World's End

by T. C. Boyle

  After a moment, one of the others took it up, an old man so wrinkled and dirty he might have been dug from the ground for the occasion. “Squagganeek,” he rasped, and then, like children with a new plaything, they all tried it out, repeating the phrase over and over in a soft, caressing, rhythmic chant.

  Wouter didn’t find him that evening, or the next either. Even in the depths of his fright and disillusionment, of his despair and denial, he couldn’t have imagined that it would be another eighteen months before he would lay eyes on his cousin again. He did go home eventually, for lack of anything better to do—home to his mother. She tended to his chafed wrists and ankles, fed him, put him to bed. In time, he healed. Or rather, part of him did. His cousin was gone and he missed him as he would have missed a limb wrenched from his body. And his father—he had no father. Sure, the man who sat heavily in the birch rocker or cut and baled hay shirtless in the field looked like his father, but he wasn’t. He was an imposter. A spineless man, a man without definition or spirit, a man who floated through his days like a jellyfish at sea, waiting only for some survivor to snatch him up and consume him.

  Such Sweet Sorrow

  The footing was bad—very bad, treacherous even—and it was all Walter could do to ease himself down the path step by step, clinging like a mountaineer to an extended lifeline of low-hanging branches, willowy saplings and flimsy shrubs that whipped away from him like catapults and left a gummy residue in the palm of his hand. It had rained the night before, and the path was slipperier than an eel’s back—or belly, for that matter. And the leaves didn’t help any. Wads of them, yellow, red, orange, the dingy brown of crumbling newsprint, all glued wet to the ground and to each other, too. If there were times when the business of life made him forget that he stood upright only through the intercession of two lumps of molded plastic, this wasn’t one of them.

  Still, he didn’t bother asking himself why, on this day before his departure for Fairbanks, Nome and Points North, on this thirty-first day of October, on this Halloween, he was fighting his way down the slope to the infamous pasture that gave onto the bridge that in turn gave onto the path up to Tom Crane’s cramped and goat-stinking shack. Especially when the question would have been complicated by the fact, duly noted and painstakingly observed over the course of the past several weeks, that while at this hour of any given day the salutatory hubcap remained in place, the Packard—Tom Crane’s Packard—was gone. And the corollary to that fact, that the Bug—Jessica’s Bug—sat idly, invitingly, provocatively even, on the shoulder beneath it.

  But no, he didn’t question himself, didn’t think. There was no reason to. Ever since that cleansing afternoon in mid-August, that afternoon of the Grand Union, he’d entered on a new and intoxicating phase of his life, one in which he acted rather than considered, one in which he accepted his demons for what they were and let his impulses take him where they would. He was leaving for Barrow in the morning. Jessica was home alone. In the cabin. Cut off from the world. Isolated. Without water, electricity, indoor plumbing, without a telephone. He was paying her a visit, that was all.

  But these feet!

  Damn, and now he was on his ass. In the mud. Some leafy crap in his face, the whole woods stinking of mold and rot, of leaves gone bad and some defunct squirrel or skunk quietly turning to mulch under a bush. Furious, he grabbed hold of a branch and jerked himself to his feet. The seat of his new Levi’s was soaked through, and his lumberjacket—the one he’d bought to wear beneath the big down parka in Alaska—was so festooned with dangling bits of twig and leaf he might just as well have used it to line the bottom of his trash can. He beat angrily at his clothes, snatched some catkins from his hair and struggled down the relentless grade to the pasture below.

  Here the going was easier. Walking straight ahead, walking on a flat—that he’d mastered. It was the up and down that gave him trouble. He brushed at his clothes as he walked, stepping aside to dodge the occasional cow pie, the new hiking boots with the supergrip tread no more connected to him than the dead appendages that filled them. It was a low-hung day, raw and opaque, and he was just coming up on the bridge when he spotted something moving in the trees along the creek. He gritted his teeth, expecting some further collision, some parting gift of history. He squinted. The haze shifted. It was only a cow.

  Moooo.

