World's End

by T. C. Boyle

  Rombout was struck dumb. No man had insulted him to his face in twenty-five years—not since a brash upperclassman at college had called him “a starched-up ass” and taken a concussive blow to the right ear in swift retribution. And here was this trespasser, this swarthy hook-nosed bum in a ragpicker’s suit of clothes, bearding him on his own property.

  “A criminal and an expropriator,” the Indian continued. “A pauperizer of the working classes, a pander to the twin whores of privilege and capital, and a polluter of the land my ancestors lived in harmony with for seven thousand years.” The Indian paused. “You want to hear more? Huh?” He was pointing his index finger now. “You’re the trespasser, friend, not me. I’ve come to reclaim my birthright.”

  It was then that Rombout struck him—once only—a vicious swipe of the riding crop aimed at those chilly, hateful, incongruous green eyes. The sound of it, like a single burst of brutal applause, faded quickly on the antiseptic air, till in an instant only the memory of it remained.

  For his part, the Indian seemed almost to welcome the blow. He barely flinched, though Rombout had put everything he had into it. Which admittedly wasn’t much, considering the fact that he was in his mid-forties and given to a sedentary life relieved only by the occasional round of golf or canter across the property. By contrast, the Indian appeared to be in his early twenties; he was tall and fine-whittled, hardened by work and indigence. Dew drops of blood began to appear in a band that rimmed his eyes and traced the bridge of his nose like the blueprint for a pair of spectacles.

  “Damn you,” Rombout cursed, trembling with the chemical emissions his anger had released in his blood. He didn’t have a chance to say more, because the Indian bent to snatch up a stick of firewood the length and breadth of a baseball bat and laid into the side of his head like the immortal Bambino going for the stands. It later came out—at the Indian’s trial—that the attacker landed several other blows as well, including kicks, punches and knee drops, but Rombout was aware only of the first and of the blackness that followed precipitately on its heels.

  He wasn’t dead—no, he would live to recover his health and vigor, only to fatally inhale a raw oyster at Delmonico’s some ten years later—but he might as well have been. He never stirred. For three hours he lay there, bleeding and clotting, clotting and bleeding.’ He came to briefly once or twice, saw a world that looked as if it were ten fathoms beneath the ocean, tasted his own blood and descended again into the penumbral depths of unconsciousness. In all that time the Indian did nothing—he didn’t renew his attack, didn’t attempt to aid his victim, lift his wallet or abscond with Pierre, the magnificent bay gelding. He merely sat there at the doorway of his shanty, rolling and smoking cigarettes, a self-righteous look on his face.

  It was Herbert Pompey—chauffeur, stable hand, gardener, factotum, jack-of-all-trades, major domo and son of Ismailia the nurse—who ultimately rescued the lord of the manor. When after several hours Rombout hadn’t returned, Herbert went to his mother to ask her advice. “He drunk is what he is,” she opined. “Pass out against some tree, or maybe he just fell off that animal and broke his head.” Then she told him to put one foot in front of the other and go have a look for him.

  Pompey tried the dairy farm first. Rombout would sometimes ride out there to drink black coffee and grappa with Enzo Fagnoli, whose family had been milking cows for the Van Warts for eighty years. (The Fagnolis had taken over for the van der Mules or Meulens, tenants at Van Wart Manor since the world began. Apprised that the state legislature was about to put an end to the manorial system in the Hudson Valley, giving leaseholders title to the farms they’d worked for generations, Rombout’s great grandfather, Oloffe III, had evicted the Dutchmen in favor of the intrepid Italians, who converted the farm to dairy production and worked for an annual wage. It was hard on Oloffe, having to adjust to paying his tenants rather than vice versa, but the unquenchable hordes of New York City clamored for his milk, butter and cheese, his herds multiplied till they darkened the hills and in time he was able to admit that it was all for the best.) Enzo, in overalls and porkpie hat, greeted Pompey with enthusiasm and offered him a swig of apple wine from a green jug, but regretted to say that he hadn’t seen Rombout in nearly a week.

