World's End (15 page)

It was at that point that Truman came into the picture. Like Hesh, he'd been out of the service for nearly four years now—but unlike Hesh and most other veterans, he'd never abandoned the habit of regular physical exercise. He kept himself in trim with the daily regimen of calisthenics, cross-country running and weight-lifting he'd begun when he was with Army Intelligence in England. At thirty-one, he'd barely lost a step on the eighteen-year-old dynamo who'd led Hendrick Hudson to the county championship in two sports. When Hesh realized that someone had to get out, he knew Truman was his man.

Instructing his troops to hold out at all costs, he doubled back down the road to the meadow, passing the forlorn cars and buses of the concertgoers and skirting the stage where a thousand folding chairs stood unoccupied. Hurrying, he caught a glimpse of Christina, white-faced and glum, sitting at the table with her pamphlets, and of the other women gathered in clusters before the empty stage. Here and there children were playing, but in hushed voices and with movements that might have been choreographed for an underwater ballet. One of the unlucky ushers—a girl of sixteen—sat alone beneath the stage, a bright carnation of blood flowering at the neck of her blouse.

He found Truman leaning against a tree that commanded a view of the meadow all the way out to the road at the far end of the property. Piet was with him, and they were conferring in low tones like a pair of military strategists surveying a battlefield—which wasn't far from the truth of the matter. Their squad had caught two of the patriots out in the open and driven them back, but otherwise things
were quiet. Hesh explained the situation and asked Truman if he would try to slip out and get to a phone. It would be dangerous, and he'd have to leave Christina behind, but if he didn't get through it looked as if the worst was going to happen.

Truman shrugged. Sure, he'd give it a try.

“Good,” Hesh said. “Good. If the troopers know we've called out, if they know we've got to the papers, they'll have no excuse—they'll have to bail us out.”

Truman was staring down at his feet. He glanced up at Hesh and then away again. In the distance, they could hear the mob roaring. “Yeah,” he said, “I'll go. But I want to take Piet with me.”

Hesh glanced at Piet. His face was expressionless and pale, and his ears seemed unnaturally large in proportion to the rest of him. He couldn't have been taller than four-eight or -nine, and if he weighed eighty-five pounds, half of it must have been in the funny old-fashioned buckled boots he always wore. “What the hell,” Hesh murmured. “Take him.” Piet wasn't in this anyway—he'd come on a lark—and he probably couldn't have held back one of the rednecks' grandmothers if he'd wanted to. “You sure he won't slow you down?”

Truman replied that Piet could take care of himself, and then he turned and started off across the field, the little man jogging to keep up with him, all but lost in the high stiff grass. It was the last Hesh—or anyone else—would see of them that night.

Lola paused. She'd lit another cigarette and let it burn itself out. The coffee cup was empty. The first time Walter had heard the story he'd interrupted here to ask what had happened to them; now he wanted to hear it again. “So what happened?”

No one knew for sure. It was as if he and Piet had simply vanished. There was no record of any call to the police or newspapers, Hesh's knock sounded hollowly on the Dutch door of Piet's furnished room in Peterskill next morning, and none of the injured at the local hospitals answered to their descriptions. Hesh was afraid they'd been killed, beaten to death by the mob and dumped in a gully along the road. Though he had a headache that was like a mallet inside his skull, though he'd taken ten stitches in his forearms and half a dozen over his right ear, and though he was haggard from stress and lack of sleep, he was up at first light on the morning following the riot,
beating the bushes on either side of Van Wart Road. He found nothing. Little did he realize it at the time, but it would be nearly fifteen months before either he or Lola would lay eyes on Truman again. And Piet—Piet was gone for good.

Two days after the riot, Truman turned up at the bungalow out back of the Rosenberg place. By that point, Christina was in shock. Walter was three. He clung to his father's knees, chanting “Daddy, Daddy,” but Truman ignored him. Truman gave Christina a weak grin and began to pack his things. “We thought you were dead,” she said. “What happened? What are you doing?” He wouldn't answer her. Just kept packing. Sweaters, underwear, books—his precious books. Walter was crying. “Did they hurt you, is that it?” Christina screamed. “Truman, answer me!”

A car stood in the driveway. It was a Buick, and they say it belonged to Depeyster Van Wart. Piet, barely visible over the dash, was sitting in the passenger seat. “I'm sorry,” Truman said, and then he was gone.

