T. Boyle - World's End

Lula’s voice was deep and rich and slow. “Uh huh, Misser Van Wart, soon’s anything happen.”

“I’m at the office,” he said.

“Um-hm.”

“Okay, then,” he said. And then, for lack of anything better to do with it, he’d dropped the receiver back in its cradle.

No, he couldn’t call again. Not already. He’d wait half an hour — or no, fifteen minutes. God, he was jittery. He looked out at the rain again, trying to mesmerize himself, clear his brain, but all he could think of was ice. His hands were trembling as he reached into his breast pocket for the envelope of cellar dust, dipped a wet finger in it and rubbed the fine ancient dirt over his front teeth and gums as if it were a drug. He prodded it with the tip of his tongue, rolled it luxuriously against his palate, worked it over his molars and ground it between his teeth. He closed his eyes and tasted his boyhood, tasted his father, his mother, tasted security. He was a boy, hidden in the cool, forgiving depths of the cellar, and the cellar was the soul of him, avatar of Van Warts past and Van Warts to come, and he felt its peace wash over him till he forgot the world existed beyond it.

And then the phone rang. And he jumped for it.

“Yes?” he gasped. “Yes?”

Miss Egthuysen’s airy voice came back at him. “Marguerite Mott on line two.”

Marguerite Mott. It took him a moment. The tang of the cellar dust began to fade and the familiar contours of his office came back to him. Yes. All right. He would talk to her. He punched the button.

“Dipe?” Her voice was a distant crowing.

“Yes? Marguerite?”

“We’ve got it.”

He was at a loss. Got what? Had Joanna delivered already? He had a sudden vision of Marguerite, in her champagne cocktail dress and white pumps, holding the baby by its feet as if it were something she’d pounced on in the bushes. “Huh?” he said.

“The property,” she cried. “Peletiah’s place.”

All at once it began to take hold of him, flowering in his brain like a whole long double row of Helen Traubels opening their sweet compacted buds in a single unstoppable moment. The property. The Crane property. Desecrated by Communists and fellow travelers, lost to the Van Warts nearly his whole life — the fifty wild undeveloped and untrammeled wooded acres that were his link to the glorious past and the very cornerstone and foundation of the triumphant future. And she was telling him that now, at long last, it was his. “How much?” he asked.

Marguerite gave a little laugh. “You won’t believe it.”

He waited, the smile growing on his face. “Try me.”

“Sixty-two and a half.”

“Sixty—?” he repeated.

“Dipe!” she crowed. “That’s twelve-fifty an acre! Twelve-fifty!”

He was stunned. He was speechless. Twelve-fifty an acre. It was half what he’d offered the old long-nosed son of a bitch — twenty-two fifty less than what he’d been asking. “I knew it,” he said. “I knew it. Peletiah’s grave isn’t even cold yet and already the kid needs money — what’s he going to do, buy a truckload of pot or something?”

“It’s not pot, Dipe”—she cleared her throat—“but the catch is he’s going to need the money right away.”

“No problem.” Christ, he practically had the ten percent down in his pocket, and Charlie Strang down at County Trust would write him a note for six times sixty thousand. Without even blinking. “I knew it,” he repeated, crowing himself now. “So what was it? Gambling? Women? What the hell does that little shit need with sixty thousand?”

Marguerite paused for dramatic effect, then lowered her voice. “Listen, he didn’t want to tell me — not at first. But you know how I am, right?”

He knew. She’d probably taken out her false teeth and gummed him into submission.

“It was that boat. The ecology thing? You know, the one that had that accident in the paper two weeks ago or so?”

“The Arcadia.”

“Yeah. Well listen, I mean I don’t know much about it, but apparently it was pretty well beat up — Sissy Sturdivant says there was this hole you could drive a Volkswagen through in the bottom of it and god only knows how much water damage. …”

The light of perfect understanding settled on him and Depeyster found himself grinning. He anticipated her: “So he’s going to put up his own money for repairs, right?”

“Uh huh. That’s what he says.” She paused. “He’s a weird kid, you know — and I don’t just mean the way he dresses. It’s almost as if there’s something not right with him, know what I mean?”

Hallelujah and amen. There was something not right with his daughter too — with half the kids in the country — and he could have curled the ends of her wig with what he knew about it, but he didn’t answer. He was savoring the rich irony of the whole thing — his money going to repair the Arcadia —and then, in the next instant, he was thinking about Walter, about the funeral and the cold driving rain that fell without remit as they lowered him into the ground. Tom Crane was there, looking half-drowned, and a tall, flat-chested blonde with a ski-slope nose who must have been Walter’s wife. Mardi showed up too, though she wouldn’t deign to come with her father — or be seen with him either. She stood off on the far side of the group gathered around the open grave, huddled under a torn beach umbrella with a ragtag crew of hippies — the spic she ran around with and a nigger kid dressed up like the Fool in King Lear. There was no minister, no service. Hesh Sollovay read something — some atheistic hogwash that gave everybody about as much comfort as the rain did — and that was that. No ashes to ashes, no dust to dust. Just dump the poor kid in the ground and forget it.

They said he’d been dead twelve hours or more by the time they found him. It was late in the afternoon, when the storm was already on its way out to sea and everybody was busy digging out. Eighteen inches had fallen, and it had drifted to three and four times that. No one thought a thing of the buried car, and if it hadn’t been for a couple of sixth-graders building a snow fort, they might not have found him at all — at least until the rain cut the drifts down. The plant was closed, the schools were closed, everything was closed, and all anybody could talk about that afternoon was the Arcadia gone aground at Gees Point and how the police were looking into reports of sabotage. Depeyster and LeClerc and one or two of the others were actually celebrating the sad and untimely demise of that noble craft with a good fire and a bottle of Piper-Heidsieck when the call came about Walter. No one made the connection. Not at first. But Depeyster knew what had happened, knew just as certainly as if he’d been there himself. Walter had done it, done it for him.

Depeyster had wanted to cry. Standing there in the hallway, the cold black receiver in his hand, LeClerc and the others gaping at him from the parlor, he felt stricken. Walter had sacrificed himself. For him. For America. To strike a blow at the dirty little kikes and atheists who’d poisoned his childhood and somehow got a stranglehold on the whole great suffering country. It was a tragedy. It really was. It was Sophocles. It was Shakespeare. And the kid was, was — he was a hero, that’s what he was. A patriot. He’d wanted to cry, he really had, thinking of the waste, thinking of Walter’s sad and doomed life and the sad doomed life of his father before him, and he felt something high in his throat that might have been the beginning of it and something in his chest too. But he wasn’t in the habit of crying. Hadn’t cried probably since he was a child. The moment passed.

“Dipe?” Marguerite was still on the line.