World's End

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  “Who is it?” Neeltje called from the back of the house. They’d finished supper—pea soup, bread, cheese and beer—and she was getting Jeremy ready for bed. The house had fallen dark in the gathering dusk.

  Jeremias didn’t answer. He stood there, letting his mood go sour. This was the man, the shit-smeared skulking savage heathen, who’d ruined his sister and then deserted her. And here he was, filthy and ragged, angular as a wading bird, standing on the doorstep with no more Dutch than he’d had four years ago. “I have nothing for you,” Jeremias said, enunciating the words in the way of the pedagogue, each syllable bitten off clean and distinct. “Get out of here.” It was then that he felt a movement at his side and glanced down to see Jeremy standing beside him. The boy was rapt, gazing up in wonder at this apparition in the raccoon skin coat.

  “Alstublieft,” Mohonk repeated, then turned his head to call out something in the Kitchawank dialect, the words like stones in his mouth.

  At this, two Indians stepped out of the shadows at the corner of the house. One of them was old Jan, grinning broadly and trailing flaps of greasy deerskin and a smell of the swamp. The other was a young buck Jeremias recognized from Jan Pieterse’s. The buck’s face was painted, and a tomahawk decorated with the crest feathers of tanager and bunting dangled like a toy from the fingertips of his right hand. Instinctively, Jeremias reached down and pushed his nephew back into the room. “You have a message for me?” Jeremias asked, glancing from the buck to Jan.

  They stopped at the front step. The buck was expressionless. Jan grinned. Mohonk hugged the coat to him as if he were cold. “Yes,” old Jan said finally, “I have a message.”

  Neeltje had come up behind her husband now, and was pressing Jeremy to her skirts, rocking him gently back and forth. The light drained away in the west.

  Jan was grinning still, as if he’d reached a height beyond the gravitational pull of simple drunkenness and passed into a realm of giddiness and light. “From him,” he said, indicating Mohonk with an abrupt laugh. “From Mohonk, son of Sachoes.”

  The son of Sachoes never blinked. Jeremias studied him a second, then turned back to Jan. “Well?” he demanded.

  Suddenly the old Kitchawank dropped his head and began to shuffle his feet. “Ay-yah, neh-neh,” he chanted, “Ay-yah, neh-neh,” but Mohonk cut him off. He said something in a voice as harsh and rapid as gunfire, and old Jan looked up, blinking. “He wants his son back.”

  If the three of them weren’t so crapulous, if old Jan weren’t wasted by the years, the smallpox and the curse of the burning water, if Mohonk weren’t degenerate and weak and if the buck had had his senses about him, the outcome might have been different. As it was, they made a critical mistake. Jeremias, enraged by the very suggestion, drew one hand flat across the other, said “Nee” for emphasis and stepped back to shut the door on them; it was at that very moment that the young buck chose to let fly with the tomahawk. The weapon rocketed through the air with a deadly whoosh, only to be deflected by the edge of the door and drop harmlessly to the floor in the middle of the room. There was a moment—fleeting, the fraction of a fraction of a second—during which the Indians looked remorseful and deeply ashamed, and then they surged toward the door.

  Or rather, the buck did. Mohonk insinuated his long flat-arched foot, clad in a dirty moccasin, between door and frame, while old Jan lost his balance and sat down heavily in the dirt with a grunt of surprise.

  Reacting to the threat, Jeremias slammed the door on the foot of his erstwhile brother-in-law, and when it sprang back from contact with that bony appendage, he found that he was gripping the venerable pogamoggan in his right hand (Neeltje, remembering her father, had snatched it up from the inglenook and pressed it on him). The first to blunder through the door was the buck, his warpaint smeared to reveal the uncertain face of a fifteen-year-old peering out from beneath it; he caught the full force of the granite ball in the abdomen and fell gasping to the floor, where he writhed about for several minutes in imitation of an eel in a pot. Next was Mohonk, hopping on one foot while cradling the throbbing other one in both hands. Jeremias took a half-hearted swing at him, but missed, striking the wall in a storm of splinters.

