World's End (33 page)

Tom's eyes were distant and bleary above the scarf. They took in the kitchen and living room in a single glance. “No,” he said, “I guess not.”

A long moment ticked by, her disappointment like some heavy weight they both suddenly had to carry—she couldn't face it, a cold night alone with defrosted enchiladas and quesadilla chips that had the taste and texture of vinyl—until Tom tugged the scarf down past his lips and asked if she wanted to come out to his place for dinner. They could leave Walter a note.

And now, here she was, clutching her legs to her chest and watching her breath crystallize before her face, a farrago of warring odors broiling up around her. There was the cold salt stink of unwashed socks and underwear, the must of mold and woodrot, the acid sting of the smoke and the unconquerable, insurmountable, savory,
sweet, stomach-clenching aroma of garlic frying in the pan. She was about to spring down and give it a stir, when in came the saint of the forest, elbows flailing, water sloshing, feet beating the floor like drumsticks. He was breathing hard, and his nose was the color of tinned salmon. “Water,” he gasped, setting the bucket down beside the stove, and without pausing, measuring out twenty-four cups of it for the rice. “Blood Creek,” he added with a grin. “It never lets me down.”

Later, after they'd each put away two heaping tin plates of gummy rice and vegetables with garlic-fried tofu and soy grits
à la maison,
they shared another five or six jars of wine and a joint of homegrown, listened to Bobby Blue Bland sing “Call on Me” on Tom's no-fidelity battery-powered record player, and discussed Herbert Axelrod, talking chimps and UFOs with all the passion of rabbinical students delving into the mysteries of the Cabala. Tom had left the door to the stove open, and at some point Jessica had stopped shivering long enough to climb down from the airy bed and prop herself up on a chair just beyond the range of incineration. She told Tom the story of the time Herbert Axelrod, invited to lecture at the University of San Juan, had stepped off the plane and discovered a new species of fish in a puddle just off the runway. In return, Tom told her about the Yerkes Primate Center, dolphins that could do trigonometry and the UFO he'd seen right out there on Van Wart Road. Finally, though, and inevitably, the conversation turned to Walter.

“I'm worried about him,” Jessica confided.

Tom was worried too. Ever since the accident Walter had grown increasingly strange, obsessed with road signs, history and the Robeson riots, jabbering about his father as if the man existed and generally working himself into a frenzy at the Elbow every night. Even worse, he was hallucinating. Seeing his grandmother and a host of leprechauns behind every tree, seeing his mother, his father, his uncles and cousins and ancestors. All right: it must have been terrible having his foot hacked off like that, and sure, he needed time to adjust, but things were getting out of hand. “Does he tell you about seeing things?”

Jessica leaned toward him as he bent to feed the stove. “Seeing things?”

“Yeah, you know, like people? Dead people?”

She thought about this a minute, her mind numbed by the wine, the faintest queasiness spreading its fingers in her deepest gut. “His father,” she said finally. “He told me once—I think it was just after the accident—that he saw his father. But I mean”—she shrugged—“maybe he did.”

“Is he dead, or what?”

The wine was going to her head. Or maybe it was the pot. Or the tofu. “Who?”

“Walter's father.”

She shrugged again. “Nobody knows.”

It was then that they heard the thump of footsteps on the porch out front of the shack in the middle of nowhere, a sound like the rap of fleshless knuckles on the lid of a pine box, and both of them froze. “Walter,” Jessica murmured in the next breath, and they relaxed. But then the door flew open and there was Mardi, in sealskin boots and a ratty raccoon coat that fell to her knees, shouting “Hey, Tom Crane, you hairy old satyr, you old man of the mountain! Have I got something for you!”

She was in, the door slammed shut behind her, and she was warming her hands over the fire and stamping her feet in a furious little seal-pounding fandango before she acknowledged Jessica's presence. “Oh,” she said, the big cold coat in Jessica's face, her eyes bloated and streaked with red, “oh … hi.”

Tom poured her a glass of wine while she shouted about the path in from the road—“Nothing but ice, like a fucking bobsled run or something”—and how she'd fallen on her ass at least six times. “See?” she said, lifting the coat to show off her buttocks in the grip of a pair of tight faded jeans that didn't show a wrinkle.

