T. Boyle - World's End

There before him, strung out across the road and down the shoulder as far as he could see, was a line of people. Picnickers. The men in hats and baggy pants, the women in culottes and sandals and ankle socks, their arms laden with baskets, children, lawn chairs, newspapers to spread out on the ground. He was headed right for them, their cries of alarm terrible in his ears, people scattering like dominoes, a single woman — pamphlets tucked under her arm, a toddler at her side — frozen in his path, and his foot, his impotent alien foot, only now finding the brake. There was a scream, a blizzard of paper, his own face, his mother’s, and then they were gone and he was wrestling with the wheel, all the way out on the far side of the road.

He wasn’t aiming for it, didn’t mean it — he was drunk, freaked out, hallucinating — but there it was. The marker. Dead ahead of him. By the time he reached it, he couldn’t have been doing more than twenty, battling to keep out of the ditch, billows of dust rocketing up behind him — on the wrong side of the road, for christ’s sake! Still, he did hit it, dead on, the bumper of the MG like the prow of an icebreaker, cryptic Cranes and unfathomable Mohonks flung to the winds, metal grinding on metal. In the next instant he was in control again, swerving back across the road just in time to thread the stone pillars and make the hard cut into the long stately sweeping drive of Van Wart Manor.

Here, peace reigned. The world was static, tranquil, timeless, bathed in the enduring glow of privilege and prosperity. There were no phantasms here, no signs of class strife, of grasping immigrants, trade unionists, workers, Communists and malcontents, no indication that the world had changed at all in the past three hundred years. Walter gazed out on the spreading maples, the flagstone paths, the spill of the lawns and the soft pastel patterns of the roses against the lush backdrop of the woods, and he felt the panic subside. Everything was all right. Really. He was just a little drunk, that was all.

As he swung around the parabola of the driveway and approached the house itself, he saw that there were three cars pulled up at the curb in front: Dipe’s Mercedes, Joanna’s station wagon and Mardi’s Fiat. He was a little sloppy with the wheel — almost nodded off while shifting into reverse, in fact — but managed to wedge himself in between the station wagon and Fiat without hitting anything. So far as he could tell, that is. He was standing woozily in front of the MG, inspecting the bumper where the sign had raked it, when he heard the front door slam and looked up to see Joanna coming down the steps toward him.

She was dressed in moccasins and leggings, in fringed buckskin spotted with grease or ink or something, and her skin had a weird rufous cast to it, the color of old brick. Bits of feathers and seashells and whatnot dangled from her hair, which was knotted and tangled and so slick with grease she must have shampooed with salad oil. She had a box with her. A big cardboard supermarket box that bore the logo of a detergent guaranteed to brighten your shirts and socks and your mornings too. The box was overladen and she was balancing it on the apex of her swollen abdomen, waddling a bit, her lips molded in a beatific smile.

“Hi,” Walter said, straightening up and rubbing his hands together, as if crouching down in her driveway were the most natural thing in the world for him to have been doing. “Just, uh, checking to see if the beast was leaking oil again, you know?” he slurred, making it a question, an excuse and a plea all rolled in one.

Joanna acted as if she hadn’t heard him. Just kept coming, waddling, embracing the big box full of — what was it, dolls? “Hi,” Walter repeated, as she drew even with him, “need a hand with that?”

Now, for the first time, her eyes seemed to focus on him. “Oh, hi,” she said, her voice as tranquil and steady as if she’d been expecting him, “you startled me.” Her eyes were Mardi’s, but all the ice was melted from them. She didn’t look startled at all. In fact, if Walter didn’t know better, he would have guessed she was stoned. “Yes,” she said, dumping the box in his arms, “please.”

Walter took the box. Inside were dolls. Or rather, parts of dolls: heads, limbless torsos, the odd arm or leg with its molded sock and shoe affixed. Each of them — each face, limb, set of buttocks, belly and chest — had been slathered with some sort of paint or polish that made it look rusty, flesh gone the color of rakes left out in the rain. Walter clutched the box to his chest while Joanna fumbled through her rabbit-skin purse for the keys to the station wagon’s rear door.

It seemed to take her forever. Walter began to feel uncomfortable, standing there beneath the unwavering August sun in his stained pants and sweaty shirt, staring drunkenly into the heap of dismembered limbs, frozen smiles and madly winking eyes, and so he said, “For the Indians?” just to say something.

She took the box from him, gave him a look that made him wonder if she really had recognized him after all, then slid the box into the back of the wagon and slammed the door. “Of course,” she said, turning away from him to make her way to the front of the car, “who else is there?”

Next it was Lula.

She knew him now, of course, knew him well — he was the friend of her nephew Herbert and one of Mr. Van Wart’s executives. And a very special friend of Mardi too. She greeted him at the door with a smile that showed all the fillings in her teeth. “You look like you been run down in the street,” she said.

Walter gave her a sloppy grin and found himself in the anteroom, glancing first up the staircase to where the door to Mardi’s lair lay masked in shadow, and then to his left, where the comforting gloom of the old parlor was steeped in muted sunlight.

“Mardi’s upstairs,” Lula said, giving him a sly look, “and Mr. Van Wart’s out back someplace — poking around in the barn, I think. Which one you want?”

Walter was aiming for nonchalance, but the Scotch was drilling holes in his head and his feet seemed to have called in sick. He took hold of the banister for support. “I guess I came to see Mardi,” he said.

Only now did he notice that Lula was clutching her purse, and that a little white straw hat floated atop the typhoon of her hair. “I’m on my way out the door,” she said, “but I’ll give her a hoot.” Her voice rose in stentorian summons, practiced, assured and familiar all at once—“Mardi!” she called, “Mardi! Somebody here to see you!”—and then she gave him another great wide lickerish grin and ducked out the door.

There was a moment of restive silence, as if the old house were caught in that briefest hiatus between one breath and another, and then Mardi’s voice — querulous, world-weary, so shot through with boredom it was almost a whine — came back to him: “Well, who is it — Rick?” Silence. Then her voice again, faint, muffled, as if she’d already lost interest and turned away, “So send him up already.”

Walter was not Rick. Walter did not in fact know who Rick was, nor did he much care. Shakily, unsteadily, he lifted the stones of his feet, gripping the banister as if it were a lifeline, and mounted the stairs. At the top, Mardi’s door, first one on the right. The door stood slightly ajar, a garish poster of a band Walter had never heard of crudely affixed to the face of it. He hesitated a moment, staring into the hungry shameless eyes of the band’s members, trying out the ponderous flat-footed syllables of their esoteric name on his tongue, wondering if he should knock. The booze decided for him. He pushed his way in.

The room was as dark as any cave, a low moan of bass and guitar caught in the far speaker, Mardi, in the light from the door, hunkered over an ashtray in the middle of the bed. She was wearing a T-shirt and panties, nothing more. “Rick?” she said, squinting against the invasion of light.