  It was then that things turned nasty. For Mohonk, his dignity wounded, gritted his teeth, set down the palpitating foot and drew a bone knife from the blameless folds of his raccoon skin coat. And then this same Mohonk—lover and abettor of meisje and squaw alike, sire of Jeremias’ nephew and husband to his dear dead beloved sister—came at Jeremias with murder in his heart.

  Thinking back on it, Jeremias would remember the feel of that primitive weapon in his hand, the spring of the fruitwood shaft as the ball whipped forward as if under its own volition, the deadly wet final thump that collapsed the Indian’s skull like a rotten pumpkin. He remembered too the look in his nephew’s eye—the boy too young to know who this gaunt toppling giant was and yet somehow connected to the moment with a look that would endure a lifetime—and then the crablike retreat of the humiliated buck and old Jan’s interminable, wheezing, marrow-chilling dirge.

  Mohonk, last fruit of Sachoes’ loins, had been laid low.

  Jeremias was sorry for it. Heartily sorry. But he’d done what any other man would have done under the circumstances: his home and family had been threatened, and he’d defended them. Afterward, shaken and penitential, he laid the body out on the table and sent for the schout. Hours later, old Jan, wearied by the sad drone of his own whiskey-cracked voice, set off for the Kitchawank village at Indian Point, bringer of sad tidings.

  Next morning, so early the color had yet to return to the earth, Wahwahtaysee the Firefly, bent double and older by what seemed like another century, came to claim the body. Locally, from Croton all the way up to Suycker Broodt, the Indians would suffer for this attack on the white men—the schout would see to that, and Wahwahtaysee knew it. Her people had lived with the Mohawk, with the Dutch, with the English. Anger was futile. Reprisal meant counter reprisal, reprisal meant extermination. That was the way of the people of the wolf. Betrayal. Deceit. The open smile and the stab in the back. She wasn’t bitter, only confused.

  As she stood there in the dark room in that unhappy place, exuding a scent as wild and incorruptible as the spoor of the tree-dweller, the pouched one, the white beast that had lent it to her, chanting her ancient threnody and anointing her son’s flesh with the unguents and resins of the gods themselves, she glanced up to see a small, dark-eyed thing in the corner of the room, a woman, a white woman, her belly hard with child. She held those dark eyes a moment, and then turned back to her dead son.

  Five months later, when the snow lay crusted on the ground, Neeltje went into labor. Her mother was there to help her, and there was a Yankee midwife too. Her father, the schout, wasn’t quite ready yet to set foot in that tainted house, and so had installed himself in the upper manor house as the guest of Vrouw Van Wart, who was once again mortifying her flesh in religious retreat. Jeremias sat before a fire in the outer room, his green-eyed nephew and adoptive father at his side, and listened to his wife’s cries of anguish. “Hush,” said Vrouw Cats from within. “There, there,” said the midwife.

  At some point the cries reached a crescendo, then fell away to a silence thick as doom. There was a rustling of skirts, the scrape of clogs on the floorboards and a new cry, thin and resilient, a cry that had to adjust itself to the novelty of throat and voicebox, lungs and air. Vrouw Cats appeared in the doorway a moment later. “It’s a boy,” she said.

  A boy. Jeremias stood and Staats rose to embrace him. “Congratulations, mijnzoon,” Staats said, drawing the pipe from his lips to hold him at arm’s length and gaze into his eyes. “And have you got a name yet for this prodigy?”

  Jeremias felt lightheaded, giddy, felt as if he’d crossed the far boundaries of the little life he’d led up till now and entered onto a new and glorious plane of existence. “Oh, yes,” he murmured. “Yes: we’re going to call him Wouter.”

