T. Boyle - World's End

“You’d do it again,” Walter said finally, jabbing, probing, “you were right, a patriot, and my mother, Hesh and Lola, Paul Robeson himself, they were the traitors.”

Truman brooded over the bottle. He said nothing.

“They got what was coming to them, right?”

Silence. The wind. The snow machines. Muffled shouts. Dogs.

“The children too. I could have been there that day, your own son. What about the children playing in front of the stage — did they deserve it too? Do patriots beat the shit out of Communists’ children? Do they?” Walter was reviving, coming alive again, so hot for the fight he forgot which side he was on. Let him refute that, he thought. Let him convince me. And then I can rest.

Truman rose with a sigh, stirred his drink vaguely and then crossed the room to where his own coat — animal skin, just like the Eskimos’—hung from a peg. He took down the hat that hung above it, a Sergeant-Preston-of-the-Yukon sort of affair, leather and fur, with earflaps pinned up like wings, and dropped it on his head. He circled the chair twice, as if reluctant to sit, and then, mashing the hat down low over his eyes, he eased himself down again. “You want black-and-white,” he sighed. “Good guys and bad guys. You want simple.”

“ ‘I was right,’ you said. ‘I loved her,’ you said. So which was it?”

The old man ignored the question. Then he looked up suddenly and held Walter’s eyes. “I didn’t know she was going to die, Walter. It was a divorce, you know, that’s how I saw it. Happens every day.”

“You twisted the knife,” Walter said.

“I was young, confused. Like you. We didn’t shack up in those days, you know, we got married. I loved her. I loved Marx and Engels and the Socialist revolution. Three and a half years, Walter — it’s a long time. It can be, anyway. I changed, all right? Is that a crime? Like you, like you, Walter.

“Your mother was a saint, yeah. Selfless. Good. Righteous. Those eyes of her. But maybe too good, too pure, you know what I mean? Maybe she made me feel like shit in comparison, made me feel like hurting her — just a little, maybe. Like your Jessica, right? Am I right? Goody-good?”

“You’re a son of a bitch,” Walter said.

Truman smiled. “So are you.”

There was a silence. Then Truman went on. He’d been wrong to hurt her so deeply, he said, he knew it, and this life was his penance, this talk his act of contrition. He should have just left, got out. He should have warned her. But for a year and a half he’d been meeting secretly with Depeyster, LeClerc and the others — vets, like himself — and he’d fed them information. It was no big deal — minutes of the association, who said what at party meetings — nothing, really, and he didn’t take a cent for it. Didn’t want it. He’d turned around, one hundred eighty degrees, and he believed in his heart that he was right.

Sure it hurt him. He drank more, stayed away from the house, looked into Christina’s martyred eyes and felt like a criminal, like shit, like the two-faced Judas he was. “But you know, Walter,” he said, “sometimes it feels good to feel like shit, you know what I mean? It’s a need, almost. Something in the blood.”

The week that preceded the concert was the worst of his life. The end was coming and he knew it. He was out every night, drunk. Piet was with him then, and that helped. Piet was there with a joke, with an arm around the shoulder. Funny little guy. “What should I do, Piet?” Truman asked him. “Do it,” Piet said. “Stick it to ’em. Jews, Commies, niggers. The world’s gone rotten like an apple.” There was money this time. Money to get away and start over, sort things out. Someplace. Anyplace. Barrow, even. He wasn’t supposed to take the car — permanently, that is. But when it was all over, he hated Depeyster more than he hated Sasha Freeman and the Worldwide Communist Conspiracy. For making him hate himself. So he kept it. Drove the shit out of it. Seven, eight years, up here and back. Till it gave out. Till there was no reason to go back.

The funny thing was, it was all in vain.

Sasha Freeman and Morton Blum and whoever controlled them were one step ahead of Depeyster all along. “You want to talk expediency,” Truman growled, “you want to talk cynicism, Freeman and Blum, those sons of bitches had a corner on the market.”

Truman was supposed to let the boys in at some point so they could break things up — really tan the asses of Robeson and Connell and all the rest of the nigger lovers, teach them a lesson they’d never forget: Wake Up, America: Peterskill Did! That’s how Depeyster saw it. That was the plan. Truman would help the cause and he’d get a thousand dollars to bail himself out of his life and start someplace else. But it all backfired, of course. If Sasha Freeman had been there he would have let the animals in himself. Gladly. It was his idea all along to stir thing up till they were good and hot, work in a little slaughter of the innocents with some broken bones and bloody noses thrown in for good measure and get a bunch of pictures of women in blood-stained skirts into the newspapers. And if some poor coon got lynched, so much the better. A peaceful sing-along? What the hell good was that?

“You tell me, Walter,” the old man said, leaning into him, “who the bad guys were.”

Walter had no answer. He looked away from his father’s eyes, and then back again.

Truman was fingering his right ear. The lobe was deformed, shriveled back on itself like the inner fold of a sun-dried apricot. Walter knew that ear well. Shrapnel, the old man had said when he took Walter down to the trestle to catch crabs, Walter eight, nine, ten years old. “That’s how this happened,” Truman said suddenly, no act of contrition if not entire, if not heartfelt and complete.

“You always told me it was the war.”

The old man shook his head. “That night. It’s my Judas mark. The weirdest thing, too.” His eyes were squinted against the smoke of his fiftieth Camel, his face struck with something like wonder. Or puzzlement. “It was over and we were gone, Piet and me, out of the mob and up one of those back roads to where we’d left the car, when this maniac comes flying out of the bushes and takes me down from behind. I’m pretty strong in those days, pretty big. This guy is bigger. He doesn’t say a word, just starts beating the shit out of me — trying to kill me. And I mean kill. Weirdest thing …”

“Yeah?” Walter prompted.

“He was an Indian. Like you see on TV — or out in New Mexico.” Pause. “Or out the window here. Stank like a septic tank, greased up, feathers in his hair, the whole schmeer. He would have killed me, Walter — and maybe he should of — except for Piet. Piet got him off me. Stabbed him with his penknife. Then a bunch of guys jumped on him, five or six or more, I don’t know. But the guy wanted me — just me — and I’ll never know why. They had his hands, so he bit me. Like an animal. He went down, Walter, and he took a piece of me with him.”

Walter leaned back in the chair. He knew it all now, the fight was over, and where had it got him? His father was nothing, neither hero nor criminal, he was just a man, weak, venal, confused, impaled on the past, wounded beyond any hope of recovery. But so what? What did it mean? The imp. Piet. The waking nightmares and the hallucinations, a life lived out on feet that were dead, the marker, Tom Crane, Jessica. You’re already halfway there, the old man had said. Was that it? Following in his father’s footsteps? History come home to roost?

“Crazy, huh?” the old man said.

“What?”

“My ear. The Indian.”

Walter nodded absently. And then, as if correcting for that nod, he snarled, “Tell you the truth, who cares? I don’t want to know about some crazy Indian biting your ear, I want to know why, why you did it.” Walter pushed himself up from the chair and he could feel his face twisting toward some explosive show of emotion, tears or rage or desperation. “The whole thing — Piet, Depeyster, you were confused — it’s all just excuses. Words. Facts.” He found to his surprise that he was shouting. “I want to know why, why in your heart, why. You hear me: why?”