T. Boyle - World's End

She hadn’t liked it, this defacing of his birthday present, but he explained to her that daisy decals just didn’t fit his image. He was no flower child — he was harder than that, colder, the nihilist and existential hero still. Then he grinned, as if to say I’m only joking, and she grinned back.

Jessica. She was at work now. His wife, who’d forgone Scripps, Miami, N.Y.U. and Mayaguez for him, was at work, counting fish larvae preserved in trays of formalin. Tom Crane had gotten her the job. Over at the nuclear power plant, the stacks and domes of which rose up from the near shoreline like the minarets and cupolas of some fantastic high-tech mosque. The larva count was part of an environmental impact study Con Ed was funding to atone for the sin of sucking up great stinking mounds of fish in their intake pipes. An old lab mate of Tom’s had got him a job piloting a boat for the project two nights a week, and when a position came open, Tom thought of Jessica. She was in there now. Sniffing formalin, her eyes wet from the fumes of it.

Walter himself was out of work. Not that he didn’t want to work — eventually, maybe, if the right thing came along. He just didn’t feature standing up all day at a greasy whining lathe, turning out those little winged machine parts that had no use under the sun as far as he could figure (unless, as rumor had it, they were used in fragmentation bombs to grind up little children in places with names like Duk Foo and Bu Wop). Or so he told Hesh and Lola. What he didn’t tell them was that Van Wart had offered him a desk job. On the spot. No questions asked.

I like you, you know that? Van Wart had said that afternoon in the office. He’d skirted the issue of the riots for half an hour, advised Walter to read his history and assured him that wherever his father was — alive or dead — he should be proud of him. Walter, who’d taken a seat somewhere between the persecution of the kulaks and the fall of Chiang Kai-shek, had just risen to go when Van Wart made his declaration of esteem. You impress me, Van Wart said. You’ve got a good mind. Maybe we don’t see eye to eye on politics, but that’s neither here nor there. He was standing now too, clasping his hands and beaming like a haberdasher. What I’m trying to say is you’ve got a degree and I’ve got an opening for an assistant manager, $11,000 a year and all the benefits. And you can stay off that leg of yours. What do you say?

No, Walter had said, almost as a reflex, no thanks, already seeing himself in dress shirt and tie, ensconced behind a desk with the elusive Miss Egthuysen at his beck and call, Doug and all the rest of the peons cut down in a single stroke, already picturing the new Triumph, racing green, wire wheels, zero to fifty in 6.9 seconds… but work for Van Wart? It was inconceivable. (Never mind that he’d been doing just that for the past two and a half months — he’d been laboring in ignorance.) No, he told him. He appreciated the offer, but what with the shock of his accident and all he needed some time to recuperate before he could take a step like that.

Later, thinking it over, he wasn’t sure why he’d backed off. Eleven thousand dollars was a lot of money, and Van Wart, despite his preaching, his air of condescension and his Bircherisms, despite the hatred he inspired in Tom Crane’s grandfather, in Hesh and Lola and all the rest, really wasn’t half bad. No ogre, certainly. No mindless, brick-throwing racist. There was a certain style about him, a polish and a toughness that made Hesh seem crude by comparison. And he believed in what he said, the conviction set deep in his eyes — too deep for lies. In fact, by the end of their little chat, Walter had begun to soften toward him. Even more: he’d begun, in an odd and somehow disturbing way, to like him.

Walter was thinking about all this, and thinking too about the consummate weirdness of the situation — married a month, and here he was sneaking down to the marina for an assignation with the ex-ogre’s daughter — when he felt a tap on his shoulder. It was Mardi. In watch cap and peacoat, in deck shoes and jeans and black leather gloves, looking as if she’d just stepped off a freighter with the rest of the merchant marine. Except for her eyes. Her eyes were pinned to her head, hard and cold as marbles, the pupils shrunk to specks. “Hi,” she said in a breathy voice, and then she kissed him. In greeting. But it was more than a peck on the cheek — it was a full-on osculation with a taste of her tongue in it. Walter didn’t know what to do, so he kissed her back.

“All set?” she said, grinning up at him.

“Yeah,” Walter said, rocking back on his good leg. “I mean, I guess so.” He gestured toward the river, the sky. “You sure you want to go through with this?”

He’d seen Mardi only once since the wedding. He and Jessica and Tom Crane were sitting around the Elbow one night about two weeks back, listening to the jukebox and shooting pool, when she walked in the door with Hector. The game was elimination, it was Walter’s shot, and he was keying in on Jessica’s last ball while she made wisecracks, nudged the cue stick from behind and generally tried to distract, disorient and disarm him. Mardi was wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt, no sleeves, no brassiere. Walter froze. But Tom Crane, all elbows and flapping feet, with his ratty braid jogging in the breeze like the knot of hair over a horse’s ass, rushed up to embrace her, pump Hector’s hand in a power-to-the-people handshake and drag them over to the table. Walter exchanged greetings with Hector, nodded at Mardi and missed his shot.

Later, after a couple of pitchers of beer, more pool, innumerable treks across the expanse of dirty sawdust that covered the floor like bonemeal to urinate in the reeking rest rooms and share a surreptitious hit of whatever it was Hector had stuffed into the bowl of his pipe, everyone was feeling pretty relaxed. Jessica got up from the table and excused herself. “The ladies’,” she slurred, lurching across the room like one of the wounded.

Tom had vanished and Hector was up at the bar ordering shots of tequila all around. The table, which had suddenly grown small, was littered with peanut shells, ashes, butts, plates and bottles and glasses. Walter affixed a cautious little smile to his lips. Mardi smiled back. And then, out of nowhere, she asked Walter if he was still serious about the ghost ships — she’d give him a call if he was, no problem. Walter didn’t answer. Instead he posed a question of his own. “What was that business at the wedding?” he asked, trying to keep his voice steady. “You know what I mean. About my foot. I didn’t like that.”

She was silent a moment, and then she gave him a smile that would have melted the polar ice caps. “Don’t take it so seriously, Walter,” she said, peering into her drink, “I just like to shock people, that’s all — see how they’ll react. You know: épater les bourgeois.” Walter didn’t know. He’d failed French.

She looked at him and laughed. “Come on, it was a joke, that’s all. I’m really not as wild as I make out. Really.” And then she leaned forward. “The thing I want to know is are you going with me or not?”

And now, here at the marina, hemmed in by spars and halyards and anchor chains, and breathing the very scent of the ghost of his grandfather, he was up against the wall yet again. “I don’t believe you,” Mardi said, and her face went numb for a moment. “Afraid of a little spray or what?” Walter shrugged, as if to say he was afraid of nothing — not cold, nor sleet, nor shadows that flit maliciously across an open roadway in the early hours of the morning. “Good,” she said, grinning so wide he could see the glint of gold in her back teeth, and then he was following her through the boatyard to the dock and the slips at the far end of it.