T. Boyle - World's End

At first, Hesh and the others retreated in panic, without direction, every man for himself. All that changed when they came upon the arena. The field was brightly lit — one of the women had started up the generator and flashed on the stage lights as night fell — and Hesh and his dazed comrades were suddenly confronted by the spectacle of a hundred wild-eyed men running amuck amidst their wives and children. It was unendurable. Without hesitation — without even breaking stride — they came together again, charging into the melee in a wedge, swinging sticks and fists, sick and maddened and ready to die. The patriots fell back under the fury of the assault, and the women and children who’d been caught out in the open made for the stage as if it were a life raft in a churning sea. Hesh and his men grappled with their adversaries for a moment and then broke for the stage themselves as the patriots from above roared down on them. It was then that an unknown hand let loose the bottle that laid Hesh low. One moment he was handing a child up to the stage, and the next he was stretched out on the ground.

Hesh never knew how long he was out — half an hour? Forty-five minutes? But when he woke, the night was black, lit only by a bonfire in front of the stage, and the patriots were gone. They’d spent their rage on the folding chairs, on the pamphlets and tables and sound equipment. One of them had cut the lights and then they’d rampaged through the field, smashing chairs, burning books and pamphlets, putting stones through the windows of the buses and cars in the lot. They were like Indians in a movie, Christina said later. Savages. Whooping, screaming like animals. They destroyed everything they could get their hands on, and then, as if by a prearranged signal, they vanished. A few of the women had been hurt in the scuffle, a dozen others were hysterical (Christina included, who couldn’t locate either Truman or Hesh and feared the worst), and several of the men had broken bones and gashes that required stitches, but no one had been lynched, no one died.

Just after Hesh regained his senses, six pairs of headlights appeared on the dirt road above them, which the patriots had obligingly cleared by overturning the camp truck in the weeds and opening a path through the barrier at Van Wart Road. Frozen, expecting some new treachery, the concertgoers huddled on the stage and watched the cold beams approach. Then, suddenly, the red lights began to flash and a woman cried out, “Thank God, they’re finally here!”

Walter didn’t want to hear the rest. Didn’t want to hear how Lorelee Shapiro had got through to the state police, who’d known about the situation all along but took their own sweet time getting there, or how his mother was in a state of shock, or how Lola had helped organize the second concert, held a week later on the same bloodied ground, a concert at which Paul Robeson and Will Connell actually did sing and which was attended by 20,000 people and went off without a hitch — until the concertgoers tried to get out. He didn’t want to hear about the second riot, about the cars and buses stoned all the way out Van Wart Road to the parkway, didn’t want to hear about police collusion and the redneck veterans of the first riot sporting armbands that read WAKE UP, AMERICA: PETERSKILL DID! It was history. All he wanted to hear was that his father wasn’t a traitor, a turncoat, a backstabber and a fink.

“Next week it was worse, Walter,” Lola was saying, caught up in her own story now, a freshly lighted cigarette in the ashtray before her, but Walter was no longer listening. He remembered that scene in the kitchen of the bungalow as he might have remembered a distant nightmare, remembered clinging to his father’s legs while his mother raged, remembered the smell of him, the sweat like a tomcat’s musk, the sweet corrupt odor of alcohol. No! his mother shrieked. No! No! No!

“But we had to do it, Walter — we couldn’t let them get away with it. We had to show them that this was America, that we could say and think and do what we wanted. Twenty thousand turned out, Walter. Twenty thousand.”

Scum. His father was scum. A man who’d sold out his friends and deserted his wife and son. Why fight it? That’s what Walter was thinking when he looked up from the table and saw his father standing there by the stove, framed between Lola’s head and the rigid declamatory index finger of her right hand. He looked as he had in the hospital — neat, in suit and tie and with his hair cut and combed, but barefoot still. Don’t you believe it, Truman growled.

Lola didn’t see him, didn’t hear him. “Animals, Walter. They were animals. Filth. Nazis.”

Two sides, Walter, his father said. Two sides to every story.

Suddenly Walter cut her off. “Lola, okay. Thanks. I’ve heard enough.” He pushed himself up from the table and grappled with his crutches. Outside, birds sat motionless in the trees and pale yellow moths tumbled like confetti through cathedrals of sunlight. Truman was gone. “He had to have a reason,” Walter said. “My father, I mean. Nobody knows what really happened, right? You weren’t even there, and my mother’s dead. I mean, nobody knows for sure.”

Lola took a long slow drag at her cigarette before she answered. Her eyes were distant and strange, her features masked in smoke. “Go ask Van Wart,” she said.

She was living in a bark hut on the outskirts of a Weckquaesgeek village, ostracized by Boer and redman alike, and she’d shaved her head with an oyster shell as a token of abnegation and penance. On that fateful day three years back when God’s wrath had spared the oak tree only to strike at her home and abolish her family, Katrinchee, who should have been out in the fields with them, should have been huddled with them in the cabin when the thunderbolt struck, was instead sequestered in a shady bower with Mohonk, son of Sachoes, and a stone bottle of gin. She stroked his chest, his thighs and his groin, as he stroked her, and she sipped gin to assuage the guilt she felt over her father’s death. (Oh yes: that guilt haunted her night and day. She couldn’t look at a stewpot without seeing her father, and the thought of venison in any of its incarnations was so inadmissible that even the sight of a startled doe on some woodland path was enough to make her go dizzy and feel the nausea creeping up her throat.) When a Kitchawank boy came to them in the wigwam where they’d gone to seek shelter from the storm, breathless, his eyes wild, a tale of destruction rained from the heavens on his lips, the guilt rose up to suffocate her. Moeder, she choked, and then collapsed as if her legs had been shot out from under her. Sitting there in a daze, staring numbly at Mohonk, at Wahwahtaysee and the faces of the savage painted strangers hovering over her, she felt a new and insupportable knowledge festering in her veins: she’d killed them all. Yes. Killed them as surely as if she’d lined them up and shot them. First her father and now this: she’d lain with a heathen, and here was God’s vengeance. In grief, in despair, she took a honed shell to her scalp and buried herself in Mohonk.

Her son Squagganeek 2was born a year later. His eyes were green, like Agatha’s, and this peculiarity caused a good deal of consternation among the Kitchawanks. They were the eyes of greed, argued one faction, the eyes of a devil, a sorcerer, a white man, and the infant should be cast out to wander the waste places of the earth. But another faction, Wahwahtaysee among them, argued that he was the son of the son of a chief and that he had his place in the tribe. As things turned out, none of it really mattered. It was Mohonk, and Mohonk alone, who would decide the fate of his son.