T. Boyle - World's End

Happy? Yes. For he was no longer the horny celibate monkish saint he’d been for so long — things were different now, radically different: now he had a roommate. A soulmate. A love to share his vegetable medley and mung bean casserole and hang his socks out on the line where the sun peeked through the sylvan umbrella to warm the mossy banks of Blood Creek. It was this love that made him blissful, rapturous, silly even, this love that made him want to cut capers in the parking lot like Herbert Pompey sailing across the stage in La Mancha or kiss old Mrs. Fagnoli as she dragged herself from the car at the post office. Tom Crane had passed from sainthood to ecstasy.

He was happy on other counts too. For one thing, he’d failed his draft physical for the third straight time. Too skinny. He’d fasted the whole month of June (no way he was going to be a tool of the capitalist oppressors and take up arms against his revolutionary brothers in Vietnam) and staggered off the Selective Service scale at six foot two, a hundred and twenty-three pounds. Now he wouldn’t have to skulk off to Canada or Sweden or go through the trouble of faking a suicide. And to compound the joy, on the very day he’d failed his physical, the bees came into his life. Forty hives. Put up for sale by some decrepit old bankrupt redneck in Hopewell Junction for a pittance, a fraction of what they were worth. Tom had them now. Bees. What a concept: they did all the work, and he collected the profit. It was like the goose that laid the golden eggs. All he had to do was gather the stuff, strain it, pour it into the old mason jars he’d found in his grandfather’s basement, and sell it by the roadside, each jar decorated with a twenty-five-cents-the-gross lick ’em and stick ’em label that read TOM CRANE CRANE’S GOLD in Jessica’s handsomest script.

And then, as if all this bounty of bliss weren’t enough, there was the Arcadia.

Since he’d left Cornell, he’d led an aimless, commitmentless, dirt-bagging, pot-growing, goat-turd-mulching sort of existence, drifting from one placid scene to the next, like a water chestnut before it puts down roots. The Arcadia gave him an anchor for those roots. If there was a God, and He had come down from the portals of heaven to sort through all the world’s employments and enthusiasms in order to match Tom Crane up with his true, his only, his quintessential métier, the Arcadia would have been it.

The first he’d heard of it was at the April meeting of the Manitou-on-Hudson Marshwort Preservationists’ League. The speaker that evening was a tiny, bearded, lectern-thumping apologist for the Arcadia Foundation who, between thumps, gave a brief history of the fledgling organization, fulminated against the polluters and despoilers of the river, distributed membership applications and passed the hat (a porkpie cap, actually) for donations. What’s more, he showed slides of the Arcadia itself, sprung full-blown from Will Connell’s imagination.

It seemed that Will, the crusty radical folksinger and friend of the earth whose voice had rung loud and clear over Peletiah Crane’s cow pasture on that infamous day back in 1949, had had a dream. A vision. One that involved gentle breezes, halcyon days, sails and rigging and teakwood decks. He’d been reading a dog-eared old tome (Under Sail on Hudson’s River, by Preservation Crane, New York, 1879) that hearkened back to the days when the river was crowded with the low-bellied, broad-beamed Dutch sloops rendered obsolete by the steam engine, and suddenly the Arcadia rode up out of the misty recesses of some old chantey lodged in his brain. That very afternoon he strapped the mandolin to his back and hitchhiked down to the Scarsdale home of Sol and Frieda Lowenstein.

The Lowensteins were Communists who’d weathered the McCarthy era to make a killing in the recording industry. They were longtime friends and champions of Will and his music, known for their generosity in support of worthy causes. Will plunked himself down on the white linen couch in the Lowenstein drawing room, picked a song or two on the mandolin and wondered aloud why there were no big old work sloops on the Hudson anymore, the kind you saw in dim oil paintings and daguerreotypes in bars with names like “The Ship ’N’ Shore” and “The Spouter Inn.” You know, he said, the kind of big, quiet, white-sailed ship that would make people feel good about the river, and he showed them some pictures from Preservation Crane’s book. Sol and Frieda didn’t know, but they were willing to put up a piece of the money to find out. The result was the Arcadia Foundation, eight hundred and sixty-two strong, a nonprofit, tax-deductible organization dedicated to cleaning up the river, saving the short-nosed sturgeon, the osprey and the marshwort, and the Arcadia itself, all one hundred and six feet of her, a working replica of the sloops of old that would run up and down the river spreading the good news. The launching, from a shipyard in Maine, was scheduled for the Fourth of July.

Tom was electrified. It was as if all the disparate pieces of his life had come together in this one inspired moment. Here was something he could get behind, a slogan, a banner, a raison d’être: Save the River! Hail, Arcadia! Power to the People! Here was a way to protest the war, assert his extraterrestrial/vegetarian/nonviolent hippie credo, stick a thorn in the side of the establishment and clean up the river all in one blow. It was too perfect. The Will Connell connection went all the way back to the early days of the struggle that had consecrated the ground on which the shack stood, and the ecology thing tied up the loose ends of his job at Con Ed — with his experience, with his savvy and know-how, he could step aboard the Arcadia as a crew member, maybe even captain it! The fluorescent lights sizzled overhead, the little man raised his fist aloft in exhortation and all at once Tom pictured himself at the helm, champion of the lowly perch and sucker, foe to the polluters, the robber barons, the warmongers and orphan makers, the glorious high-masted ship cutting upriver like the great Ark itself, bastion of righteousness, goodness and light.

He joined that night. The next morning he quit his two-day-a-week job at Con Ed (no more formalin sniffing for him!) and gunned the Packard all the way up to South Bristol, Maine, where he found the Arcadia and volunteered his services as carpenter, fitter, pot scrubber and gofer. He was aboard for the launching, crewed on the trip down from New England, and in two weeks — was it only two weeks? — he’d be going aboard for a month as second mate.

Too much, too much, too much. The thought of it — all of it, love, freedom, bees and the sloop — had him capering around the Grand Union like a fool in motley. In fact, he was juggling two oranges and an avocado, watching his hands and gradually expanding the perimeter of his arc, when he looked up and saw Walter standing there before him.

It was a shock. His mood evaporated, his concentration broke. One of the oranges skewed off to the right and vanished in a bin of bean sprouts; the other landed at his feet with a sick thump. Walter caught the avocado.

The saint let out a gasp, mumbled two or three nonsensical phrases along the lines of “Hi are you, how?” and inadvertently jerked the cart over the little toes of his right foot.

Walter said nothing. He merely stood there, smiling faintly, the sagacious professor with an awkward student. He was dressed, to Tom’s amazement, in wingtip shoes, Arrow shirt, light tan summer suit and clocked tie. He was suntanned, handsome, big, standing up straight and tall on his inert feet like a man who’d never known the violence of the surgeon’s blade. “Tom Crane,” he said finally, grinning wider to show off his strong white teeth, “so how the hell are you? Still living up in the shack?”