by T. C. Boyle
So here he was, Walter the empiricist, standing on the deck of a cruising sloop in the middle of the darkling Hudson on the eve of Allhallows, confronting a mob of jeering phantoms, and not knowing what to do next. He was seeing things. There was something the matter with him. He’d consult a shrink, have his head bandaged—anything. But for now he could think of only one thing to do, the same thing he’d done when he’d been razzed in junior high: he gave them the finger, one and all. With both hands. And he cursed them too, cursed them in a ragged raging high-pitched tone till he began to grow hoarse, his extended fingers digging at the air and feet dancing in furious rapture.
All very well and fine. But they were gone. He was cursing a deserted ship, cursing empty decks and berths unslept in for twenty years or more, cursing steel. The razzing had faded away to nothing and the only sound he could hear now was the whisper of a human voice at his back. Mardi’s voice. He turned around and there she was, standing at the cabin door. The door was open, and she was naked. He saw her breasts—silken, pouting, the breasts he remembered from the night of his collision with history. He saw her navel and the fascinating swatch of hair below it, saw her feet, calves, the swell of her thighs, saw the beckoning glow of the electric coil in the darkened cabin behind her. “Walter, what are you doing?” she said in a voice that rubbed at his skin. “Don’t you know I’ve been waiting for you?”
The blood shot from his head to his groin.
“Come on in and get warm,” she whispered.
It was past seven when the Catherine Depeyster motored into the slip at the marina. Walter was late. He was supposed to have been at the Elbow by six-thirty, dressed in costume, to meet Jessica and Tom Crane. They were going to have a few drinks, and then go out to a party in the Colony. But Walter was late. He’d been out in the middle of the river, fucking Mardi Van Wart. The first time—there at the cabin door—he’d practically tackled her, grabbing for flesh like a satyr, a rapist, all his demons concentrated in the slot between her legs. The second time was slow, soft, it was making love. She stroked him, ran her tongue across his chest, breathed in his ear. He stroked her in return, lingered over her nipples, lifted her atop him—he even, for moments at a time, forgot about the blasted torn stump of his leg and the inert lump of plastic that terminated it. Now, as he helped her secure the boat, he didn’t know what he felt. Guilt, for one thing. Guilt, and an overwhelming desire to shake hands, peck her cheek or whatever, and disappear. She’d said she was going to a party up in Poughkeepsie and that he was welcome to come along; he’d stammered that he was meeting Jessica and Tom down at the Elbow.
He watched her face as she tied off the lines and gathered up her things. It was noncommittal. He was thinking about his bike, a quick exit, thinking about what kind of excuse he was going to run Jessica and wondering what he could possibly do in the next five minutes about a costume.
Mardi straightened up and wiped her hands on the peacoat. “Hey,” she said, and her voice was husky, choked to a whisper. “It was fun. Want to do it again, sometime?”
He was about to say yes, no, maybe, when suddenly the image of the ghost ship rose up before him and he felt as if his leg—the good one—was about to buckle and drop him to the hard cold planks of the dock. He was going crazy, that’s what it was. Seeing things. Hallucinating like some shit-flinger up at Matteawan.
“Hm?” she said, and she reached for his arm and leaned into him. “You had a good time, didn’t you?”
It was then that he became aware of a figure standing in the shadows at the far end of the dock. He thought of muggers, trick or treaters, he thought of Jessica, he thought of his father. “Hello?” he called. “Is someone there?”
The light was bad, sky dark, a single streetlamp illuminating the dead geometry of masts and cranes at the far end of the boat yard. Walter felt Mardi go tense beside him. “Who’s there?” she demanded.
A man emerged from the shadows and moved toward them, the slats of the dock groaning under his footsteps. He was big, his shoulders like something hammered on as an afterthought, he wore a flannel shirt open to the navel despite the cold, and his graying hair trailed down his back in a thick twisted coil. Walter guessed he must have been fifty-five, sixty. “That you, Mardi?” the man asked.
She dropped Walter’s arm. “Jesus, Jeremy, you scared the shit out of us.”
