T. Boyle - World's End

They were gone.

Son of a bitch. He wanted to tear the place apart, wanted to kill her, kill him. “Hey, shake it up there, will you,” he heard himself snarl, the checker, the woman ahead of him, the stringy looking boxboy all suddenly gone white in the face, “you think I got all day here?”

Outside, the first thing he did — even before he loaded the perishables into the trunk of the MG or stripped off his damp jacket and rolled up the sleeves — was trundle angrily on up to the liquor store on the far side of the laundromat and buy himself a pint of Old Inver House. He didn’t usually drink in the afternoon — even on a Saturday afternoon — and he hadn’t been drunk, or stoned either, since New Year’s and the occasion of his second dire miscue in the face of history. But this was different. This was a situation that called for meliorative measures, for a dampening and allaying of the spirit, for loss of control. He dropped the groceries in the trunk and eased into the driver’s seat. Right then and there, though the top was down and everyone could see him, he cracked the Scotch and took a long burning hit of it. And then another. He glared at a beefy armed old woman who looked suspiciously like his grandmother, tossed the bottle cap over his shoulder, jammed the pint between his legs and took off in a smokescreen of exhaust, laying down rubber as if he were flaying flesh.

The bottle was half-gone and he was hurtling up the Mohican Parkway, concentrating on pinning the obstinate little white needle on a speck of dust mired between the 8 and the o, when he thought of Miss Egthuysen — of Laura. If he was now the very model of the disaffected hero, cut off from friends, wife and family (the last two times he’d stopped in for dinner with Hesh and Lola he’d wound up in a shouting match over his relationship with Depeyster Van Wart), cut off from feeling itself, well, at least he had Laura. As a consolation of sorts. If Meursault had his Marie (“A moment later she asked me if I loved her. I said that sort of question had no meaning, really; but I supposed I didn’t”), Walter had his Laura. And that was something. Especially at a time like this.

He might have paused to reflect on the turmoil of his feelings, to wonder why, when ostensibly he couldn’t have given a shit what Jessica, Tom Crane, Mardi or the pope in Rome himself did or didn’t do, he felt so bitter and desperate all of a sudden. But he didn’t pause. The trees beat past him, endless lashings of green, the wind tore at his hair and the image of Miss Egthuysen loomed up out of his fevered brain. He saw her stretched out naked on the black velvet couch in her living room, her lips puckered in a kissy pout, hands masking her breasts, her private hair so blonde it might have been white. Suddenly the onrushing breeze went sweet with the scent of the vanilla extract she dabbed behind her ears, on her wrists and ankles and between her breasts (extra-thick shakes, napoleons, Boston cream pie, that’s what he thought of when he closed his eyes and plunged into the creamy aromatic core of her), and he hit the brakes so hard the car fishtailed a hundred yards up the parkway. In the next instant he was humping over a grassy divider — no one coming either way, thank god — and peeling out on the far side of the road, headed south.

The bottle was two-thirds gone and the day’s second disappointment on him as he jabbed angrily at what for a moment had become the glowing little omphalos of Miss Egthuysen’s existence, the door buzzer. He listened, first with anticipation, then with impatience, and finally with despair shading into rage, as the harsh trill of the buzzer sounded in the cluttered hallway he knew so well. There was no answer. He felt defeated. Put out. Abused. The bitch, he muttered, throwing himself down heavily on the front steps and peering into the aperture of the bottle like a jeweler examining a rare stone. As luck would have it, he was sitting in a puddle of something resinous and sticky, something that was even then irreparably transforming the hue of his beige slacks, but he was too far gone to notice.

Overwhelmed with drunken gloom, Walter tilted the bottle back and drank, pausing only to level his eyes on the pinched censorious features of Laura’s landlady, Mrs. Deering, who was regarding him with loathing from behind the sunstruck front window of the apartment next door. Walter momentarily lowered the bottle to fix her with a look so vehement, so bestial, slack-jawed and irresponsible, that she backed away from the window as if from the sight of some half-wit abusing himself in the street. Keeping her eyes on him all the way, she disappeared into the fastness of her apartment, no doubt to telephone the sheriff, the state police and the local barracks of the National Guard. Okay, fine. What did Walter care? What were they going to do to him — string him up by his feet? He had a bitter laugh at the thought, but it only served to intensify his gloom. The fact was that the confectionery comforts of Miss Egthuysen were not available to him, and his bottle was nearly empty. Yes, and his wife was living with his best friend, he himself was crippled, unloved and doomed by the scourge of history, and all those letters he’d addressed to Truman Van Brunt, c/o General Delivery, Barrow, Alaska, had vanished as if into the snowy wasteland itself, pale missives overwhelmed by white.

Cursing, he took hold of the rusty wrought-iron railing and pulled himself to his feet. He stood there a moment, swaying like a sapling in a storm, glaring angrily at Mrs. Deering’s window as if challenging her to show herself again. Then he killed the bottle, dropped it in the bushes and wiped his hands on his shirt. A kid on a bicycle — eight, nine years old, red hair, freckles — came tearing down the sidewalk as he lurched for the car, and it was all Walter could do to avoid him. Unfortunately, the concentration and force of will expended in this tricky maneuver left him vulnerable to other obstacles. Like the fire hydrant. In the next instant, the kid was gone, Mrs. Deering’s head had reappeared in the window, and Walter was reclining face down on the lawn.

Back in the car, he examined the grass stains on the knees of his once-beige trousers and the suspicious smear at the base of his clocked tie. What next? he muttered angrily, jerking the tie from his neck and flinging it into the street. It took him a while to fit the key into the little silver slot of the ignition, which kept dodging away from him and bobbing back again, like a float with a nibbling fish beneath it, but at last he succeeded, firing up the car with a vibraphonic rattle of the valve lifters. He looked around him for a moment, the world gone suddenly strange, his face tingling as if a swarm of tiny hairy-legged creatures were trapped beneath the skin and struggling to get out. Then he slammed the car into gear and took off with a screech Mrs. Deering would never forget.

Before he knew it, he was on Van Wart Road. Heading west. That is, heading in the direction of several significant landmarks. Tom Crane’s hubcap, for one. Van Wart Manor, for another. And for yet another, the hellish, mysterious, realigned and reinforced historical marker that had launched him on this trail of tears in the first place.

And where was he going?

Not until he’d come within a cigarette’s length of sideswiping a van full of fist-waving teenagers at Cats’ Corners, not until he’d lumbered through the wicked S curve that followed, not until he slowed at Tom Crane’s elm to bore his eyes into the back of the car pulled up on the shoulder beneath it, did it become clear to him: he was going to Van Wart Manor. For Mardi. The MG rolled to a halt and he gazed ruefully at the hubcap leering at him from the bole of the elm I’m home, yes, it seemed to mock, and so is she —until a station wagon roared past him in the outside lane, horn blaring, and he came to his senses. He jerked the wheel and lurched away from that declamatory hubcap, intent on Van Wart Manor and the solace of Mardi, but almost as soon as he hit the gas — gravel flying, tires protesting, Jessica’s Bug falling away to his right — he was stabbing for the brake. Violently. Desperately.