World's End

by T. C. Boyle

  It was almost five, the sleet had changed to a pasty wet snow and the party was in full swing when they motored into the dock at Garrison. A purist, Barr had kept her under sail as long as he could, but with the unpredictable wind he’d given up any notion of sailing in, and started the engines five hundred yards out.

  The decks were slick and anything that stood upright, including the crew, trailed a beard of snow. Ahead, the dock was white, and beyond it the ground lay pale and ghostly under an inch of snow. There was the scent of food on the cold air, distant strains of music. Hunched and bony, the ex-saint of the forest stood in the bow, holding Jessica’s hand and watching as the lights rode toward them across the water. “Well I’ll be damned,” he said, “if they didn’t start without us.”

  By seven o’clock Tom had gone through three soyburgers, an egg salad sandwich, two falafel delights, a bowl of meatless chili, six or seven beers (he’d lost count) and maybe just one too many hits of Fred the bosun’s miracle weed, puffed stealthily in the lee of the tent. Winded, he’d just sat down after a spate of fancy gangly-legged do-si-doing and swinging his partner, and he was beginning to feel a little vague about his surroundings. Those are the walls of the tent, he said to himself, gaping up from his hard wooden seat as if he were tarred to it, and those the big electric heaters. Outside, in the dark, is the dock. And next to the dock is the sloop. Yes. And down deep, tucked way up under the taffrail in the innermost recess of the main cabin, is my bunk. Into which I can fall at any moment. Suddenly he blinked his eyes rapidly and jerked up with a start. He was babbling. Only seven o’clock and he was babbling.

  He was giving some thought to extricating himself from the oozing tarpit of his chair and maybe bellying up to the food table for just one more soyburger with tomato, lettuce, ketchup and onions, when he was assailed by a familiar, probing, cat’s purr of a voice and found himself staring up into a face so familiar he knew it as well as his own.

  The purr rose to a yowl. “Tom Crane, you horny old dirtbagging sex fiend, don’t you recognize me? Wake up!” A familiar hand was on his elbow, shaking it like a stick. And now that familiar face was peering into his, so close it was distorted, big hard purple eyes, ambrosial breath, lips he could chew: Mardi.

  “Mardi?” he said, and a flood of emotions coursed through him, beginning with a thunderbolt of lust that stirred his saintly prick and ending with something very like the fear that gives way to panic. He was suddenly lucid, poised on the edge of his chair like a debutante and scanning the dance floor for Jessica. If she should see him talking to … sitting beside … christ, breathing the same air in the same tent…

  “Hey, you okay or what? T.C.? It’s me, Mardi, okay?” She waved her mittened hands in his face. She was wearing some sort of fur hat pulled down to her eyes and a raccoon coat over a flesh-colored body stocking. And boots. Red, blue, yellow and orange frilled and spangled high-heeled cowgirl boots. “Anybody home?” She rapped playfully at his forehead.

  “Uh—” he was stalling, scheming, caught between lust and panic, wondering how he was going to keep himself from bolting out of the tent like a purse snatcher. “Um,” he said, somewhat redundantly, “um, I was thinking. Want to step outside a minute and have a hit of some miracle weed with me and Fred the bosun?”

  She put her hands to her hips and smiled out of the corner of her mouth. “Ever know me to refuse?”

  And then he was outside, the chill air revivifying him, a cold whisper of snow on his face. Mardi trooped along beside him, her coat open and sweeping across the ground, her breasts snug in spandex. “Isn’t this a trip?!” she said, whirling twice and throwing her hands out to the sky. There was snow in her hair. Across the river, to the north, the lights of West Point were dim and diffuse, as distant as stars fallen to earth.

  “Yeah,” he said, throwing his head back and spreading his arms, remembering the excitement of waking as a boy to a world redeemed by snow, remembering the big console radio in his grandfather’s living room and the measured, patient voice of the announcer as he read off the list of school closings. “It is, it really is.” And suddenly the torpor was gone—indigestion, that’s all it was, indigestion—and he was whirling with her, cutting capers, swinging her by the arm and do-si-doing like a double-jointed hog farmer from Arkansas. Then he slipped. Then she slipped. And then they went down together, helpless with laughter.

