T. Boyle - World's End

There were only two boats in the water. The Catherine Depeyster, a thirty-two-foot cruising sloop with auxiliary engine and woodwork varnished to a high gleam, stood alone among the deserted slips. The other boat, a peeling, nondescript, wide-bottomed thing with a broken mast and dry rot to the water line, lay at anchor beyond it, looking as if it had been dredged up from the bottom the week before. Walter was about to join Mardi aboard the Catherine Depeyster —she was already fumbling through the locker for foul-weather gear — when he saw a puff of smoke rise from the stovepipe of the blistered hulk. At first he couldn’t believe his eyes. But then, unmistakably, a thin gray column of smoke began to issue from the blackened pipe. He was stunned. Somebody was actually living aboard that thing, some crazed river rat who’d wake one morning to find himself under twelve feet of water. It had to be a joke. But no, the smoke was coming steadily now, flattened by the wind and blown back to him with the rich, gut-clenching scent of bacon on it. “Christ,” he said, turning to Mardi, “I can’t believe it.”

“Can’t believe what?” she said, handing him a black sou’wester as he stepped aboard.

“Over there. That piece of shit, that floating outhouse. There’s somebody living on it.”

“You mean Jeremy,” she said.

The cold stabbed at his ears. He looked from the hulk to Mardi and back again. The wind was slowly swinging the boat around on its anchor, bringing its stern into his line of vision. “Jeremy?” he repeated, never taking his eyes from the boat.

He heard Mardi at his back. She was saying that Jeremy had been around all summer, that he fished and did odd jobs and helped out at the marina. He was a gypsy or Indian or something, and he was all right for an old guy. Walter heard her as from a great distance, the words echoing in his head as he watched the ship swing around and reveal its name, in chipped and faded letters. He felt odd all of a sudden, felt the grip of history like a noose around his neck and he didn’t know why. The ship’s name was the Kitchawank.

All right: it was cold. But once they’d left the marina and hoisted sail, once they’d felt the pulse of the river under their feet and the first icy slap of spray in their faces, it no longer mattered. Mardi, the watch cap pulled down to her eyebrows, was at the tiller, drinking coffee from a thermos and mugging as if it were June, and Walter, in rubber boots, pants and slicker, was hiking out over the rail like a kid with his first Sunfish. He hadn’t been sailing since his grandfather died, hadn’t even been out on the river for as long as he could remember. It awakened his blood, flooded him with memories: it was like coming home. The mountains may have been dwarfs by the standards of the Alps or Rockies — Dunderberg and Anthony’s Nose were both under a thousand feet — but from here, on the water, they rose up like a dream of mountains, tall, massive and forbidding. Dead ahead lay Dunderberg, sloping back from the water like a sleeping giant, the ghost fleet nestled at its foot. To the south was Indian Point, with its power plants and estuarine biologists, with Jessica and her pickled fish; to the north, opening up like a shadowy mouth, was the entrance to the Highlands, where all the great mountains — Taurus, Storm King, Breakneck and Crow’s Nest — stepped down to wade in the river.

This was the province of the Dunderberg Imp, the capricious gnome in trunk hose and sugarloaf hat who ruled the river through its most treacherous reaches, from Dunderberg to Storm King. It was he who brewed up squalls and flung thunderbolts down on the unsuspecting sloop captains of old, he who made men look foolish and strewed temptation in their paths, he who presided over Kidd’s treasure and ruined any ship that came near. It was he who’d popped all the corks on Stuyvesant’s kegs as old Silver Peg sailed upriver to chastise the Mohicans, he who’d lifted the nightcap from the inviolable pate of Dominie Van Schaik’s wife and deposited it on the steeple of the Esopus church, forty miles distant. His laugh — the wild stuttering whinny of the deranged and irresponsible — could be heard over the keen of the wind, and his diminutive hat could be found perched placidly atop the mainmast during the fiercest gale. Not even the most hardened sea dog would dream of rounding Kidd’s Point without first tacking a horseshoe to the mast and making an offering of Barbados rum to the Heer of the Dunderberg.

Or so the legend went. Walter knew it well. Knew it as he knew the story of every witch, goblin, pukwidjinny and wailing woman that haunted the Hudson Valley. His grandmother had seen to that. But if he’d believed it once, if there’d been a spark of the old joy in the irrational left in him, of the child who’d sat over a liverwurst sandwich and thrilled to the story of Minewa’s betrayal or the legend of the headless Hessian of Sleepy Hollow, then Philosophy 451, Contemporary Philosophy with Emphasis on Death Obsession and Existentialist Thought, had extinguished it and left only the ash of cynicism behind.

Still, as the Catherine Depeyster cut for the base of the black mountain under a sky that was blacker still, he couldn’t help thinking of the twisted little Heer of the Dunderberg. What a concept. It wasn’t lousy seamanship or drunkenness or fog that had been scuttling ships in the Highlands since the time of Pieter Minuit and Wouter the Doubter, but the malicious forces of the supernatural as embodied in a leering little homunculus — the Heer of the Dunderberg, in baggy pantaloons and buckled shoes — who lived only to drive boats upon the rocks. Walter remembered his grandfather pouring two cups of rye and ginger every time he rounded Kidd’s Point: one for the belly and one for the river. What’s that for? Walter, twelve years old and wise in the ways of the world, had asked one day. For the Heer, his hairy grandfather had replied, smacking his lips. For luck. And then Walter, not daring to question the humorless old man, had challenged the Imp under his breath. Kill us, he whispered. Come on: I dare you. Strike us with lightning. Overturn the boat. I dare you.

The Imp had been silent that day. The sun lingered in the sky, the nets were full, they had Coke and crab cakes for dinner. Of course, the next time Walter rounded the point and rode up through the gorge of the mountains with his grandfather, thinking of baseball or a new fly rod or the way Susie Cats’ pedal pushers swelled at the intersection of her thighs, the sky suddenly went dark, the wind howled down off the mountains and the engine coughed, sputtered and went dead. What the—? his grandfather had snorted, rising up over his belly to jerk the starter cord in an automatic rage. They’d just skirted West Point and entered Martyr’s Reach, the most formidable of the fourteen reaches that sectioned the river from New York to Albany, a stretch of water known to generations of sailors for its treacherous winds, unpredictable currents and unforgiving shores. Just below them, two hundred and thirty feet down, lay World’s End, the graveyard for sloops and steamers and cabin cruisers alike, where rotting spars groaned in a current that was like the wind and from which no body had ever been recovered, deepest hole in a river that rarely ran more than a hundred feet deep. It was here that the Neptune capsized in 1824, with the loss of thirty-five passengers, and here too that Captain Benjamin Hunt of the James Coats met his maker when the mainsheet looped around his neck in a sudden gust and severed his head. In wild weather, you could still hear his startled cry, and then, right on its heels, the chilling splash of the trunkless head. Or so the story went.