T. Boyle - World's End

Suddenly confident, elated even, he started across the yard, the place just as he remembered it: a few scattered stumps, honeysuckle fallen back from the house in frost-killed clumps, rusted machinery poking its bones from the subsiding bushes. The porch, as usual, was cluttered with everything that wouldn’t fit in the house but was too valuable yet to toss to the elements, and then there was the venerable old wood of the shack itself, aged to the color of silver fox, no lick of paint ever wasted on its parched and blistered hide. As he mounted the steps, a pair of bandy-legged goats stuck out their necks to peer at him around the far corner of the house, and a cat — brindled, with a patch of white over one eye — shot between his legs and vanished in the litter along the path. And then all at once he could feel Jessica moving across the floorboards inside — the same boards that supported him outside the door. Or at least he thought he could. What the hell. He forced his face into a smile and rapped twice. On the door. With his knuckles.

Dead silence.

Frozen silence.

Silence both watchful and tense.

He tried again, tap-tap, and then thought to make use of his voice: “Jessica?”

Now she was moving, he could feel her, could hear her, moving across the floor with a pinch and squeak of the dry boards beneath her, beneath him. One, two, three, four, the door swung open — stove going, bed made, jars of this and that on the shelf — and she was standing there before him.

“Walter,” she said, as if identifying a suspect in a police lineup. He saw the surprise and consternation on her face, and he grinned harder. She was wearing jeans, a pair of men’s high-top sneakers and a cable-knit sweater. Her hair hung loose, and bangs — folksingers’ bangs, newly cut — concealed the high white patrician swell of her brow. She looked good. Better than good. She looked like the girl he’d married.

“I was just passing by,” he joked, “and thought I’d stop in to say hello, I mean, goodbye—”

Still she stood there, the door poised on its hinges, and for a second he thought she was going to slam it in his face, send him packing, boot him out like a fast-talking door-to-door salesman with a vacuum cleaner strapped to his back. But then her face changed, she stepped back, and, perhaps a little too brightly, said: “Well, why don’t you come in out of the cold, at least?”

And then he was in.

As soon as she shut the door, though, confusion took hold of them both — they were in a cell, a box, a cave, there was nowhere to go, they didn’t know what to do with their hands, where to cast their eyes, where to sit or stand or what to say. His back was to the door. She was there, two feet from him, her face as white as it was the time they’d carved a sun-warmed melon in a Catskill meadow and the knife had slipped and gashed her palm. Her head was bowed, her hands clasped in front of her. Was this an awkward moment? You bet.

It was Jessica who recovered first. She turned, brushed past him and bent briskly to relieve the room’s sole armchair of its burden of hats, jackets, dope pipes, cheese graters, paperback books and other impedimenta, at the same time echoing what he’d said at the door: “Goodbye? What do you mean — are you moving or something?”

And so he was able to settle into the vacant armchair and tell her of his impending journey to the heart of the polar night, to joke about mushers and mukluks and ask, in mock earnestness, if she knew a good dog he could take along to warm his hands in. “But seriously,” he went on, encouraged by her laugh, “you don’t have to worry about me — I’m no tenderfoot. I mean, I know my Jack London cold, and there’s no way I’m going to try humping from my motel room to the bar without spitting first.”

“Spitting?”

He glanced over his shoulder as if revealing a closely guarded secret, and then leaned forward. “Uh-huh,” he said, dropping his voice. “If your spit freezes before it hits the ground, you go back to bed and wait till spring.”

Laughing, she offered him a glass of wine — the same vinegary stuff Tom Crane had been fermenting in the corner for the past two years — and settled down at the table beneath the window to string beads and listen. He took it as a good sign that she poured herself a glass too.

“You know,” he said suddenly, “there was this guy in the hospital, in the bed next to me … a midget, I guess he was. Or a dwarf. I always forget the difference.”

“Midgets look like little children,” she said, drawing the shape with her hands. “Everything in proportion.”

“Well, this guy was a dwarf then. He was old. And his head was huge, big ears and nose and all that.” He paused. “His name was Piet. He knew my father.”

She snuck a look at him, then turned back to her work, tugging at a coil of monofilament with her teeth.

“He’s the one who told me he was in Alaska.”

“So that’s it,” she said, turning to him. “Your father.”

Walter chafed the glass between his palms as if he were trying to warm them. He smiled, staring down at the floor. “Well, it’s not exactly the time of year for a vacation up there, you know. I mean, people are losing their noses, earlobes frozen solid, toes dropping like leaves—”

Again she laughed — an old laugh, a laugh that gave him hope.

He looked up, no smile now. “I’m hoping to track him down. See him. Talk to him. He is my father, after all, you know?” And then he was telling her about the letters he’d written — sometimes two or three a day — trying to catch up eleven years in a couple of months. “I told him it was okay, let bygones be bygones, I just wanted to see him. ‘Dear Dad.’ I actually wrote ‘Dear Dad’ at the top of the page.”

He drank off the wine and set the glass down on a carton of old magazines. She was turned away from him, in profile, stringing her beads as if there were nothing else in the world. He watched her a moment, her lips pouted in concentration, and knew she was faking it. She was listening. She was trembling. On fire. He knew it. “Listen,” he said, shifting gears all of a sudden. “I never told you how hurt I was that day in the Grand Union. But I was. I wanted to cry.” His voice was locked deep in his throat.

She looked up at him then, her eyes soft, a little wet maybe, but she let it drop. It was almost as if she hadn’t heard him — one moment he was pouring out his heart to her and the next she was off on a jag of disconnected chatter. She talked about the war, protest marches, the environment — there was untreated sewage being pumped into the river, could he believe that? And then ten miles downstream people were drinking that very same water — incredible, wasn’t it?

Incredible. Yes. He gave her a soulful, seductive look — or what he thought was a soulful, seductive look — and settled in to hear all about it. They were on their third glass of wine when she brought up the Arcadia.

To this point, her litany of industrial wrongs, her enumeration of threatened marshes and polluted coves, her wide-eyed assertion that so-and-so had said such-and-such and that the something-or-other levels were a thousand times the maximum allowable by law, had only managed to lull him into a state of quiet contentment. He was half-listening, watching her hands, her hair, her eyes. But now, all of a sudden, he perked up his ears.

The Arcadia. It was a boat, a sloop, built on an old model. He hadn’t seen it yet, but he’d heard about it. Heard plenty. Dipe and his VFW cronies were up in arms about it— It’s the riots all over again, Walter, Depeyster had told him one night, we taught them a lesson twenty years ago in that cow pasture down the road and now it’s as if it never happened. As far as Walter was concerned, it was no big deal — who cared if there was one hulk more or less on the tired old river? — but at least he had some perspective on it. It was Will Connell’s connection to the thing that burned Dipe and LeClerc and the others, that much was clear. The very name was a bugbear, a red flag, a gauntlet flung down at their feet — Robeson was dead, but Connell was still going strong, vindicated by the backlash against the McCarthy witch hunts, a survivor and a hero. And here he was parading up and down the river in a boat the size of a concert hall (Can you believe it, Walter, Depeyster had asked, his voice lit with outrage, to put together this, this floating circus as a front for his Communistic horseshit … clean water, my ass. All he cares about is waving the Viet Cong flag on the steps of the Capitol Building …), here he was laughing in the faces of the very people who’d turned out to shut him and Robeson down twenty years back.