World's End (53 page)

“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 pushed 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.”

Tom. The name came at him out of nowhere, out of another universe, and he barely heard it. Victims. Dreamers. He fought down her arms and jerked at the sweater like a clumsy magician trying to pull the tablecloth out from under a service for eight. She cried out. Flailed her arms. Fell back against the table. Beads scattered, falling to the floor like heavy rain, like the drumbeat of the polluters marching off to war. He tugged the sweater up, bunched it in an angry knot beneath her chin and lifted her from the chair, pinning her groin to the edge of the table with the weight of his own. He went for her mouth, but she turned away from him; he went for her breasts, but she hung on to the sweater with both hands. Finally, he went for her jeans.

She cried the whole time, but she clung to him. And he leaned into her and felt her tongue and when she stiffened against him she held fast to him as if he were her life and her all. When it was over he pulled back from her and the look in her eyes frightened him. She looked whipped, wounded, like a dog that's been fed and beaten at the same time. Was that a bruise under her left eye? Was that blood on her lip? He didn't know what to say—he'd run out of words. In silence he zipped up, buttoned his jacket; in silence he backed away from her and felt for the door.

Slowly, tentatively, as if he were facing down a wild beast that might spring at him if he glanced away for even an instant, he turned the knob behind him. It was then that she let herself fall to the floor, lifeless as a doll. She lay there, motionless, her head cradled in her arms, the jeans down around her ankles. He couldn't hear her sobs now, but the balled white length of her was trembling with them, that much he could see.

It was his last picture of her.

Coming down the hill was nothing. He seemed to skate on his feet and each time he lost his balance a stiff young sapling sprang up for him to latch hold of. He squeezed his mind as he might have squeezed a blister, and purged himself of the image of her. By the time he reached the bridge he was in Barrow, with its unfathomable shadows,
its hard edges, its geometry of ice. He saw his father there, and his father was healthy and vigorous, the man who'd taken him to the trestle to plumb the murky river for crabs, the man who'd stood up to Sasha Freeman and Morton Blum and all the rest.
Walter,
his father said,
it's been a long time,
and he held out his arms.

She was a good-looking woman, a beauty, what with her expensive teeth, her full proud bosom, the flat abdomen that had grown round only once to contain the swell of life. He liked her eyes too, eyes that were like the marbles he'd won as a boy, the palest cloud of violet in a prism of glass, and he liked the way she looked at him when he was telling her things. He told her about Manitou's big woman or Mishemokwa the bear-spirit or about his father and Horace Tantaquidgeon, and she leaned forward, her lips parted, brow furrowed, eyes so intent she might have been listening to the oracle, to the father of nations, to Manitou himself. But what he liked best of all about her was that she was a white woman, the wife of the son of his ancient enemy—that was too perfect.

He'd first met her up there, in Jamestown. What was it—four, five years ago? He was tired of the shack, tired of carrying the burden of his hopeless race, tired of solitude, and he'd gone north to pick apples and shoot duck for a couple of weeks—till Thanksgiving, maybe. Till the lakes froze and the ducks were gone, anyway. It was November, the Tuesday before Turkey Day, and he was sitting out on One Bird's porch with a rag, a can of 3-In-One oil and One Bird's hoary single-shot Remington. He'd used it the day before to bring down a pair of canvasbacks and a pintail, and he'd cleaned and oiled it after supper. He wasn't really cleaning it now—he was just stroking the barrel with a rag soaked in oil, just to have something to do with his hands. The day was clear, breezy, with a scent of the tundra on the wind.

The station wagon—it was a Chevy, brand-new, white, with that
fake wood business along the side—surprised him. It came around the corner by Dick Fourtrier's place, muscling its way over the washboard dirt and the potholes, and then slowed in front of One Bird's, jerking to a halt finally just down the road. On came the back-up lights, and the wagon lumbered back till it was even with him. He saw a head bob in the window, saw the wind tug at the exhaust. The morning locked itself up in silence. Then the driver's door fell open and there she was, Joanna, the charity lady, coming around the side of the car in her leather pumps, her cashmere sweater and pleated skirt, coming up the flagstone path with its hackles of stiff yellow weed, coming to the house that needed paint, coming to him.

“Hello,” she said when she was halfway up the walk, and her smile gave back the glory of all those years of six-month checkups and all those miles of dental floss well-plied.