T. Boyle - World's End

Truman was wearing a polo shirt and a pair of baggy white trousers, and he was conferring with a big-armed man in a bloodied work shirt and what appeared to be a boy of six or seven. Though the Indian had never laid eyes on Truman before, and didn’t learn his name till the following morning in Peletiah’s kitchen, there was something familiar about him, something that tugged at his consciousness like a half-remembered dream. Crouched low in the bushes, Jeremy watched. And listened.

The big-armed man was wrought up, his eyes wild, his hands raking at one another as if with some uncontainable itch. He wanted to know if the man in the polo shirt would make a sacrifice for them, if he’d try to slip through the mob and get help — because if help didn’t come soon, they were doomed. Truman didn’t hesitate. “Sure,” he said, “I’ll go, but only if I can take Piet with me,” and he indicated the boy. It was when the boy spoke—“Fuck, you goddamned well better take me with you”—that Jeremy recognized his mistake. He looked again. This was no boy — no, this was a man, a dwarf, his twisted little face blanched with evil, this was the pukwidjinny come to life. Jeremy clenched his fists. Something was wrong here, desperately wrong. Suddenly there was a shout from the direction of the arena, and the big-armed man threw a nervous glance over his shoulder. “Take him,” he said, and Truman and the dwarf started across the field.

The Indian gave it a minute, till the man with the big arms had turned and jogged back toward the arena, and then he emerged from the trees and started after Truman. Silent and slow as a moving statue, bent double in his stalking crouch, he crept up on the man in the polo shirt and his undersize companion. Truman never once glanced over his shoulder. In fact, he strode through the field as if he hadn’t a care in the world, as if he were strolling into a restaurant for Sunday brunch instead of going out to risk his neck among the mad dogs on the road ahead of him. The Indian, hurrying now to keep up, thought he must be insane. Either that or he was the bravest man alive.

Suddenly three figures broke from the trees at the road’s edge and started for Truman and the dwarf. They wore Legionnaire’s caps and dirty T-shirts. All three brandished weapons — jack handles and tire chains hastily plucked from the trunks of their cars. “Hey, nigger-lover,” the one in the middle called, “come to poppa.”

Jeremy sank low in the grass, ready for trouble. But there wasn’t any trouble, that was the odd thing. Truman just walked right up to them and said something in a low urgent tone — something the Indian couldn’t quite catch. Whatever he’d said, though, it seemed to placate them. Instead of raising their weapons, instead of flailing at him like the mad dogs and capitalist tools they were, they ducked their heads and grinned as if he’d just told the joke of the century. And then, astonishingly, one of them held a bottle out to him and Truman took a swig. “Depeyster Van Wart,” Truman said, and his voice was as clear suddenly as if he were standing right there beside the Indian, “you know him?”

“Sure,” came the reply.

“Is he up the road somewhere or what?”

At that moment, a dull roar rose up from the concert grounds, and all five of them — the dwarf, the Legionnaires and Truman — turned their heads. Jeremy held his breath.

“I seen him up around the bend there, up at the road into the Crane place.” The man who clutched the tire chains was speaking, the dry rasp of his voice punctuated by the clank of steel on steel. “We’re going to make a run at the fuckers soon as it’s dark.”

“Take me to him, would you?” Truman said, and the Indian, buried in the tall grass like a corpse, went cold with an apprehension that was like a stab in the back, that was like the hard-edged message his father had received from Horace Tantaquidgeon in a time past. “I’ve got news.”

“Kikes and niggers, kikes and niggers,” the dwarf sang, his voice pinched and nasal, echoing as if he’d poured himself into the bottle Truman had handed him. Then the five of them moved off through the trees that fringed the road. As soon as they were gone, Jeremy Mohonk pushed himself up from the grass. White men. They’d betrayed the Kitchawanks, the Weckquaesgeeks, the Delawares and Canarsees, and they betrayed their own kind too. It was on his lips: the taste of the shit they’d made him eat in prison. He thought of Peletiah, thought of the men he’d punished in the woods, thought of the women and children huddled around the stage with their pamphlets and picnic baskets. Thought of them all and rose up out of the weeds to trail the fink in the polo shirt.

Out on the road, all was confusion. Some of the cars parked along the shoulders had flicked on their headlights, and the pavement glittered with broken glass. In this naked white light, the Indian could see groups of men and boys hurrying in both directions, while dogs nosed about and people perched on fenders or sat in their cars as if awaiting a fireworks display or the heifer judging at the county fair. There was a smell of scorched paint on the air, of creosote and burning rubber. Somewhere a radio was playing. Jeremy squared his shoulders and emerged from the bushes between two parked cars. He sidestepped a cluster of young women passing a bottle of wine and started up the road. No one said a word to him.

The noise grew louder as he neared the entrance to the concert grounds — yelps, cries, curses, screams of drunken laughter and the roar of revving engines. Groups of men with makeshift weapons stalked past him, and boys, some as young as nine or ten, hurried up the road with sacks of stones. A blackened car lay on its side in the middle of the road up ahead, and another burned furiously behind it. He quickened his pace, craning his neck for a glimpse of the Judas in the polo shirt and his obscene little companion. A man in an overseas cap and a chest full of medals shouted something at him, an old woman in rolled-up blue jeans waved a flag in his face, there was smoke in his nostrils and the blood had dried beneath his eyes. He was about to break into a trot when he saw him, Truman, leaning in the window of a late-model Buick. In the same instant he spotted the dwarf too, propped insouciantly against the fender and leering with apparent satisfaction at the conflagration around him.

The Indian kept walking, and as he passed them, he caught a glimpse of the man behind the wheel of the Buick. He knew the face, though he’d never seen it before, knew the humorless mouth and outthrust chin, the eyes like branding irons: it was the face of the man who’d sent him to prison, the face of a. Van Wart. Fighting the desire to glance over his shoulder, Jeremy felt the dwarf’s eyes on him and kept going. He was about to double back — if only he could get this red-headed fink alone — when a horde of vigilantes, led by Truman’s pal with the tire chains, came streaming past him.

Under cover of the diversion — all heads turned, even the dwarf’s, to watch them hurry down the road toward the undefended pasture — Jeremy ducked between two cars, crouched down and waited. A moment later, Van Wart emerged from the Buick, said something to Truman and started up the road toward the barricade at the entrance to the concert grounds. Truman and his pukwidjinny fell into step behind him, and the Indian, after counting to ten, rose up out of the gloom to bring up the rear. He was taking a chance — the mob could fall on him any minute, his skin, his hair, his clothes like nothing they’d ever seen, like some nigger’s or Communist’s — but he didn’t care. Hatred fueled him, and he snaked through the knots of angry men as if he were invisible.

As he approached the barricade, the crowd thickened, dark shapes moving in and out of the static glare of the headlights that flooded the narrow dirt road beyond it. This was the omphalos of confusion and strife, rage stamped on every face, voices reduced to a collective snarl, the mob shoving first one way and then the other. Jeremy almost lost his quarry here — the faces all alike, shirts and shoulders and hats, the crush of bodies — but then he spotted Van Wart conferring with a bald-headed man in an open-collared dress shirt, and just beyond him, Truman and the pukwidjinny. Truman was conferring with no one. He was weaving through the crowd, a man in a hurry, heading up the road and away from the whole messy business of betrayal and bigotry; the dwarf was right behind him, visible only as a sort of moving furrow in the standing field of the mob. He’s getting away, Jeremy thought, and he surged forward, heedless, shoving vigilantes aside as if they were so many straw men. “Hey!” someone shouted at him, “Hey you!” but he never even bothered to turn his head.