World's End

by T. C. Boyle

  Jessica stood beside him, fidgeting with her purse. She was wearing an embarrassed smile. Lola was smiling too, but her smile was worn and rueful. Walter, despite himself, found that he was smiling back at her. His wasn’t a comforting smile, though. He was too disoriented, too crushed by the ghost of the familiar that screamed like something choked in the bushes each time he glanced down at his right foot, to smile like an unconstrained and doting son. No, his smile was more a baring of the teeth.

  Did he want something to eat? Lola wanted to know. A little borscht maybe? With some rye bread? Tea? Cookies? Did he want to sit down? Was it too warm? Should she turn on the fan? Hesh would be thrilled when he got home from work.

  Walter didn’t want any borscht. Nor rye bread, tea or cookies either. It wasn’t too warm. The fan could rest. He looked forward to seeing Hesh. But for now—and here he gave Jessica a significant look—he just wanted to go up to bed. To rest, that is. He would not drink the champagne, he would not have a beer or monster burger and he would not engage in an act of love and affirmation with his fiancée. Instead, he would mount the stairs to his boyhood room like a soldier returned from battle, like a martyr, and he would draw the shades, stretch out on the bed and watch the shadows deepen toward night.

  Next morning he awoke to the smell of potato pancakes, a smell that roused him like a slap in the face. He sat up in bed, seized with fear and loathing. The cycle was beginning again. Already his mother’s sorrowful eyes had begun to detach themselves from the gloom in the corner behind the bureau. A minute more and his grandmother would be looking over his shoulder and his father poking fun at him or delivering yet another cryptic message. It was intolerable. How many pounds of flesh did he have to sacrifice? How many limbs? He fumbled with the straps of the prosthesis, jerked on his clothes, seized the crutches and flung himself down the stairs like a hunted man.

  It was 7:00 A.M. Hesh and Lola were in the kitchen, their voices soft and murmurous. The house ticked with the small comfortable sounds he’d missed in the hospital—water trickling through the pipes, the hum of dishwasher and refrigerator. Outside, the sun slanted through elms and maples and spilled across the lawn and into the garden. Walter stood at the window a moment to collect himself. He saw corn. Tomatoes. Pumpkins, cucumbers, squash. Hesh had planted them. In May. Before Walter had gone to work at Depeyster Manufacturing, before he’d reconditioned the Norton and discovered a ghost in the scent of a pancake. And now here they were, rooted in the ground.

  In the kitchen, he braced his crutches against the wall and sat down at the table across from Hesh. Lola stood at the gas range, flipping pancakes. “I made your favorite, Walter,” she said.

  The smell was intolerable. It was death. He’d rather have snuffed the fumes of burning plastic, nerve gas, blood and offal and shit. A glass of milk stood beside his plate. He took a sip. It was warm. “I’m not hungry,” he said.

  “Not hungry?” Hesh echoed. He was perched over his muffin like an eagle masking its kill. His forearms swelled against the edge of the table. “Come on, kid, snap out of it. You lost your foot. Okay. It’s not the end of the world.”

  Walter set down the glass of milk. “Please, Lola,” he said, craning his neck to look over his shoulder, “not now. I just can’t eat.” And then, turning back to Hesh, who was licking butter from the tips of his fingers and chewing with a rhythmic roll of his great, clean-shaven jaws, he said, “It’s not that. Really. It’s”—he didn’t know how to tell him—“I’ve been thinking about my father lately.”

  Hesh had stopped chewing. “Your father?” he repeated, as if he hadn’t heard properly. He picked up the butter knife and laid it down again. “You know how I feel about your father.”

  Walter knew. But whatever had gone wrong with him had its roots here—in the riots, on the ghost ships, in the conundrum of the marker and the burden of heredity. “Yeah, I know. But things are different now and I have a right to know what he did to you and Lola and my mother that was so awful, and I have a right to know where he is now. I have a right to ask him myself.”