  “Pssssst,” called a voice from the shadows. “Tom?”

  It was Fred. The bosun. He was conferring over a joint with Bernard, the first mate, and Rick, the engineer. They were being discreet.

  Unfortunately, discretion was not one of Mardi’s strong points.

  The first thing she said—or rather shouted—when they joined the nervous little group hunkered over the glowing joint was: “Hey, what are you guys—hiding? You think pot’s illegal or something?”

  She was met by stony looks and a furtive rustling of anxious feet. There were plenty of people out to kill the Arcadia—the same chicken-necked, VFW-loving, flag-waving, anti-Communist warmongers who’d beat the shit out of everybody twenty years ago in Peterskill—and a drug bust would be heaven come to earth for them. Tom could envision the headline in the Daily News, in block letters left over from Pearl Harbor: POT SHIP SCUTTLED; GOV ASKS POT SHIP BAN. That was all they needed. People mistrusted them already, what with the Will Connell connection and the fact that the crew was composed exclusively of longhairs in Grateful Dead T-shirts with FREE HUEY! and MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR buttons pinned over their nipples. The first time they’d docked at Peterskill there’d been a bunch of jerks waiting for them with signs that read WAKE UP, AMERICA: PETERSKILL DID!, and at Cold Spring a troop of big-armed women in what looked like nurses’ uniforms had showed up to wave flags as if they had a patent on them.

  “It’s a sacrament,” Mardi said. “A religious rite.” She was trying to be funny, trying to be hip and bubbly and trying to act more stoned than she was. “It’s, it’s—”

  “Barr Aiken catches us with this shit, we can hang it up,” Bernard drily observed. In a whisper.

  Fred was a little guy with a Gabby Hayes beard, bandy legs and the upper body of a weight lifter. He loved puns, and couldn’t resist one now. “Barr catches us, our ass is grass.”

  Rick tittered. “He’ll keelhaul us.”

  “Make you walk the plank, hey, right?” Mardi said, getting into the spirit of it. For some strange reason, probably having to do with the moon shot, UFOs and the accoustic quality of the snow-laden air, her voice seemed to boom out across the water as if she were leading cheers through a megaphone. Someone handed her the joint. She inhaled, and was quiet.

  For a time, they were all quiet. The joint went around, became a roach, vanished. The snow anointed them. Beards turned white, Mardi’s hair got wilder. The music fell away and started up again with a skitter of fiddle and a thump of bass. Fred produced a second joint and the little group giggled conspiratorially.

  It was at some point after that—at what point or what time it was or how long they’d been there, Tom couldn’t say—that Mardi took him aside and told him he was an idiot for living with that bitch Walter was married to, and Tom—ex-saint, apprentice holy man and red-hot lover—found himself defending his one and only. The snow was falling faster and his head was light. Rick and Bernard were engaged in a heated debate over the approach to some island in the Lesser Antilles and Fred the bosun was unsuccessfully trying to shift the conversation back to the time he’d heroically climbed the shrouds in a thunderstorm to free the fouled mainsail and how he’d slipped and fallen and cut his arm in six places.

  “ ‘Bitch’? What are you talking about?” Tom protested. “She’s like the calmest, most copacetic—”

  “She’s skinny.”

  Tom’s hair was wet. His beard was wet. His denim jacket and the hooded sweatshirt beneath it were wet. He began to feel the chill, and the vagueness was coming over him again. Jessica was probably looking for him that very minute. “Skinny?” />
  “She has no tits. She dresses like somebody’s mother or something.”

  Before Tom could respond, Mardi took hold of his arm and lowered her voice. “You used to like me,” she said.

  It was undeniable. He used to like her. Still did. Liked her that very minute, in fact. Had half a mind to—but no, he loved Jessica. Always had. Shared his house with her, his soy grits, his toothbrush, his bunk aboard the Arcadia.

  “What’s wrong with me?” Mardi was leaning into him now and her hands, mittenless and hot, had somehow found their way up under his shirt.

  “Nothing,” he said, breathing into her face.

  Then she smiled, pushed him away, pulled him back again and gave him a kiss so quick she might have been counting coup. “Listen,” she said, breathless, warm, smelling of soap, perfume, herbs, wildflowers, incense, “I’ve got to run.”