  Next it was the Blue Rock Inn, where the lord of the manor was wont to take a hiatus from the rigors of equestrian exercise in order to share a cup of bootleg bourbon with the proprietor, Charlie Outhouse, who more typically regaled his guests with soda water and orange pekoe tea. Pompey retraced his steps, passing within hailing distance of the manor house—still no Rombout—and hiked down to where the inn perched over Van Wart Creek as it debouched in the Hudson. Charlie was out back, plucking hens for dinner. He hadn’t seen Rombout either. Pompey kept walking, skirting Acquasinnick Ridge and following the bank of the creek until finally he swung north for Nysen’s Roost.

  He struck the stony path that traversed Blood Creek (so named because Wolf Nysen had incarnadined its waters in trying to wash the blood of his daughters from his hands), his legs heavy with fatigue as he pumped up the steep hill. His mother, a gossipy, superstitious woman, repository of local legend and guardian of the Van Wart family history, had told him tales of Wolf Nysen, the mad murdering Swede. And of the loup-garou, the pukwidjinnies and the wailing woman of the Blue Rock, who’d perished in a snowstorm and whose voice could still be heard on nights when the snow fell thick. The woods were dense here—never lumbered—and the shadows gathered in clots around the bones of fallen trees. It was an unlucky place, strangely silent even in summer, and as boy and man, Pompey had avoided it. But now, though the leaves were ankle deep on the trail, he could see that a horse had passed this way recently, and he felt nothing but relief.

  When he emerged from the woods at the top of the rise, he was as surprised as his employer had been to find a crude habitation of notched saplings and tar paper huddled beneath the big old white oak that stood sentinel over the place. The next thing he noticed was Pierre, still saddled, grazing quietly beneath the tree. Then, as he drew closer, he became aware of a stranger sitting in the doorway of the shack—a bum, from the look of him—and beyond him, something like a heap of rags cast off in the stiff high grass. But where was Rombout?

  Never hesitating, though his gut was clenched with foreboding, Pompey strode right on up to the shack to confront this stranger. He halted five feet from him, hands on hips. Who the devil are you?—the words were on his lips when he glanced down at that heap of rags. Rombout looked as if he were sleeping, but there was blood on the side of his head. His riding boots—Pompey had put a shine on them that very morning—glinted in the pale autumn light.

  “What happen here?” Pompey demanded of the Indian, who’d barely raised his head to watch him stride up to the shack. A great lowering ancestral fear gripped Pompey as he looked down at the white man sprawled in the grass.

  The Indian said nothing.

  “You do this?” Pompey was scared. Scared and angry. “Huh?”

  Still the Indian held his silence.

  “Who you, anyway? What you want?” Pompey was glancing distractedly from the Indian to the horse and from the horse to the terrible inert bundle of clothing on the ground.

  “Me?” the Indian said finally, raising his head slowly to pin him with those fanatic’s eyes. “I’m the last of the Kitchawanks.”

  The trial didn’t last an hour. The Indian was accused of criminal trespass, assault with a deadly weapon and attempted murder. His attorney, appointed by the court, had gone to school with Rombout. The sheriff, the court recorder, the district attorney and the district attorney’s assistant had also gone to school with Rombout. The judge had gone to school with Rombout’s father.

  “Clearly, your honor,” the Indian’s attorney pleaded, “my client is not in possession of his faculties.”

  “Yes?” returned the judge, who was a big, harsh, reactionary man, known for his impatience with hoboes, panhandlers, gypsies and the like. “And just how is
that?”

  “He claims to be an Indian, your honor.”

  “An Indian?” The judge lifted his eyebrows while everyone in the courtroom stole a glance at the Kitchawank, who sat erect as a pillar in the witness box.

  The judge now turned to him. “Jeremy Mohonk,” he began, and then glanced at the court recorder. “Mohonk? Is that right?” The recorder nodded, and the judge turned back to the accused. “Do you understand the nature of the charges against you?”

  “I was defending my person and my property,” the Indian growled, his eyes sweeping the room. Rombout, his head still bandaged and the left side of his face swollen and discolored, looked away.

  “Your property?” the judge asked.

  The Indian’s attorney was on his feet. “Your honor,” he began, but the judge waved him off.

  “Are you aware, sir, that the property you claim as your own has been in the Van Wart family since before this country, as we know it, even came into existence?”

  “And before that?” the Indian countered. His eyes were like claws, tearing at every face in the courtroom. “Before that it belonged to my family—until we were cheated out of it. And if you want to know something, so did the land this courtroom stands on.”

