T. Boyle - World's End

But alas, his elation was short-lived. For Wasamapah, eager to make the old chief look bad and with the patroon’s note for two thousand guilders stuffed in his moccasin, had surreptitiously added three jagged bruise-colored shells to the treaty string, shells that extended the boundaries of the patroon’s purchase till they encompassed every last verst, morgen and acre of the Kitchawank’s homeland. Where Sachoes had heard the Twice Gnarled Tree, Wasamapah, so he claimed, had heard the Twice Gnarled Tree Struck Twice by Lightning. And where Sachoes had agreed to Near Deer Run as the southern boundary, Wasamapah had registered Far Deer Run, another matter altogether; so too with the Brook That Speaks, which Wasamapah had recorded as the Brook That Speaks in Winter. When Wasamapah told over the treaty shells for the council of elders, outrage crept into the worn and weary faces of that august body, the light of recrimination flickered in their ancient eyes.

Six months later, Sachoes was dead. Unable to eat, to sleep, unable to stand or sit or lie flat in his robes, the old chief ate himself up with grief over what he’d done. Or rather, what Jan Pieterse, Oloffe Van Wart and Wasamapah had done to him. Not a brave in the tribe sided with him — he was senile, doddering, a woman in a breechclout, and he’d dealt away the soul of his tribe for a few baubles, for dogs that had run off, a white man’s hat that mouldered away to nothing, for food that had been eaten and beads that hid themselves in the grass. He was done. Finished. Wasamapah, stern, righteous, unforgiving, a man of sudden wealth and confidant of the great patroon-chief who now held dominion over them, stepped in to replace him. Outcast, hunched with grief, a traitor to his own tribe, Sachoes fell away to nothing, his life as tenuous as the fluff that clings to the dandelion. Wahwahtaysee tried to protect him, but it was no use. One day, in the middle of the strangely pale and wintry summer that succeeded the patroon’s coup, the wind blew. Blew hard. Blew a regular gale. And that was. the end of Sachoes.

“Yeah, Sachoes,” Piet sighed, and Walter started and looked around him as if he were waking to a nightmare. “Got taken by one of his own, wasn’t that the story?” The imp was leering at him now, showing acres of gum at the edges of his grin, his eyes recessed in twin sinkholes of wrinkle. “Betrayed, fucked over, stabbed in the back. Right?”

Walter only stared.

And then Piet leaned way out over the abyss between the beds, his face still squinched in that unholy leer, and hit Walter with everything he had: “So what do you hear from your old man?”

What does he hear? The question choked him with bitterness — he could barely get the words out. “I haven’t heard from him. At all. Not since — since I was eleven.” He looked down at the floor. “I don’t even know if he’s still alive.”

The dwarf fell back into himself with surprise — or feigned surprise. His eyebrows shot up. He fanned himself with a quick hand. “Eleven? Shit. I got a card from him just — when? — shit, must of been a week before my accident.”

The whole of Walter’s being was caught up in the sudden hammering of his heart. “Where?” he blurted. “Where is he?”

“He’s teaching,” Piet said, and let a beat go by. “In Barrow.”

“Barrow?”

“Point Barrow.” Pause, grin, lick lips. “You know: like in Alaska?”

Next morning, Piet was gone. Walter woke to the clatter of the dayshift nurse and the furtive tones of desperation and bewilderment that trickled down the corridor to him, and saw that the bed in the corner was made up as if it had never been occupied. After breakfast, Lola appeared with the big dusty clothbound atlas from the bookshelf in the front room, and Walter barely had time to graze her cheek before snatching it from her hands. “Barrow, Barrow, Barrow,” he muttered to himself, flipping impatiently through the pages and then scanning the jagged, glaciated outline of the big bleak mysterious state as if he were seeing it for the first time. He found Anchorage, Kenai, Spenard and Seward. He found the Aleutians, the Talkeetna Mountains, Fairbanks, the Kuskokwim Range. But no Barrow. He had to consult the index for Barrow — G-I — and follow his finger to the top of the map. There it was, Barrow, the northernmost city in the world. Barrow, where windchill took the temperature down to a hundred below and night reigned unbroken for three months of the year.

Lola, looking on with a bemused smile, had a question for him: “Why the sudden interest in Alaska — thinking of doing some seal hunting?”

He looked up as if he’d forgotten she was there. “There was a thing on TV about it last night,” he said, flashing his winning smile. “Sounds cool.”

“Cool?”

They laughed together. But the minute she left he got an outside line and phoned a travel agent in Croton. Round-trip from Kennedy to Anchorage/Fairbanks alone was $600, plus tax, and service from Fairbanks to Barrow was spotty at best, and could cost another hundred on top of that, not to mention cabs, food and hotel. Where was he going to get that kind of money?

This time, when Walter was discharged from the hospital to continue his recuperation at home, it was not the sweet-smelling champagnetoting Jessica who came to retrieve him; this time Walter departed those depressing tangerine and avocado hallways in the company of his adoptive mother, haunted more than ever by ghosts of the past. Lola drove: white hair, skin tanned to leather, the turquoise earrings she’d picked up in New Mexico. The Volvo ratcheted and wheezed. Did he want a monster burger? she wanted to know. With pickle, relish, mayonnaise, mustard and three-star chili sauce? Or did he just want to go straight home and rest? No, he told her, he didn’t want a monster burger, though the food in the hospital had been crap — tasteless, overcooked and heavy on the Jello end of the scale — but he didn’t want to go home either.

Where to, then — Fagnoli’s? For pizza?

No. He didn’t think so. What he really wanted was to go to Depeyster Manufacturing. On Water Street.

Depeyster—?

Uh-huh. He had to see about a job.

But he’d just got out of the hospital. Couldn’t it wait a few days?

It couldn’t.

Walter didn’t bother with the entrance marked EMPLOYEES ONLY — he had Lola park out front, and he swung through the big double doors that gave onto the carpeted vestibule of the inner sanctum, fluid as a gymnast on his crutches, all his weight on his arms and what was now, by default, his good leg. He didn’t bother with Miss Egthuysen either, clumping down the hall as if he owned it, pausing half a moment to knock at the frosted-glass door of executive office #7, and then, without waiting for a response, pushing his way in.

“Walter?” Van Wart gasped, getting up from his desk. “But I thought … I mean, my daughter told me—”

But Walter had no time for explanations. He leaned forward, the padded supports of the crutches cutting like knives into the pits of his arms, and waved his hand in dismissal. “When do I start?” he said.

All right, he was thinking, so maybe the place did need a new coat of paint, and perhaps the wisteria was lifting the slate off the stepped gables out front, and yes, the window frames were gouged, the roof leaked and the interior, big as it was, had grown too small for the clutter of ancestral furnishings, but for his money Van Wart Manor was still the best-kept place of its kind in the Hudson Valley, bar none. Sure, there were the museums — Philipsburg Manor, Sunnyside, the lower Van Wart house itself — but they were soulless, husks of houses, uninhabited, ghostly, useless. Even worse were the private restorations like the Terboss place in Fishkill or the Kent house in Yorktown, owned and occupied by strangers, parvenues, interlopers with names like Brophy, Righetti, Mastafiak. Talk about tradition — it went all the way back to some tramp steamer out of Palermo in 1933. It was a joke, that’s all. A bad joke.