T. Boyle - World's End

When the lights of Barrow came into view across the blank page of the tundra, Ray turned to Walter and shouted something. “What?” Walter shouted back, distracted by uncertainty, his stomach sinking and the nausea rising in his throat — Here? he was thinking, my father lives here?

“Your foot,” Ray shouted. “I saw you having some trouble there when we were boarding back at Fairbanks. Lost one of your pegs, huh?”

Lost one of his pegs. Walter gazed out on the approaching lights and saw the image of his father, and all at once the roar of the plane became the roar of that ghostly flotilla of choppers in the doomed Sleepy Hollow night. Lost one of his pegs. And how.

“No,” Walter hollered, snatching at the handgrip as a gust rocked the plane, “lost both of ’em.”

Ray shouted something into the teeth of the wind as Walter trudged across the fractured skating rink of the airstrip. Walter couldn’t hear him, couldn’t even tell from the tone whether the man with whom he’d just risked his life in a rickety, worn-out, 10,500-dollar for-sale aircraft was blessing him, warning him or mocking him. “Good luck,” “Look out!” and “So long, sucker,” all sound pretty much the same when the temperature is down around forty below, the wind is tearing in off the frozen ocean with nothing to stop it for god knows how many thousand miles and you’ve got the drawstrings of the fur-lined hood of your parka tightened to the point of asphyxiation. Without turning around, Walter raised an arm in acknowledgment. And promptly fell face first on the jagged ice. When he pushed himself up, Ray was gone.

Ahead lay the six frozen blocks of wooden shacks that comprised the metropolis of Barrow, population three thousand, nine-tenths of whom, Ray had told him, were Eskimos. Eskimos who hated honkies. Who spat on them, pissed on them, cut them to pieces with the glittering sharp knives of their hooded eyes. Walter tottered forward, toward the lights, his suitcase throwing him off balance, the ragged uneven knobs of ice punching at his feet like the bumpers of a giant pinball machine. He’d never been so cold in his life, not even swimming in Van Wart Creek in October or jogging off to Philosophy 451 at the state university, where it sometimes got down to twenty below. No Exit, he thought. The Sickness Unto Death. Barrow. They’d got it all wrong, he thought, some cartographer’s mistake. Barren was more like it. He kept going, fell twice more, and began to regret his Jack London jokes. This was serious business.

Five minutes later he was staggering up the main drag — the only drag — of Barrow, last home and refuge of Truman Van Brunt. Or so he hoped. If the airstrip was deserted, the street was pretty lively, considering the temperature. Snowmobiles shrieked and sputtered around him, racing up and down the street; dogs that looked like wolves — or were they wolves? — fought and snarled and careened around in packs; hooded figures trudged by in the shadows. Walter’s hand, the one that gripped the suitcase, had gone numb despite his thermal mittens, and he thought grimly that at least he didn’t have to worry about his feet. No problem there. No sir.

The wind was keen and getting keener. The hairs inside his nostrils were made of crystal and his lungs felt as if they’d been quick-frozen. He’d stumbled past three blocks of windowless shacks already, most of them with chunks of some sort of frozen meat, bloody naked ribs and whatnot, strung up on the roof out of reach of the dogs, and still no sign of a hotel, bar or restaurant. There were only three blocks more to go, and then what? He was thinking he might go on trudging up and down that icy dark forbidding street until he curled up in a ball and froze through like a side of beef, doomed like the heedless tenderfoot in the Jack London story, when finally, up on the left, he spotted an Olympia Beer sign, red neon, white script, glowing like a mirage in the desert, and below it, a hand-painted sign that read “Northern Lights Café.” Shaken, desperate, shivering so hard he thought he’d dislocate his shoulders, he fumbled in the door.

For a minute, he thought he’d found nirvana. Lights. Warmth. A Formica counter, stools, booths, people, a wedge of apple pie in a smudged glass case, a jukebox surmounted by a glowing neon rainbow. But wait a minute, what was this? The place smelled, stank like a latrine. Of vomit, superheated piss, rancid grease, stale beer. And it was filled to capacity. With Eskimos. Eskimos. He’d never seen an Eskimo in his life, except in books and on TV — or maybe that was only Anthony Quinn in mukluks on a backlot in Burbank. Well, here they were, slouching, standing, sitting, snoozing, drinking, scratching their privates, looking as if they’d been dumped out of a sack. Their eyes — wicked, black, sunk deep beneath the slits of their lids — were on him. Their hair was greasy, their teeth rotten, their faces expressionless. To a one — he couldn’t tell if they were man or woman, boy or girl — they were dressed in animal skins. Walter dropped his suitcase in the corner and shuffled up to the counter, where an electric heater glowed red.

There was no one behind the counter, but there were dirty plates and beer bottles on the tables, and a couple of the Eskimos were bent over plates of french fries and what looked like burgers. No one said a word. Walter began to feel conspicuous. Began to feel awkward. He cleared his throat. Shuffled his feet. Stared down at the floor. Once, when he was sixteen, he and Tom Crane had taken Lola’s car down to the City, to an address they didn’t know — a Hundred Thirtieth or Fortieth Street, something like that — because Tom had seen an ad for cheap jazz albums at a Hearns department store. It was the first time Walter had been in Harlem. On the street, that is. In the hour he spent there, he saw only two white faces — his own, reflected in the grimy window of the department stores, and Tom’s. It was an odd feeling, a feeling of alienation, of displacement — even, almost, of shame for his whiteness. For that hour, he wanted desperately, with all his heart, to be black. Beyond that, nothing happened. They bought their records, climbed into the car and drove back to the suburbs, where every face was white. It was a lesson, he realized that. An experience. Something everyone should go through.

Somehow, he’d never felt the need to repeat it.

How long had he been standing here — a minute, five minutes, an hour? This was worse, far worse, than Harlem. He’d never seen an Eskimo before in his life. And now he was surrounded by them. It was like being on another planet or something. He was afraid to look up. He was beginning to feel that anything was better than this — even freezing to death on the streets or being torn to pieces by the wolf dogs or run down by drunken snowmobilers, when the swinging doors to the kitchen flew open and an extravagantly blonde, heavily made-up, rail-thin woman of Lola’s age hustled into the room, six long-necked beers in one hand and a steaming plate of something in the other. “Be with you in a minute, hon,” she said, and eased past him, arms held high.

The waitress seemed to have broken the spell. She served the beers and the plate of something, and the place came back to life. A murmur of low, mumbled conversation started up. An old man, his face as dead and leathery as the face of a shrunken head Walter had once seen in a museum, pushed past him with a seething glare and practically fell atop the jukebox. And then a teenager — yes, he could distinguish them now — tried to catch his eye and Walter looked timidly away. But now the waitress was there, and Walter looked into her tired gray eyes and thought for just an instant he was back in Peterskill. “What’ll it be, honey?” she asked him.