the event—hadn’t heard from him in twenty years—but it was a thing he could approve of, a thing he could recognize and applaud.

  When the trouble started, he never hesitated. Circling the arena, a shadow among shadows, he surprised bat-toting veterans and skulking boys alike, springing from the bushes with a whoop or merely rising up before them like a wrathful demon. Most took to their heels at the sight of him, but a handful—drunker or more foolish than the rest—kept coming. It was just what he wanted. He broke noses, bloodied lips, bruised ribs—and each kick, each punch, was a debt repaid. A paunchy veteran came at him with a tire iron and he kicked him in the groin. He snatched a fence post from a man with the sunken red-flecked eyes of a pig and slapped his backside with it till he began to squeal. At some point he discovered blood on his hands and forearms, and he paused to draw a single incarnadine slash beneath each of his eyes, and then, looking fierce and aboriginal, looking like a warrior of old, he chased a pair of teenaged boys till they collapsed in tears, begging for mercy. Mercy was a thing he’d never known, but he stayed his hand, thinking of Peletiah, thinking, for once, of the repercussions. He let them go. And then, as dusk began to thicken the branches of the trees and the cries from the roadway grew more hellish and disjointed, he drifted instinctively toward the open field to the north, and there, in the gathering gloom, made the acquaintance of Truman Van Brunt.

  Truman was wearing a polo shirt and a pair of baggy white trousers, and he was conferring with a big-armed man in a bloodied work shirt and what appeared to be a boy of six or seven. Though the Indian had never laid eyes on Truman before, and didn’t learn his name till the following morning in Peletiah’s kitchen, there was something familiar about him, something that tugged at his consciousness like a half-remembered dream. Crouched low in the bushes, Jeremy watched. And listened.

  The big-armed man was wrought up, his eyes wild, his hands raking at one another as if with some uncontainab
le itch. He wanted to know if the man in the polo shirt would make a sacrifice for them, if he’d try to slip through the mob and get help—because if help didn’t come soon, they were doomed. Truman didn’t hesitate. “Sure,” he said, “I’ll go, but only if I can take Piet with me,” and he indicated the boy. It was when the boy spoke—“Fuck, you goddamned well better take me with you”—that Jeremy recognized his mistake. He looked again. This was no boy—no, this was a man, a dwarf, his twisted little face blanched with evil, this was the pukwidjinny come to life. Jeremy clenched his fists. Something was wrong here, desperately wrong. Suddenly there was a shout from the direction of the arena, and the big-armed man threw a nervous glance over his shoulder. “Take him,” he said, and Truman and the dwarf started across the field.

  The Indian gave it a minute, till the man with the big arms had turned and jogged back toward the arena, and then he emerged from the trees and started after Truman. Silent and slow as a moving statue, bent double in his stalking crouch, he crept up on the man in the polo shirt and his undersize companion. Truman never once glanced over his shoulder. In fact, he strode through the field as if he hadn’t a care in the world, as if he were strolling into a restaurant for Sunday brunch instead of going out to risk his neck among the mad dogs on the road ahead of him. The Indian, hurrying now to keep up, thought he must be insane. Either that or he was the bravest man alive.

  Suddenly three figures broke from the trees at the road’s edge and started for Truman and the dwarf. They wore Legionnaire’s caps and dirty T-shirts. All three brandished weapons—jack handles and tire chains hastily plucked from the trunks of their cars. “Hey, nigger-lover,” the one in the middle called, “come to poppa.”

  Jeremy sank low in the grass, ready for trouble. But there wasn’t any trouble, that was the odd thing. Truman just walked right up to them and said something in a low urgent tone—something the Indian couldn’t quite catch. Whatever he’d said, though, it seemed to placate them. Instead of raising their weapons, instead of flailing at him like the mad dogs and capitalist tools they were, they ducked their heads and grinned as if he’d just told the joke of the century. And then, astonishingly, one of them held a bottle out to him and Truman took a swig. “Depeyster Van Wart,” Truman said, and his voice was as clear suddenly as if he were standing right there beside the Indian, “you know him?”