World's End (27 page)

Now, as the mountain loomed above them, Walter pushed himself up and made his way back to where Mardi sat at the tiller.

“Having a good time?” she shouted over the wind.

He just grinned in response, rocking with the boat, and then settled down beside her and helped himself to a cup of coffee from the thermos. The coffee was good. Hot and black and tasting of Depeyster Van Wart's ten-year-old cognac. “Seen the Imp?” he said.

“Who?”

“You know, the little guy in the high hat and buckled shoes that runs around sitting on people's masts and whipping up storms and whatnot.”

Mardi gave him a long slow look and a wet-lipped smile that took a moment to spread across her face. She looked good, with the cap pulled down low like that and her hair fanned out behind her in the wind. Real good. She put her free arm through his and drew him closer. “What've you been smoking?” she said.

It was Halloween, the night the dead rise from their graves and people hide behind masks, Halloween, and getting dark. Walter stood on the deck of the
Catherine Depeyster
and gazed up at the ranks of mothballed ships that rose above him on either side in great depthless fields of shadow. This time he hadn't tried to hoist himself up the anchor chain of the U.S.S.
Anima,
nor of any of the other ships either.
This time he'd been content merely to shove his hands deep in his pockets and stare up at them.

Mardi was in the cabin, sipping cognac and warming herself over the electric space heater. She'd furled the sails and started up the engine when they got in close, afraid the wind would push her into one of the big ships. Then, when they'd maneuvered their way through the picket of steel monsters and anchored amongst them, she picked up the thermos and headed for the cabin. “Come on,” she said, “let's get in out of this wind,” but Walter wasn't moving. Not yet, anyway. He was thinking of Jessica and feeling the stab of guilt and betrayal, knowing full well what was going to happen once he got into that cabin with Mardi. Oh, he could delay it, exercise his will, stand out here in the wind and gawk up at the ships as if they meant anything at all to him, but eventually he would follow her into the cabin. It was inevitable. Preordained. A role in a play he'd been rehearsing all his life. This was why he'd come out to the ghost ships—this, and nothing more. “Come on,” she repeated, and her voice dropped to a purr.

“In a minute,” he said.

The cabin door clicked shut behind him, and he never turned his head. This ship that hung over him, with its rusted anchor chain and hull streaked with bird crap, had suddenly become fascinating, riveting, a thing rare and unique in the world. He was thinking nothing. The wind bit at him. He counted off thirty seconds and was about to turn around and submit himself to the inevitable, when something—a sudden displacement of shadow, a furtive movement—caught his eye. Up there. High against the rail of the near ship.

It was almost dark. He couldn't be sure. But yes, there it was again: something was roaming around up there. A bird? A rat? He tried to keep his eyes fixed on the spot, but at some point he must have blinked involuntarily—because the next thing he knew there was an object perched on the rail, where no object had been a fraction of a second earlier. From down here, beneath the great soaring wall of the ship, it appeared to be a hat—wide of brim, high of crown, and of a fashion that had its day centuries ago, a hat the pilgrims might have worn, or Rembrandt himself. It was at that moment, as Walter stood puzzling over this shadowy apparition, that an odd flatulent sound began to insinuate itself in the niche between the slosh of the waves
and the moan of the wind, a sound that brought back memories of elementary school, of playgrounds and ballfields: someone was razzing him.

Walter looked to his right, and then to his left. He looked behind him, above him, he peered over the rail, tore open the locker, searched the sky—all to no avail. The sound seemed to be coming from everywhere, from nowhere, caught up in the very woof of the air itself. The hat was still perched atop the rail of the big rotting merchantman before him, and Mardi—he could see her through the little rectangular windows—was still ensconced in the cabin. The razzing grew louder, faded, pulsed back again, and Walter began to feel an odd sensation creeping up on him, déjà vu, a sensation grown old since the day of his accident.

