T. Boyle - World's End

“You get tired,” Truman said, “you sleep over there, by the stove. I’ve got a sleeping bag, and you can take the cushions off the couch.” He sat again, arching his back against the hard wooden slats of the chair. He took a long sip from the cup and then walked the chair across the floor till he was so close to Walter he might have been bandaging a wound. “Now,” he said, his voice a hard harsh rumble of phlegm, “now you listen to my story.”

“No matter what they tell you, I loved her. I did.”

The old man drained his cup, flung it aside and lifted the bottle to his lips. He didn’t offer Walter any. “Your mother, I mean,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his sleeve. “She was something. You probably don’t remember her much, but she was so — what do you call it? — earnest, you know? Idealistic. She really bought all that Bolshevik crap, really thought Russia was the workers’ paradise and Joe Stalin everybody’s wise old uncle.” There was a single lamp burning, brass stand, paper shade, on the desk behind him; the shadows softened his features. “She was like Major Barbara or something. I’d never met anybody like her.”

Walter sat there transfixed, the rasping voice and the everlasting night holding him as if by spell or incantation. His mother, she of the soulful eyes, was right there before him. He could almost smell the potato pancakes.

“But you’ve been married, right? What was her name?”

“Jessica.” The name was an ache. Jessica and his mother.

“Right,” the old man said, his voice gravelly and deep, ruined by drink and nights that never end. “Well, you know how it is, then—”

“No,” Walter snapped, suddenly belligerent. “How is it?”

“I mean, once the first glow dies and all that—”

Walter jumped on him. “You mean you screwed her over. From the beginning. You married her so you could destroy her.” He tried to get up, but his feet were numb. “Sure I remember her. I remember her dead too. And I remember the day you left her — in that car out there, right? Depeyster Van Wart’s car, isn’t it?”

“Bullshit, Walter. Bullshit. You remember what Hesh taught you to remember.” The old man’s voice was steady — he wasn’t debating, he was narrating. The pain of it, the pain that made him hide out in the hind end of the world, was up on a shelf in a little bottle with a tight cap. Like smelling salts. “Don’t give me that self-righteous look, you little shit — you want to know hurt, you listen to me. I did it. Yes. I’m a fink, I’m a backstabber. I murdered my wife, set up my friends. That’s right, I’ll tell you that right off. So don’t argue with me, you little son of a bitch. Just listen.”

The temperature had gone up high under the old man’s voice, and for the second time in as many hours he looked as if he were about to lurch up and tear the place apart. Walter sat frozen, so close he could smell the stink of the gin on his father’s breath. “If you want to get beyond all that, I mean. And you do, right? Or you wouldn’t have come all the way up here.”

Numb, Walter nodded.

“Okay,” the old man said, “okay,” and the calm had returned to his voice. He was wearing mukluks and a bulky wool sweater with reindeer dancing across the front of it, and when he leaned forward, his hair and beard touched with gray, he looked like some scored and haunted figure out of an old Bergman movie, the pale oracle of the north. “Let me start at the beginning,” he said, “with Depeyster.”

Truman had met him in England during the war — they were both G2, Army Intelligence, and they’d struck an immediate chord on discovering they both hailed from the Peterskill area. Depeyster was a smart guy, good-looking, tough — and a pretty good ball player too. Basketball, that is. They shot some hoop with a couple of other guys once in a while when they were off duty. But then Depeyster got another assignment and they drifted apart. The important thing was that Truman met Christina — and married her — before he ever laid eyes on Depeyster Van Wart again. And that was the truth.

“But you joined the party,” Walter said, “—I mean, that’s what Lola—”

“Oh, fuck,” Truman spat, a savage crease cut into his forehead. He pushed himself up from the chair and paced the little room. Outside, the wolf dogs set up a howl. “Yeah. Okay. I joined the party. But maybe it was because I was in love with your mother, ever think of that? Maybe it was because she had some influence over me and maybe because, in a way, I wanted to believe that happy horseshit about the oppressed worker and the greed of the capitalists and all the rest of it — hey, my father was a fisherman, you know. But who was right, huh? Khrushchev comes along and denounces Stalin and everybody in the Colony shits blood. You got to put things in perspective, Walter.” He paused at his desk, picked up a sheaf of paper covered in a close black typescript, then set it down again. Instead he shook a cigarette — a Camel — from the pack that lay beside it, and raised a lighter to it. Walter could see that his hands were shaking, for all his bravado.

“So then, what — we’re married a year, two years — and Depeyster comes back into the picture. After, Walter,” he said, something like a plea in his eyes for the first time, “after I met your mother and married her, I run into him in the store at Cats’ Corners out there, we’re going on a picnic, your mother and me and Hesh and Lola, and I stop in for a beer and pack of smokes on a Sunday afternoon, and there he is.” He paused, took another drink from the neck of the bottle. “There’s a lot of factors here, things you know nothing about. Don’t be so quick to judge.”

Walter found that he was gripping the arms of the chair as if he were afraid he would topple out of it, as if he were high up on a Ferris wheel in a wind like the wind outside the door. “I told you,” he said, “I work for him. He’s all right. Really, he is. He says Hesh and Lola are wrong. Says you’re a patriot.”

Truman let out a bitter laugh, the pale swampy green of his eyes obscured in smoke, the massive torso swaying ever so slightly with the effect of the alcohol and maybe the emotional charge too. “Patriot,” he repeated, his face contorted as if he’d bitten into something rotten. “Patriot,” he spat, and then he stretched himself out on the floor in front of the stove and fell asleep, the lit cigarette still jammed between his fingers.

In the morning — if you could call it morning — the old man was guarded, frazzled, hung over and furious, as communicative as a stone. At some point, deep in the folds of that interminable night, Walter had heard him stagger up from the floor, pour himself a drink and dial the phone. “I’m not coming in today,” he growled into the receiver. There was a pause. “Yeah, that’s right. I’m sick.” Another pause. “Let ’em read the Constitution — better yet, have them copy it out.” Click.

Now it was light — or rather there was a noticeable softening of the darkness that pressed up against the windows — and there was a smell of bacon, strong as life, mixed in with a subtler smell, a mnemonic smell, a cruel and heartless smell: potato pancakes. Walter lurched up out of the sleeping bag as if it were on fire, living flesh in a house of ghosts. The dogs howled. It must have been about noon.

Truman served him bacon, eggs over easy, potato pancakes—“Like your mother used to make,” he said out of a pouchy, expressionless face, and then he said nothing more till the sun flickered out an hour later. “Gone dark,” he said suddenly out of the silence. “Cocktail hour,” he said with a sloppy grin. “Story time.”