  Hesh’s eyes had changed. They were open—fixed on Walter’s—but they might as well have been shut fast. He’d begun chewing again, but more slowly, and, it seemed, without relish. “Sure,” he said finally, while Lola rattled pans at the stove. “You’ve got all the right in the world. But your mother made us your legal guardians, not him. He deserted you, Walter. And even after he came back, those summers, you think he was about to take on the responsibility of raising a kid even though he caused a big stink all the time? Huh? Do you?”

  Walter shrugged. The pancakes were killing him. He felt as if he were about to cry.

  “Look him up, go ahead. Where you’ll look, God only knows. But as far as I’m concerned, he’s a bum. A Judas. Persona non grata. As far as I’m concerned, the book is closed.”

  But the book is never closed.

  Hesh went off to his glazier’s shop on Houston Street and Lola sat at the table and told Walter the story of the riots for the thousandth time. He knew every nuance, anticipated her every pause and change of inflection as if he were speaking himself, but he listened now as if he’d never heard the story before, listened as he had the day after his eleventh birthday when Lola sat him down and tried to explain why Hesh and his father had nearly come to blows over so marvelous and inoffensive a thing as an Italian motorbike with red fenders and chrome-plated handlebars. He listened.

  She hadn’t been able to get near the place—the concert grounds, that is. But Hesh had. And Walter’s father and mother too. The organizing committee had asked them to come early to set up the chairs and see to the lights and loudspeakers. After that, Christina would be in charge of programs and literature, and Hesh and Truman were supposed to mingle with the crowd and keep an eye out for trouble. It was going to be quite a night: the warmth of the summer evening like a big communal blanket, the stars overhead, a thousand voices joined in song. They’d talked about nothing else for weeks.

  Will Connell was going to be there, to strum his guitar and sing his songs about the working people of America (later, when the whole country had caught the sickness of the riots, he would be blacklisted by every record company, every music publisher, booking agent and theater owner from Maine to California). A woman from the New York stage was going to sing too. And there were two speakers, one from the Garment Workers’ Union, the other a party member who’d fought in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. The big attraction, though—the man everyone was coming to see—was Paul Robeson. Paul Robeson was a Negro and a Communist, he was an actor and a civil libertarian, he was a great huge lion of a man who could sing the old spirituals till you could feel them in the marrow of your bones.

  Lola had seen him at the pavilion in Kitchawank Colony just the year before. Two hundred or so had turned out to hear him that time, local people from the Colony mostly, the graying Anarchists and Socialists who’d founded the community back in the twenties because they wanted to free themselves from the diseases of city life and give their children a libertarian education, and the party-line Communists who’d begun to supplant them. People brought sandwiches and sat on the grass—old couples, children, pregnant women. There was no trouble. Just a nice time for everyone. A little culture in the hinterlands.

  But the following year—in August, late August—it was a different story. Lola was working then, a half-day shift at the counter in the old van der Meulen bakeshop in Peterskill, and so she couldn’t go in early with Hesh and Truman. Walter’s mother went, though. Christina made up some sandwiches and a thermos of iced tea, dropped Walter at his grandmother’s—he’d just turned three, did he remember?—and then climbed into Hesh’s 1940 Plymouth with her husband and his buddy Piet.

  Lola tilted her head back and glanced around the room. A cup of black coffee sat before her on the table, going cold. She lit a cigarette, shook out the match and exhaled. “He was quite a character, Piet,” she said. “Short little guy, no higher than my chin. And alway
s playing practical jokes—you know, your father was a great one for jokes.” She took a sip of cold coffee. “The two of them were always at it. Silly stuff. Palm buzzers and squirting carnations and whatnot. I wonder what ever became of him?—Piet, I mean. Your father thought he was really something else.”

  There were no jokes that night. Hesh drove. Christina sat up front, with the thermos and sandwiches and the box of programs and party literature; Truman and Piet were in back, boxed in by sound equipment. Lola was planning to join them later, as soon as she got out of work. There’d be plenty of time—she got off at seven and the concert wasn’t scheduled to start until seven-thirty. She hoped they’d save her a seat.

