T. Boyle - World's End

That was it. Walter had had it. “Who is this man?” he demanded. “What’s he doing in here? Why in christ’s name did you stick him in here with me?”

Nurse Rosenschweig was no sour fraulein, as she’d just demonstrated, but Walter’s protestations made her face go hard. “You want a private room, you’ve got to make the proper arrangements,” she said. “In advance.”

“But — but who is this man?” Something was beginning to dawn on Walter, confused, bereft, drugged and tormented though he may have been. It went like this: if the nurse was real — walking, talking, breathing, flesh, blood and bone — and she admitted Piet’s existence, then either the whole world was a hallucination or the phantom in the bed beside him was no phantom at all.

“Name’s Piet Aukema,” the dwarf rasped, leaning way out over the chasm between the beds to extend his hand, “and I’m pleased to meet you.”

Nurse Rosenschweig fixed her withering glare on Walter, who reluctantly leaned forward to shake the proferred hand. “Walter,” he mumbled, voice sticking in his throat, “Walter Van Brunt.”

“There now, isn’t that better?” the nurse was saying, beaming at Walter like a contented schoolmarm, when Piet suddenly dropped Walter’s hand and jerked upright in bed. Slapping his forehead, he gasped “Van Brunt? Did you say Van Brunt?”

Faintly, weakly, almost imperceptibly, Walter nodded.

“I knew it, I knew it,” the dwarf sang. “Soon as I laid eyes on you, I knew it.”

The chill of history was descending yet again — Walter could feel it, familiar as a toothache, and he shivered inwardly.

“Sure,” the dwarf said, marshaling his features into an obscene parody of amity and ingenuousness, “I knew your father.”

Every time Walter opened his eyes during the course of the next three days, Piet was there, the cynosure of the room, the hospital, the universe, the first and only thing that mattered. He would wake in the morning to the little man’s booming “Up and at ’em, lazybones!” jolt up from a tormented nap to see him calmly paring his nails or crunching into an apple, arouse himself from a sitcom-induced doze to watch him leaf through a pornographic magazine or hold up the centerfold with a complicitous wink. Still, Walter couldn’t quite believe he wasn’t hallucinating — not until Lola came to visit and recognized the wizened little runt in her first breath. “Piet?” she said, narrowing her eyes to examine him as she might have examined the ghostly figures of a faded photograph.

The dwarf perked up like a dog catching the faintest ring of silverware from the farthest corner of the kitchen. “I know you,” he said, his big leathery lips twisted into the best facsimile of a smile. “Lola, isn’t it?”

Lola’s hands went to her hair. She fumbled with her purse, her bulky coat, and sat heavily in the visitor’s chair. A change came across her face, her mouth grim, lips trembling.

“What’s it been,” he said, “twenty years?”

Her voice was dead. “Not long enough.”

Piet went on as if he hadn’t noticed, filling her in on the sliding scale of his fortunes over the past two decades. Smirking, winking, rolling his eyes, gesticulating so violently he set the traction wires atremble, the little man told her of his careers in carpentry, Off-Broadway theater (a supporting role in a short-lived musical based on Todd Browning’s “Freaks”), commercial fishing, managing a bar and grill in Putnam Valley, selling doughnut makers door-to-door and Renaults, VWs and Mini-Coopers at a lot in Brewster. He chattered on for the better part of an hour, hooting at his own jokes, dropping his voice to an ominous rasp to underscore the bad times, rushing with passion as he described his loves and triumphs, going on and on, signing, guffawing and wisecracking, performing the grand symphony of his little life for an audience chained to their seats. Never once did he mention Truman.

The moment Lola left, Walter turned to him. Puffed up like a toad with the litany of his adventures, Piet regarded him slyly. “You, uh, you said you knew my father,” Walter began, and then faltered.

“That’s right. He was a real card, your old man.”

When did you see him last? What happened to him? Is he alive? The questions were stacked up in Walter’s head like jetliners over La Guardia — Why did he leave us? What happened that night in 1949? Was he gutless? A fink? A turncoat? Was he the no-account, perfidious, two-faced, backstabbing son of a bitch everyone made him out to be? — but before he could ask the first of them, Piet was off on another jag of reminiscence.

“A card,” he repeated, wagging his head in disbelief. “Did you hear about the time—?” Walter hadn’t heard. Or if he had, he was going to hear it again. Waving his stumpy arms like a conductor, leering, grimacing, clucking, chortling, Piet served up the old stories. There were the pranks — flying upside down under the Bear Mountain Bridge, stealing the life-size figures from the crèche outside the Church of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception and hoisting them up the flagpole in front of the monument on Washington Street, substituting distilled vinegar for vodka at the VFW Memorial Day picnic; there were the drinking bouts, the women, the crab boils and card games — names and places and dates that meant nothing to Walter. Finally the rasping atonal voice paused a moment, as if to collect itself — as if perhaps, at last, it had run out of stories — when Piet threw his head back on the pillow, slapped the rock-hard cast with an exclamatory palm and uttered a single astonishing proper noun, one that hadn’t been uttered in Walter’s presence since the death of his grandmother. “Sachoes,” the dwarf said in what amounted to a prefatory sigh.

“Sachoes?” Walter flung it back at him. “What about him?”

Piet gave him a long, smirking, supremely self-satisfied look, simultaneously plumbing an ear for wax and running a gnarled hand through his hair. “That’s all Truman’d talk about when I first met him back in, what? — ’40, I guess it was, just before the War. Sachoes this, Sachoes that. You know, the Indian chief. Owned all this”—his hand swept the room in a gesture meant to suggest the dubious worth not only of the paltry room but of the gray landscape that fell away from the windows in a bristle of bare-crowned trees—“before us white men took it away from him, that is. Damndest thing. For a couple of months or so back then your father was all worked up about it, as though we could turn history around or something.” Piet — the gargoyle, the imp — looked him full in the face. “You know the story?”

Walter knew it — one of his grandmother’s stories — and suddenly he saw that neat square little house perched over the river, a night of crippling cold, his grandfather hunched hairily over the fire, plucking and jabbing at the muck-smelling length of his drift net like an old lady with her needlepoint, his grandmother busy shaping clay in a maelstrom of newspaper at the kitchen table. She was attempting something big — her major statement on trash fish, a planter in the shape of three intertwined and gaping carp. Walter was nine or ten — it was the winter Hesh and Lola had gone down to Miami over the Christmas break and left him with his grandparents. There was no TV — his grandmother mistrusted televisions as she mistrusted telephones, prying eyes and ears, conduits into which her enemies could pour their malice — but there would have been a radio. Christmas carols maybe, playing softly in the background. Cookies in the oven. Snow flying at the black impervious panes of the big bay window that looked out over the river. Gram, Walter said, tell me a story.

Her hands — big and fleshy, spotted with age — worked at the clay. She rolled out a string of it, formed an O and gave the near carp a set of lips. At first he thought she hadn’t heard him, but then she began to speak, her voice barely audible over the snap of the fire, the carols, the wind in the eaves: It was the winter after they’d buried Minewa, and Sachoes, great sachem of the Kitchawanks, was in despair. Smeared with otter fat against the cold, wrapped in the fur of Konoh, the bear, he stared glumly into the fire while the wind flapped the thatch of elm bark and basswood strips till he could have sworn all the geese in the world were beating around his head.