T. Boyle - World's End

His grandfather, former guiding light of the Van Wartville and Peterskill schools and a firm believer in the dignity of work and the principles of John Dewey, gave a snort of contempt. He was seventyseven years old and his eyebrows rose and fell again like great white swooping owls.

“I wanted to ask you if I could live in the shack.”

For a moment the old man was speechless. “The Indian’s shack?” he said finally, a fine trembling crusty incredulity oscillating his voice. “Way out there in the hind end of nowhere? Good Christ, you’ll freeze to death.”

Oh no, he wouldn’t freeze. Last summer he’d equipped the place with a new wood stove, replaced the windows and patched the chinks in the walls with scrap lumber and wood putty. And the summer before he’d put up a porch, installed a chemical toilet and dragged enough crapped-over discarded furniture up there to make the place habitable. Besides, he had a good down bag and fifty acres of firewood.

His grandfather, he of the sharp Crane beak and devouring Crane eyes, had doted on him since he lay kicking in the cradle, and now that his own son was gone, the old man clung to him with a fierceness that had all the desperate love of dying blood in it. That is, he was a pushover. “If that’s what you want,” he said at last, heaving a sigh that might have raised the curtains.

And so here he was, living like a hermit, a man of the mountains, a saint of the forest and hero of the people, free of the petty pecuniary worries that nag shop owner and working stiff alike. Sure it was nippy, and yes, necessity forced him to trudge out to Van Wart Road and hitch the two miles to his grandfather’s for a hot meal and the occasional ritual peeling of the long johns and immersion in a steaming tub, but he was doing it. Independence was his! Self-direction! The joy of sloth! He lay in bed all morning, wrapped in his sleeping bag, his arms pinned beneath the weight of Indian blankets uncountable and an old reeking raccoon coat he’d found in his grandmother’s closet, watching his breath hang in the air. Sometimes he’d get up to open a can of creamed corn and set it on the kerosene stove or maybe make himself a cup of herb tea or hot chocolate, but mostly he just lay there, listening to his beard grow and relishing his freedom. About ten or eleven — he couldn’t tell which, didn’t have a clock or watch — he’d begin reading. Typically, he’d start out light, with some elfin fantasy or sci fi, with Tolkien or Vonnegut or Salmón. After lunch — chick peas mashed into brown rice with lentil gravy, out of the five-gallon pot — he’d get into the heavy stuff. Lenin, Trotsky, Bakunin, cheap pamphlets with gray or green covers, the paper no better than newsprint. What did he care for leather bindings and rag content? — he was studying for the revolution.

But now, on this grim winter’s night, while Walter lucubrated and Jessica turned her thoughts to Holothurians, Tom Crane was pulling on his pink suede lace-up boots (with the unfortunate smirches of motor oil he’d tried to remove by applying a solution of carbon tetrachloride and high-test gasoline) and slipping into the houndstooth bellbottoms that hugged his bony knees and made racing chocks of his feet. He was grabbing for the aviator’s coat and mummy-wrapping the scarf around his neck, heading out the door, suffused with an excitement that made his long bony feet tap across the porch as if they’d come loose: he was going to a concert. A rock concert. A wild, joyous, jungle-thumping celebration of nubility, rebelliousness, draft resistance, drug indulgence, sexual liberation and libidinous release. He’d been waiting three whole days for it.

The sky was low, black, rippled with cloud, and the warming trend of the past few days had pushed the mercury all the way up to fifteen above. He had to feel his way out to the road, the thin jerky beam of the flashlight so weak it could do little more than satisfy his curiosity as to which quivering, low-hanging branch had poked him in the eye or grabbed hold of the frayed tail of his scarf. It was half a mile down the stony, concave path to Van Wart Creek and the wooden footbridge erected by some altruist in times gone by, and then another quarter mile or so across a marshy pasture that was home to grazing cows and dotted like a minefield with their skillet-sized puddles of excrement. The path then wound through a copse of naked beech and thick-clustered fir, ascended a short rise and finally emerged on the motionless black river of macadam that was Van Wart Road.

(So what if it was a regular and tedious trek out to or in from the road, made all the more tedious when the trekker was laden with bursting sacks of lentil flakes, pinto beans or bran pellets? The remoteness of the place had its advantages. A hero of the people and saint of the forest could expect few visitors, for example, or representatives of the duly constituted authorities of the county and township, like the assessor, inspectors from the Department of Building and Safety or the sheriff and his minions. Nor would he be much bothered by drummers, panhandlers, Avon ladies and Jehovah’s Witnesses, as these, passing by on the road, would see only an infinity of trees, each one adumbrating the next. For the initiated, however, for his privileged guests, Tom Crane had provided the Packard hubcap. If you slowed in the vicinity of a certain diseased-looking elm that was one-tenth of a mile beyond a certain breached guardrail, and you recognized the hubcap depending from a nail driven into the trunk of that certain elm, you would park and walk in: Tom was at home. If the hubcap was on the ground, you needn’t bother.)

Out on the road, Tom removed his deerskin gloves — one of sixteen pairs his father had inadvertently bequeathed him. He’d found them, some still wrapped in gift paper that featured snowmen and candy canes, while poking around in his father’s bureau the week after his parents’ first vacation in twenty years had been terminated by pilot error somewhere over San Juan. He stuffed the gloves inside the belt loop of his aviator’s coat, slipped the all-but-useless flashlight in the back pocket of his bellbottoms, and removed the Packard hubcup from the tree. Then he blew on his hands and turned to address the long black shadow that stretched along the side of the road like the mouth of an unfathomable cave.

This was the Packard itself, a relic of the distant past, painted the color of sleep and forgetfulness and pitted with rust. Its windows were jammed open, the brakes were a memory and the floorboards had dissolved in a delicate tracery that left the pedals floating in space while the road moved beneath them like a conveyor belt. A genuine artifact, as revealing in its way of previous civilization as the arrowhead or potsherd, the old hulk had been unearthed the previous year in the shed out back of his grandfather’s place. The elder Crane had owned a succession of Packards, and this, dating from the late forties, was the last of them. (“They went bad after the War,” the old man insisted, real vehemence inflating the flanges of his magnificent nose. “Junk. Nothing but junk.”) Now it was Tom’s.

Working by rote, he struggled to lift and brace the hood and then remove the air filter. He was in the act of spraying ether into what he took in the darkness to be the carburetor when he first spotted the flying saucer. Trembling and luminous, it jerked violently across the sky, coming to an abrupt halt directly above him, where it hovered tentatively, as if looking for a place to land. Tom froze. He watched the thing without apprehension and with a keen sciential eye (it was saucer-shaped, all right, and emitting a pale, rinsed-out light), surprised, but only mildly. He believed in clairvoyance, reincarnation, astrology and the economic theories of Karl Marx, and as he stood there, he could feel his belief system opening up to include an unshakable faith in the existence of extraterrestrial life as well. Still, after ten minutes or so his neck began to go stiff, and he found himself wishing that this marvelous apparition would do something — spit flames, open up like an eye, turn to mud or jelly — anything but hover interminably over his head. It was then that he reached surreptitiously for the flashlight he’d tucked in his back pocket, thinking in a vague way of signaling to the aliens in Morse code or something.