Sure enough, when he looked up again, the rail of the ship was crowded with ragged figures—bums, the bums he'd seen the night of the accident—each with his fingers to his nose and a vibrating tongue between his lips. And there, in the middle of them, sat their ringleader—the little guy in baggy trousers and work boots his father had called Piet. Piet's face was expressionless—as stolid as an executioner's—and the antiquated hat was now sitting atop his head like an overturned milk can. As Walter focused on him, he saw the tip of the little man's tongue emerge from between his tightly compressed lips to augment the mocking chorus with its own feathery but distinctive raspberry.

So here he was, Walter the empiricist, standing on the deck of a cruising sloop in the middle of the darkling Hudson on the eve of Allhallows, confronting a mob of jeering phantoms, and not knowing what to do next. He was seeing things. There was something the matter with him. He'd consult a shrink, have his head bandaged—anything. But for now he could think of only one thing to do, the same thing he'd done when he'd been razzed in junior high: he gave them the finger, one and all. With both hands. And he cursed them too, cursed them in a ragged raging high-pitched tone till he began to grow hoarse, his extended fingers digging at the air and feet dancing in furious rapture.

All very well and fine. But they were gone. He was cursing a deserted ship, cursing empty decks and berths unslept in for twenty
years or more, cursing steel. The razzing had faded away to nothing and the only sound he could hear now was the whisper of a human voice at his back. Mardi's voice. He turned around and there she was, standing at the cabin door. The door was open, and she was naked. He saw her breasts—silken, pouting, the breasts he remembered from the night of his collision with history. He saw her navel and the fascinating swatch of hair below it, saw her feet, calves, the swell of her thighs, saw the beckoning glow of the electric coil in the darkened cabin behind her. “Walter, what are you doing?” she said in a voice that rubbed at his skin. “Don't you know I've been waiting for you?”

The blood shot from his head to his groin.

“Come on in and get warm,” she whispered.

It was past seven when the
Catherine Depeyster
motored into the slip at the marina. Walter was late. He was supposed to have been at the Elbow by six-thirty, dressed in costume, to meet Jessica and Tom Crane. They were going to have a few drinks, and then go out to a party in the Colony. But Walter was late. He'd been out in the middle of the river, fucking Mardi Van Wart. The first time—there at the cabin door—he'd practically tackled her, grabbing for flesh like a satyr, a rapist, all his demons concentrated in the slot between her legs. The second time was slow, soft, it was making love. She stroked him, ran her tongue across his chest, breathed in his ear. He stroked her in return, lingered over her nipples, lifted her atop him—he even, for moments at a time, forgot about the blasted torn stump of his leg and the inert lump of plastic that terminated it. Now, as he helped her secure the boat, he didn't know what he felt. Guilt, for one thing. Guilt, and an overwhelming desire to shake hands, peck her cheek or whatever, and disappear. She'd said she was going to a party up in Poughkeepsie and that he was welcome to come along; he'd stammered that he was meeting Jessica and Tom down at the Elbow.

He watched her face as she tied off the lines and gathered up her things. It was noncommittal. He was thinking about his bike, a quick exit, thinking about what kind of excuse he was going to run Jessica and wondering what he could possibly do in the next five minutes about a costume.

Mardi straightened up and wiped her hands on the peacoat.
“Hey,” she said, and her voice was husky, choked to a whisper. “It was fun. Want to do it again, sometime?”

He was about to say yes, no, maybe, when suddenly the image of the ghost ship rose up before him and he felt as if his leg—the good one—was about to buckle and drop him to the hard cold planks of the dock. He was going crazy, that's what it was. Seeing things. Hallucinating like some shit-flinger up at Matteawan.

“Hm?” she said, and she reached for his arm and leaned into him. “You had a good time, didn't you?”

It was then that he became aware of a figure standing in the shadows at the far end of the dock. He thought of muggers, trick or treaters, he thought of Jessica, he thought of his father. “Hello?” he called. “Is someone there?”

The light was bad, sky dark, a single streetlamp illuminating the dead geometry of masts and cranes at the far end of the boat yard. Walter felt Mardi go tense beside him. “Who's there?” she demanded.

A man emerged from the shadows and moved toward them, the slats of the dock groaning under his footsteps. He was big, his shoulders like something hammered on as an afterthought, he wore a flannel shirt open to the navel despite the cold, and his graying hair trailed down his back in a thick twisted coil. Walter guessed he must have been fifty-five, sixty. “That you, Mardi?” the man asked.