  Collision
the Second

  In another age, in a time when meat and bread came wrapped in plastic and cabbage appeared spontaneously between the kohlrabi and bok choy in the produce section of the supermarket, Walter Van Brunt found himself leaning up against a fieldstone fireplace in the house of a stranger, sipping warm Cold Duck from a wax cup and digesting a lunatic rap on the subject of Smaug the dragon’s relevance to the war in Southeast Asia (“Clearly, man—I mean how could Tolkien make it any clearer without slapping you in the face with it?—Smaug’s just a stand-in for Nixon, right?”). Walter was profoundly drunk, seminauseous, bombarded by angst and raked with regrets as with flying bullets, and he was simultaneously trying to get drunker, fend off the jerk who’d pinned him up against the fireplace and keep an eye out for Mardi. “Fiery breath!” shouted the jerk, who wore his hair in braids, exhaled his own fiery breath and had received his draft notice two days earlier. “And what do you think that’s all about, huh?”

  Walter hadn’t the faintest idea. He swallowed the dregs of the Cold Duck, now flecked with bits of exfoliated wax, and felt the jerk’s grip on his forearm. “Napalm, brother,” the jerk whispered with a knowing shake of his head, “that’s what Tolkien’s talking about.”

  Looking fearlessly into the draftee’s bloodshot eyes, Walter said he agreed with him a hundred percent, then shoved past him and made for the bathroom. On the way, he stepped over half a dozen recumbent bodies, snaked unsteadily through a maze of reeling, treacherous, arm-flailing dancers and very nearly lurched into a withered Christmas tree festooned with cigarette papers and the dangling, disconnected limbs of plastic dolls. Drums kneaded him like dough, guitars throbbed in his gut. Mardi was nowhere in sight.

  It was New Year’s Eve, 1968, and this was the fifth or sixth house full of strangers to which Mardi had dragged him. By way of celebration. Somewhere on the dim periphery of the evening there’d been a suburban interior and someone’s gaping, tartar-toothed parents insisting they have a toddy, and then there was Mardi’s father saying “You will look in on the Strangs, won’t you? And the Hugleys?” and Mardi sneering “Sure, and we’ll stop in at the D.A.R. quilting bee too.” Then there was Cold Duck, $1.79 the bottle, Mexican pot that tasted as if it had been cured in Windex, the little striated pill Mardi had slipped him in the coffee shop where they’d stopped to get out of the cold, and houses, houses full of drunken, grinning, suspicious, long-toothed, dog-faced, silly-ass strangers. And now there was this place, with its dirty wood paneling, its unrelenting assault of Top Ten hits and its hermeneutical draftee. He didn’t even know where he was exactly—somewhere out in the hind end of Tarrytown or Sleepy Hollow, he guessed. At least that’s what it had looked like when Mardi, straddling the Norton and clinging to his back like a mountaineer pressed to a wind-sheared scarp, shouted “This is it!” and he’d shot right up on the lawn and skidded into the stone slab at the foot of the porch, no problem, you okay?

  That was an hour ago. At least. Now he was looking for the bathroom. He fumbled into the kitchen, startling two guys in serapes and cowboy hats who were cleaning pot in a colander, and tore open the door to the broom closet. “Down the hall, man,” said the near cowboy in an accent right out of western Queens.

  When finally he located the bathroom, he pulled back the door to find himself staring into the steamed-up eyes of a girl with frizzy hair and a pair of blue crepe bell bottoms puddled around her ankles; she lowered herself daintily to the toilet seat and gave him a look that would have corroded metal. “Sorry,” he mumbled, backing out the door like a crayfish feeling for its hole. The moment the door clicked shut, he felt a familiar grip on his arm and swung around to discover that he was standing toe-to-toe with the deluded draftee. “She’s really something, huh?” the jerk said, wiping something from his hands on the sleeves of Walter’s jacket.

