World's End (65 page)

But for now—for this thumping, glorious, wind-scoured moment—he was sailing. Beating upriver against a strong head wind, standing proud and runny-nosed at the helm while the captain, first mate and bosun sat around the coffeepot below. Jessica was below too, elbows braced on the big square dining table in the main cabin, boning up on the morphology of the polychaete worm as the pale silk of her hair fell forward to trickle over her ears and mask her face. He looked out over the gray chop of the river—not another boat in sight—and he looked down through the spattered glass and into the cabin. The deck moved beneath his feet. The captain drank coffee. Jessica studied.

They were just rounding Dunderberg and heading into the Race, Manitou Mountain and Anthony's Nose looming up on the right, Bear Mountain rising on the left. They'd left Haverstraw at noon, and were scheduled to dock at Garrison for the night. Normally, they'd be in within the hour, but the wind was steady in their faces and the tide was slack. There was no telling when they'd get there. Tom studied the sky, and saw that it looked bad. He sniffed the breeze and smelled snow. Shit, he thought, of all days.

But then he brightened. Snow or no snow, they
were
on their way
to a party. Dockside at Garrison. And it couldn't start till they got there. Awash in light, he took in the mountains, the plane of the river, the soar and dip of the gulls, he filled his lungs, savored the spray. A party, he thought, working the image over in his mind until he could taste the food and hear the music. But it wasn't just another party, it was a foot-stomping, finger-waving, do-si-doing, year's end blowout for all the members and friends of the
Arcadia,
replete with a mini concert from the guru himself, Will Connell, and the Tucker, Tanner and Turner Bluegrass Band. They'd set up a big circus tent with electric heaters right down on the green, and there would be square dancing, there would be beer, a bonfire, hot food and hotter drinks. It was a big day. A great day. Her inaugural year was over, and the
Arcadia
was coming home to roost.

The sky darkened. The chop got rough. Sleet began to drive down, pins and needles whipped by the wind. And the wind—suddenly it was playing tricks, blowing steady across the bow one minute, puffing from the stern the next and then all at once shearing across the port side in a sudden gust that whipped the boom halfway around and nearly jerked the tiller from the numbed hands of the scrawny exsaint. There were eight crew members aboard, and all eight of them—plus Jessica—got into the act before it was over.

With the first lurch of that great deadly boom, Barr Aiken, the
Arcadia's
captain and a man for whom Tom would gladly plunge into raging seas or fight off the Coast Guard single-handed—just let him give the word—shot across the cabin and up the gangway like a hurdler coming out of the blocks. He called for all hands, relieved Tom at the helm and in half a minute had everybody scrambling to reef the sails. Thirty-five years old, a sallow and weather-beaten native of Seal Harbor, Maine, with a hangdog look and eyes that always focused in the distance, the captain was a man of few and soft-spoken words. He pronounced his name Baaaa, like a forlorn sheep.

Now, the wind dancing and the sleet in their teeth, he spoke so softly he might have been whispering, yet his every word was as distinct as if he'd been screaming to the roots of his hair. Down came the jib. The mainsail was reefed again. Everyone held on as he jibed and began tacking from point to point across the narrow neck of the
Race. It was business as usual, no problem, only a little more exciting maybe with the way the wind was kicking up. Tom almost fainted from happiness when the captain handed the tiller back to him.

“Must be the Imp,” Barr observed, folding his arms and spreading his feet for balance. He spoke in his characteristic whisper, and there was something like a smile hovering around the lower part of his face.

Tom looked around him. The mountains were shaggy with denuded trees, their great puffed cheeks bristling with stubble. The sky was black over Dunderberg, blacker ahead. “Uh huh,” Tom said, and found that he was whispering too.

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?