T. Boyle - World's End

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?

All he wanted, really, after he’d zipped up and plunged off into the gloom, was to find Jessica and crawl back to his bunk and the comfort of his ptarmigan-down sleeping bag, the one that could keep a man toasty and warm out on the tip of the ice sheet. But which way to go? And Jee-sus! it was cold. Shouldn’t have stayed out so long. Shouldn’t have smoked so much. Or drunk so much. He belched. His hair had begun to freeze, trailing down his neck in ringlets of ice.

He started toward the lights, but when he was halfway there he realized that they were, after all, the old-fashioned hooded lamps of the railway station. Which meant that, if he turned around one hundred and eighty degrees and marched off toward those lights glimmering behind him, he’d reach the tent. Three minutes’ effort, punctuated by a series of desperate arm-flailing slaloms across the slick earth, proved him wrong. He was under a light, all right, but it illuminated a false storefront that carried the legend YONKERS over it. Well that stumped him for a minute, but then the vagueness let go long enough for him to remember Hello, Dolly, and how the crew that filmed it had put up all sorts of gingerbread facades over the weathered old buildings to evoke the spirit of Yonkers in some bygone era. He stared stupidly at the sign for a moment, thinking Yonkers? The spirit of Yonkers? Yonkers was a derelict place of rotten wharves, blasted tenements and a river that looked like somebody’s toilet — that was somebody’s toilet. And this place, Garrison, had about as much spirit as Disneyland.