He’d reached them now, and stood grinning before them. His two front teeth were outlined in gold, and he wore a bone necklace from which a single white feather dangled. “Boo,” he said in a ruined, phlegmy voice. “Trick or treat.”
Mardi was grinning now too, but Walter was glum. Whatever was about to happen, he didn’t want any part of it. He glanced longingly at his motorcycle, then turned back to the stranger. “I’ll take the treat,” Mardi said.
“Looks like you already got it,” the man said, giving Walter a sick grin.
“Oh,” she said, taking Walter’s arm again, “oh, yeah,” and she made as if to slap her brow for forgetfulness. “This is my friend—”
But the Indian—that’s what he was, Walter realized with a jolt—the Indian cut her off. “I know you,” he said, searching Walter’s eyes.
Walter had never laid eyes on him before. He felt his stomach drop. “You do?”
The stranger tugged at the collar of his lumberjack shirt and winced as if it were choking him. Then he spat and looked up again. “Yeah,” he rasped. “Van Brunt, right?”
Walter was stunned. “But, but how—?”
“You could be two toads out of the same egg, you and your father.”
“You knew my father?”
The Indian nodded, then ducked his head and spat again. “I knew him,” he said. “Yeah, I knew him. He was a real piece of shit.”
Mohonk, or the History of a Stab in the Back
He was born on the Shawangunk reservation, Jamestown, New York, in 1909, the green-eyed son of a green-eyed father. His mother, a Seneca ye-oh whose bellicose forefathers had been pacified by none other than George Washington himself, had eyes as black as olives. Ignoring those black eyes and the warlike temperament that lurked behind them, Mohonk père followed the patrilineal custom of his own tribe, the Kitchawanks, of which he was the last known surviving member, and christened the boy Jeremy Mohonk, Jr. The boy’s mother was scandalized. Her people, the warriors of the north, the survivors, claimed descent through the womb. The boy, his mother insisted, was by all rights a Seneca and a Tantaquidgeon. If he married in the clan, he’d be committing incest. But the elder Mohonk wouldn’t be moved. Twice during the first month of little Jeremy’s existence he took a half-strung snowshoe to the side of his wife’s head, and once, after an especially vehement disputation, he chased her through the Jamestown feedlot with a dibble stick honed to the killing sharpness of a spear.
The upshot of all this was an informal knife fight between Mohonk pére and Horace Tantaquidgeon, his wife’s brother. They were scaling fish on the banks of the Conewango—yellow perch, walleyes, maskinonge—their knives glinting in the sun. Mohonk fils, barely able to focus his eyes, was strapped to his mother’s back and gazing up into the dancing green of the trees and the stolid, unmoving sky that rose up everywhere around him, oceanic and blue. The men’s hands were wet with blood, with mucus. Translucent scales clung to their forearms. There was no sound but for the rasp of the knives and the furious drone of the flies. Suddenly, and without warning, Horace Tantaquidgeon rose to his feet and sank his knife into the back of the last of the Kitchawanks but one. The knife stuck there, quivering, the blade lodged like a splinter between two ridges of the lumbar vertebrae.
For a moment, there was no reaction. The elder Mohonk, barechested and dressed in stained work pants, squatted over his mound of fish as before. And then all at once his eyes went cold with a new kind of knowledge, and he dropped to his buttocks, sitting upright among those hacked and dumb-staring fish that squirted out from under him as if they’d come back to life … but no, he wasn’t just sitti
ng, he was pitching backward from there, his legs, his gut, his bowels gone, cut loose and drifting like so many balloons puffed with helium.
The Tantaquidgeons were remorseful and penitent. Horace extracted a rumpled dollar bill from the hoard of eight he kept buried in a gourd out back of his house, walked the six miles to Frewsburg, and purchased a wheelchair from the widow of a white man who’d been crippled in the Spanish-American War. Then he wheeled it back home, all the long way up the dusty road to the reservation. And Mildred, the fractious wife, was fractious no more. Not only did she dismiss the subject of little Jeremy’s descent (the boy was his father’s son, a Kitchawank, one of two surviving members of the once-mighty Turtle Clan and rightful inheritor of the Kitchawank domain to the south, and that was that), but she devoted the rest of her days to the care of her husband. She prepared stewed opossum and venison, collected berries for him in season, greased his hair and diapered him like a second son. And all this was necessary, and more. For Jeremy Mohonk, son of Mohonks uncountable, last of his race but one, would never walk again.
