T. Boyle - World's End

Walter’s grandfather didn’t like it a bit. He cursed and fiddled over the motor while the ebbing tide carried them downriver and the first few drops of rain began to pucker the surface. Take the oars! he’d roared, and Walter had obeyed without hesitation. He was scared. He’d never seen the daylight so dark. Swing it around and head for home, his grandfather snarled. Row! Walter rowed, rowed till his arms went numb and his back felt as if someone had driven hot splinters into it, but to no avail. The rain caught them just below West Point. But it wasn’t just rain, it was hail too. And thunder that reverberated in the basin of the mountains like a war at sea. They wound up sitting at anchor beneath an overhang on the west bank, huddled and shivering, not daring to venture out on the open water for fear of the lightning that tore the sky apart over their heads. Two weeks later, Walter’s grandfather had his stroke and toppled into the bait pen.

Now, as the mountain loomed above them, Walter pushed himself up and made his way back to where Mardi sat at the tiller.

“Having a good time?” she shouted over the wind.

He just grinned in response, rocking with the boat, and then settled down beside her and helped himself to a cup of coffee from the thermos. The coffee was good. Hot and black and tasting of Depeyster Van Wart’s ten-year-old cognac. “Seen the Imp?” he said.

“Who?”

“You know, the little guy in the high hat and buckled shoes that runs around sitting on people’s masts and whipping up storms and whatnot.”

Mardi gave him a long slow look and a wet-lipped smile that took a moment to spread across her face. She looked good, with the cap pulled down low like that and her hair fanned out behind her in the wind. Real good. She put her free arm through his and drew him closer. “What’ve you been smoking?” she said.

It was Halloween, the night the dead rise from their graves and people hide behind masks, Halloween, and getting dark. Walter stood on the deck of the Catherine Depeyster and gazed up at the ranks of mothballed ships that rose above him on either side in great depthless fields of shadow. This time he hadn’t tried to hoist himself up the anchor chain of the U.S.S. Anima, nor of any of the other ships either. This time he’d been content merely to shove his hands deep in his pockets and stare up at them.

Mardi was in the cabin, sipping cognac and warming herself over the electric space heater. She’d furled the sails and started up the engine when they got in close, afraid the wind would push her into one of the big ships. Then, when they’d maneuvered their way through the picket of steel monsters and anchored amongst them, she picked up the thermos and headed for the cabin. “Come on,” she said, “let’s get in out of this wind,” but Walter wasn’t moving. Not yet, anyway. He was thinking of Jessica and feeling the stab of guilt and betrayal, knowing full well what was going to happen once he got into that cabin with Mardi. Oh, he could delay it, exercise his will, stand out here in the wind and gawk up at the ships as if they meant anything at all to him, but eventually he would follow her into the cabin. It was inevitable. Preordained. A role in a play he’d been rehearsing all his life. This was why he’d come out to the ghost ships — this, and nothing more. “Come on,” she repeated, and her voice dropped to a purr.

“In a minute,” he said.

The cabin door clicked shut behind him, and he never turned his head. This ship that hung over him, with its rusted anchor chain and hull streaked with bird crap, had suddenly become fascinating, riveting, a thing rare and unique in the world. He was thinking nothing. The wind bit at him. He counted off thirty seconds and was about to turn around and submit himself to the inevitable, when something — a sudden displacement of shadow, a furtive movement — caught his eye. Up there. High against the rail of the near ship.

It was almost dark. He couldn’t be sure. But yes, there it was again: something was roaming around up there. A bird? A rat? He tried to keep his eyes fixed on the spot, but at some point he must have blinked involuntarily — because the next thing he knew there was an object perched on the rail, where no object had been a fraction of a second earlier. From down here, beneath the great soaring wall of the ship, it appeared to be a hat — wide of brim, high of crown, and of a fashion that had its day centuries ago, a hat the pilgrims might have worn, or Rembrandt himself. It was at that moment, as Walter stood puzzling over this shadowy apparition, that an odd flatulent sound began to insinuate itself in the niche between the slosh of the waves and the moan of the wind, a sound that brought back memories of elementary school, of playgrounds and ballfields: someone was razzing him.

Walter looked to his right, and then to his left. He looked behind him, above him, he peered over the rail, tore open the locker, searched the sky — all to no avail. The sound seemed to be coming from everywhere, from nowhere, caught up in the very woof of the air itself. The hat was still perched atop the rail of the big rotting merchantman before him, and Mardi — he could see her through the little rectangular windows — was still ensconced in the cabin. The razzing grew louder, faded, pulsed back again, and Walter began to feel an odd sensation creeping up on him, déjà vu, a sensation grown old since the day of his accident.

Sure enough, when he looked up again, the rail of the ship was crowded with ragged figures — bums, the bums he’d seen the night of the accident — each with his fingers to his nose and a vibrating tongue between his lips. And there, in the middle of them, sat their ringleader — the little guy in baggy trousers and work boots his father had called Piet. Piet’s face was expressionless — as stolid as an executioner’s — and the antiquated hat was now sitting atop his head like an overturned milk can. As Walter focused on him, he saw the tip of the little man’s tongue emerge from between his tightly compressed lips to augment the mocking chorus with its own feathery but distinctive raspberry.

So here he was, Walter the empiricist, standing on the deck of a cruising sloop in the middle of the darkling Hudson on the eve of Allhallows, confronting a mob of jeering phantoms, and not knowing what to do next. He was seeing things. There was something the matter with him. He’d consult a shrink, have his head bandaged — anything. But for now he could think of only one thing to do, the same thing he’d done when he’d been razzed in junior high: he gave them the finger, one and all. With both hands. And he cursed them too, cursed them in a ragged raging high-pitched tone till he began to grow hoarse, his extended fingers digging at the air and feet dancing in furious rapture.

All very well and fine. But they were gone. He was cursing a deserted ship, cursing empty decks and berths unslept in for twenty years or more, cursing steel. The razzing had faded away to nothing and the only sound he could hear now was the whisper of a human voice at his back. Mardi’s voice. He turned around and there she was, standing at the cabin door. The door was open, and she was naked. He saw her breasts — silken, pouting, the breasts he remembered from the night of his collision with history. He saw her navel and the fascinating swatch of hair below it, saw her feet, calves, the swell of her thighs, saw the beckoning glow of the electric coil in the darkened cabin behind her. “Walter, what are you doing?” she said in a voice that rubbed at his skin. “Don’t you know I’ve been waiting for you?”

The blood shot from his head to his groin.

“Come on in and get warm,” she whispered.

It was past seven when the Catherine Depeyster motored into the slip at the marina. Walter was late. He was supposed to have been at the Elbow by six-thirty, dressed in costume, to meet Jessica and Tom Crane. They were going to have a few drinks, and then go out to a party in the Colony. But Walter was late. He’d been out in the middle of the river, fucking Mardi Van Wart. The first time — there at the cabin door — he’d practically tackled her, grabbing for flesh like a satyr, a rapist, all his demons concentrated in the slot between her legs. The second time was slow, soft, it was making love. She stroked him, ran her tongue across his chest, breathed in his ear. He stroked her in return, lingered over her nipples, lifted her atop him — he even, for moments at a time, forgot about the blasted torn stump of his leg and the inert lump of plastic that terminated it. Now, as he helped her secure the boat, he didn’t know what he felt. Guilt, for one thing. Guilt, and an overwhelming desire to shake hands, peck her cheek or whatever, and disappear. She’d said she was going to a party up in Poughkeepsie and that he was welcome to come along; he’d stammered that he was meeting Jessica and Tom down at the Elbow.