World's End

by T. C. Boyle

  “Years ago.”

  “I know.” Walter’s voice was hushed, almost a whisper. There was another moment of silence, during which Van Wart slid back the desk drawer and began to fumble through his papers. “That’s why I went out to your house,” Walter confessed. “That’s what I wanted to ask you about. My father.”

  Van Wart looked distracted. He looked old, and in that moment, vulnerable. Without lifting the envelope from the drawer, he slipped a pinch of something into his mouth. “Truman?” he said finally. “What, he hasn’t turned up, has he?”

  When Walter answered in the negative, Van Wart seemed relieved. He helped himself to another pinch of whatever it was he kept in that precious envelope and then stared down at his impeccable shirt cuffs and manicured hands. So this was the ogre, Walter thought, the bogeyman, the Fascist who’d masterminded the slaughter of the innocents and haunted the bedtime tales of a generation of Colony children. Somehow he didn’t look the part. With his fine, clean, razorcut hair, his strong teeth and even tan, with his air of well-being and the precise hieratic tones of his speech, he could have been the saintly and forebearing father of TV legend, he could have been a judge, a professor, a pianist or conductor.

  But all that was dispelled in the next instant. Van Wart looked up and said suddenly, “Don’t you believe them, Walter. Don’t listen to them. Your father was all right. He was somebody who could stand up to the lot of them and their stinking vicious lies.” His eyes had taken hold of Walter’s now and there was nothing genial about them. Those eyes were outraged, formidable, those eyes were capable of anything. “Your father,” he said, leaning forward and making an effort to control his voice, “your father was a patriot.”

  Then there was the wedding.

  If life had begun to peel away from Walter, layer by layer, like some great unfathomable onion, if all its mysterious manifestations—the accident, the marker, the ghosts and pancakes, the face in the doorway at Van Wart Manor, Van Wart himself—were pieces of a puzzle, the wedding was a breath of fresh air: the wedding, at least, was unequivocal. Walter, former brooding and alienated hero to whom commitment and marriage were as death, loved Jessica, and she loved him. But no, it was more than that. Or maybe less. Walter needed her—he had but one foot on the ground now—and she needed to be needed.

  The ceremony was performed in a field of lush, knee-deep grass amidst the sleepy drone of Tom Crane’s bees and within a stone’s throw of his shack. Jessica’s family had pushed for a traditional wedding, with organ music, garter tossing and a seven-tiered cake, to be held at the Episcopal church in Peterskill, but both bride and groom had rejected it outright. They were no slaves to tradition. They were originals, free spirits, flamboyant and daring, and it took them no more than five minutes to hit on Tom Crane’s place as the ideal site of their nuptials.

  What could be better, after all? No corrupt institution would cast its gloom over the ceremony, and nature itself would become a celebrant. It would be an outdoor wedding, irreverent and unconstrained, with a barbecue—and tofu sandwiches for the vegetarians. And they would have readings from Gurdjieff or Kahlil Gibran instead of the dreary maunderings of the civil and religious ceremonies, and music from Herbert Pompey and his nose flute rather than the tedium of Mendelssohn. The bride would wear flowers in her hair. The groom would wear flowers in his hair. The guests, in serapes and boots and fringed suede, would wear flowers in their hair. And then of course, for Walter, the pasture below had its own special significance.

  Walter arrived early. His bachelor party, which had begun at the Elbow with several rounds of boilermakers and ended with cooking sherry and kif at the apartment of one of his old high school compatriots—he couldn’t remember which—had left him feeling drained and hung over. He’d finally got to bed around four, but a steady procession of historical markers began marching around his room to the beat of “Yankee Doodle Dandy” as soon as he closed his eyes, and his dreams were the dreams of a man who has left his youth behind. He woke at seven, shagged and unrefreshed, to an intense itching in his missing foot. That was when he decided to pull on his wedding outfit and head over to Tom Crane’s.

  It was late September, the morning warm and hazy, the light held out to him in a bundle above the treetops. He looked up into the web of branches that fell back from the windshield and saw that the maples had turned, and though it was early yet, he could detect the faint caustic odor of burning leaves on the air. When he’d had his accident, now almost two months ago, he’d stopped shaving, and as he drove, he stroked the patchy stubble that had sprouted beneath his nose and along the plane of his sideburns. He was dressed in white, like a guru or Paschal Lamb, wearing the Nehru shirt and cotton bells Jessica had chosen for his wedding ensemble. His hair, after the fashion of the day, trailed down his neck. He wore the familiar Dingo boots, and for color and good luck both, he’d slipped on a belt that his soulful, sorrowful mother had braided from pink and blue plastic lanyards when she was a girl at summer camp.

