T. Boyle - World's End

The station wagon — it was a Chevy, brand-new, white, with that fake wood business along the side — surprised him. It came around the corner by Dick Fourtrier’s place, muscling its way over the washboard dirt and the potholes, and then slowed in front of One Bird’s, jerking to a halt finally just down the road. On came the back-up lights, and the wagon lumbered back till it was even with him. He saw a head bob in the window, saw the wind tug at the exhaust. The morning locked itself up in silence. Then the driver’s door fell open and there she was, Joanna, the charity lady, coming around the side of the car in her leather pumps, her cashmere sweater and pleated skirt, coming up the flagstone path with its hackles of stiff yellow weed, coming to the house that needed paint, coming to him.

“Hello,” she said when she was halfway up the walk, and her smile gave back the glory of all those years of six-month checkups and all those miles of dental floss well-plied.

He was stoic, he was tough, he was an ex-con, a survivor, a man who lived off the land, a communist. His own teeth were rotten as a hyena’s and he was wearing work pants, a flannel shirt and a vest that had once been sky blue in color but was now smeared with grease, blood, steak sauce, the leavings of rabbit, pheasant, fish. He watched her with cold green eyes and he said nothing.

She stopped at the foot of the porch, her smile just the smallest bit strained, and she clasped her slim hands together and began twisting a ring round her finger — a diamond, of the type that proclaimed her the property of another man. “Hi,” she said, reiterating the greeting, as if he might not have heard her the first time, “can you tell me where I might find the social hall?”

The social hall. He wanted to sneer at her, shock her, hurt her, wanted to tell her she could look for it up her ass for all he cared, but he didn’t. There was something about her — he couldn’t say what — that set her apart from the others, those blue-haired old loons with their ratty blankets and their bibles and the rest of their do-goody claptrap, and it frightened him. Just a bit. Or maybe it wasn’t fright exactly — it was more of a frisson, a jolt. He just couldn’t picture her waving a placard (Save the Poor Ignorant Downtrodden Native American!) with the rest of them or slipping into a cheery barbecue apron and serving up flapjacks and sausage links at one of those horrific charity breakfasts.

She was a good-looking woman, of course — young, too — but that wasn’t it. There was something else here, something deeper, something that was coming to him like a gift, like a birthday cake with all the candles aglow. He didn’t know what. Not yet. It was enough to know it was there.

Since he’d said nothing, merely dug into her with those insolent eyes and dropped the barrel of the gun between his legs, rubbing it up and down as suggestively as he could, she went on, her voice a little jumpy, talking too fast now: “It’s my first time. Here, I mean. I’m from downstate, in Westchester, and Harriet Moore — she’s a friend of my cousin from Skaneateles — well, to make a long story short,” tossing her hair to indicate the wagon behind her, “I’ve got a load of stuff that we collected in the Peterskill area — cranberries, canned peaches and yellow beans, and — and gravy mix — for the, for you, I mean — no, I mean for your people and …” she trailed off in confusion, the green gaze too much for her.

He stopped rubbing. A wedge of geese called out from half a mile up. She glanced over her shoulder to where the car sat at the curb, still running, the door flung open wide, and then turned back to him: “So can you tell me where it is?”

For the first time, he spoke: “Where what is?”

“The social hall.”

He set the gun down on the newspaper spread out to protect the weathered boards of the porch, then rose from his chair to tower over her. And then he grinned, rotten teeth and all. “Sure,” he said, coming down off the steps to stand there and catch the scent of her, “sure I know where it is. I’ll take you there myself.”

He had sex with her that night, after she’d unloaded her dusty cans of succotash and anchovy paste and whatever other garbage the good wives of Peterskill had found cluttering the dark recesses of their cupboards, sex that necessarily involved some damage to underwear that looked as if it had just come off the shelf at Bloomingdale’s. He tore it from her on the bed of her sanitized room at the Hiawatha Motel, where everything — chairs, bureau, mirror frame, even the TV cabinet — was constructed of Lincoln Logs, painstakingly fit, glued and shellacked by reservation squaws for fifty cents an hour. It was a decor designed to give you that woodsy feeling, that half-naked, tomahawk-thumping, mugwump-in-his-lodgehouse sort of feeling. In Jeremy, however, it produced a very different feeling. One that made him want to tear the underwear from charity ladies.

Joanna surprised him, though. He’d expected prim, he’d expected blushing and beautiful, the averted eye and the trembling flesh. But she wasn’t like that at all. She was hungry, needful, more savage than he. Once he’d heard her name, once he’d unraveled the threads of her identity— “Van Wart?” No, it can’t be? Depeyster Van Wart, son of the old man, old Rombout?”—he knew he’d have her, that it was destined to be, that this was the gift wrapped specially for him, and he knew that he would humiliate her, ravage her, fill her right up to the back of the throat with all the bitterness of his fifty-five bleak and hopeless years. But she surprised him. The more brutal he was, the more she liked it. She came at him, lashing, lacerating, leaving marks on his back, and the whole thing turned on him. He backed off. Gave in. Fell, for the first time in his life, in love.

He waited for her, every other week, for the station wagon laden with rhinestone-encrusted handbags, golf clubs, Caldor sneakers, with wood-etching sets, men’s overcoats, galoshes, and took her directly from the social hall to the motel. He never confessed to her how much he hated the place, how much he resented it. But after a month or two, after he’d overstayed his welcome at One Bird’s, and Christmas and New Year’s had come and gone, he told her that the Hiawatha Motel made him sick. But it wasn’t just the motel, it was the whole godforsaken, fenced-in, roped-off disease of the reservation itself. It was One Bird. The Tantaquidgeons. The whole thing. It stank.

They were walking the banks of the Conewango after making love, she in the fringed buckskin jacket and leggings he’d given her for Christmas, he in his work pants and flannel shirt and the new down vest she’d given him in return, and she stopped him with a tug of her arm. “What do you mean?” she asked.

“I mean it’s time for a change. I’m going back to Peterskill.”

Her face went strange for a moment, and he could see that she was trying to fit the idea into her scheme of things, trying to place her wild aboriginal lover in the tranquil picture of her Peterskill, alongside her husband, her daughter, the big galleon of a house that rode the sea of all those perfect lawns in an unbroken chain of perfect days. Then she shrugged. Reached her face up to his and kissed him. “Fine with me,” she said. “I’ll be able to see you all the more.”

And so he packed up his things — underwear, socks, moccasins, the rude garments he’d fashioned from hides and that he wore only on his native soil, Ruttenburr’s book, the gutting knife — while One Bird offered her opinion of the charity lady with the glass eyes, and then he climbed into the station wagon beside Joanna and rode in comfort over the creeks and hills he’d crossed on foot for the first time so many years before. He gazed out the window on the Allegheny, the Cohocton and the Susquehanna rivers, on the timber-lined mounds of the Catskills, on the plunging dark drop of the Hudson’s gorge. Then they were over the Bear Mountain Bridge, through the outskirts of Peterskill and heading east on Van Wart Road, and he felt like Hannibal coming into Rome, like a conquering hero, like a man who would never again know defeat.