T. Boyle - World's End

“An Indian?” The judge lifted his eyebrows while everyone in the courtroom stole a glance at the Kitchawank, who sat erect as a pillar in the witness box.

The judge now turned to him. “Jeremy Mohonk,” he began, and then glanced at the court recorder. “Mohonk? Is that right?” The recorder nodded, and the judge turned back to the accused. “Do you understand the nature of the charges against you?”

“I was defending my person and my property,” the Indian growled, his eyes sweeping the room. Rombout, his head still bandaged and the left side of his face swollen and discolored, looked away.

“Your property?” the judge asked.

The Indian’s attorney was on his feet. “Your honor,” he began, but the judge waved him off.

“Are you aware, sir, that the property you claim as your own has been in the Van Wart family since before this country, as we know it, even came into existence?”

“And before that?” the Indian countered. His eyes were like claws, tearing at every face in the courtroom. “Before that it belonged to my family — until we were cheated out of it. And if you want to know something, so did the land this courtroom stands on.”

“You do then claim to be an Indian?”

“Part Indian. My blood has been polluted.”

The judge gazed at him for a long moment, smacking his lips from time to time and twice removing his glasses to wipe them on the sleeve of his robe. Finally he spoke. “Nonsense. There are Indians in Montana, Oklahoma, the Black Hills. There are no Indians here.” Then he dismissed the defense attorney and asked the D.A. if he had any further questions to put to the accused.

The jury, eight of whom had gone to school with Rombout, was out for five minutes. Their verdict: guilty as charged. The judge sentenced Jeremy Mohonk to twenty years at Sing Sing, a place named, ironically enough, for the Sint Sinks, a long extinct tribe that had been second cousin to the Kitchawanks.

Rombout had seen justice done, and yet that piece of property — disputed by a madman and never much good for anything anyway — proved too great a burden to bear. Six months after Jeremy Mohonk had been shunted off to prison and his shack razed, Rombout was forced to put the place up for sale. Over the years, through legislation, population pressure, division among heirs and other forms of attrition, the original Van Wart estate had shrunk from 86,000 acres to fewer than two hundred. Now it would be deprived of fifty more.

Times were hard all over. For two years the plot remained on the market and not a single bid was forthcoming, until finally Rombout put an ad in the Peterskill Post Dispatch (soon to merge with both the Herald and the Star Reporter). The day after the ad appeared, a gleaming late-model Packard sedan made its slow, flatulent way up the drive to the manor house. Inside was Peletiah Crane, principal of the Van Wartville school and descendant of the legendary pedagogue-legislator. He was dressed in his principal’s pinstripes, replete with bow tie, celluloid collar and straw boater, and he carried with him a black satchel similar to those employed by doctors making their rounds.

Pompey led the educator into the brightly lit back parlor, where Rombout and his thirteen-year-old son, Depeyster, sat over a game of chess. “Peletiah?” Rombout exclaimed in surprise, rising and extending his hand.

The principal was smiling — no, grinning — till he looked like a walnut about to split open. Depeyster ducked his head. He knew that grin. It was a variant of the one Old Stone Beak, as they called him, employed just prior to lifting his cane down from the wall and applying it to some miscreant’s backside. Wider, gummier and more compressed about the lips than the caning grin, this one was reserved for special occasions of triumph, as when Dr. Crane had assembled the student body to announce that his own son had won the essay contest commemorating the founding of Peterskill, or when he’d curtailed athletics for a month because Anthony Fagnoli had desecrated the shower stall with an anatomical diagram. Thirteen years old and mortified in the face of that smile, Depeyster felt like slipping down to the cellar for a pinch of dirt. Instead, he concentrated on the chessboard.

The principal pumped his father’s hand joyously and then took a seat. “Mr. Van Wart,” he said, “Rombout,” and he was tapping the black bag in his lap with a knowing and proprietary air, as if it contained the philosopher’s stone or the first draft of Roosevelt’s New Deal speech, “I’ve come to make an offer on the property.”

It was February, grim and cold and gray. Walter, a young man with two feet like anyone else, was still in school, sitting down to his desk with a jar of wheat germ and a carton of prune-whip yogurt, trying to make sense of Heidegger. His motorcycle was in the garage out back of the rooming house in which he ate, slept, shat and ruminated over questions pertaining to man’s fate in an indifferent universe, where it stood forlornly amidst a clutter of three-legged tables, disemboweled armchairs and lamps with mismatched shades. He wouldn’t be needing it for a while. The outside temperature was twenty below, he was three hundred fifty miles and a whole universe away from the clapboard bungalow in Kitchawank Colony and the hissing inferno of Depeyster Manufacturing and he had three more interminable months to endure before he could accept his diploma from the liver-spotted hands of President Crumley and tear the pages from Heidegger with the same slow malicious pleasure with which he’d torn the wings from flies as a child.

Jessica was at school too. In Albany. She hadn’t seen Walter since Christmas break and had written him three times without reply in the past week. She’d also written to graduate schools. Scripps, Miami, N.Y.U., Mayaguez. What she wanted from Walter was love, fidelity and an enduring relationship; what she wanted from Scripps, Miami, N.Y.U. and Mayaguez was a chance to study marine biology. At the moment, she was contemplating the typescript of her senior thesis, which lay on the desk beside yet another letter to Walter. Her legs were crossed, and a furry slipper, shaped like a rabbit but made of cotton, dangled from her pink-frosted toes. The title gave her a little thrill of pleasure: The Effect of Temperature Fluctuation on Vanadium Concentration in Tunicates of the Intertidal Zone, by Jessica Conklin Wing. She weathered the thrill, turned the page and began to read.

Tom Crane, grandson to Peletiah, friend and father confessor to Jessica and lifelong boon companion to Walter, was not in school. Not as of two weeks ago, anyway. Nope. Not he. He was a dropout, and proud of it. Cornell, as far as he was concerned, was strictly a bourgeois institution, repressive, reactionary and stultifyingly dull. He’d dissected his last frog, tortured his last rat and struggled for the last time to heft twenty-five-pound textbooks crammed with illustrations, diagrams and appendices. He’d cleaned up his room and sold the whole business — desk, chair, tensor lamp, slide rule, texts, dictionaries, his fieldbook of natural history and a two-year-old calendar featuring the wildflowers of the Northeast as displayed against the wet vulvae of naked, black-nippled Puerto Rican girls — for twenty-six dollars, stuffed his underwear in a rucksack and hitchhiked home.

“What are you going to do now?” his grandfather asked him when he got there.

Hunched and dirty, the eight-foot canary-yellow scarf wrapped around his neck like an anaconda and his World War I German aviator’s coat hanging open to the waist, he merely shrugged. “Don’t know,” he said. “Might get a job, I guess.”