  He negotiated the hill down from the road without much trouble—he was getting used to the prosthesis in the way he’d got used to his first pair of skates, and he’d been lifting weights to strengthen the long muscles of his thighs for added support. It wasn’t his leg that bothered him, it was his head. The cooking sherry had been a mistake, no doubt about it. As he wound his way down the trail that roughly followed the course of the old road, sidestepping the odd cow pie, he found himself envying Tom Crane, who’d left after two beers, pleading pronubial responsibilities. He paused for a moment in the mist-shrouded meadow that gave on to the creek, thinking Here was the stage, and there the parking lot, then turned and clumped over the footbridge, startling the swallows that nested beneath it. He was going to be married. Here. Here of all places. The choice of it, he understood, hadn’t been so whimsical as he might have led himself to believe.

  Walter was climbing the steep trail up from Van Wart Creek, the nervous little tributary known as Blood Creek on his left, Tom Crane’s beehives and the still-burgeoning vegetable patch with its fat zucchini, pumpkins and late tomato on his right, when he ran across the first of the uninvited guests. Her back was to him, the heavy stockings were rolled down over the tops of her shoes and he could see the veins standing out in her legs. He recognized her with the first skip of his heart. She was bent over, searching for something—or no, she was pulling weeds, her knees stiff and her big backside waving in the breeze like a target at the fair. He remembered the day he’d found that target so irresistible and pelted her with dirt clods as she stooped over the tulip bed out front of the house in Verplanck, and he remembered the retribution that had followed when his grandfather came home from his nets and introduced him to the bitter end of an old ship’s halyard. Pulling weeds. It was just like her. He remembered how each hairy taproot or cluster of crabgrass would merit an incantation in the Low Dutch that people had forgotten a century before, as she wished it on the swinish Mrs. Collins across the street or on Nettie Nysen, the witch who’d forced her to disconnect the phone. In the spring, she buried the frozen deadman of a crab—eyestalks and brain—with each new packet of seed. “Gram,” he said, and she whirled around as if he’d startled her.

  So what if he had?—he was angry. He thought he was done with all this, thought he’d left the dreams and visions in the hospital or along the road, thought the sacrifice of a foot was enough. But he was wrong.

  She was smiling now, fat and glowing with the health of the indiscriminate eater, the woman who’d breakfasted every morning of her life on kippered herring, jelly doughnuts and sugared coffee as thick and black as motor oil. “Walter,” she murmured in her crackling voice, “I just wanted to wish you the best on your wedding day.” And then, with all the finesse of a backyard gossip: “So how’s the foot?”

  The foot? Suddenly he wanted to scream at her: Did you have anything to do with that? Did you? But he was staring at the stump of a tree taken down by Jeremy Mohonk on his release from prison in 19
46. His grandmother was gone. More history. All at once he felt weary. Nostalgia filled him, wine turned to vinegar, and the birds railed at him from the trees that crowded in on him like a mob. He’d tried to put it all out of his mind, tried to remember that he hated his father and didn’t give a damn where he was, that he had a life and being of his own that transcended that of the abandoned boy, the motherless boy, the boy who’d grown up among strangers. He’d tried to concentrate on Jessica, on the union that would redeem him and make him whole. And now here it was again: more history.

  He plodded up the hill and his incorporeal grandmother was whispering in his ear, retelling one of his favorite stories—one he liked better than the betrayal of Minewa or the hoodwinking of Sachoes—the story of his parents’ wedding. What did they wear? he would ask her. What was my mother like? Tell me about the lake.