It was nearly a year after the funeral when he turned up again. Unshaven, drunk, sorrowful-looking, in clothes that hung from him like a beggar's rags, he showed up at Lola's door, demanding to see his son. “He was abusive, Walter,” Lola said. “A changed man. He called me names.” This wasn't the man she knew—this was some crazy on a street corner in Times Square, some bum. When Hesh came up from the basement to see what the commotion was about, Truman tried to shove past him and Hesh hit him, hit him in the face and then in the gut. Truman went down on his hands and knees on the front porch, gasping till the tears came to his eyes. Hesh shut the door.

By then, people were certain that Truman had betrayed them, that his sympathies had always been with the “patriots” and that he'd turned his back on family and friends in the most calculating and callous way. Rose Pollack, who hadn't been able to get into the concert grounds that night, had seen him on the road with Depeyster Van Wart and LeClerc Outhouse just before a criminal put a brick through her windshield, and the day he turned up in the Colony to break the heart of Walter's mother and pack up his books and underwear, Lorelee Shapiro had seen him driving Van Wart's car. Or so
she said. Lola didn't know what to think—or Hesh either. They'd loved him, this jubilant and quick-smiling man, their comrade and friend, husband of Christina Alving, father of their godson. After the riots people were hysterical—they were looking for scapegoats. Lola—and Hesh too, Hesh too—had wanted to believe in him, but the evidence was against him. There was the way he'd disappeared, for one thing. And then there was that terrible fateful night of the riot itself.

Truman never called the state police; he never called the
Times.
And twenty minutes after he started off across the field, a hundred patriots swarmed in from the same direction—unchecked, and shouting filth. “Was it a coincidence, Walter? Was it?” Lola was asking the questions now. Walter said nothing.

It was getting dark, and out on the road the mob had begun to pelt Hesh and his defenders with rocks—fist-sized and bigger, hundreds upon hundreds of them, thudding against the flank of the camp truck, striking men in the face, in the chest and legs and groin. One of the seminary students was knocked flat, his nose smashed to pulp; the stevedore, a huge black man who made a conspicuous target, was already bleeding from a scalp wound when a barrage of stones brought him to his knees.

The patriots were thirty feet away now and closing. Their arms whipped forward, stones boomed off the truck, skittered across the road, hit home with a dull wet thump. Hesh heard that sound, the sound of the butcher's mallet on a slab of meat—thump, thump, thump—and knew they were finished. He saw the stevedore go down, and then felt himself hit in both legs; in the same instant a stone glanced off his cheek, and when he raised an arm to shield his face, a beer bottle caught him in the ribs. This was ridiculous. Useless. Suicidal. He was no martyr. “Break!” he suddenly roared. “Break and run!” Bleeding, battered, their suits and sportshirts torn to rags, the defenders dropped back, skirted the truck and flung themselves headlong down the darkened road. Behind them, the patriots surged forward with a shout.

At first, Hesh and the others retreated in panic, without direction, every man for himself. All that changed when they came upon the arena. The field was brightly lit—one of the women had started up
the generator and flashed on the stage lights as night fell—and Hesh and his dazed comrades were suddenly confronted by the spectacle of a hundred wild-eyed men running amuck amidst their wives and children. It was unendurable. Without hesitation—without even breaking stride—they came together again, charging into the melee in a wedge, swinging sticks and fists, sick and maddened and ready to die. The patriots fell back under the fury of the assault, and the women and children who'd been caught out in the open made for the stage as if it were a life raft in a churning sea. Hesh and his men grappled with their adversaries for a moment and then broke for the stage themselves as the patriots from above roared down on them. It was then that an unknown hand let loose the bottle that laid Hesh low. One moment he was handing a child up to the stage, and the next he was stretched out on the ground.

Hesh never knew how long he was out—half an hour? Forty-five minutes? But when he woke, the night was black, lit only by a bonfire in front of the stage, and the patriots were gone. They'd spent their rage on the folding chairs, on the pamphlets and tables and sound equipment. One of them had cut the lights and then they'd rampaged through the field, smashing chairs, burning books and pamphlets, putting stones through the windows of the buses and cars in the lot. They were like Indians in a movie, Christina said later. Savages. Whooping, screaming like animals. They destroyed everything they could get their hands on, and then, as if by a prearranged signal, they vanished. A few of the women had been hurt in the scuffle, a dozen others were hysterical (Christina included, who couldn't locate either Truman or Hesh and feared the worst), and several of the men had broken bones and gashes that required stitches, but no one had been lynched, no one died.

