T. Boyle - World's End

By the time Jeremy managed to break free of the crowd, Truman and the drawf were a hundred yards up the road, clots of black against the richer texture of the night. They hurried past a line of stalled and battered cars on the darkened roadway, then angled off on an unpaved lane that wound through the woods in the direction of Peterskill. Jeremy broke into a run. He passed a pair of teenagers bent over a gas can in the dark, dodged a man who stood flatfooted and astonished in the middle of the road, and saw a frightened black face peering from the window of a stalled car; a moment later, still running hard, he was turning into the lane. Immediately, he saw that his luck had changed. The shouts of the crowd were muted here, the road all but deserted: this was the chance he’d been waiting for.

He came at Truman without warning, swift silent steps in the dirt, flinging himself at the shadowy form ahead of him like a linebacker going for the tackling dummy. He caught him in the small of the back — something gave: bone, cartilage, hinges that need oil — and slammed his face down in the dirt. At the moment of impact, the dwarf leapt aside with a squeal and Truman let out a gasp of surprise before the hard compacted dirt of the road sucked the breath out of him. The Indian knew then that he was going to kill this son of a bitch in the polo shirt, this back stabber, this white man, and he locked an arm around his throat and ground his face into the road. When he was done with him, he’d get up and crush the dwarf like an egg.

“Get off!” Truman choked, tearing at the Indian’s arm. “Get… off!”

Shrill, manic, the dwarf leapt up and down in the dirt like a rodent in a cage. “Murder!” he piped. “Help! Murder!”

The Indian tightened his grip.

And so it would have gone — Truman, powerful as he was, taken by surprise, cut down and emasculated before his invisible adversary’s rage, first fatality of the riots … so it would have gone, but for the dwarf. He screamed, and a hundred feet came running, vigilantes by the score, soreheads and rednecks and born-again racists with blood on their hands. That in itself would have been enough, but the little man was wickeder than the Indian could have guessed. He had a knife. Three inches’ worth. Nothing like Horace Tantaquidgeon’s gutting knife, but a knife nonetheless. And he slipped that knife from his pocket, sprung the blade with a soft evil click, and began punctuating the Indian’s back. He dug a full stop first, then a colon; he slashed commas, hyphens and a single ragged exclamation point.

Half a second, that’s all it took. The Indian reared up and slapped the dwarf as he might have slapped a fly, but the moment’s distraction allowed Truman to wriggle free. In the next moment, he was on his feet, gasping for breath and flinging frenzied blows at his assailant, who rose up out of the darkness like a mountain in motion. Wordlessly, without so much as a grunt of effort or pain, the Indian returned the blows. With interest. “You crazy?” Truman gasped, throwing up his arms to protect himself. “You nuts or what?” Behind them, the thin white lances of flashlights and the slap of running feet.

Jeremy felt a weak fist glance off the side of his head, then another. He moved in closer. It was then that he got his first good look at the man he was about to kill. The onrushing beam of a flashlight played across the traitor’s face, and again the Indian felt he somehow knew this man, knew him in some deep and tribal way. Truman must have got a good look at Jeremy too, because suddenly he dropped his hands in bewilderment. “Who the—?” he began, but it was too late for introductions. The Indian lunged for his throat and got hold of him again, both hands locked around the windpipe in an unbreakable grip, a death grip, the grip that leaves the rabbit twitching and the goose cold. Jeremy would have answered the half-formed question, would have answered Truman as he’d answered Sasha Freeman and Rombout Van Wart and anyone else who cared to know, but he never got the chance. All at once the patriots were on him, swarming over him with their sticks and tire irons and chains.

It was Sing Sing and the prison guard all over again. Jeremy held on like the swamp turtle that lent its name to his clan — pummel him, stab him, cut off his head, his grip was good to death and beyond — held on despite the wounds in his back and the fingers jerking at his wrists. Then someone brought a jack handle down across the back of his skull and he felt Truman slipping away from him. Just before he fell, desperate, guided by the turtle, he lunged forward and locked his jaws in the traitor’s flesh — the ear, the right ear — and clamped down till he tasted blood.

All was quiet when he opened his eyes again, and he thought for a moment he was back in his cot listening to the crickets tick off the seconds till dawn. There were no shouts. No tires squealed, no engines roared, there were no cries of grief and rage. But he wasn’t in his cot. He was laid out on his back in a ditch beside the road and his body was possessed by the demons of pain. He’d been clubbed, kicked, stabbed; his left arm was broken in two places. Lying there in the ditch, gazing up at the stars through the interstices of the trees, he listened for a moment to the chant of the crickets and let his mind touch each of his wounds. He thought of his ancestors, warriors who’d used their pain as a tool, mocking their torturers even as the blade bared the nerve. After a while, he pushed himself up and started down the road for Peletiah’s place.

Jeremy Mohonk left the hills of Van Wartville six months later. The despair that had eaten at him in prison, the sense of decay and futility, drove him from his shack beneath the white oak as no man could ever have done. He returned to the reservation outside of Jamestown, looking for the mother of his twenty sons. His own mother was dead. Ten years earlier, while he was languishing beneath the stones of Sing Sing, she succumbed to a mysterious wasting disease that stole her appetite and left her looking like a corpse mummified over the centuries. Her brother, he of the perfidious knife, was hardier. Jeremy found him in a cluttered little house on the bank of the river. Snaggle-toothed and wizened, with his white hair bound in a topknot and his suit of burial clothes draped over a chair in the corner, he stared at his nephew with eyes that could barely place him. As for Jeremy’s coevals, the clean-limbed boys and efflorescent girls of his school days, they’d either sunk into fat so pervasive their eyes were barely visible or vanished into the world of the expropriators. Jeremy found himself a picking job — grapes at that season, apples to follow — and within the month had married a Cayuga named Alice One Bird.

She was a big woman, One Bird, with calves that swelled under the fullness of her and a broad open face that spoke of her good nature and optimism. Her two sons by a previous marriage were grown men, and though she claimed to be thirty-four, she was closer to forty. To Jeremy, her age didn’t matter, so long as she was capable of bearing children, and her sons — both of them razor-eyed and tall — gave proof of that. He picked grapes, he picked apples. In the fall, he hunted. When the snow lay over the ground like a fungus and the larder was empty, he got a job as a stock boy in a supermarket in Jamestown.

A year passed. Two, three. Nothing happened. One Bird grew heavier, though she wasn’t carrying a child. Jeremy was forty-three years old. He consulted a Shawangunk medicine man who’d known his father, and the old man asked him for a lock of One Bird’s hair. Jeremy snipped the hair while she slept and brought it to him. With trembling fingers, the medicine man selected a hank of Jeremy’s hair, clipped it close, and then rolled the two locks vigorously between his palms, as if he were trying to start a fire. After a moment he separated the strands, dropping them one by one on a sheet of newspaper. For a long while he studied their configuration in silence. “It’s not you,” he said finally, “it’s her.”