  Your mother was like royalty, she told him. And your father was the handsomest man in the county. An athlete, a prankster, full of jokes and high spirits. He was married in his uniform, with the medals on his chest and the sergeant’s stripes on his shoulder. Your mother was an Alving. Swedish. Her father was Magnus Alving, the architect—he drew up the plans for the free school in the Colony, did you know that?—and her mother was of Dutch descent, an Opdycke. She wore her mother’s gown—peau de soie, trimmed with seed pearls and Madeira lace. Her hair was up and she was wearing white heels like she just stepped out of a fairy tale. They held the ceremony outdoors, on the beach at Kitchawank Lake, though it was late in the year and turning cold, and when the justice said “You may kiss the bride” and your father took your mother in his arms, all the geese around the lake started honking and the fish threw themselves up on shore like pieces of tinfoil. Hesh was best man.

  He’d almost reached the top of the hill when another voice began to intrude on his consciousness. He looked up. There before him, pale, bowlegged and naked as a wood sprite, stood Tom Crane. The saint of the forest clutched a bottle of baby shampoo in one hand, and in the other, a towel as stiff as a sheet of cardboard. He was grinning and saying something about getting cold feet, but Walter couldn’t quite make it out, the buzz of his grandmother’s voice murmuring in his ears still. Walter, Walter, she said, her voice dolorous and fading now, don’t blame him. He loved her. He did. It’s just that in his heart … he loved his country … more. …

  “Hey, Walter—Van—snap out of it.” The naked saint was two feet from him now, peering into his eyes as if into the far end of a telescope. “You still zonked from last night or what?”

  He was. Yes. That was it. He focused on Tom Crane for the first time and saw that the saint’s skinny frame was maculated with boils, blemishes and insect bites. Tom was scratching his beard. His ribs were slats in a fence, his feet so white and long and flat they might have been molded of dough that wouldn’t rise. His lips were moving now and he was saying something about waking up, a dip in the creek and hot coffee and bourbon up at the shack. Walter allowed himself to be led back down the hill, across the footbridge and into the ferns at water’s edge.

  The stream was low this time of year, but the saint of the forest, looking to his toilet, had dammed it up under the bridge—the resulting pool was about as deep as a bathtub and three times as wide. Pausing only to wedge his towel in the crotch of a tree, Tom stepped into the pool, exposing the flat pale nates that hadn’t felt the embrace of cotton briefs since his mother had stopped doing his laundry when he went off to Cornell four years earlier. He eased himself into the creek like a mutant water strider, ass first, hooting with the shock of it.

  Walter was slower. Fumbling back down the path had left him winded and sweat-soaked. His leg suddenly felt as if it had been rubbed with jalapeño oil from the knee down and his eyes were still playing tricks on him. It was nothing major—the trees didn’t transform themselves into claws or lollipops and his grandmother was nowhere in sight—yet everything seemed skewed and out of focus, the visible world in intricate motion, as if he were examining a drop of pond water under a microscope. The leaves that overhung them, the peeling footbridge, the bark of the trees and the grain of the rock: they’d all been reduced to their components, to a grid of minuscule dancing dots. It was last night, he figured. The cooking sherry. That had to be it. He lowered himself down on a rock and began to tug at his left boot.

  Tom was thrashing his limbs spastically and deep-breathing like a seal coming up for air.

  “Cold?” Walter asked.

  “No, no,” Tom said, too quickly. “Just right.” He averted his eyes as Walter removed the boot from his other foot.

  Walter pulled the Nehru shirt up over his head, dropped his pants and undershorts and stood there naked among the ferns and saplings. He could feel the mud of the bank between the toes of his left foot; the right foot, the inert one, planted itself like a stone. No one had seen him like this, not even Jessica. And Tom Crane, his oldest friend and intellectual mentor, wasn’t looking.

  “You know something?” Tom said, glancing at Walter as he lowered himself into the water, and then looking away again. “Cars. Automobiles. They were originally going to call them electrobats.” He was snickering with the idea of it. “Electrobats,” he repeated.

  The water was cold as glacial runoff. Walter didn’t cry out, didn’t catch his breath, didn’t curse or thrash. He just settled there on his back, the current lifting his genitals and subtly reconstituting itself to accommodate his neck and shoulders. After a moment he lifted his right leg from the water and propped the plastic foot on a rock at the edge of the pool.

  “Oleo locomotives,” Tom said. “That one was in the running too.” But the levity had gone out of his voice. “That’s it, huh?” he said. And then: “How does it feel?”

  “Right now it hurts like a son of a bitch.” Walter paused, contemplating the plastic sculpture at the nether end of his leg. “The doctor says I’ll learn to live with it.”