  “You do then claim to be an Indian?”

  “Part Indian. My blood has been polluted.”

  The judge gazed at him for a long moment, smacking his lips from time to time and twice removing his glasses to wipe them on the sleeve of his robe. Finally he spoke. “Nonsense. There are Indians in Montana, Oklahoma, the Black Hills. There are no Indians here.” Then he dismissed the defense attorney and asked the D.A. if he had any further questions to put to the accused.

  The jury, eight of whom had gone to school with Rombout, was out for five minutes. Their verdict: guilty as charged. The judge sentenced Jeremy Mohonk to twenty years at Sing Sing, a place named, ironically enough, for the Sint Sinks, a long extinct tribe that had been second cousin to the Kitchawanks.

  Rombout had seen justice done, and yet that piece of property—disputed by a madman and never much good for anything anyway—proved too great a burden to bear. Six months after Jeremy Mohonk had been shunted off to prison and his shack razed, Rombout was forced to put the place up for sale. Over the years, through legislation, population pressure, division among heirs and other forms of attrition, the original Van Wart estate had shrunk from 86,000 acres to fewer than two hundred. Now it would be deprived of fifty more.

  Times were hard all over. For two years the plot remained on the market and not a single bid was forthcoming, until finally Rombout put an ad in the Peterskill Post Dispatch (soon to merge with both the Herald and the Star Reporter). The day after the ad appeared, a gleaming late-model Packard sedan made its slow, flatulent way up the drive to the manor house. Inside was Peletiah Crane, principal of the Van Wartville school and descendant of the legendary pedagogue-legislator. He was dressed in his principal’s pinstripes, replete with bow tie, celluloid collar and straw boater, and he carried with him a black satchel similar to those employed by doctors making their rounds.

  Pompey led the educator into the brightly lit back parlor, where Rombout and his thirteen-year-old son, Depeyster, sat over a game of chess. “Peletiah?” Rombout exclaimed in surprise, rising and extending his hand.

  The principal was smiling—no, grinning—till he looked like a walnut about to split open. Depeyster ducked his head. He knew that grin. It was a variant of the one Old Stone Beak, as they called him, employed just prior to lifting his cane down from the wall and applying it to some miscreant’s backside. Wider, gummier and more compressed about the lips than the caning grin, this one was reserved for special occasions of triumph, as when Dr. Crane had assembled the student body to announce that his own son had won the essay contest commemorating the founding of Peterskill, or when he’d curtailed athletics for a month because Anthony Fagnoli had desecrated the shower stall with an anatomical diagram. Thirteen years old and mortified in the face of that smile, Depeyster felt like slipping down to the cellar for a pinch of dirt. Instead, he concentrated on the chessboard.

  The principal pumped his father’s hand joyously and then took a seat. “Mr. Van Wart,” he said, “Rombout,” and he was tapping the black bag in his lap with a knowing and proprietary air, as if it contained the philosopher’s stone or the first draft of Roosevelt’s New Deal speech, “I’ve come to make an offer on the property.”

  The Finger

  It was February, grim and cold and gray. Walter, a young man with two feet like anyone else, was still in school, sitting down to his desk with a jar of wheat germ and a carton of prune-whip yogurt, trying to make sense of Heidegger. His motorcycle was in the garage out back of the rooming house in which he ate, slept, shat and ruminated over questions pertaining to man’s fate in an indifferent universe, where it stood forlornly amidst a clutter of three-legged tables, disemboweled armchairs and lamps with mismatched shades. He wouldn’t be needing it for a while. The outside temperature was twenty below, he was three hundred fifty miles and a whole universe away from the clapboard bungalow in Kitchawank Colony and the hissing inferno of Depeyster Manufacturing and he had three more interminable months to endure before he could accept his diploma from the liver-spotted hands of President Crumley and tear the pages from Heidegger with the same slow malicious pleasure with which he’d torn the wings from flies as a child.