The boy grew to manhood there on the reservation, where the light was a thing that invested the visible world with its glory, where streams met and bears roamed and the clouds held the setting sun in a grip as gentle as a mother’s hand. He listened to the dew settle on the grass at night, watched the sun pull itself out of the trees in the morning, stalked game, gigged frogs, fished and climbed and swam. He learned to read and write at the agency school, learned about Amerigo Vespucci and Christopher Columbus from a white man who wore a starched collar and whose face was like an overripe plum; at night he sat at the foot of his father’s wheelchair and discovered the history of his race.
His father sat stiff in the chair, holding himself erect with arms that were eternally flexed against the numbness of his belly and bowels. The injury had made him gaunt, and he seemed to grow more attenuated day by day, year by year, as if Horace Tantaquidgeon’s blade had somehow let the spirit escape like air from his body, leaving only the husk behind. Still, he told the old stories in a voice that sang, strong and true, told them with the breath of history. Jeremy was no more than four or five when he heard them the first time; he was a full-grown man of eighteen summers when he heard them the last.
His father told him how Manitou had sent his big woman to earth and how she squatted in the water that covered everything and gave birth to dry land. Undaunted by this mighty feat of parturition, she heaved herself up again and gave birth to trees and plants, and then finally to three animals: the deer, the bear and the wolf. From these, all the men of the earth are descended, and each of them—man, woman and child—has the nature of one of these beasts. There are those who are innocent and timid, like the deer; those who are brave, revengeful and just of hand, like the bear; and those who are false and bloodthirsty, like the wolf.
Wasted, his face drawn and cheeks sucked back to bone, the elder Mohonk sat beneath the stovepipe hat given him by the Tantaquidgeons as partial recompense for his injury and told his son of god and the devil, of the spirits in things, of pukwidjinnies, neebarrawbaigs and the imps that haunt the still and sheltered lagoons of the Hudson. Jeremy was eleven, he was twelve, fourteen. His father was dying, but the stories never stopped. In school he learned that Lincoln had freed the slaves, that the square root of four is two and that everything in the world is composed of atoms. At home he sat before the fire with his father while the spirit of the flames raised her hackles along the length of a sputtering log.
After his father’s death, the last of the Kitchawanks had no reason to linger on the reservation. His mother, ancient enemy of his tribe and betrayer of his father, took another husband before the grass had gone yellow on the grave. Horace Tantaquidgeon, who’d taught him to hunt and fish and fire a clay cookpot, turned his back on him now, as if, with his father’s death, the debt had been paid. And though Jeremy had stayed on to finish school with a white man’s diploma, he found the doors in Jamestown shut to him. Hey, chief, people called to him on the street, where’s your wigwam? Hey, you. Geronimo. No, there was nothing in Jamestown. And so it was the most natural thing in the world to bundle up his possessions—the knife that had cut his father’s legs out from under him, a bearskin sleeping bag, two strips of eel jerky, a dog-eared copy of Ruttenburr’s Indian Tribes of the Hudson’s River and the notochord of a sturgeon his father had worn around his neck to remind him of the perfidy of fishes—and head east, along the Susquehanna and Delaware, then across the Catskills to that gleaming apotheosis of modern technology, the Bear Mountain Bridge, and then over the storied river to the hills of Peterskill itself.
He was almost surprised to see that those hills had houses on them, to see that the streets were paved with brick and cobblestone and lined with automobiles and telegraph poles. Battened on tales, he’d expected something different. If not dewy forests, free-running streams and open campfires, then at least a sleepy Dutch village with dogs drowsing in the streets and a noonday silence that sank into the marrow of the bones. He was sadly deluded. For Peterskill in 1927 was clanking along with the industrial revolution, stirring up dust and turning over the greenback dollar; to an Indian from the reservation it was teeming, dirty, pandemonium itself. On the other hand, it wasn’t a bad place to get lost in. No one noticed an Indian on the street. No one even knew what an Indian was. They recognized Bohunks, Polacks, wops, micks, kikes and even the occasional nigger—but an Indian? Indians wore headdresses and funny underwear and lived in teepees somewhere out west.