  Anyway, they were going to hold the concert down near the river, just off Van Wart Road, on some property owned by Peletiah Crane, who was then superintendent of the Peterskill schools. (Yes, that’s right, Lola had said when she’d first told him the story, Tom’s grandpa.) Peletiah wasn’t a party member himself, but he was sympathetic to the cause and he’d been a supporter of cultural events in the Colony for years. When it became apparent that the concert and rally would be much bigger than the last—a show of solidarity for progressives that would attract perhaps two and a half thousand from the City—the Kitchawank Colony Association realized it wouldn’t have the space or facilities to handle such a crowd and dropped its sponsorship of the event. That’s when Peletiah stepped in. He offered the Robeson people the use of his property for nothing, and this encouraged one of the trade unions to put up the money to rent chairs, sound equipment and floodlights. Sasha Freeman, the novelist, and Morton Blum, the builder, were the chief organizers. They didn’t expect any trouble, but you never knew. They asked Hesh and Truman, both of them party members and big men, toughened by war and adversity, to be in charge of security.

  Hesh had his hair then, and for all his gruffness he was a teddy bear inside. Truman was the best-looking man in Peterskill, wild, a daredevil who rented a plane and flew it under the Bear Mountain Bridge—upside down, yet—and had his license taken away by the C.A.A. He and Hesh were best friends (Yes, she’d told him that first time, like you and Tom)—they were all friends. Lola and Christina had gone through school together, first at the Colony Free School and then later at Peterskill High. After the war, when Christina brought Walter’s father around, everybody fell for him. (Almost a local boy, but not quite, he’d grown up in Verplanck and gone to school at Hendrick Hudson. Hesh had played opposite him in football, and Lola recognized him at once as the vanquisher of Peterskill’s best, the triple threat who’d so many times made her heart sink as he poked a baseball over the fence, dribbled downcourt in his silken shorts or burst through a gap in the line with his muddied calves and the angry black slashes of greasepaint masking his eyes.) He was working in the old Van Wart iron foundry, which had gone out of business during the Depression and been revived and retooled by a one-armed war veteran from Brooklyn, and he was going to night school at City College to earn a B.A. degree in American history. “History,” Lola said, lingering over the syllables, “that was his passion.

  “Your mother’s father—he was a president of the Colony Association and a party member—he gave Truman some literature and talked to him about the dignity of the worker, surplus value and the fetishism of commodities—we all did, we all talked to him—and before long, he’d joined us. Of course, it was your mother who really won him over, but that’s another story. That fall they were married, and they rented a little two-room bungalow out back of the Rosenberg place—you remember it, don’t you?”

  Lola paused to snub out her cigarette. “In the summer, Walter, summer of forty-six, you were born.”

  Walter knew when he was born. He’d learned the date when he was three or four, and if it should ever happen to slip his mind, he could always consult his driver’s license. He knew that bungalow too, his home through the first dim years of his life, just as he knew what was coming next. He leaned forward all the same.

  So Truman joined the party. Truman got married. Truman spent two nights a week at City College, studying the American Revolution, and five nights a week at the card table in Hesh and Lola’s front room. One night Christina would make up a pan of stuffed cabbage or a hutspot stew she’d learned from her mother, or her crisp potato pancakes; the next night, Lola would bake a cheese-and-noodle kugel. That was the way it was. Lola couldn’t have children of her own. But when Walter was born, Truman came to her and asked if she and Hesh would consent to be the boy’s godparents, and the evenings went on as before, only now little Walter’s crib stood in the corner.

  And then it was 1949. August. And the party wanted Paul Robeson to give a concert in Peterskill, and Sasha Freeman and Morton Blum came to Hesh and to Truman. For security. There wouldn’t be any violence. No, they didn’t think so. It was going to be a peaceful affair, Negroes and whites together, working people, women and children and old folks, enjoying a concert and maybe a couple of political speeches, exercising their right to assemble and to express unpopular ideas. But Sasha Freeman and Morton Blum came to Hesh and Truman. Just in case.

