T. Boyle - World's End

Walter was slower. Fumbling back down the path had left him winded and sweat-soaked. His leg suddenly felt as if it had been rubbed with jalapeño oil from the knee down and his eyes were still playing tricks on him. It was nothing major — the trees didn’t transform themselves into claws or lollipops and his grandmother was nowhere in sight — yet everything seemed skewed and out of focus, the visible world in intricate motion, as if he were examining a drop of pond water under a microscope. The leaves that overhung them, the peeling footbridge, the bark of the trees and the grain of the rock: they’d all been reduced to their components, to a grid of minuscule dancing dots. It was last night, he figured. The cooking sherry. That had to be it. He lowered himself down on a rock and began to tug at his left boot.

Tom was thrashing his limbs spastically and deep-breathing like a seal coming up for air.

“Cold?” Walter asked.

“No, no,” Tom said, too quickly. “Just right.” He averted his eyes as Walter removed the boot from his other foot.

Walter pulled the Nehru shirt up over his head, dropped his pants and undershorts and stood there naked among the ferns and saplings. He could feel the mud of the bank between the toes of his left foot; the right foot, the inert one, planted itself like a stone. No one had seen him like this, not even Jessica. And Tom Crane, his oldest friend and intellectual mentor, wasn’t looking.

“You know something?” Tom said, glancing at Walter as he lowered himself into the water, and then looking away again. “Cars. Automobiles. They were originally going to call them electrobats.” He was snickering with the idea of it. “Electrobats,” he repeated.

The water was cold as glacial runoff. Walter didn’t cry out, didn’t catch his breath, didn’t curse or thrash. He just settled there on his back, the current lifting his genitals and subtly reconstituting itself to accommodate his neck and shoulders. After a moment he lifted his right leg from the water and propped the plastic foot on a rock at the edge of the pool.

“Oleo locomotives,” Tom said. “That one was in the running too.” But the levity had gone out of his voice. “That’s it, huh?” he said. And then: “How does it feel?”

“Right now it hurts like a son of a bitch.” Walter paused, contemplating the plastic sculpture at the nether end of his leg. “The doctor says I’ll learn to live with it.”

The sun was climbing through the trees now, firming up the shadows and suffusing the undergrowth with a rich golden light that clung to the leaves like batter. Walter counted the fronds of the fern beside him, watched the minnows drop down with the current and settle between his legs, listened to the rap of woodpecker and the call of vireo. For a moment he felt a part of it all, creature of the forest primeval that antedated macadam, case-hardened steel and the plastic prosthesis, but then the stutter of a motorcycle out on Van Wart Road brought him back. “All right,” he said, rising from the pool in the slow groping way of an octogenarian. “Okay. I’m all right now.”

“Use my towel if you want,” Tom said. He was sitting up, blowing and puffing still, the long wet queue of his hair trailing down his pimply back like something that had clung to him and drowned.

Walter flayed himself with the stiff stinking towel while mosquitoes whined around him and mud worked between his toes. He was feeling better, no doubt about it. The headache had receded, the leaves and twigs that reached out to him seemed to have consolidated once again, and the pain had gone out of his numbed leg. It was then, standing there on the mud bank and shivering in the early morning light, that he had a revelation. All at once he realized that the whole business of daily life was irrelevant to him, that he didn’t want to make small talk, didn’t want to discuss electrobats, last night’s party, drugs, nerve gas or revolution in Latin America. No: what he really wanted to talk about was his father. He wanted to open himself up to the quivering, abject, bony mass of gooseflesh that now stood dripping beside him and tell him that he’d been fooling himself, tell him that now and always he did give a damn where his father was and wanted nothing more — nothing, not Jessica, not the flesh and bone that had been torn from him — than to find him, confront him, wave the bloody rag of the past in his face and reclaim himself in the process. He didn’t want to talk about his wedding or about music or health food or UFOs. He wanted to talk about the mothball fleet and genealogy, about his grandmother, about a ghost in the scent of a pancake and the trouble with his eyes that made the past come alive in the present.

But he never got the chance.

Because the saint of the forest, blue in the face and chattering with the cold in every molar and ratcheting joint, the ratty towel working furiously at his splayed shoulders and bald scrotum, suddenly said, “What did you do to Mardi, anyway?”

Mardi. She was a shadow, a fragment of memory, a stain on his consciousness — she was another ghost. “Who?”

“You know: Mardi. Mardi Van Wart.”

Walter didn’t know. Didn’t want to know. There was a screaming in his ears, a terrible unquenchable din that all at once rose up from the bloodied ground before him. He could hear the cries of the victims, his mother’s caressing voice stretched taut, the rabid raging curses of the men with sticks and tire irons and fence posts in their hands. Kike, nigger, Commie: he was in the eye of the storm. Van Wart? Mardi Van Wart?

“She says she was with you and Hector the night you, uh, had your accident, you know? Says she really needs to see you.”

He felt it tugging at him, something obscene, unholy, irresistible. “You … you know her?”

Tom Crane was ridiculous. Naked, dripping, the reeking towel clamped under one arm and a toothbrush nonchalantly dangling from his lip, he paused to give Walter a big meaningful goat-toothed grin. “Oh, yeah,” he said, the cries of the innocents echoing around him, “I know her.”

Jessica wore a lace dress laboriously tatted by underfed peasants on the far side of the world, a pair of unadorned white sandals and her grandmother’s ivory cameo brooch. In her hair, which shone with a blonde brilliance that might have blinded the Vikings themselves, there were glimmers of baby’s breath and primrose. Walter stood beside her in the late morning with its insouciant bees and butterflies, flanked by Hesh and Lola and Jessica’s pink-faced parents, while Tom Crane read a passage from a science fiction novel about extraterrestrial propagation and Herbert Pompey danced around under the weight of the flowers in his hair and rendered the serpentine melodies of the Indian snake charmers on his nose flute. Then Jessica recited a couple of verses by an obscure scribbler on the subject of love and fish, and Hesh stepped forward to read the climactic lines from the civil ceremony (“Do you, Walter Truman Van Brunt, take this woman … till death do you part?”). “I do,” said Walter, and he kissed the bride in a surge of emotion — in love and gratitude and the fullest apprehension of life and youth — that lifted him for the moment from the trough of confusion into which the accident had thrust him. It was then that Hector Mantequilla set off a string of Arecibo firecrackers and the celebration began in earnest.

Jessica’s family, Conklins and Wings alike, left early. Grandmother Conklin, a starchy old patrician with dead white skin, pendulous nose and tortoise eyes, had been carried up the hill in a blanket. She sat on a folding chair in the shade of the oak tree, surrounded by aged nieces from Connecticut, a conspicuous smear of cowshit on her black patent leather pumps, glaring her disapproval of the proceedings. Half an hour after the punch was served and the cake cut, she was gone. The aged nieces soon followed, and then John Wing himself — as bland and awkwardly handsome as the star of a sitcom about the wisdom of fathers — was shaking Walter’s hand in parting and telling him to take care of his little girl. By late afternoon, all the representatives of the elder generations had departed, scratching insect bites and dabbing handkerchiefs at sun-blistered faces. Hesh, Lola and Walter’s aunt Katrina (three sheets to the wind and fighting back tears) were the last of them.