T. Boyle - World's End

Why me? he kept thinking as the doctor played with the alien foot as if it were a curio or paperweight. Why me?

“No, no, Walter,” Huysterkark was saying, “in point of fact you’re actually very lucky. Very lucky indeed. Had you hit that sign a bit higher and lost the leg above the knee, well—” His hands finished the thought.

The sun was sitting in the treetops beyond the window. Out there, along the highway, people were going off to play tennis, shop for groceries, swim, golf, rig up sailboats at the Peterskill Marina or stop in for a cold one at the Elbow. Walter lay amidst the stiff white sheets, frozen with self-pity, beyond repair. But lucky. Oh, yes indeed. Lucky, lucky, lucky.

The night before, after Hesh and Lola and Jessica had left and the anesthesia had begun to let go of him, Walter had a dream. The pale glow of the corridor faded into mist, the whisper of the intercom was translated to the lap of dirty water at the pilings, the tide running out, the smell as keen as everything that has ever lived and died upon the earth. He was crabbing. With his father. With Truman. Up at dawn, traps flung in the trunk of the Studebaker, bait wrapped in newspaper, walking out along the Acquasinnick trestle where the river opens up at high tide to flow all the way up Van Wart Creek. Stay off the tracks, his father warned him, and Walter stared into the mist, half-expecting the 6:20 from Albany to break free of the morning and tear him in two. But that would have been too easy. This dream was subtler, the payoff more sinister.

The bait? What was it? Fish gone high, covered with flies. Bones. Marrow. Chicken backs so rotten your hand would stink for a week if you touched them. When people drowned in the river, when they lay pale and bloated in the muck, pinned beneath a downed tree or the skeleton of a car, when they began to go soft, the crabs got them. His father never talked of it. But the neighborhood kids did, the river rats did, the bums who lived in the waterfront shanties you could see from here — they did. Anyway, maybe the 6:20 went by with an apocalyptic roar that felt as if it would rip the trestle from the pilings, maybe it didn’t. But Walter pulled at the line and the net was stuck, wouldn’t budge. His father, smelling of alcohol, a cigarette clenched between his lips and eyes squinted against the smoke, set down his beer to help him. Work it easy, he grunted. Don’t want to snap the line. Then it was free, rising toward him, as heavy as if it were filled with bricks.

There were no bricks. There was no trap. Just Walter’s mother, she of the soulful eyes, her hair in a cloud and the crabs all over her, nothing from the waist down. Nothing but bone.

Next thing he knew the nurse was there. A big woman, middleaged, with something extra stuffed into her uniform about the hips and thighs, she took the room by storm, hitting the overhead light, the blinds, flourishing bedpan and syringe, plying the rectal thermometer like a saber. Sunlight screamed through the windows, she was whistling some martial tune — was that Sousa or the “Marine Corps Hymn”?—and he felt a brief fluctuation in the calculus of pain as the IV was jerked from his arm and clumsily reinserted.

The dream — horrible enough — was letting go its grip and Walter was waking to an insupportable reality. Everything came on him in a rush, the voice of waking rationality hissing in his ear like a bulletin from the front: You’re in the hospital, your ribs on fire, your arm a scab. And what about this: you’ve got no foot. None. Nothing at all. You’re a cripple. A freak. A freak for life.

Next came breakfast. Reconstituted orange juice, powdered eggs, simulated bacon. Brought by a nurse so incommunicative she might have taken a vow of silence, and a lush sixteen-year-old candy striper who discovered a bird on the far windowsill and cooed to it the entire time she was in the room: “Oooh, the wittle widgeon, oooh the wittle wittle.” Walter wasn’t hungry.

When they left, he sat up and tentatively examined his leg. There was a dull throb in his kneecap, a slice of pain where he’d taken twenty stitches in his calf. His fingers roamed lower, creeping down his shin, reluctant, skirting disclosure. He felt bandages — gauze and tape — and then, touching it as he might have touched a hot iron, the flat hewn stump of his leg. He threw back the sheets. There it was. His leg. Or no, this was somebody else’s leg, truncated and ravaged, obscene, alien, inert as a log. He thought of bread, French bread, hacked across the beam. He thought of liverwurst.

Then he was asleep again. Out cold. Tugged down by the morphia and Demerol, he substituted one nightmare for another. Sleeping, he relived the accident. There was the shadow, the marker, the feeling of helplessness and predestination. And then he was an old man, stooped, white-haired, beslobbered with his own spittle, selling pencils on a street corner in the Bowery or stretched out on a pallet in some charity ward with a hundred other cripples and half-wits. Sleeping, he saw his grandfather’s corpse and the cloud of killifish closing over it. Sleeping, he saw his father.

The old man was sitting in a chair beside the bed. His hair was cut, parted and freshly combed; he was wearing a mohair suit and silk tie, and his eyes were serene. But here was the odd part: he wasn’t wearing any shoes. Or socks. And as Walter turned his head to gaze at him, Truman made a point of lifting first one foot, then the other, and depositing them on the edge of the bed as if they were on exhibit. Then he wriggled his bare toes and held Walter’s gaze.

“But, but I thought—” Walter sputtered.

“Thought what?” the old man said. “That I was a cripple too?” He flexed his toes, then dropped both feet to the floor. “But I am, Walter, I am,” he said, shutting his eyes and rubbing the bridge of his nose, “—you just can’t see it, that’s all.”

“On the boat, the ship—” Walter began.

Truman waved his hand as if he were deflecting smoke. “An illusion,” he said. “A warning.” He leaned forward, elbows pressed to his knees. “Watch your step, Walter.”

It was then that Walter was seized with inspiration, then that he understood what it was he’d meant to ask on the ghost ship. All his life he’d bought the story handed down by Hesh and Lola as if it were chiseled in granite on Anthony’s Nose — his father was a traitor, a conscienceless fiend who’d betrayed them, sold them out, and his mother had died because of it. And yet no one, not even Hesh, knew for sure. “Nineteen forty-nine,” Walter said. “The riots. Tell me, what did you do to her? What was it?”

Truman said nothing.

“It killed her, didn’t it?”

His father’s eyes had hardened, the look of the mad prophet come to dwell there once again. After a moment, he said: “Yeah, I guess it did.”

“Hesh says you’re no better than a murderer—”

“Hesh.” Truman spat out the name as if he’d bitten into something rotten. “You want to know?” He paused. “Go back and take a look at that sign.”

“Sign? What sign?”

The old man was standing now, an odd composite of what he’d been eleven years earlier and the man who’d made his way in the world since. He almost looked dapper. “You tell me,” he said, glancing down at Walter’s leg, and then he swung around and strode out the door.

It was the ghost ship all over again. “Come back here!” Walter shouted. “Come back, you son of a bitch!”

“I’m right here, Walter.”

He opened his eyes. At first he didn’t know where he was, couldn’t focus on the pale white field hanging over him, but then the smell of her — creme rinse, My Sin, tutti-frutti gum — brought him back. “Jessica,” he murmured.