  Going up was a little better, though the path was just as slick. Somehow it was easier to wedge his feet into the dirt here, and there seemed to be more rock, ribs of it washed clean by the runoff of a thousand storms. He snatched at branches, a mountaineer still, and hoisted himself up. Soon he was passing through Tom’s garden, with its wet glowing pumpkins and the brown stalks of all the rest, and then he sideskirted a clutch of beehives to emerge in the little clearing beneath the big naked oak.

  There it was, the cabin, in all its ramshackle glory—but was she home, that was the question. Just because her car was out front was no guarantee. What if she’d gone someplace with Tom? What if she was out gathering nuts or acorns or dried flowers? Or washing her undies, taking a shower, painting her pretty toenails in her parents’ spacious and well-appointed bathroom? What if she was even then breezing up and down the rarefied aisles of the Peterskill Grand Union? The possibility that he’d find the place empty had haunted him all the way down the path from the road, across the field and up the ridge to the cabin. But now, even before he fastened on the smeared windows or glanced at the porch, he knew he had her—the smoke gave her away. He smelled it first, then lifted his eyes to the rust-eaten stovepipe and there it was, smoke, pale wisps of it against a sky that was like smoke itself.

  Suddenly confident, elated even, he started across the yard, the place just as he remembered it: a few scattered stumps, honeysuckle fallen back from the house in frost-killed clumps, rusted machinery poking its bones from the subsiding bushes. The porch, as usual, was cluttered with everything that wouldn’t fit in the house but was too valuable yet to toss to the elements, and then there was the venerable old wood of the shack itself, aged to the color of silver fox, no lick of paint ever wasted on its parched and blistered hide. As he mounted the steps, a pair of bandy-legged goats stuck out their necks to peer at him around the far corner of the house, and a cat—brindled, with a patch of white over one eye—shot between his legs and vanished in the litter along the path. And then all at once he could feel Jessica moving across the floorboards inside—the same boards that supported him outside the door. Or at least he thought he could. What the hell. He forced his face into a smile and rapped twice. On the door. With his knuckles.

  Dead silence.

  Frozen silence.

  Silence both watchful and tense.

  He tried again, tap-tap, and then thought to make use of his voice: “Jessica?”

  Now she was moving, he could feel her, could hear her, moving across the floor with a pinch and squeak of the dry boards beneath her, beneath him. One, two, three, four, the door swung open—stove going, bed made, jars of this and that on the shelf—and she was standing there before him.

  “Walter,” she said, as if identifying a suspect in a police lineup. He saw the surprise and consternation on her face, and he grinned harder. She was wearing jeans, a pair of men’s high-top sneakers and a cable-knit sweater. Her hair hung loose, and bangs—folksingers’ bangs, newly cut—concealed the high white patrician swell of her brow. She looked good. Better than good. She looked like the girl he’d married.

  “I was just passing by,” he joked, “and thought I’d stop in to say hello, I mean, goodbye—”

  Still she stood there, the door poised on its hinges, and for a second he thought she was going to slam it in his face, send him packing, boot him out like a fast-talking door-to-door salesman with a vacuum cleaner strapped to his back. But then her face changed, she stepped back, and, perhaps a little too brightly, said: “Well, why don’t you come in out of the cold, at least?”

  And then he was in.

  As soon as she shut the d
oor, though, confusion took hold of them both—they were in a cell, a box, a cave, there was nowhere to go, they didn’t know what to do with their hands, where to cast their eyes, where to sit or stand or what to say. His back was to the door. She was there, two feet from him, her face as white as it was the time they’d carved a sun-warmed melon in a Catskill meadow and the knife had slipped and gashed her palm. Her head was bowed, her hands clasped in front of her. Was this an awkward moment? You bet.

  It was Jessica who recovered first. She turned, brushed past him and bent briskly to relieve the room’s sole armchair of its burden of hats, jackets, dope pipes, cheese graters, paperback books and other impedimenta, at the same time echoing what he’d said at the door: “Goodbye? What do you mean—are you moving or something?”

  And so he was able to settle into the vacant armchair and tell her of his impending journey to the heart of the polar night, to joke about mushers and mukluks and ask, in mock earnestness, if she knew a good dog he could take along to warm his hands in. “But seriously,” he went on, encouraged by her laugh, “you don’t have to worry about me—I’m no tenderfoot. I mean, I know my Jack London cold, and there’s no way I’m going to try humping from my motel room to the bar without spitting first.”