Suddenly Jessica felt as sour as the rancid wine in the pit of her stomach.

“You know what?” Mardi said, flinging off the coat to reveal a ski sweater featuring what appeared to be a band of humping reindeer, and following this with a squealing non sequitur (“Oh, what's this? Ummmmm. …”) as she first peered into the pot and then began to pick bits of squash and tofu from it. “Hmmmmm, that's good. What is it, tofu?” She sat above them, perched on the edge of the table, jaws working, licking at her fingertips. Her hands were slim, pretty, no
bigger than a child's, and she wore two or three rings on each finger. “You know what?” she repeated.

Silence. Jessica could hear the low moan and suck of the stove, the pop and wheeze of sap in the burning wood. Tom was grinning at Mardi like a hick at the sideshow. “What?” he said finally.

Mardi came up off the table in a theatrical leap and threw out her arms like a cabaret singer. “Hash!” she announced. “Blond Lebanese!” It was, she assured them, the best, the purest, the most potent, unrefined, mind-numbing, groovy and auspicious hash they'd ever partake in the glory of, and furthermore, she added with a lopsided wink, she had five grams of it for sale. Not that she wasn't tempted to keep it all for herself—just to have around, you know—nor did she usually do anything like sell drugs or anything, but it was just that she, like, needed the cash.

Jessica tried, she really did. But there was something about this girl in the raccoon coat that irritated her to the depths of her soul, that made her want to grind her teeth and howl. It wasn't just that she was crude, loudmouthed, sloppy and offensive—it went deeper than that. There was something in the very timbre of her voice, in her movements, in the way she rubbed at the touched-up mole at the corner of her mouth or drew breath through the gap between her front teeth, that unhinged Walter's sweet-tempered wife. Every word, every gesture, was a sliver driven beneath her nails.

Stoned, Mardi couldn't stop talking. She told a long, barely coherent story about seducing two of her professors at Bard, appreciated motorcycles with Tom—come spring
she
was going to get the big Honda, the 750—and dissolved in giggles over something that had happened at a concert the two of them had attended. In the middle of all this, she produced a pipe from the breast pocket of the raccoon coat, lit it, took a suction-hose drag and handed it to Tom. Resinous and rich, with an edge to it that defeated even the acid sting of the woodsmoke, the aroma of the smoldering drug filled the shack. Tom passed the pipe to Jessica.

Now when it came to hashish, Jessica was no neophyte. Hacking like a tubercular, she'd shared the occasional hookah with her college dorm mates or taken furtive hits from Walter's foil-wrapped pipe out back of the Elbow, and everything had been fine, no problem. But
Mardi's stuff took her by surprise. Especially on top of all that spoiled wine and tofu and Tom Crane's own, tight-rolled little joint. Five minutes after Mardi lit the pipe, Jessica felt as if she were sinking through the floor, great pulsing blotches of color exploding across her field of vision like the blips on a blank movie screen. The queasiness she'd felt earlier had migrated all of a sudden, from her bowels to her stomach, and it was creeping up her throat like the disembodied hand in “The Beast with Five Fingers.” She was about to gag, about to leap up, throw herself through the door and spew squash, tofu, brown rice and sour white wine out into the crystallized and pristine night, when the door swung open of its own accord.

And who should be standing there, cocked on his good leg and framed by that same Arctic night, his Salvation Army greatcoat and scarf a mess of shaved leaves, burrs, twigs and other woodland refuse? Who, with his Dingo boots scuffed beyond recognition and the look of not one, not two, but falls and scrapes uncountable in his eyes? None other. It was Walter.

MacArthur coming ashore at Leyte could hardly have generated more excitement. Tom was up and across the room in two hops, slapping backs with the lost wanderer, Jessica's gorge sank momentarily and she sprang up to embrace him and peck a kiss, and Mardi, while she never moved, nonetheless allowed a big wicked lascivious smile to spread across her lips and the light of knowledge—knowledge in the narrowest and most euphemistic biblical sense—to manifest itself in her perfect, glacial, deep-set and mocking violet eyes.