Dressed in the work pants and faded flannel shirt he’d worn on the reservation, his hair cropped close with the blade that had stuck his father, Jeremy appeared one morning at 7:00 A.M. outside the gate of the Van Wart Foundry on Water Street, asking for work. Half an hour later he was dodging around vats of molten iron, hammer and file in hand, hacking lumps of fused residue from the castings. The first week he slept in a clump of smartweed near the mouth of Acquasinnick Creek, and he got wet twice; once he’d been paid, he took a room in a boardinghouse on the west end of Van Wart Road. From here, in the shortening evenings, on half-day Saturdays and breezy Sunday mornings, he hiked up into the hills to commune with the spirit of his ancestors.
It was on one of these hikes that he met Sasha Freeman.
Carrying nothing that would identify him to the casual observer as the innocuous footslogger and nature lover he was—no rucksack, no canteen or alpenstock, no sandwiches wrapped in butcher’s paper—Jeremy made his way up Van Wart Creek one warm September afternoon, keeping off the roads and out of the way of cottages and farmhouses. He didn’t want to run into any watchdogs, any fences or posted signs or inquisitive white faces. He saw enough white faces at work. In his element, in the forests that had given birth to his ancestors, he wanted to see where the deer had come down to drink, where quail nested in the grass, he wanted to see the brook trout wagging in the current and test his reflexes against the one that would make his lunch … it was nothing personal, but when he was outside the walls of the foundry, he wanted to see the world as it had been, and white faces were no part of it.
But it was a white face he discovered peering up at him in alarm from a clump of mountain laurel as he rounded a bend in the creek and flung himself over a fallen birch in a single gangling unconscious leap. The face was bearded, bespectacled, small-eyed and suspicious, and it was attached to the stark white body of a naked man with a book in his hand. Jeremy halted in mid-stride, every bit as surprised as the naked man stretched out there in the mountain laurel as if in his own bed, uncertain as to whether he should slink off into the undergrowth or continue on his way as if nothing were amiss. But before he could make a decision either way, the white man was on his feet, simultaneously bobbing into a pair of baggy undershorts, shouting hello and extending his hand in greeting. “Sasha Freeman,” he said, pumping the Indian’s hand as if he’d been expecting him all afternoon.
Jeremy gaped down at him in bewilderment. The stranger was at least a f
oot shorter than he, round-shouldered and slight, with the musculature of an adolescent girl and a berserk growth of coiled black hair that sprang up like a pelt on his limbs, his back, even his hands and feet. The only place he lacked hair, it seemed, was on the crown of his head, where it was thinning, though he couldn’t have been more than twenty or so. “You’re a fresh-air fiend too, I take it,” the stranger said, squinting up into the trees.
“Sure,” Jeremy mumbled, numbly shaking the proferred hand. “Fresh-air fiend. That’s right.” He was embarrassed, impatient, angry at this stranger for intruding on his solitude, and he was anxious to get on up the stream and explore the tributary that branched off to the left and ascended the ridge to the crown of the forest. But Sasha Freeman, with his mad toothy smile and dancing little feet, already had him by the arm, offering him a sandwich, a drink, a seat on his blanket, and for some reason—out of a desire to please, out of loneliness—Jeremy joined him.
“So what did you say your name was?” Sasha Freeman handed him half an egg salad sandwich and a tin cup of fruit punch.
“Mohonk,” Jeremy said, looking away. “Jeremy Mohonk.”
“Mohonk,” the stranger echoed in a ruminative tone, “I don’t believe I’ve heard that one before. Is it shortened from something?”
As a matter of fact, it was.
“From Mohewoneck,” Jeremy said, staring down at his feet. “He was a great sachem of my tribe.”
“Your tribe?” Behind the wire-rimmed spectacles that gave him the look of a startled scholar, Sasha Freeman’s eyes blinked in amazement. “Then, you’re … you’re—?”
