T. Boyle - World's End

It didn’t look to be a good night. Half-past six, and already the mercury in the rusted thermometer outside the window was dipping toward the flat red hashmark that indicated no degree of temperature at all. To Tom’s credit, he had managed to get the fire going seconds after stepping through the door, hurling himself at the tinder box with all the urgency of the desperate doomed chechaquo in the Jack London story, but as he explained between strokes of the knife on the cutting board, the place took a while to warm up. Jessica was thinking that this was an understatement in the master class, when Tom suddenly snatched up a galvanized pail and darted for the door. “You’re not going back out there?” she asked in genuine horror.

The answer came in the form of a duosyllabic yelp as he fumbled with the buttons of his aviator’s coat and inadvertently clanked the pail against a footlocker piled high with yellowing laundry. “Water!” he cried, hustling past her, and then the door slammed shut behind him.

Earlier that day — in the pale light of dawn, to be precise — Jessica, who’d been married for all of twelve weeks now, had complained to her husband that the car wouldn’t start, and that because the car wouldn’t start, she was late for work. Walter wasn’t very helpful. Unemployed, unshaven, hung over from yet another late night at the Elbow, he lay inert in the center of the bed, mummy-wrapped in the quilt Grandmother Wing had given them on their wedding day. She watched the slits of his eyes crack open. The lids were about six inches thick. “Call Tom,” he croaked.

Tom didn’t have electricity. Tom didn’t have running water. He didn’t have an electric toothbrush, hair dryer or waffle iron. He didn’t have a phone, either. And even if he did have one, there were no phone lines running through the woods, across Van Wart Creek and up the hill to his shack, so it wouldn’t be of much use to him. Stalking back and forth in her herringbone maxicoat, gulping cold coffee and running a nervous brush through her fine blond hair, she attempted to point this out to her supine husband.

The quilt was motionless, the life presumably held in its grip, silent. After a moment she heard his breathing ease into the gentle autonomous rhythm of sleep. “Walter?” She prodded him. “Walter?”

Muffled, slurred, his words might have come from the brink of an unbridgeable gulf: “Call in sick,” he murmured.

It was a temptation. The day was cold enough to exfoliate flesh, and the thought of eight hours beneath the fluorescent lights sniffing formalin was enough to make her long for the term papers, final exams and lab reports of the year before. The job had turned grim in the past few weeks, nothing but larva counts and record keeping, nothing but sitting and watching the clock — it would be March before they got out on the water again. Even Tom, who’d been hired to run the dredge on the big boat, had lately found himself hunched over a glass dish swimming with bits of weed and insect and fish larvae, breathing fumes. No: she didn’t want to go to work. Especially if she had to fight Arctic blasts and a sapped battery to get there.

“You know I can’t do that,” she pleaded, the dregs of the coffee gone sour in her mouth. She was hoping he’d argue with her, tell her to stuff the job and come back to bed, but he was already snoring. She started up the kettle for another cup of instant, padded across the cold linoleum in her slippers and was fumbling through the cupboard for the Sanka, when she was suddenly seized with spasms of guilt. She had to go to work, of course she did. There was her career to think about — she knew just how good this job would look on her record when she applied to grad school again in the fall — and then, on a more prosaic level, they needed the money. Walter hadn’t worked since his accident. He claimed he was weighing his options, feeling things out. Trying to deal with the trauma. He was going into teaching, sales, insurance, banking, law, he was going to go back to school, start a motorcycle repair shop, open a restaurant. Any day now. Jessica cut the flame beneath the kettle and slipped into the other room to call her father. If she was lucky, she’d catch him before he left for the train. …

She was lucky. As it turned out, she was only twenty minutes late, and she got to breathe formalin all through the long gray morning and the dim, slow, Hyperborean afternoon.

Tom had given her a ride home. In the dark. On the back of his ratcheting, rusty, mufflerless Suzuki 50, in wind-chill conditions that must have approximated those at Ice Station Zebra. Dancing high up off her toes, thrashing herself with clonic arms and dabbing wildly at her runny nose, she’d dashed up the steps of the cozy little Kitchawank Colony bungalow (rent: $90 a month, plus utilities) that she and Walter had chosen from among a hundred identically cozy little Kitchawank Colony bungalows, only to find that Walter was gone. Tom stood behind her, helmet in hand, the yellow scarf wrapped around the lower part of his face like a camel driver’s kaffiyeh. “He’s not here,” she said, turning to him.

Tom’s eyes were distant and bleary above the scarf. They took in the kitchen and living room in a single glance. “No,” he said, “I guess not.”

A long moment ticked by, her disappointment like some heavy weight they both suddenly had to carry — she couldn’t face it, a cold night alone with defrosted enchiladas and quesadilla chips that had the taste and texture of vinyl — until Tom tugged the scarf down past his lips and asked if she wanted to come out to his place for dinner. They could leave Walter a note.

And now, here she was, clutching her legs to her chest and watching her breath crystallize before her face, a farrago of warring odors broiling up around her. There was the cold salt stink of unwashed socks and underwear, the must of mold and woodrot, the acid sting of the smoke and the unconquerable, insurmountable, savory, sweet, stomach-clenching aroma of garlic frying in the pan. She was about to spring down and give it a stir, when in came the saint of the forest, elbows flailing, water sloshing, feet beating the floor like drumsticks. He was breathing hard, and his nose was the color of tinned salmon. “Water,” he gasped, setting the bucket down beside the stove, and without pausing, measuring out twenty-four cups of it for the rice. “Blood Creek,” he added with a grin. “It never lets me down.”

Later, after they’d each put away two heaping tin plates of gummy rice and vegetables with garlic-fried tofu and soy grits à la maison, they shared another five or six jars of wine and a joint of homegrown, listened to Bobby Blue Bland sing “Call on Me” on Tom’s no-fidelity battery-powered record player, and discussed Herbert Axelrod, talking chimps and UFOs with all the passion of rabbinical students delving into the mysteries of the Cabala. Tom had left the door to the stove open, and at some point Jessica had stopped shivering long enough to climb down from the airy bed and prop herself up on a chair just beyond the range of incineration. She told Tom the story of the time Herbert Axelrod, invited to lecture at the University of San Juan, had stepped off the plane and discovered a new species of fish in a puddle just off the runway. In return, Tom told her about the Yerkes Primate Center, dolphins that could do trigonometry and the UFO he’d seen right out there on Van Wart Road. Finally, though, and inevitably, the conversation turned to Walter.

“I’m worried about him,” Jessica confided.

Tom was worried too. Ever since the accident Walter had grown increasingly strange, obsessed with road signs, history and the Robeson riots, jabbering about his father as if the man existed and generally working himself into a frenzy at the Elbow every night. Even worse, he was hallucinating. Seeing his grandmother and a host of leprechauns behind every tree, seeing his mother, his father, his uncles and cousins and ancestors. All right: it must have been terrible having his foot hacked off like that, and sure, he needed time to adjust, but things were getting out of hand. “Does he tell you about seeing things?”