T. Boyle - World's End

He watched her face as she tied off the lines and gathered up her things. It was noncommittal. He was thinking about his bike, a quick exit, thinking about what kind of excuse he was going to run Jessica and wondering what he could possibly do in the next five minutes about a costume.

Mardi straightened up and wiped her hands on the peacoat. “Hey,” she said, and her voice was husky, choked to a whisper. “It was fun. Want to do it again, sometime?”

He was about to say yes, no, maybe, when suddenly the image of the ghost ship rose up before him and he felt as if his leg — the good one — was about to buckle and drop him to the hard cold planks of the dock. He was going crazy, that’s what it was. Seeing things. Hallucinating like some shit-flinger up at Matteawan.

“Hm?” she said, and she reached for his arm and leaned into him. “You had a good time, didn’t you?”

It was then that he became aware of a figure standing in the shadows at the far end of the dock. He thought of muggers, trick or treaters, he thought of Jessica, he thought of his father. “Hello?” he called. “Is someone there?”

The light was bad, sky dark, a single streetlamp illuminating the dead geometry of masts and cranes at the far end of the boat yard. Walter felt Mardi go tense beside him. “Who’s there?” she demanded.

A man emerged from the shadows and moved toward them, the slats of the dock groaning under his footsteps. He was big, his shoulders like something hammered on as an afterthought, he wore a flannel shirt open to the navel despite the cold, and his graying hair trailed down his back in a thick twisted coil. Walter guessed he must have been fifty-five, sixty. “That you, Mardi?” the man asked.

She dropped Walter’s arm. “Jesus, Jeremy, you scared the shit out of us.”

He’d reached them now, and stood grinning before them. His two front teeth were outlined in gold, and he wore a bone necklace from which a single white feather dangled. “Boo,” he said in a ruined, phlegmy voice. “Trick or treat.”

Mardi was grinning now too, but Walter was glum. Whatever was about to happen, he didn’t want any part of it. He glanced longingly at his motorcycle, then turned back to the stranger. “I’ll take the treat,” Mardi said.

“Looks like you already got it,” the man said, giving Walter a sick grin.

“Oh,” she said, taking Walter’s arm again, “oh, yeah,” and she made as if to slap her brow for forgetfulness. “This is my friend—”

But the Indian — that’s what he was, Walter realized with a jolt — the Indian cut her off. “I know you,” he said, searching Walter’s eyes.

Walter had never laid eyes on him before. He felt his stomach drop. “You do?”

The stranger tugged at the collar of his lumberjack shirt and winced as if it were choking him. Then he spat and looked up again. “Yeah,” he rasped. “Van Brunt, right?”

Walter was stunned. “But, but how—?”

“You could be two toads out of the same egg, you and your father.”

“You knew my father?”

The Indian nodded, then ducked his head and spat again. “I knew him,” he said. “Yeah, I knew him. He was a real piece of shit.”

He was born on the Shawangunk reservation, Jamestown, New York, in 1909, the green-eyed son of a green-eyed father. His mother, a Seneca ye-oh whose bellicose forefathers had been pacified by none other than George Washington himself, had eyes as black as olives. Ignoring those black eyes and the warlike temperament that lurked behind them, Mohonk père followed the patrilineal custom of his own tribe, the Kitchawanks, of which he was the last known surviving member, and christened the boy Jeremy Mohonk, Jr. The boy’s mother was scandalized. Her people, the warriors of the north, the survivors, claimed descent through the womb. The boy, his mother insisted, was by all rights a Seneca and a Tantaquidgeon. If he married in the clan, he’d be committing incest. But the elder Mohonk wouldn’t be moved. Twice during the first month of little Jeremy’s existence he took a half-strung snowshoe to the side of his wife’s head, and once, after an especially vehement disputation, he chased her through the Jamestown feedlot with a dibble stick honed to the killing sharpness of a spear.

The upshot of all this was an informal knife fight between Mohonk pére and Horace Tantaquidgeon, his wife’s brother. They were scaling fish on the banks of the Conewango — yellow perch, walleyes, maskinonge — their knives glinting in the sun. Mohonk fils, barely able to focus his eyes, was strapped to his mother’s back and gazing up into the dancing green of the trees and the stolid, unmoving sky that rose up everywhere around him, oceanic and blue. The men’s hands were wet with blood, with mucus. Translucent scales clung to their forearms. There was no sound but for the rasp of the knives and the furious drone of the flies. Suddenly, and without warning, Horace Tantaquidgeon rose to his feet and sank his knife into the back of the last of the Kitchawanks but one. The knife stuck there, quivering, the blade lodged like a splinter between two ridges of the lumbar vertebrae.

For a moment, there was no reaction. The elder Mohonk, barechested and dressed in stained work pants, squatted over his mound of fish as before. And then all at once his eyes went cold with a new kind of knowledge, and he dropped to his buttocks, sitting upright among those hacked and dumb-staring fish that squirted out from under him as if they’d come back to life … but no, he wasn’t just sitting, he was pitching backward from there, his legs, his gut, his bowels gone, cut loose and drifting like so many balloons puffed with helium.

The Tantaquidgeons were remorseful and penitent. Horace extracted a rumpled dollar bill from the hoard of eight he kept buried in a gourd out back of his house, walked the six miles to Frewsburg, and purchased a wheelchair from the widow of a white man who’d been crippled in the Spanish-American War. Then he wheeled it back home, all the long way up the dusty road to the reservation. And Mildred, the fractious wife, was fractious no more. Not only did she dismiss the subject of little Jeremy’s descent (the boy was his father’s son, a Kitchawank, one of two surviving members of the once-mighty Turtle Clan and rightful inheritor of the Kitchawank domain to the south, and that was that), but she devoted the rest of her days to the care of her husband. She prepared stewed opossum and venison, collected berries for him in season, greased his hair and diapered him like a second son. And all this was necessary, and more. For Jeremy Mohonk, son of Mohonks uncountable, last of his race but one, would never walk again.

The boy grew to manhood there on the reservation, where the light was a thing that invested the visible world with its glory, where streams met and bears roamed and the clouds held the setting sun in a grip as gentle as a mother’s hand. He listened to the dew settle on the grass at night, watched the sun pull itself out of the trees in the morning, stalked game, gigged frogs, fished and climbed and swam. He learned to read and write at the agency school, learned about Amerigo Vespucci and Christopher Columbus from a white man who wore a starched collar and whose face was like an overripe plum; at night he sat at the foot of his father’s wheelchair and discovered the history of his race.

His father sat stiff in the chair, holding himself erect with arms that were eternally flexed against the numbness of his belly and bowels. The injury had made him gaunt, and he seemed to grow more attenuated day by day, year by year, as if Horace Tantaquidgeon’s blade had somehow let the spirit escape like air from his body, leaving only the husk behind. Still, he told the old stories in a voice that sang, strong and true, told them with the breath of history. Jeremy was no more than four or five when he heard them the first time; he was a full-grown man of eighteen summers when he heard them the last.