  She was five steps away from him, already swallowed up in a swirl of snow, when she turned around. “Oh, yeah,” she said. “There’s something else. I shouldn’t tell you cause I’m mad at you, but you’re too cute, right? Listen: watch out for my old man.”

  The snow was a blanket. The vagueness was a blanket. He tried to lift it from his head. “Huh?”

  “My father. You know him. He hates you.” She waved her hand at the tent, the dock, the dim tall mast of the Arcadia. “All of you.”

  If he hadn’t had to take a leak so bad—all that beer and all—he would have run into Jessica a lot sooner. She was looking for him. And she passed the very spot where Rick, Bernard and Fred were conducting their huddled rant, but Tom had vacated it to drift off into the storm and christen the breast of the new-fallen snow. Problem was, he got turned around somehow and the snow was falling so fast he couldn’t for the life of him figure out exactly where he was. The band was on a break, apparently, so the music was no help, and even the noise of the party itself seemed muted and omnipresent. Was it over there, where those lights were? Or was that the train station?

  All he wanted, really, after he’d zipped up and plunged off into the gloom, was to find Jessica and crawl back to his bunk and the comfort of his ptarmigan-down sleeping bag, the one that could keep a man toasty and warm out on the tip of the ice sheet. But which way to go? And Jee-sus! it was cold. Shouldn’t have stayed out so long. Shouldn’t have smoked so much. Or drunk so much. He belched. His hair had begun to freeze, trailing down his neck in ringlets of ice.

  He started toward the lights, but when he was halfway there he realized that they were, after all, the old-fashioned hooded lamps of the railway station. Which meant that, if he turned around one hundred and eighty degrees and marched off toward those lights glimmering behind him, he’d reach the tent. Three minutes’ effort, punctuated by a series of desperate arm-flailing slaloms across the slick earth, proved him wrong. He was under a light, all right, but it illuminated a false storefront that carried the legend YONKERS over it. Well that stumped him for a minute, but then the vagueness let go long enough for him to remember Hello, Dolly, and how the crew that filmed it had put up all sorts of gingerbread facades over the weathered old buildings to evoke the spirit of Yonkers in some bygone era. He stared stupidly at the sign for a moment, thinking Yonkers? The spirit of Yonkers? Yonkers was a derelict place of rotten wharves, blasted tenements and a river that looked like somebody’s toilet—that was somebody’s toilet. And this place, Garrison, had about as much spirit as Disneyland.

  God, this snow was something. He couldn’t see the nose in front of his face. (He was attempting the experiment, looking cross-eyed at the index finger and thumb of his cold and wet right hand, which were tugging at the cold and wet tip of his nose, when a pair of headlights swept across him.) Ah, so, here he was. In front of the antique shop. And down there, yes, the barn-red duplex with the Hollywood front, and around the corner, the green and the tent. He was on his way now, oh yes, stepping out with real confidence, when he spotted something that caught him up short. Somebody up ahead. Slipping around the corner. He knew that walk. That tottering, footshorn, awkward, big-shouldered walk. “Walter?” he called. “Van?”

  No answer.

  A car started up behind him, then another farther up the street. Two girls in knit hats rounded the corner, arm in arm, and then an older couple, in matching London Fog raincoats. When Tom got to the corner, he found the tent, found the party, found about a hundred people milling around over goodbyes and plastic cups of beer. A moment later, he even found Jessica.

  “I was worried,” she said, “where were you? God, you’re soaked. You must be freezing.”

  “I, uh, had too much. … Took a walk, you know. Try to clear my head.”

  Onstage, the band had been joined by Will Connell for an encore. Will’s goatee was flecked with white. He was thin and hunched, his face like something out of an old painting. He made a few cracks about the weather and then started strumming his banjo like an eggbeater salesman. After a while he set it aside in favor of the guitar and launched into “We Shall Overcome.”

  “You’re shivering,” Jessica said.

  He was. He didn’t deny it.

  “Let’s go,” she whispered, and her hand closed over his.

