T. Boyle - World's End

Hesh had his hair then, and for all his gruffness he was a teddy bear inside. Truman was the best-looking man in Peterskill, wild, a daredevil who rented a plane and flew it under the Bear Mountain Bridge — upside down, yet — and had his license taken away by the C.A.A. He and Hesh were best friends ( Yes, she’d told him that first time, like you and Tom) —they were all friends. Lola and Christina had gone through school together, first at the Colony Free School and then later at Peterskill High. After the war, when Christina brought Walter’s father around, everybody fell for him. (Almost a local boy, but not quite, he’d grown up in Verplanck and gone to school at Hendrick Hudson. Hesh had played opposite him in football, and Lola recognized him at once as the vanquisher of Peterskill’s best, the triple threat who’d so many times made her heart sink as he poked a baseball over the fence, dribbled downcourt in his silken shorts or burst through a gap in the line with his muddied calves and the angry black slashes of greasepaint masking his eyes.) He was working in the old Van Wart iron foundry, which had gone out of business during the Depression and been revived and retooled by a one-armed war veteran from Brooklyn, and he was going to night school at City College to earn a B.A. degree in American history. “History,” Lola said, lingering over the syllables, “that was his passion.

“Your mother’s father — he was a president of the Colony Association and a party member — he gave Truman some literature and talked to him about the dignity of the worker, surplus value and the fetishism of commodities — we all did, we all talked to him — and before long, he’d joined us. Of course, it was your mother who really won him over, but that’s another story. That fall they were married, and they rented a little two-room bungalow out back of the Rosenberg place — you remember it, don’t you?”

Lola paused to snub out her cigarette. “In the summer, Walter, summer of forty-six, you were born.”

Walter knew when he was born. He’d learned the date when he was three or four, and if it should ever happen to slip his mind, he could always consult his driver’s license. He knew that bungalow too, his home through the first dim years of his life, just as he knew what was coming next. He leaned forward all the same.

So Truman joined the party. Truman got married. Truman spent two nights a week at City College, studying the American Revolution, and five nights a week at the card table in Hesh and Lola’s front room. One night Christina would make up a pan of stuffed cabbage or a hutspot stew she’d learned from her mother, or her crisp potato pancakes; the next night, Lola would bake a cheese-and-noodle kugel. That was the way it was. Lola couldn’t have children of her own. But when Walter was born, Truman came to her and asked if she and Hesh would consent to be the boy’s godparents, and the evenings went on as before, only now little Walter’s crib stood in the corner.

And then it was 1949. August. And the party wanted Paul Robeson to give a concert in Peterskill, and Sasha Freeman and Morton Blum came to Hesh and to Truman. For security. There wouldn’t be any violence. No, they didn’t think so. It was going to be a peaceful affair, Negroes and whites together, working people, women and children and old folks, enjoying a concert and maybe a couple of political speeches, exercising their right to assemble and to express unpopular ideas. But Sasha Freeman and Morton Blum came to Hesh and Truman. Just in case.

Hesh swung off a dirt lane onto Van Wart Road, not a mile from the concert grounds, and the first thing he noticed was the number of people gathered along the road. Some were headed in the direction of the Crane property, in groups of four and five, ambling and desultory, beer bottles in hand; others just stood at the side of the road, waiting, as if for a parade. A moment later he encountered the cars. Scores of them, parked alongside the road, drawn up on the shoulders on both sides, so that only a narrow one-way lane remained between them. It was only half past six.

Hesh was mystified. Peletiah had set aside a pasture the size of three football fields expressly for parking, and here they were lined up along the road like cabbies at the airport, practically choking off access to the place. Buses had to get through here, buses from the City, and camp trucks and more buses from the summer colonies in Rockland County and the Catskills. Not to mention hundreds upon hundreds of private cars. What was going on here? Why hadn’t they parked on the concert grounds?

He got his answer soon enough.

No one had even glanced at them until they reached the gauntlet of parked cars, but now, once they’d entered the single lane heading for the entrance to the concert grounds, heads began to turn. A man in an overseas cap shouted an obscenity and then something glanced off the side of the car. These people hadn’t come to see the concert — they’d come to prevent it.

Sasha Freeman and Morton Blum didn’t think there would be any violence — though the Peterskill paper had seethed with anti-Communist, anti-Jew and anti-Negro invective for the past month, though the local chapter of the VFW had threatened to hold a “loyalty rally” to protest against the concert, though flags had been waving aggressively from every porch in town and placards reviling Robeson had begun to appear in shop windows — but here it was. At the entrance, Hesh was confronted with a larger and denser crowd — two hundred or more — that erupted in jeers and insults when it became clear that he and his passengers were concertgoers rather than kindred spirits. They rolled up the windows, though it was eighty-five degrees outside, and Hesh shifted down as he approached the mouth of the narrow dirt road that gave onto Peletiah’s property.

“Nigger lovers!” someone shouted.

“Kikes!”

“Commie Jew bastards!”

A teenager with slicked-back hair and a face red with hate loomed out of the crowd to spit across the windshield, and suddenly Hesh had had enough and put his foot to the floor. The Plymouth leapt forward and the crowd parted with a shout, there was the thump-thump-thump of angry fists and feet against fenders and doors, and then they were in and the crowd was receding in the rearview mirror.

Shaken, Hesh pulled into the lot beside a rented bus. Three other buses, a truck bearing the legend “Camp Wahwahtaysee” and perhaps twelve or fifteen cars were already there. Christina’s face was white. Truman and Piet were silent. “Trouble,” Hesh muttered, “son of a bitch. We’re in for it now.”

Seven o’clock came and went. There was no Robeson, no Freeman, no Blum. Out on the road, nothing moved. The access routes were either blocked or jammed with the cars and buses of frustrated concertgoers, and no one could get in or out. Except for the patriots, that is, who fingered brass knuckles and tire irons or tore up fence posts and tried the heft of them, ambling along the blacktop road as if they owned it. Which they did, for some four hours that night. The unlucky few who did actually make it to Van Wart Road, thinking to sit on a blanket, sip a Coke or beer and enjoy a concert, were routed past the blockaded concert grounds, pulled from their cars and beaten. No one, from Peterskill to Kitchawank Colony and back again, saw a single policeman.

There were maybe a hundred and fifty people gathered in front of the stage when Hesh and the others arrived. Most were women and children who’d turned out early to enjoy an evening in the sylvan glades of northern Westchester. Besides Hesh, Truman and Piet, there were about forty men among them; up above, beyond the line of trees that marked the boundary of Peletiah’s property, five hundred patriots stormed up and down the road, looking for Communists.