  The sun was climbing through the trees now, firming up the shadows and suffusing the undergrowth with a rich golden light that clung to the leaves like batter. Walter counted the fronds of the fern beside him, watched the minnows drop down with the current and settle between his legs, listened to the rap of woodpecker and the call of vireo. For a moment he felt a part of it all, creature of the forest primeval that antedated macadam, case-hardened steel and the plastic prosthesis, but then the stutter of a motorcycle out on Van Wart Road brought him back. “All right,” he said, rising from the pool in the slow groping way of an octogenarian. “Okay. I’m all right now.”

  “Use my towel if you want,” Tom said. He was sitting up, blowing and puffing still, the long wet queue of his hair trailing down his pimply back like something that had clung to him and drowned.

  Walter flayed himself with the stiff stinking towel while mosquitoes whined around him and mud worked between his toes. He was feeling better, no doubt about it. The headache had receded, the leaves and twigs that reached out to him seemed to have consolidated once again, and the pain had gone out of his numbed leg. It was then, standing there on the mud bank and shivering in the early morning light, that he had a revelation. All at once he realized that the whole business of daily life was irrelevant to him, that he didn’t want to make small talk, didn’t want to discuss electrobats, last night’s party, drugs, nerve gas or revolution in Latin America. No: what he really wanted to talk about was his father. He wanted to open himself up to the quivering, abject, bony mass of gooseflesh that now stood dripping beside him and tell him that he’d been fooling himself, tell him that now and always he did give a damn where his father was and wanted nothing more—nothing, not Jessica, not the flesh and bone that had been torn from him—than to find him, confront him, wave the bloody rag of the past in his face and reclaim himself in the process. He didn’t want to talk about his wedding or about music or health food or UFOs. He wanted to talk about the mothball fleet and genealogy, about his grandmother, about a ghost in the scent of a pancake and the trouble with his eyes that ma
de the past come alive in the present.

  But he never got the chance.

  Because the saint of the forest, blue in the face and chattering with the cold in every molar and ratcheting joint, the ratty towel working furiously at his splayed shoulders and bald scrotum, suddenly said, “What did you do to Mardi, anyway?”

  Mardi. She was a shadow, a fragment of memory, a stain on his consciousness—she was another ghost. “Who?”

  “You know: Mardi. Mardi Van Wart.”

  Walter didn’t know. Didn’t want to know. There was a screaming in his ears, a terrible unquenchable din that all at once rose up from the bloodied ground before him. He could hear the cries of the victims, his mother’s caressing voice stretched taut, the rabid raging curses of the men with sticks and tire irons and fence posts in their hands. Kike, nigger, Commie: he was in the eye of the storm. Van Wart? Mardi Van Wart?

  “She says she was with you and Hector the night you, uh, had your accident, you know? Says she really needs to see you.”

  He felt it tugging at him, something obscene, unholy, irresistible. “You … you know her?”

  Tom Crane was ridiculous. Naked, dripping, the reeking towel clamped under one arm and a toothbrush nonchalantly dangling from his lip, he paused to give Walter a big meaningful goat-toothed grin. “Oh, yeah,” he said, the cries of the innocents echoing around him, “I know her.”

  Jessica wore a lace dress laboriously tatted by underfed peasants on the far side of the world, a pair of unadorned white sandals and her grandmother’s ivory cameo brooch. In her hair, which shone with a blonde brilliance that might have blinded the Vikings themselves, there were glimmers of baby’s breath and primrose. Walter stood beside her in the late morning with its insouciant bees and butterflies, flanked by Hesh and Lola and Jessica’s pink-faced parents, while Tom Crane read a passage from a science fiction novel about extraterrestrial propagation and Herbert Pompey danced around under the weight of the flowers in his hair and rendered the serpentine melodies of the Indian snake charmers on his nose flute. Then Jessica recited a couple of verses by an obscure scribbler on the subject of love and fish, and Hesh stepped forward to read the climactic lines from the civil ceremony (“Do you, Walter Truman Van Brunt, take this woman … till death do you part?”). “I do,” said Walter, and he kissed the bride in a surge of emotion—in love and gratitude and the fullest apprehension of life and youth—that lifted him for the moment from the trough of confusion into which the accident had thrust him. It was then that Hector Mantequilla set off a string of Arecibo firecrackers and the celebration began in earnest.