T. Boyle - World's End

“I’m sorry,” she said, looking hard at his crutches, the hair gone long down his neck and creeping over his ears, the twenty-seven black specks above his upper lip that might have been a mustache and then again might not have been, “he’s not in right now.” The maid had stopped yodeling, and her face was set with suspicion. “What you want with him?”

“Nothing,” Walter mumbled, and he was about to mumble further and in an even lower and less audible tone that he’d be back later, already thinking about the Peterskill library and the handprinted card catalogue he’d used for high school reports on the state of Alaska, John Steinbeck and the B.&O. Railroad, wondering if there would be any reference to Mohonk or Crane, when a voice called out from deep inside the house: “Lula? Lula, who is it?”

Through the open door Walter could see heavy dark pieces of furniture, a worn strip of Oriental carpet and a gloomy portrait on the wall. “Nobody,” the maid called over her shoulder, and then she turned back to Walter. He could have taken this as his dismissal, he could have swung around on his crutches and thumped down the stairs, across the drive and into his car, but he didn’t. Instead he just stood there, propped up under the armpits, and waited until the footsteps stopped at the door and he was looking up into the tanned inquisitive face of a woman who looked so familiar she might have come to him in a dream.

The woman seemed to be about Lola’s age — or no, younger. Forty or so. She was wearing corduroy pants and moccasins, and some sort of Indian headband encrusted with plastic beads. She gave him a puzzled look, shot a glance at the maid and then turned back to him. “May I help you?” she said.

He was hallucinating, no doubt about it. If the maid had Pompey’s bridgeless nose and bulging eyes, then this woman, with her icy violet stare, her high cheekbones and strong jaw, reminded him uncannily of someone too. But who? He had a sense of déjà vu, felt the flesh tearing as he went down on the hard cold pavement, heard the derisive laughter of the bums ranged along the deck of the U.S.S. Anima. He was almost there — he’d almost got it, that face — when her voice came back at him again, softened now, alarmed even. “Are you all right?”

“I’m Truman Van Brunt’s son,” he said.

“Whose son?”

“Truman Van Brunt’s. My name’s Walter. I wanted to maybe talk with Mr. Van Wart … about my father.”

She didn’t flinch at the name, didn’t raise a hand up to mask her face or fall dead away in a faint. But her eyes, which had begun ever so slightly to defrost, went gelid again. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t help you.”

So much for the seeking.

Next day, after spending a futile hour in the library (he found references to Mo-ho, Mohole, Moholy-Nagy, the Mohr Diagram and Mohsin-ul Mulk, but no Mohonk, while the Cranes were represented by the juridical reminiscences, circa 1800, of one I. C. Crane), he drove down to Depeyster Manufacturing to pick up his check and tell Doug, the foreman, that he’d be coming back to work in a week or so but couldn’t stand at the lathe anymore on account of his foot. The factory was housed in an ancient brick building on Water Street in Peterskill, amid the derelict warehouses and the tottering ruins of the stove works, wire, hat and oilcloth factories that harkened back to Peterskill’s boom days at the end of the last century. The industries had grown up here along the river’s edge to take advantage of both the fresh water for cooling and waste disposal and easy access to shipping and railways. But the semi-truck had come to supersede barge and boxcar, oilcloth had given way to Formica, pot-bellied stoves to gas and electric ranges, the demand for hoopskirt wire wasn’t what it was and no one wore hats anymore. To Walter, of course, the ruins along Water Street were as incomprehensible as Stonehenge or the Great Pyramid at Giza. Someone had made something there once. What it was or who made it or for what purpose couldn’t have interested him less.

He parked the Volvo in the employees’ lot next to Peter O’Reilly’s primer-splotched ’55 Chevy, exchanged a mumbled greeting with the sullen, bullet-headed brother who worked the loading dock and wore T-shirts imprinted with uplifting slogans like “Off Pigs” and “Free Huey,” and then shoved his way through the big steel door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. Unfortunately, the weight of the door threw him off balance, and he lurched into the raging din of the shop like a drunken pencil peddler, fouling his crutches and snatching wildly at the time clock to keep from pitching face forward on the concrete floor. In the next moment he came within an ace of being run down by some idiot on a forklift, and then Doug had him by the arm, leading him along the pocked and faded brick wall to his office.

Walter had been absent for almost three weeks now, and during that time he’d begun to forget just how dismal the place really was. Cavernous and dim, lit at intervals by flickering fluorescent lights that descended from the ceiling on aluminum stalks, reeking of cutting oil and degreasing fluid and vibrating with the ceaseless racket of machinery, it could have been one of the subterranean sweatshops of Metropolis. People ran about in filthy green smocks, dodging in and out of clouds of vapor the color of ginger ale, shouting at one another over the clamor like pale frantic drones. Walter didn’t like it, didn’t like it a bit. As he swung along beside Doug, nodding at his coworkers — they looked up blearily, in a pall of smoke, from their lathes — he knew all at once that he wasn’t coming back. Ever. Even if they offered him a sit-down job in the inspection room, even if they made him foreman, president, chairman of the board. The job had been Hesh’s idea in the first place. Something temporary, something to hold him till he decided what he wanted to do with his degree. All that had changed now.

“So,” Doug said, once he’d pulled Walter into a grimy office decorated with oil-soaked rags and trays of rejected muffins and aximaxes that rose in tottering array to the ceiling, “we heard about your foot.”

In here, behind the smudged glass door, the noise was muted to a dull insistent drone, the sound of a distant phalanx of dentists gearing up their drills. Walter shrugged. He was leaning heavily on his crutches, and the stump of his leg ached. “Yeah,” he said.

Doug was about thirty, a Depeyster Company lifer whose salient physical feature was an upper lip as broad, hairless and mobile as a chimpanzee’s. Once, when Walter had questioned his lathe settings, Doug had reminded him that he wasn’t paid to think, and then, in an offhand and edifying way, had mentioned the key to his own success. “I’m different than the rest of you guys around here, you know,” he’d said, nodding significantly. “And you better believe it — I got a hundred and five I.Q.” Now, pausing to light a cigarette, he glanced down at Walter’s foot and asked, “Does it hurt?”

Walter gave him another shrug. “Look, Doug,” he said, “I don’t know if I’ll be able to work anymore. I just came in to pick up my check.”

Doug had begun to cough. He hacked for a moment, took another drag of his cigarette, and then leaned over to spit in the wastebasket. His eyes had watered, and he looked bewildered, as if Walter had just asked him to dance or name the square root of 256. “I don’t got it,” he said finally. “You got to go up to the front office for that.”

A moment later Walter found himself gliding along a carpeted hallway, looking for Miss Egthuysen’s office, while cooling breezes wafted around him and the mellifluous strains of violin, cello and viola poured forth from hidden speakers to massage his ears. There were potted plants, framed watercolors; the walls looked as if they’d been painted yesterday and the skylights glowed with sunlight that was like a shower of gold. The contrast wasn’t lost on him. No more than a hundred feet from where he’d sweated over the lathe and counted the interminable minutes until the five o’clock whistle blew, there was this. Walter felt cheated.