World's End (19 page)

He parked the Volvo in the employees' lot next to Peter O'Reilly's primer-splotched '55 Chevy, exchanged a mumbled greeting with the sullen, bullet-headed brother who worked the loading dock and wore T-shirts imprinted with uplifting slogans like “Off Pigs” and “Free Huey,” and then shoved his way through the big steel door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. Unfortunately, the weight of the door threw him off balance, and he lurched into the raging din of the shop like a drunken pencil peddler, fouling his crutches and snatching wildly at the time clock to keep from pitching face forward on the concrete floor. In the next moment he came within an ace of being run down by some idiot on a forklift, and then Doug had him by the arm, leading him along the pocked and faded brick wall to his office.

Walter had been absent for almost three weeks now, and during that time he'd begun to forget just how dismal the place really was. Cavernous and dim, lit at intervals by flickering fluorescent lights that descended from the ceiling on aluminum stalks, reeking of cutting oil and degreasing fluid and vibrating with the ceaseless racket of machinery, it could have been one of the subterranean sweatshops of
Metropolis.
People ran about in filthy green smocks, dodging in and out of clouds of vapor the color of ginger ale, shouting at one another over the clamor like pale frantic drones. Walter didn't like it, didn't like it a bit. As he swung along beside Doug, nodding at his coworkers—they looked up blearily, in a pall of smoke, from their lathes—he knew all at once that he wasn't coming back. Ever. Even if they offered him a sit-down job in the inspection room, even if they made him foreman, president, chairman of the board. The job had been Hesh's idea in the first place. Something temporary, something to hold him till he decided what he wanted to do with his degree. All that had changed now.

“So,” Doug said, once he'd pulled Walter into a grimy office decorated with oil-soaked rags and trays of rejected muffins and aximaxes that rose in tottering array to the ceiling, “we heard about your foot.”

In here, behind the smudged glass door, the noise was muted to a dull insistent drone, the sound of a distant phalanx of dentists gearing up their drills. Walter shrugged. He was leaning heavily on his crutches, and the stump of his leg ached. “Yeah,” he said.

Doug was about thirty, a Depeyster Company lifer whose salient physical feature was an upper lip as broad, hairless and mobile as a chimpanzee's. Once, when Walter had questioned his lathe settings, Doug had reminded him that he wasn't paid to think, and then, in an offhand and edifying way, had mentioned the key to his own success. “I'm different than the rest of you guys around here, you know,” he'd said, nodding significantly. “And you better believe it—I got a hundred and five I.Q.” Now, pausing to light a cigarette, he glanced down at Walter's foot and asked, “Does it hurt?”

Walter gave him another shrug. “Look, Doug,” he said, “I don't know if I'll be able to work anymore. I just came in to pick up my check.”

Doug had begun to cough. He hacked for a moment, took another drag of his cigarette, and then leaned over to spit in the wastebasket. His eyes had watered, and he looked bewildered, as if Walter had just asked him to dance or name the square root of 256. “I don't got it,” he said finally. “You got to go up to the front office for that.”

A moment later Walter found himself gliding along a carpeted hallway, looking for Miss Egthuysen's office, while cooling breezes wafted around him and the mellifluous strains of violin, cello and viola poured forth from hidden speakers to massage his ears. There were potted plants, framed watercolors; the walls looked as if they'd been painted yesterday and the skylights glowed with sunlight that was like a shower of gold. The contrast wasn't lost on him. No more than a hundred feet from where he'd sweated over the lathe and counted the interminable minutes until the five o'clock whistle blew, there was this. Walter felt cheated.

Miss Egthuysen was the secretary. Doug had scrawled her name and the number of her office on a soiled scrap of paper—#1, or maybe it was #7, Walter couldn't tell which—and escorted him through the door at the far end of the shop and into the inner sanctum. Then he'd swung around without a word and faded back into the gloom of the shop. Walter was cursing under his breath—cursing Doug, cursing the hours he'd wasted in the pit behind him, cursing Huysterkark and Mrs. Van Wart, cursing the meanness and perfidy of a world every bit as rotten as Sartre had made it out to be in Philosophy 451—when he found it, #1, a frosted-glass door with nothing
but the single numeral painted on its face. He tried the door. It was locked. No one answered his knock.