Just after Hesh regained his senses, six pairs of headlights appeared on the dirt road above them, which the patriots had obligingly cleared by overturning the camp truck in the weeds and opening a path through the barrier at Van Wart Road. Frozen, expecting some new treachery, the concertgoers huddled on the stage and watched the cold beams approach. Then, suddenly, the red lights began to flash and a woman cried out, “Thank God, they're finally here!”

Walter didn't want to hear the rest. Didn't want to hear how
Lorelee Shapiro had got through to the state police, who'd known about the situation all along but took their own sweet time getting there, or how his mother was in a state of shock, or how Lola had helped organize the second concert, held a week later on the same bloodied ground, a concert at which Paul Robeson and Will Connell actually did sing and which was attended by 20,000 people and went off without a hitch—until the concertgoers tried to get out. He didn't want to hear about the second riot, about the cars and buses stoned all the way out Van Wart Road to the parkway, didn't want to hear about police collusion and the redneck veterans of the first riot sporting armbands that read WAKE UP, AMERICA: PETERSKILL DID! It was history. All he wanted to hear was that his father wasn't a traitor, a turncoat, a backstabber and a fink.

“Next week it was worse, Walter,” Lola was saying, caught up in her own story now, a freshly lighted cigarette in the ashtray before her, but Walter was no longer listening. He remembered that scene in the kitchen of the bungalow as he might have remembered a distant nightmare, remembered clinging to his father's legs while his mother raged, remembered the smell of him, the sweat like a tomcat's musk, the sweet corrupt odor of alcohol. No! his mother shrieked. No! No! No!

“But we had to do it, Walter—we couldn't let them get away with it. We had to show them that this was America, that we could say and think and do what we wanted. Twenty thousand turned out, Walter. Twenty thousand.”

Scum. His father was scum. A man who'd sold out his friends and deserted his wife and son. Why fight it? That's what Walter was thinking when he looked up from the table and saw his father standing there by the stove, framed between Lola's head and the rigid declamatory index finger of her right hand. He looked as he had in the hospital—neat, in suit and tie and with his hair cut and combed, but barefoot still.
Don't you believe it,
Truman growled.

Lola didn't see him, didn't hear him. “Animals, Walter. They were animals. Filth. Nazis.”

Two sides, Walter,
his father said.
Two sides to every story.

Suddenly Walter cut her off. “Lola, okay. Thanks. I've heard enough.” He pushed himself up from the table and grappled with his
crutches. Outside, birds sat motionless in the trees and pale yellow moths tumbled like confetti through cathedrals of sunlight. Truman was gone. “He had to have a reason,” Walter said. “My father, I mean. Nobody knows what really happened, right? You weren't even there, and my mother's dead. I mean, nobody knows for sure.”

Lola took a long slow drag at her cigarette before she answered. Her eyes were distant and strange, her features masked in smoke. “Go ask Van Wart,” she said.

She was living in a bark hut on the outskirts of a Weckquaesgeek village, ostracized by Boer and redman alike, and she'd shaved her head with an oyster shell as a token of abnegation and penance. On that fateful day three years back when God's wrath had spared the oak tree only to strike at her home and abolish her family, Katrinchee, who should have been out in the fields with them, should have been huddled with them in the cabin when the thunderbolt struck, was instead sequestered in a shady bower with Mohonk, son of Sachoes, and a stone bottle of gin. She stroked his chest, his thighs and his groin, as he stroked her, and she sipped gin to assuage the guilt she felt over her father's death. (Oh yes: that guilt haunted her night and day. She couldn't look at a stewpot without seeing her father, and the thought of venison in any of its incarnations was so inadmissible that even the sight of a startled doe on some woodland path was enough to make her go dizzy and feel the nausea creeping up her throat.) When a Kitchawank boy came to them in the wigwam where they'd gone to seek shelter from the storm, breathless, his eyes wild, a tale of destruction rained from the heavens on his lips, the guilt rose up to suffocate her.
Moeder,
she choked, and then collapsed as if her legs had been shot out from under her. Sitting there in a daze, staring numbly at Mohonk, at Wahwahtaysee and the faces of the savage painted strangers hovering over her, she felt a new and insupportable knowledge festering in her veins: she'd killed them all. Yes. Killed them as surely as if she'd lined them up and shot them. First her father and now this: she'd lain with a heathen, and here was God's vengeance.
In grief, in despair, she took a honed shell to her scalp and buried herself in Mohonk.