  “Spitting?”

  He glanced over his shoulder as if revealing a closely guarded secret, and then leaned forward. “Uh-huh,” he said, dropping his voice. “If your spit freezes before it hits the ground, you go back to bed and wait till spring.”

  Laughing, she offered him a glass of wine—the same vinegary stuff Tom Crane had been fermenting in the corner for the past two years—and settled down at the table beneath the window to string beads and listen. He took it as a good sign that she poured herself a glass too.

  “You know,” he said suddenly, “there was this guy in the hospital, in the bed next to me … a midget, I guess he was. Or a dwarf. I always forget the difference.”

  “Midgets look like little children,” she said, drawing the shape with her hands. “Everything in proportion.”

  “Well, this guy was a dwarf then. He was old. And his head was huge, big ears and nose and all that.” He paused. “His name was Piet. He knew my father.”

  She snuck a look at him, then turned back to her work, tugging at a coil of monofilament with her teeth.

  “He’s the one who told me he was in Alaska.”

  “So that’s it,” she said, turning to him. “Your father.”

  Walter chafed the glass between his palms as if he were trying to warm them. He smiled, staring down at the floor. “Well, it’s not exactly the time of year for a vacation up there, you know. I mean, people are losing their noses, earlobes frozen solid, toes dropping like leaves—”

  Again she laughed—an old laugh, a laugh that gave him hope.

  He looked up, no smile now. “I’m hoping to track him down. See him. Talk to him. He is my father, after all, you know?” And then he was telling her about the letters he’d written—sometimes two or three a day—trying to catch up eleven years in a couple of months. “I told him it was okay, let bygones be bygones, I just wanted to see him. ‘Dear Dad.’ I actually wrote ‘Dear Dad’ at the top of the page.”

  He drank off the wine and set the glass down on a carton of old magazines. She was turned away from him, in profile, stringing her beads as if there were nothing else in the world. He watched her a moment, her lips pouted in concentration, and knew she was faking it. She was listening. She was trembling. On fire. He knew it. “Listen,” he said, shifting gears all of a sudden. “I never told you how hurt I was that day in the Grand Union. But I was. I wanted to cry.” His voice was locked deep in his throat.

  She looked up at him then, her eyes soft, a little wet maybe, but she let it drop. It was almost as if she hadn’t heard him—one moment he was pouring out his heart to her and the next she was off on a jag of disconnected chatter. She talked about the war, protest marches, the environment—there was untreated sewage being pumped into the river, could he believe that? And then ten miles downstream people were drinking that very same water—incredible, wasn’t it?

  Incredible. Yes. He gave her a soulful, seductive look—or what he thought was a soulful, seductive look—and settled in to hear all about it. They were on their third glass of wine when she brought up the Arcadia.

  To this point, her litany of industrial wrongs, her enumeration of threatened marshes and polluted coves, her wide-eyed assertion that so-and-so had said such-and-such and that the something-or-other levels were a thousand times the maximum allowable by law, had only managed to lull him into a state of quiet contentment. He was half-listening, watching her hands, her hair, her eyes. But now, all of a sudden, he perked up his ears.

  The Arcadia. It was a boat, a sloop, built on an old model. He hadn’t seen it yet, but he’d heard about it. Heard plenty. Dipe and his VFW cronies were up in arms about it—It’s the riots all over again, Walter, Depeyster had told him one night, we taught them a lesson twenty years ago in that cow pasture down the road and now it’s as if it never happened. As far as Walter was concerned, it was no big deal—who cared if there was one hulk more or less on the tired old river?—but at least he had some perspective on it. It was Will Connell’s connection to the thing that burned Dipe and LeClerc and the others, that much was clear. The very name was a bugbear, a red flag, a gauntlet flung down at their feet—Robeson was dead, but Connell was still going strong, vindicated by the backlash against the McCarthy witch hunts, a survivor and a hero. And here he was parading up and down the river in a boat the size of a concert hall (Can you believe it, Walter, Depeyster had asked, his voice lit with outrage, to put together this, this floating circus as a front for his Communistic horseshit … clean water, my ass. All he cares about is waving the Viet Cong flag on the steps of the Capitol Building …), here he was laughing in the faces of the very people who’d turned out to shut him and Robeson down twenty years back.