  “Who?” Walter said, knowing he should have let it drop. They were alone in the hallway. Music thumped from the direction of the living room, the Queens cowboys shared a laugh in the kitchen behind them. Walter was beginning to forget what Mardi looked like.

  “My sister,” the draftee said. He couldn’t have been more than twenty, but with his beard and hair and the twisted maniacal leer that suddenly flamed up to disarrange his features, he might have been the ancient mariner himself, his hand fastened on the wedding guest’s sleeve. “In the crapper,” he added with a significant nod. “Doesn’t she remind you of Galadriel, you know—the elf princess? Like when Elrond gets it on? You know who I’m talking about, right?”

  No, Walter didn’t know. And in any case, he’d stopped listening—perhaps, propped up against the wall with an ache in his bladder and a rushing, hissing spume of light rising like a heavy sea in his head, he even closed his eyes for a moment. He was thinking about Jessica and Tom Crane, Hector, Herbert Pompey—the people he should be with now, the people he couldn’t be with. He was thinking of that bleak cold Saturday afternoon three weeks back when the sun shone pale as milk through the worn curtains in the bedroom and Jessica, booted, gloved, wrapped and muffled from her sinewy higharched feet to the glowing turned-up tip of her Anglo-Saxon nose, had bent to kiss him as he lay caught between sleep and waking. “Where to?” he’d managed.

  She was going Christmas shopping. Of course.

  “So early?”

  She laughed. It was half-past twelve. “How do you feel about a blender?” she called from the next room. “For your aunt Katrina?” He didn’t feel. His mouth was dry, he had to take a piss, and the lining of his brain seemed to have swollen overnight like dough in a pan. “I thought …” she murmured, and now she was talking to herself, feet beating a brisk tattoo to the door, the wheeze of the hinges, a breath of refrigerated air, and then her last words hanging suspended till the door shut softly behind her, “… frozen daiquiris and whatnot.”

  In his very next moment of consciousness he was aware of a new voice—Mardi’s—projecting forcefully from the front of the house. “Hey! Anybody home? Fa-la-la-la-la! Deck the halls and all that shit!” The door slammed behind her. “Walter?”

  He propped himself up on one elbow, smoothed down his mustache and pushed the hair out of his eyes. “In here,” he said.

  He’d been seeing Mardi three or four times a week since the afternoon of the ghost ships, and feeling bad about it too. Here he was, married less than four months, and already he was running around behind his wife’s back. Worse: he was doing it while she was at work earning the money he spent on beer and cigarettes and rib-eye steak. When he let himself think about it, he felt like a shit—a real, First Class, Select, Grade A, certifiable shit. On the other hand, he was still soulless, hard and free, wasn’t he? Married or not. What would Meursault have done in his situation? Fucked them both, that’s what. Or neither of them. Or somebody else altogether. Sex didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. He was Walter Truman Van Brunt, nihilist hero, Walter Truman Van Brunt, hard as stone.

  Besides, Mardi was something he couldn’t get enough of. She was dangerous, wild, unpredictable—she made him feel as if he were living on the edge, made him feel bad in the best sense of the word, like James Dean, like Belmondo in Breathless. While Jessica made him feel bad, period. She came home from work, stinking of formalin, her eyes red, a sack of groceries clutched to her high tight bosom while he lay sprawled on the couch amidst the refuse of the day, and she never said a word. Never asked if he’d looked for a job or made up his mind about going back to school, never reproached him for the sink full of dishes, the beer bottles set up on the coffee table like bowling pins, the haze of incinerated pot that clung to the curtains, seeped into the furniture and filmed the windows. No. She just smiled. Loved him. Went to work on the dishes with one hand and whipped up some trout amandine, fettuccine Alfredo or Texas hot chili and a vitamin-choked spinach salad with the other, all the while singing along to Judy Collins or Joni Mitchell in a high pure soprano that would have made all the angels in heaven faint with the superabundant beauty of it. And oh, did he feel bad.
>
  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.