Cursing still—cursing Miss Egthuysen and the bosses who'd hired her, cursing the eggheads in lab coats and ties who strolled out of this very hallway and into the shop once a month to make notations in loose-leaf binders—he swung around and considered the slip of paper in his hand. What he'd taken to be a one could actually have been a seven. Or a nine, for that matter. Doug's scrawl was just about undecipherable—but then, with his soaring I.Q., Doug couldn't really be expected to waste his precious mental resources on so tedious a consideration as penmanship. Walter trudged back up the hall, located #7, and tried the door.

It was open.

Manning his crutches with a clatter, he leaned against the corrugated glass and pushed his way in. He saw a desk, a chair, a filing cabinet. Plants. Framed pictures. But wait a minute: something was wrong here. This wasn't Miss Egthuysen gaping up at him in alarm, slipping an envelope into the desk and slamming the drawer with a report like the blast of a shotgun, this was the man in the tan summer suit, the one he'd glimpsed now and again probing among the eggheads at the door to the shop. “I, uh—” Walter began.

The man was glaring at him now, boring into him with a look of such ferocity that Walter suddenly began to wish he were out in the shop breathing fumes, back in the hospital, anywhere but here. “Uh, I was looking for Miss—” Walter murmured, but then stopped cold. There was a nameplate on the man's desk. Of course.

“What are you doing here?” Van Wart demanded. He was on his feet now, and he looked alarmed. He looked angry. Threatened. “You were at the house yesterday, weren't you?”

“Yes, but”—guilty, guilty, why did he always feel guilty?—“I … I work here.”

Van Wart's face went blank.
“You
work for
me?”

“Just since the end of May, but I didn't know. … I mean, I didn't realize—”

But the eponym of Depeyster Manufacturing wasn't listening. “Well, that's rich,” he said, dropping into his swivel chair as if the news had somehow weakened his legs. “Out on the floor?”

“Uh-huh. I run one of the lathes?”

“That's really rich,” Van Wart repeated, and suddenly he cracked a grin that was like a crevasse leaping across an ice field. “Truman Van Brunt's son.” Then he glanced down at Walter's foot and the smile faded. “I was sorry to hear about your accident.” There was silence. “Your name's Walter, right?”

Walter nodded.

“I read about it in the paper.”

Walter nodded again.

“I knew your father.”

Walter said nothing. He was waiting.

“Years ago.”

“I know.” Walter's voice was hushed, almost a whisper. There was another moment of silence, during which Van Wart slid back the desk drawer and began to fumble through his papers. “That's why I went out to your house,” Walter confessed. “That's what I wanted to ask you about. My father.”

Van Wart looked distracted. He looked old, and in that moment, vulnerable. Without lifting the envelope from the drawer, he slipped a pinch of something into his mouth. “Truman?” he said finally. “What, he hasn't turned up, has he?”

When Walter answered in the negative, Van Wart seemed relieved. He helped himself to another pinch of whatever it was he kept in that precious envelope and then stared down at his impeccable shirt cuffs and manicured hands. So this was the ogre, Walter thought, the bogeyman, the Fascist who'd masterminded the slaughter of the innocents and haunted the bedtime tales of a generation of Colony children. Somehow he didn't look the part. With his fine, clean, razorcut hair, his strong teeth and even tan, with his air of well-being and the precise hieratic tones of his speech, he could have been the saintly and forebearing father of TV legend, he could have been a judge, a professor, a pianist or conductor.

But all that was dispelled in the next instant. Van Wart looked up and said suddenly, “Don't you believe them, Walter. Don't listen to them. Your father was all right. He was somebody who could stand up to the lot of them and their stinking vicious lies.” His eyes had taken hold of Walter's now and there was nothing genial about them.
Those eyes were outraged, formidable, those eyes were capable of anything. “Your father,” he said, leaning forward and making an effort to control his voice, “your father was a patriot.”

Then there was the wedding.

If life had begun to peel away from Walter, layer by layer, like some great unfathomable onion, if all its mysterious manifestations—the accident, the marker, the ghosts and pancakes, the face in the doorway at Van Wart Manor, Van Wart himself—were pieces of a puzzle, the wedding was a breath of fresh air: the wedding, at least, was unequivocal. Walter, former brooding and alienated hero to whom commitment and marriage were as death, loved Jessica, and she loved him. But no, it was more than that. Or maybe less. Walter needed her—he had but one foot on the ground now—and she needed to be needed.

