T. Boyle - World's End

He’d almost forgotten. The sad censorious faces of Jessica, Lola and Hesh passed in quick review, a sudden manifestation of a larger affliction, and then he was grabbing for her, seeking orifices, trying to kiss, nuzzle, grip the anchor chain, tread water and copulate all at once. He got a mouthful of river and came up coughing.

Mardi made a soft, moaning, lip-smacking noise, as if she were tasting soup or sherbet. Wavelets lapped around them. Walter was still coughing.

“Listen, birthday boy,” she whispered, breaking away and then pulling close again, “I could be real nice to you if you’d do something for me.”

Walter was electrified. Hot, eager, bereft of judgment. The chill, fishy current was as warm suddenly as a palm-fringed Jacuzzi. “Huh?” he said.

What she wanted, bobbing there like a naiad in the turbid ancient Hudson in the late hours of the night and with the great high monumental V-shaped prow of the ship hanging over her, was derring-do. Heroics. Feats of strength and agility. What she wanted was to see Walter hoist himself up the anchor chain like a naked buccaneer and vanish into the fastness of the mystery ship, there to unravel the skein of its secrets, absorb the feel of its artifacts and memorize the lay of its decks. Or something like that. “My arms are too weak,” she said. “I can’t do it myself.”

A tug moved by in the distance, towing a barge. Beyond it, Walter could make out the dim lights of Peterskill, hazy with distance and the pall of mist that hung over the river’s middle reaches.

“Come on,” she prodded. “Just take a peek.”

Walter thought about the presumptive watchman, the penalties for trespassing on federal property, his fear of heights, the crapulous, narcotized, soporific state of his mind and body that made every movement a risk, and said, “Why not?”

Hand over hand, foot over foot, he ascended the chain like a true nihilist and existential hero. What did danger matter? Life had neither meaning nor value, one lived only for personal extinction, for the void, for nothingness. It was dangerous to sit on a sofa, lift a fork to your mouth, brush your teeth. Danger. Walter laughed in the face of it. Of course, for all that, he was terrified.

Two-thirds of the way up he lost his grip and snatched at the chain like a madman, twelve pints of blood suddenly pounding in his ears. Below, blackness; above, the shadowy outline of the ship’s rail. Walter caught his breath, and then continued upward, dangling high above the water like a big pale spider. When finally he reached the top, when finally he could snake out a tentative hand and touch skin to the great cold fastness of the ship’s hull, he found that the anchor chain plunged into an evil-looking porthole sort of thing that might have been the monstrous, staved-in, piratical eye of the entire ghostly fleet. He leaned back to take in the huge block letters that identified the old hulk — U.S.S. Anima —hesitated a moment, then twisted his way through the porthole.

He was inside now, in an undefined space of utter, impossible, unalloyed darkness. Bare feet gripped bare steel, his fingers played along the walls. There was a smell of metal in decay, of oil sludge and dead paint. He worked his way forward, inch by inch, until shadows began to emerge from the obscurity and he found himself on the main deck. A covered hatch stood before him; above rose the mainmast and cargo booms. The rest of the ship — cabins, boats, masts and cranes — fell off into darkness. He had the feeling of perching on a great height, of flying, as if he were strolling the aisles of a jetliner high above the clouds. There was nothing here but shadows. And the thousand creaks and groans of the inanimate in faint, rhythmic motion.

But something was wrong. Something about the place seemed to rekindle the flames of nostalgia that had licked at him throughout the day. He stood stock-still. He drew in his breath. When he turned around he was only mildly surprised to see his grandmother perched on the rail behind him. “Walter,” she said, and her voice crackled with static as if she were talking on a bad long-distance connection. “Walter, you’ve got no clothes on.”

“But Gram,” he said, “I’ve been swimming.”

She was wearing a big sack dress and she was as fat as she’d been in life. “No matter,” she said, waving a dimpled wrist in dismissal, “I wanted to tell you about your father, I wanted to explain. … I—”

“I don’t need any explanation,” a voice growled behind him.

Walter whirled around. It had been going on all day — yes, from the moment he’d opened his eyes — and he was sick of it. “You,” he said.

His father grunted. “Me,” he said.

The eleven years had wrought their changes. The old man seemed even bigger now, his head swollen like something you’d find carved into the cornice of a building or standing watch over an ancient tomb. And his hair had grown out, greasy dark fangs of it jabbing at his face and trailing down his neck. The suit — it seemed to be the same one he’d been wearing on Walter’s eleventh birthday — hung in tatters, blasted by the years. There was something else too. A crutch. Hacked like a witching stick from some roadside tree, still mottled with bark, it propped him up as if he were damaged goods. Walter glanced down, expecting a gouty toe or a foot bound in rags, but could see nothing in the puddle of shadow that swallowed up the lower half of his father’s body like a shroud.

“But Truman,” Walter’s grandmother said, “I was just trying to explain to the boy what I told him all my life. … I was trying to tell him it wasn’t your fault, it was the circumstances and what you believed in your heart. God knows—”

“Quiet down, Mama. I tell you, I don’t need any explanations. I’d do it again tomorrow.”

It was at this point that Walter realized his father was not alone. There were others behind him — a whole audience. He could hear them snuffling and groaning, and now — all of a sudden — he could see them. Bums. There must have been thirty of them, ragged, red-eyed, drooling and stinking. Oh yes: he could smell them now too, a smell of stockyards, foot fungus, piss-stained underwear. “America for Americans!” Walter’s father shouted, and the phantom crowd took it up with a gibber and wheeze that wound down finally to a crazed muttering in the dark.

“You’re drunk!” Walter said, and he didn’t know why he’d said it. Perhaps it was some recollection of the early years, after his mother died and before his father disappeared for good, of the summers at his grandparents’ when his father would be around for weeks at a time. Always — whether the old man was asleep on the couch, helping his own father with the nets, taking Walter out to the Acquasinnick trestle for crabs or to the Polo Grounds for a ballgame — there had been the smell of alcohol. Maybe that’s what had done it tonight, at the Elbow. The smell of alcohol. It was the cipher to his father as surely as the potato pancakes and liverwurst were ciphers to his sadeyed mother and the big-armed, superstitious woman who’d tried to fill the gap she left.

“What of it,” his father said.

Just then a little man with a gargoyle’s face stepped out of the shadows. He wasn’t wearing the sugarloaf hat or pantaloons — no, he was dressed in a blue work shirt and baggy pleated trousers with side pockets — but Walter recognized him. “No drunker than you,” the man said.

Walter ignored him. “You deserted me,” he said, turning on his father.

“The boy’s right, Truman,” his grandmother crackled, her voice frying like grease in a skillet.

The old man seemed to break down then, and the words caught in his throat. “You think I’ve had it easy?” he asked. “I mean, living with these bums and all?” He paused a moment, as if to collect himself. “You know what we eat, Walter? Shit, that’s what. A handful of this spoiled wheat, maybe a mud carp somebody catches over the side or a rat they got lucky and skewered. Christ, if it wasn’t for the still Piet set up—” He never finished the thought, just spread his hand and let it fall like a severed head. “A long absurd drop,” he muttered, “from the womb to the tomb.”