  Jessica was at school too. In Albany. She hadn’t seen Walter since Christmas break and had written him three times without reply in the past week. She’d also written to graduate schools. Scripps, Miami, N.Y.U., Mayaguez. What she wanted from Walter was love, fidelity and an enduring relationship; what she wanted from Scripps, Miami, N.Y.U. and Mayaguez was a chance to study marine biology. At the moment, she was contemplating the typescript of her senior thesis, which lay on the desk beside yet another letter to Walter. Her legs were crossed, and a furry slipper, shaped like a rabbit but made of cotton, dangled from her pink-frosted toes. The title gave her a little thrill of pleasure: The Effect of Temperature Fluctuation on Vanadium Concentration in Tunicates of the Intertidal Zone, by Jessica Conklin Wing. She weathered the thrill, turned the page and began to read.

  Tom Crane, grandson to Peletiah, friend and father confessor to Jessica and lifelong boon companion to Walter, was not in school. Not as of two weeks ago, anyway. Nope. Not he. He was a dropout, and proud of it. Cornell, as far as he was concerned, was strictly a bourgeois institution, repressive, reactionary and stultifyingly dull. He’d dissected his last frog, tortured his last rat and struggled for the last time to heft twenty-five-pound textbooks crammed with illustrations, diagrams and appendices. He’d cleaned up his room and sold the whole business—desk, chair, tensor lamp, slide rule, texts, dictionaries, his fieldbook of natural history and a two-year-old calendar featuring the wildflowers of the Northeast as displayed against the wet vulvae of naked, black-nippled Puerto Rican girls—for twenty-six dollars, stuffed his underwear in a rucksack and hitchhiked home.

  “What are you going to do now?” his grandfather asked him when he got there.

  Hunched and dirty, the eight-foot canary-yellow scarf wrapped around his neck like an anaconda and his World War I German aviator’s coat hanging open to the waist, he merely shrugged. “Don’t know,” he said. “Might get a job, I guess.”

  His grandfather, former guiding light of the Van Wartville and Peterskill schools and a firm believer in the dignity of work and the principles of John Dewey, gave a snort of contempt. He was seventyseven years old and his eyebrows rose and fell again like great white swooping owls.

  “I wanted to ask you if I could live in the shack.”

  For a moment the old man was speechless. “The Indian’s shack?” he said finally, a fine trembling crusty incredulity oscillating his voice. “Way out there in the hind end of nowhere? Good Christ, you’ll freeze to death.”

  Oh no, he wouldn’t freeze. Last summer he’d equipped the place with a new wood stov
e, replaced the windows and patched the chinks in the walls with scrap lumber and wood putty. And the summer before he’d put up a porch, installed a chemical toilet and dragged enough crapped-over discarded furniture up there to make the place habitable. Besides, he had a good down bag and fifty acres of firewood.

  His grandfather, he of the sharp Crane beak and devouring Crane eyes, had doted on him since he lay kicking in the cradle, and now that his own son was gone, the old man clung to him with a fierceness that had all the desperate love of dying blood in it. That is, he was a pushover. “If that’s what you want,” he said at last, heaving a sigh that might have raised the curtains.

  And so here he was, living like a hermit, a man of the mountains, a saint of the forest and hero of the people, free of the petty pecuniary worries that nag shop owner and working stiff alike. Sure it was nippy, and yes, necessity forced him to trudge out to Van Wart Road and hitch the two miles to his grandfather’s for a hot meal and the occasional ritual peeling of the long johns and immersion in a steaming tub, but he was doing it. Independence was his! Self-direction! The joy of sloth! He lay in bed all morning, wrapped in his sleeping bag, his arms pinned beneath the weight of Indian blankets uncountable and an old reeking raccoon coat he’d found in his grandmother’s closet, watching his breath hang in the air. Sometimes he’d get up to open a can of creamed corn and set it on the kerosene stove or maybe make himself a cup of herb tea or hot chocolate, but mostly he just lay there, listening to his beard grow and relishing his freedom. About ten or eleven—he couldn’t tell which, didn’t have a clock or watch—he’d begin reading. Typically, he’d start out light, with some elfin fantasy or sci fi, with Tolkien or Vonnegut or Salmón. After lunch—chick peas mashed into brown rice with lentil gravy, out of the five-gallon pot—he’d get into the heavy stuff. Lenin, Trotsky, Bakunin, cheap pamphlets with gray or green covers, the paper no better than newsprint. What did he care for leather bindings and rag content?—he was studying for the revolution.