The ceremony was performed in a field of lush, knee-deep grass amidst the sleepy drone of Tom Crane's bees and within a stone's throw of his shack. Jessica's family had pushed for a traditional wedding, with organ music, garter tossing and a seven-tiered cake, to be held at the Episcopal church in Peterskill, but both bride and groom had rejected it outright. They were no slaves to tradition. They were originals, free spirits, flamboyant and daring, and it took them no more than five minutes to hit on Tom Crane's place as the ideal site of their nuptials.

What could be better, after all? No corrupt institution would cast its gloom over the ceremony, and nature itself would become a celebrant. It would be an outdoor wedding, irreverent and unconstrained, with a barbecue—and tofu sandwiches for the vegetarians. And they would have readings from Gurdjieff or Kahlil Gibran instead of the dreary maunderings of the civil and religious ceremonies, and music from Herbert Pompey and his nose flute rather than the tedium of Mendelssohn. The bride would wear flowers in her hair. The groom would wear flowers in his hair. The guests, in serapes and boots and fringed suede, would wear flowers in their hair. And then of course, for Walter, the pasture below had its own special significance.

Walter arrived early. His bachelor party, which had begun at the Elbow with several rounds of boilermakers and ended with cooking sherry and kif at the apartment of one of his old high school compatriots—he
couldn't remember which—had left him feeling drained and hung over. He'd finally got to bed around four, but a steady procession of historical markers began marching around his room to the beat of “Yankee Doodle Dandy” as soon as he closed his eyes, and his dreams were the dreams of a man who has left his youth behind. He woke at seven, shagged and unrefreshed, to an intense itching in his missing foot. That was when he decided to pull on his wedding outfit and head over to Tom Crane's.

It was late September, the morning warm and hazy, the light held out to him in a bundle above the treetops. He looked up into the web of branches that fell back from the windshield and saw that the maples had turned, and though it was early yet, he could detect the faint caustic odor of burning leaves on the air. When he'd had his accident, now almost two months ago, he'd stopped shaving, and as he drove, he stroked the patchy stubble that had sprouted beneath his nose and along the plane of his sideburns. He was dressed in white, like a guru or Paschal Lamb, wearing the Nehru shirt and cotton bells Jessica had chosen for his wedding ensemble. His hair, after the fashion of the day, trailed down his neck. He wore the familiar Dingo boots, and for color and good luck both, he'd slipped on a belt that his soulful, sorrowful mother had braided from pink and blue plastic lanyards when she was a girl at summer camp.

He negotiated the hill down from the road without much trouble—he was getting used to the prosthesis in the way he'd got used to his first pair of skates, and he'd been lifting weights to strengthen the long muscles of his thighs for added support. It wasn't his leg that bothered him, it was his head. The cooking sherry had been a mistake, no doubt about it. As he wound his way down the trail that roughly followed the course of the old road, sidestepping the odd cow pie, he found himself envying Tom Crane, who'd left after two beers, pleading pronubial responsibilities. He paused for a moment in the mist-shrouded meadow that gave on to the creek, thinking
Here was the stage, and there the parking lot,
then turned and clumped over the footbridge, startling the swallows that nested beneath it. He was going to be married. Here. Here of all places. The choice of it, he understood, hadn't been so whimsical as he might have led himself to believe.

Walter was climbing the steep trail up from Van Wart Creek, the
nervous little tributary known as Blood Creek on his left, Tom Crane's beehives and the still-burgeoning vegetable patch with its fat zucchini, pumpkins and late tomato on his right, when he ran across the first of the uninvited guests. Her back was to him, the heavy stockings were rolled down over the tops of her shoes and he could see the veins standing out in her legs. He recognized her with the first skip of his heart. She was bent over, searching for something—or no, she was pulling weeds, her knees stiff and her big backside waving in the breeze like a target at the fair. He remembered the day he'd found that target so irresistible and pelted her with dirt clods as she stooped over the tulip bed out front of the house in Verplanck, and he remembered the retribution that had followed when his grandfather came home from his nets and introduced him to the bitter end of an old ship's halyard. Pulling weeds. It was just like her. He remembered how each hairy taproot or cluster of crabgrass would merit an incantation in the Low Dutch that people had forgotten a century before, as she wished it on the swinish Mrs. Collins across the street or on Nettie Nysen, the witch who'd forced her to disconnect the phone. In the spring, she buried the frozen deadman of a crab—eyestalks and brain—with each new packet of seed. “Gram,” he said, and she whirled around as if he'd startled her.