All right. Questions flew. No, he hadn't eaten. Sure, he'd love some tofu. Yeah, he was at a bar down in Verplanck, shooting pool with Hector, and he hadn't realized how late it was. Uh-huh, yeah: he got the note. Probably no more than ten minutes after they'd left. Well, yeah, he got cleaned up a bit, took a shower and whatnot, and thought it might be fun on the coldest night in history to come on out and see how the saint of the forest was taking things. (This with a grin for Tom Crane, who was already at the stove, stirring the depths of the cauldron with a wild and spastic rotation of his bony arm.) And yes, he must have gone down about a hundred times on the path—damn worthless son-of-a-bitching foot kept skidding out from under him.

“Want a hit of this?” Mardi, still perched on the edge of the table, leaned toward him, her voice pinched with the effort to contain the inestimable smoke, the pipe held out to Walter like a propitiary offering.

“Sure,” Walter said, touching his hand to hers, “thanks,” and Jessica saw something in his eyes. “How you been, Mardi,” he said, bringing the pipe to his lips, and Jessica heard something in his voice. She looked at Mardi, sitting there like a cat with a mouthful of feathers, and she looked at Walter, squinting through the smoke at Mardi, and all at once the most devastating, most heartrending and sickening thought came to her.

Mardi was talking now, her voice coming fast and hard, honed like a razor, telling Walter the same story she'd told fifteen minutes before, about the professors and her own provocative and irresistible self. And Walter, sprawled in a chair, unbuttoning his coat and passing the pipe, was listening. But no. No. She was just being paranoic, that's all. It was the hash. It always did this to her. So what if Walter wasn't home for dinner, so what if he stayed out at the Elbow half the nights of the week, so what if Mardi had preceded him by a
matter of mere minutes
—what did that prove? Oh no, she was way out of line.

For all that, though, she was on her feet in the next instant, the half-full Smucker's jar hurtling to the floor like a two-ton bomb, on her feet and out the door to the porch, where she leaned over the railing and brought up all the fire in her guts, retching so furiously, so uncontrollably and without remit or surcease, that she thought for the longest while she'd been poisoned.

It wasn't another woman, she was sure of that. But that something was wrong, radically wrong, Christina had no doubt. She leaned back on the dog-smelling davenport her mother had fished out of the basement for her, held the steaming cup of Sanka to her lips and stared out the bungalow's yellowed windows and into the saturate dusk that gathered in the trees like a precursor of heavy weather to come. All the world was quiet. Walter was asleep already, Hesh and Lola gone out for the night. Dropping her gaze from the trees to the pine desk beneath the window (her husband's desk, with its hulking black Smith Corona and its neatly squared row of arcane little volumes with titles like
Agrarian Conflicts in Colonial New York
and
Van Wart Manor: Then and Now),
she felt a pang of sadness so acute it was like giving birth to something twisted and deformed, ugly as a lie. When she looked up again, she had to bite her ring finger to keep from crying out.

It wasn't another woman, but she almost wished it were. At least then she would know what she was up against. As things stood now, she didn't know what had gone wrong, but she had only to look into Truman's eyes to know it was bad. For the past few nights he'd been “unwinding” after work at one of the local taphouses, lurching in at midnight with wild eyes and volatile breath, distant as an alien dropped from another world into the bed beside her. Unwinding. Yes. But before that—through the whole course of that blighted summer—he'd grown so strange and self-absorbed she hardly recognized him. Each night he would drag himself back from the foundry, his face set,
hardened, all the sympathy driven out of it. He'd duck away from her embrace, spin Walter in the air and pour himself a drink. Then he'd sit down at the desk, pull open his notebook and lose himself until dinner. “How was work?” she'd ask. “Okay if we have green beans again for a vegetable? Have the Martians landed yet?” Nothing. No response. He was a monk of the sacred texts, he was carved of stone. After dinner he would read his bewildered son a chapter of Diedrich Knickerbocker's
History of New York,
his voice toneless and dull, and then it was back to the books. Sometimes, even on work nights, she'd wake at one or two in the morning and there he'd be, reading, underlining, making notes, his whole being caught up in the page.

“You're working too hard,” she told him.

He looked up at her like a beast surprised over its prey, the book spread open in his lap as if it were the thing he'd stalked and killed, the bloody meat he was gnawing in the refuge of his den. “Not hard enough,” he growled.