T. Boyle - World's End

The storm began to kick up around four. Jessica, bright-eyed and thick-tongued, was giving Nancy Fagnoli an exhaustive biographical account of Herbert Axelrod, patron saint of tropical fish, Walter was swilling rotgut champagne and smoking a joint with Herbert Pompey out by the bee tenements, and Tom Crane was squatting on the porch in a cloud of smoke with Hector and half a dozen other epithalamial celebrants. Susie Cats, a big overwrought girl with soft-boiled eyes, had passed out on Tom Crane’s cot after drinking fourteen cups of tequila punch and crying without remit for two hours. She lay there now, her faint rhythmic snores drifting across the clearing to where Walter stood with Herbert Pompey. Someone was strumming a guitar somewhere up in the woods.

Walter watched the low belly of the sky as it edged over the treetops, sank into the cleft of the hill behind him and billowed up to snuff out the sun. Within minutes, the sky was dark. Squinting against the smoke, Herbert Pompey handed him the yellowed nub of a joint. “Looks like it’s going to rain on your party.”

Walter shrugged. He was feeling pretty numb. Champagne, pot, a hit of this and a hit of that, the bourbon in his coffee that morning and the excesses of the night before: the cumulative effect was leveling. He was married, and over there by the oak tree stood his bride, that much he knew. He knew too that in a few hours they would take the train up to Rhinebeck and check into a quaint hotel full of gloomy nooks and dusty bric-a-brac and that afterward they’d make love and fall asleep in each other’s arms. As for the weather, he could give a shit. “What’d you expect?” he said, dropping the bottle in the grass. Then he took Pompey by the arm and went looking for another.

The storm didn’t break until nearly an hour later, and by then the second uninvited guest had shown up. Though he’d been fighting it, Walter understood just how susceptible he was at this moment to history, nostalgia and the patterns of the past, and throughout the day he’d half-expected to glance up and see his father perched on the edge of the porch between Tom Crane and Hector Mantequilla or picking his way through the high grass with a bottle of cheap champagne clamped in his big iron hand. But it wasn’t his father who emerged from the shadow of the trees as Walter stood urinating against the side of the shack — it was Mardi.

She made straight for him, half a smile caught on her lips, a package wrapped in tissue paper in her hand. He tried to be nonchalant, but as it turned out he was too hasty with the business of micturition, with stowing away his equipment and zipping up, and he turned to face her with warm urine on his thigh and in the crotch of his pants. “Hi,” she said. “Remember me?”

She was barefoot, wearing a miniskirt (not paper this time, not anything that might dissolve in his wet hands, but leather) and a shimmering low-cut blouse that matched the color of her eyes. There were Indian beads around her neck and she wore earrings fashioned from tiny shells and feathers. She looked like her mother. She looked like her father. “Sure, yeah,” Walter said, “I remember you,” and they both glanced down at his foot.

“I brought this for you,” she said, handing him the package.

“Oh, hey, you didn’t have to—” he began, looking reflexively over his shoulder for Jessica, but no one was there. They stood alone at the rear of the shack; the birds had gone quiet suddenly and the sky was like the underside of a dream. The package was small and heavy. He tore back the paper. Brass and wood, the heft of metal: he held a telescope in his hand. Or no, it was a telescope with something else grafted to it, a dull brass quarter-circle ticked out with calibrations and festooned with clamps, screws and mirrors. She was watching him. He caught her eye and then glanced down at the thing in his hand, trying to look knowledgeable and appreciative. “It’s, uh … nice. Really nice.”

“You know what it is?”

He shook his head slowly. “Not really.” The brass was green with age, the wood of the telescope chipped and gouged as if gnawed by some marooned mariner in times gone by. “Looks old,” he offered.

Mardi was grinning at him. She wasn’t wearing any makeup — or maybe just a trace. Her legs were naked and strong, and her feet — uniformly tan, fine-boned, with perfect arches and a tracery of rich blue veins — were beautiful. “It’s a sextant,” she said. “They used to use them for navigation in the old days. My father had it lying around.”

“Oh,” said Walter, as if it should have been obvious to him all along. He’d just been married, he was stoned and exalted, the sky was splitting open and lightning sat in the trees. He was holding a sextant in his hand, and he wondered why.

“It’s kind of a joke,” she said. “So you can find your way to me, you know?” He didn’t know, but the words stirred him. “Don’t you remember? That night down at the river?”

He gave her a numb look: maybe he remembered and maybe he didn’t. A lot had happened that night. Suddenly, maddeningly, he felt a terrific itch in his missing foot.

She was fishing for something in a leather pouch: Walter saw a comb, a mirror, a tube of lipstick. “I mean our date.” She found what she was looking for — cigarettes — and she shook one from the pack and lit it. Walter said nothing, but he watched her as if he’d never seen match or cigarette before. “My father’s sailboat,” she said. “I’m taking you out to the ghost ships.” She glanced up at him and her eyes were cold and hard as marbles. He felt the first few heavy drops of rain through the back of his shirt. There was a rumble of thunder. “You didn’t forget?”

“No,” he lied. “No, no,” and he knew in that moment he would take her up on it, knew he would go back and walk the barren rusted decks as he’d gone back to stand yearning and bewildered before the road marker, knew he was bound to her in some frightening and unfathomable way.

“How does it feel?” she asked suddenly.

“What?” he said, but he didn’t have to ask.

“You know: your foot.”

The rain was coming harder now, big pregnant drops that tickled his scalp and wet his cheeks. He shrugged. “Like nothing,” he said. “It feels dead.”

And then, just as he was about to turn and jog around the corner to huddle with the others beneath the leaky roof of Tom Crane’s shack, she took his arm and pulled him toward her. Her voice was a whisper, a rasp. “Can I see it?”

Thunder crashed in the trees, a bolt of lightning lit the branches of the big white oak that snaked over them. He didn’t know what he must have looked like at that moment, but his face showed what he felt. She let go of him. “Not now,” he heard her say as he turned and plunged through the quickening rain, seeing the pall of mist, the road marker and the swift glancing shadow all over again, “I don’t mean now.” He kept going. “Walter!” she called. “Walter!” He’d reached the corner of the shack and could see Jessica, Tom and Hector huddled under the eaves before him by the time he stopped to look over his shoulder. Mardi was standing there, indifferent to the rain. Wet hair clung to her face, her hands were outstretched in supplication. “Not now,” she repeated, and the skies broke open above her.

Dominie Van Schaik, as yet churchless, had to hike all the way out to the Van Brunt farm for the christening. He’d spent the previous night on a pallet at the upper manor house and had breakfasted on hard biscuit and water before conducting a dawn service for Vrouw Van Wart, a service followed by two rigorous hours of prayer and meditation (rigorous, to say the least — the woman was a fanatic). He could feel every amen in the crook of his knee as he shambled over the crude footbridge and struggled up the steep stony path to the farm.