T. Boyle - World's End

She didn’t like it, didn’t like it a bit. For one thing, her husband had a boat at the marina, and how could she visit Jeremy there without arousing suspicion? And for another, Indians didn’t live on boats. They lived in longhouses, in lodges and wickiups and tar-paper shacks, they lived on land. And why in God’s name would he want to spoil the setup they already had? The way it was, she could visit him any time the spirit moved her — through the woods, direct to his bed, a fifteen-minute walk that got her juices flowing and put the sparkle back in her eyes. No, she didn’t like it, but she gave him the money all the same. And now, in the grimmest month of her life, in the penultimate month of her pregnancy, in the dismal, disastrous October of a year of riots in the streets, assassinations and men on the moon, now, after two years of trysts in the secret swaying darkness of that damp and fishy boat, she knew why he’d done it — to get away from her, that’s why. To mock her. To punish her.

It was an old story, a sad story, and it went like this: three weeks ago, gravid, swollen with his child, weighed down by this alien presence within her and yet lighter than air too, she went to him, full of the future, wanting only to hold him, touch him, rock with him in the cramped bunk of the Kitchawank as it rode the translucent skin of the river. As usual, she parked in the lot of Fagnoli’s restaurant and took a cab to the marina, and as usual, she found him below decks, reading. (He was going through two or three books a day — anything from Marcuse, Malcolm X or Mao Tse Tung to James Fenimore Cooper and the fantasies of Vonnegut, Tolkien or Salmón.) On this particular day — she remembered it distinctly — he was reading a paperback with a cover that featured a busty half-clad woman cowering before a liver-colored reptilian creature with teeth like nail files and an unmistakable genital bulge in the crotch of his silver jumpsuit. “Hello,” she said softly, ducking low to avoid the insidious beam on which she’d cracked her head a hundred times in the past.

He didn’t return her greeting. And when she made as if to squeeze in beside him on the bunk — stooped awkwardly, the baby swinging like a pendulum — he didn’t move. She felt the boat lurch beneath her and she sat heavily on the edge of the bunk across from him, a distance of perhaps three feet in those cramped quarters. For a long while she just sat there, glowing, beaming at him, drinking in the sight of him, and then, when she felt she wanted him so badly she couldn’t take it another second, she broke the silence with a soft amiable inquiry: “Good book?”

He didn’t answer. Didn’t even so much as grunt.

Another moment passed. The air coming down the gangway was cool, salt, smelling of the mélange of things that ran through the river’s veins — fish, of course, and seaweed. But other things too, things that weren’t so pleasant. Or natural. Who was it had told her they were dumping sewage upriver? She peered out the grimy porthole behind Jeremy and pictured the gray chop awash with human excrement, with toilet paper and sanitary napkins, and all at once she felt depressed. “Jeremy,” she said suddenly, and the words were out of her mouth before she could stop them. “I’m going to leave Depeyster.”

For the first time, he looked at her. The hooded eyes she knew so well lifted themselves from the page and focused their green squint on hers.

“I don’t care what he thinks or my parents or the neighbors or anyone else either. Even if he won’t give me a divorce. What I mean is, I want to be with you”—she reached out to squeeze his hand—“always.” Now it was said, now it was out in the open and there was no turning back.

It was a subject he’d avoided. Strenuously. Assiduously. Even, it seemed to her, fearfully. Yes, he assured her, he wanted her to have his child. Yes, he wanted to live out on the river for a while, fishing, crabbing, doing odd jobs around the marina to pick up the little he needed to get by — a dollar here and there for used paperbacks, a carton of eggs, the occasional soft drink. And yes, he loved her (though the question really didn’t have any meaning, did it?). But she was another man’s wife and things were fine the way they were. Besides, he couldn’t see the future at all. Not yet, anyway, not yet.

But now it was out in the open and there was no turning back: she was going to leave Depeyster for him. “I could live here on the boat with you,” she went on, staring at the floor, the words coming in a spate, “and we could go upriver and dock at Manitou or Garrison or Cold Spring. Or maybe on the other side of the river — at Highland Falls or Middle Hope. I have some money, my own money, a trust fund my mother’s father set up for me when I was a girl, and I’ve never touched it, you know, thinking that someday—” but she couldn’t go on, because now, suddenly, unconsciously, she was looking into his face.

And his face was terrible. No longer the face of the stoic who could have posed for the frieze on the back of a nickel, nor even of the strange charismatic man who’d led her across the threshold of the bright little room at the Hiawatha Motel or taught her to slip through the woods like the ghost of a deer, it was the face of the raider, the avenger, the face beneath the raised tomahawk. He sat up. Shoved himself violently from the bunk and stooped over her, his back, shoulders, neck melding with the dark low rafters. “I don’t want you,” he said. “I don’t want your half-breed bastard, or your quarter-breed either.”

His face was in hers. She could smell the fish on his breath, the sweat dried in the armpit of his shirt. “Destroyer,” he hissed. “Usurper. She-wolf. Charity Lady.” He pursed his lips, almost as if he were about to kiss her, and held her with his fierce unstinting gaze. “I spit on you.”

The next morning, the Kitchawank was gone.

Depeyster’s voice—“Joanna! Joanna, get that, will you?”—came to her as if from another dimension, as if she were trying to conduct her life on the cold floor of the river and the current drove all the words down. “Joanna!”

It was the door. Children were at the door — she could see them through the window — dressed as witches, ghosts, imps, Indian braves, Indian princesses. A jack-o’-lantern leered from the corner, where her husband, who couldn’t have loved the tradition more were he a child himself, had set out a bowl of candy corn and Hershey’s Kisses. Numbly she rose from the chair, fought the tug of the current, and fumbled to open the door. Their voices piped around her, swallowed her up, and their ugly little paws clutched at the contents of the bowl she’d somehow managed to lift from the table and prop against the swell of her belly. Then they were gone and she was struggling up-stream to sink ponderously into the waiting chair.

“Joanna? Sweetheart?”

She turned in the direction of his voice, and there he was, in silk hose and knee breeches, in a square-skirted coat with stupendous brass buttons, in buckled shoes and sugarloaf hat. “How do I look?” he said, adjusting the brim of his hat in the mirror over the mantelpiece.

How did he look? He looked like a refugee from one of Rembrandt’s group portraits, like a colonist, a pioneer, like the patroon who’d wrested the place from the Indians. He looked, down to the smallest detail, exactly as he looked each year for LeClerc Outhouse’s Halloween party. There was one year, a long time back, when he was still young and adventurous, that he’d dressed as Pieter Stuyvesant, pegleg and all, but ever after he’d been the patroon. After all, he told her, why fool with perfection? “You look fine,” she said, the words trailing from her mouth as if encapsulated in the little bubbles they used in the funny papers.