  Rednecks. That’s how Walter had always thought of them—how he’d been taught to think of them—but now that he actually knew Dipe, now that he’d worked with him, sat in his living room, drunk his Scotch, confided in him, he saw that there was a lot more to it than he’d imagined. Hesh and Lola and his mother’s parents had forced their version on him, and wasn’t that propaganda? Hadn’t they given him one side of the story only? Hadn’t they told him all his life that his father was no good, a traitor, a fink, a broken man? They were wrong about the Soviets, after all—they knew in their hearts they were. Here they’d bought the party line as if it were carved in stone, and then Stalin rotted away from within, and where were they? Freedom? Dignity? The Workers’ Paradise? Russia had been a morgue, a slave camp, and the party the ultimate oppressor.

  They were gullible—Hesh, Lola, his own sad and wistful mother and her parents before her. They were dreamers, reformers, idealists, they were followers, they were victims. And all along they thought they were the champions of the weak and downtrodden, thought they could blunt the viciousness of the world by holding hands and singing and waving placards, when in truth they themselves were the weak and downtrodden. They were deluded. Unhard, unsoulless, unfree. They were dreamers. Like Tom Crane. Like Jessica. He was leaving for Alaska in the morning and he was going to find his father there and his father was going to tell him how it was. Traitor? Walter didn’t think so. Not anymore.

  “You didn’t know we were founding members?” Jessica said, and he was looking right through her. “Tom and me? Tom even crewed down from Maine on her maiden voyage.”

  He hadn’t known. But he could have guessed. Of course, he thought, hardening all of a sudden, Jessica and Tom Crane, Tom Crane and Jessica. The two of them, out on the river, clasped together in their sanctimonious bunk, waving their I’m-Cleaner-Than-You banners on the deck and chanting for peace and love and hope, crowing for the spider monkeys and the harp seals, for Angel Falls and the ozone layer and all the rest of the soft-brained shit of the world. Suddenly he pushe
d back the chair and stood. “Did you hear me before?” he asked, and there was no trace of humor in his voice now, no humility, no passion even. “When I said how much you mean to me?”

  She bowed her head. The stove snapped, a bird shot past the window. “I heard you,” she whispered.

  He took a step forward and reached for her—for her shoulders, her hair. He could feel the heat of the stove on his left side, saw the dreary woods through the smeared window, felt himself go hard with the first touch of her. She was still sitting, slumped in the chair, a welter of beads, elastic thread, fishing line and sewing needles spread out across the table before her, and though he pressed her to him, she didn’t respond. He petted her hair, but she turned her head away and let her arms fall limp at her sides. It was then that he felt it, a tremor that began deep inside her, a wave that rose against the tug of gravity to fill her chest to bursting and settle finally, trembling, in her shoulders: she was crying.

  “What’s the matter?” he said, and his voice should have been soft, tender, solicitous, but it wasn’t. It sounded false in his ears, sounded harsh and impatient, sounded like a demand.

  She was sniffling, catching her breath at the crux of a sob. “No, Walter,” she breathed, looking away from him still, as limp as one of the dead, “I can’t.”

  He had his hands on the sweater now, and he was pressing his lips to the part of her hair. “You’re my wife,” he said. “You love me.” Or no, he’d got that wrong. “I love you,” he said.

  “No!” she protested with sudden vehemence, turning on him with a face that was like a mask, like someone else’s, like something she’d put on for a costume party, for Halloween, and then she seized both his arms just above the elbow and tried to push him away. “No!” she repeated, and all at once he could see her as if through a zoom lens, the tiny capillaries of her eyes gorged with blood, droplets of moisture trapped in her lashes that were thick as fingers, the nostrils of her turned-up nose dilated and huge, red as an animal’s. “It’s over, Walter,” she said. “Tom. I’m with Tom now.”