  Hesh swung off a dirt lane onto Van Wart Road, not a mile from the concert grounds, and the first thing he noticed was the number of people gathered along the road. Some were headed in the direction of the Crane property, in groups of four and five, ambling and desultory, beer bottles in hand; others just stood at the side of the road, waiting, as if for a parade. A moment later he encountered the cars. Scores of them, parked alongside the road, drawn up on the shoulders on both sides, so that only a narrow one-way lane remained between them. It was only half past six.

  Hesh was mystified. Peletiah had set aside a pasture the size of three football fields expressly for parking, and here they were lined up along the road like cabbies at the airport, practically choking off access to the place. Buses had to get through here, buses from the City, and camp trucks and more buses from the summer colonies in Rockland County and the Catskills. Not to mention hundreds upon hundreds of private cars. What was going on here? Why hadn’t they parked on the concert grounds?

  He got his answer soon enough.

  No one had even glanced at them until they reached the gauntlet of parked cars, but now, once they’d entered the single lane heading for the entrance to the concert grounds, heads began to turn. A man in an overseas cap shouted an obscenity and then something glanced off the side of the car. These people hadn’t come to see the concert—they’d come to prevent it.

  Sasha Freeman and Morton Blum didn’t think there would be any violence—though the Peterskill paper had seethed with anti-Communist, anti-Jew and anti-Negro invective for the past month, though the local chapter of the VFW had threatened to hold a “loyalty rally” to protest against the concert, though flags had been waving aggressively from every porch in town and placards reviling Robeson had begun to appear in shop windows—but here it was. At the entrance, Hesh was confronted with a larger and denser crowd—two hundred or more—that erupted in jeers and insults when it became clear that he and his passengers were concertgoers rather than kindred spirits. They rolled up the windows, though it was eighty-five degrees outside, and Hesh shifted down as he approached the mouth of the narrow dirt road that gave onto Peletiah’s property.

  “Nigger lovers!” someone shouted.

  “Kikes!”

  “Commie Jew bastards!”

  A teenager with slicked-back hair and a face red with hate loomed out of the crowd to spit across the windshield, and suddenly Hesh had had enough and put his foot to the floor. The Plymouth leapt forward and the crowd parted with a shout, there was the thump-thump-thump of angry fists and feet against fenders and doors, and then they were in and the crowd was receding in the rearview mirror.

  Shaken, Hesh pulled into the lot beside a rented bus. Three other buses, a truck bearing the legend “Camp Wahwahtaysee” and perhaps twelve or fifteen cars were already there. Christina’s face was white. Truman and Piet were silent. “Trouble,” Hesh
muttered, “son of a bitch. We’re in for it now.”

  Seven o’clock came and went. There was no Robeson, no Freeman, no Blum. Out on the road, nothing moved. The access routes were either blocked or jammed with the cars and buses of frustrated concertgoers, and no one could get in or out. Except for the patriots, that is, who fingered brass knuckles and tire irons or tore up fence posts and tried the heft of them, ambling along the blacktop road as if they owned it. Which they did, for some four hours that night. The unlucky few who did actually make it to Van Wart Road, thinking to sit on a blanket, sip a Coke or beer and enjoy a concert, were routed past the blockaded concert grounds, pulled from their cars and beaten. No one, from Peterskill to Kitchawank Colony and back again, saw a single policeman.

  There were maybe a hundred and fifty people gathered in front of the stage when Hesh and the others arrived. Most were women and children who’d turned out early to enjoy an evening in the sylvan glades of northern Westchester. Besides Hesh, Truman and Piet, there were about forty men among them; up above, beyond the line of trees that marked the boundary of Peletiah’s property, five hundred patriots stormed up and down the road, looking for Communists.