  When they got back to the sloop, everyone was gathered around the woodstove in the tiny galley, eating cookies and drinking hot chocolate. Tom stripped down right there, hugging the stove. He drank chocolate, munched cookies, cracked jokes with his mates. He didn’t worry about Mardi or the worrisome fact that he’d failed to mention her to Jessica. He didn’t worry about Mardi’s father or Walter either. (Had he really seen him? he wondered ever so briefly between sips of hot chocolate. But no, he must have been dreaming.) He didn’t worry about tomorrow’s sail or the icy decks or his yellowed underwear. He merely yawned. A great, yodeling, jaw-cracking yawn of utter peace and satiation, and then he shrugged into his longjohns and climbed into the ptarmigan-down bag, his lady love at his side. He lay there a moment, breathing in the atmosphere of quiet joy and repletion that closed gently over the cabin, and then he shut his eyes.

  The bunk was snug. The river rocked them. The snow fell.

  World’s End

  It was one of those pressed-glass lamps with a hand-painted shade, ancient, no doubt, and priceless, and Walter was staring into it as if into a crystal ball. He was sitting hunched over his knees on a loveseat in the front parlor of the museum Dipe called home, clutching a tumbler of single-malt Scotch that had probably been distilled before he was born and trying to smoke a menthol cigarette in a properly nihilistic way. He’d been back from Barrow just over a week now, and he was feeling very peculiar all of a sudden, feeling light-headed and a bit nauseous. His groin ached, he was wet under the arms and the arch of his right foot began to itch so furiously he was actually reaching for it before he caught himself. It was funny—or no, it wasn’t funny at all—but it was almost as if he were bracing himself for another attack of history.

  Dipe sat on the couch across from him, sipping at his Scotch and furrowing his handsome brow at LeClerc Outhouse and a stranger in trench coat and black leather gloves. The stranger, whose name Walter hadn’t caught, wore his hair in a crewcut so severe his scalp shone through like a reflector. He didn’t unbutton his trench coat and he didn’t remove his gloves. “It’s a shame,” the stranger said, slowly shaking his head, “it really is. And nobody seems to care.”

  LeClerc, who always seemed to have a suntan, even in winter, and whose favorite expression was “damn straight,” said, “Damn straight.”

  Dipe leaned back in his chair with a sigh. He glanced at Walter, then back at LeClerc and the man in the trench coat. “Well, I tried. Nobody can say I didn’t.” He sipped Scotch, and sighed into it. The others made consoling and affirmative noises: yes, he’d tried, they knew that. “If it wasn’t for the damn weather—” He waved his hand at the ceiling in futility.

  “Damn straight,” LeClerc said.

  Depeyster set his glass down and the stranger finished the thought for him, “—th
ey’d never have got that floating circus within half a mile of Garrison.”

  “Damn straight,” LeClerc said.

  “Snow,” Depeyster grunted, and from the tone of his grunt you would have thought shit was dropping from the trees.

  The conversation had been going on along these lines for the better part of an hour. Walter had come home with Depeyster after work and had stayed for supper with Joanna, LeClerc and the grimlooking stranger, who’d kept his gloves on even while buttering his bread. Mardi’s seat was vacant. Walter couldn’t taste his food. It had been snowing—unseasonably, unreasonably—since three.

  The principal theme of the evening was the Arcadia, and Dipe’s thwarted effort to organize a rally against its landing at Garrison, “or, for shit’s sake, anywhere else on this side of the river.” The centerpiece of the rally was to have been a flotilla from the Peterskill Yacht Club—everything from cabin cruisers to dinghies—that would track north with banners and flags, harass the Arcadia and then block access to the Garrison dock through sheer force of numbers. The only problem was the weather. Dipe had taken Walter down to the marina at lunch, and only three boat owners had showed up. The rest were presumably discouraged by gale winds and predictions of two to four inches of snow that were later updated to as much as a foot.

  “Apathy,” Depeyster growled. “Nobody gives a good goddamn.”

  “Damn straight,” LeClerc said.

  The stranger nodded.

  “If I was twenty years younger,” Depeyster said, glancing at Walter again.

  “It’s a shame,” the stranger said in a doleful whisper, and whether he was referring to Depeyster’s age or the Communist-inspired, anti-American, long-haired hippie outrage being perpetrated that very moment and not five miles from his tumbler of Scotch, wasn’t clear.