She dropped Walter's arm. “Jesus, Jeremy, you scared the shit out of us.”

He'd reached them now, and stood grinning before them. His two front teeth were outlined in gold, and he wore a bone necklace from which a single white feather dangled. “Boo,” he said in a ruined, phlegmy voice. “Trick or treat.”

Mardi was grinning now too, but Walter was glum. Whatever was about to happen, he didn't want any part of it. He glanced longingly at his motorcycle, then turned back to the stranger. “I'll take the treat,” Mardi said.

“Looks like you already got it,” the man said, giving Walter a sick grin.

“Oh,” she said, taking Walter's arm again, “oh, yeah,” and she made as if to slap her brow for forgetfulness. “This is my friend—”

But the Indian—that's what he was, Walter realized with a jolt—
the Indian cut her off. “I know you,” he said, searching Walter's eyes.

Walter had never laid eyes on him before. He felt his stomach drop. “You do?”

The stranger tugged at the collar of his lumberjack shirt and winced as if it were choking him. Then he spat and looked up again. “Yeah,” he rasped. “Van Brunt, right?”

Walter was stunned. “But, but how—?”

“You could be two toads out of the same egg, you and your father.”

“You knew my father?”

The Indian nodded, then ducked his head and spat again. “I knew him,” he said. “Yeah, I knew him. He was a real piece of shit.”

He was born on the Shawangunk reservation, Jamestown, New York, in 1909, the green-eyed son of a green-eyed father. His mother, a Seneca
ye-oh
whose bellicose forefathers had been pacified by none other than George Washington himself, had eyes as black as olives. Ignoring those black eyes and the warlike temperament that lurked behind them, Mohonk
père
followed the patrilineal custom of his own tribe, the Kitchawanks, of which he was the last known surviving member, and christened the boy Jeremy Mohonk, Jr. The boy's mother was scandalized. Her people, the warriors of the north, the survivors, claimed descent through the womb. The boy, his mother insisted, was by all rights a Seneca and a Tantaquidgeon. If he married in the clan, he'd be committing incest. But the elder Mohonk wouldn't be moved. Twice during the first month of little Jeremy's existence he took a half-strung snowshoe to the side of his wife's head, and once, after an especially vehement disputation, he chased her through the Jamestown feedlot with a dibble stick honed to the killing sharpness of a spear.

The upshot of all this was an informal knife fight between Mohonk
pére
and Horace Tantaquidgeon, his wife's brother. They were scaling fish on the banks of the Conewango—yellow perch, walleyes, maskinonge—their knives glinting in the sun. Mohonk
fils,
barely able to focus his eyes, was strapped to his mother's back and gazing up into the dancing green of the trees and the stolid, unmoving sky that rose up everywhere around him, oceanic and blue. The men's hands were wet with blood, with mucus. Translucent scales clung to
their forearms. There was no sound but for the rasp of the knives and the furious drone of the flies. Suddenly, and without warning, Horace Tantaquidgeon rose to his feet and sank his knife into the back of the last of the Kitchawanks but one. The knife stuck there, quivering, the blade lodged like a splinter between two ridges of the lumbar vertebrae.

For a moment, there was no reaction. The elder Mohonk, barechested and dressed in stained work pants, squatted over his mound of fish as before. And then all at once his eyes went cold with a new kind of knowledge, and he dropped to his buttocks, sitting upright among those hacked and dumb-staring fish that squirted out from under him as if they'd come back to life … but no, he wasn't just sitting, he was pitching backward from there, his legs, his gut, his bowels gone, cut loose and drifting like so many balloons puffed with helium.

The Tantaquidgeons were remorseful and penitent. Horace extracted a rumpled dollar bill from the hoard of eight he kept buried in a gourd out back of his house, walked the six miles to Frewsburg, and purchased a wheelchair from the widow of a white man who'd been crippled in the Spanish-American War. Then he wheeled it back home, all the long way up the dusty road to the reservation. And Mildred, the fractious wife, was fractious no more. Not only did she dismiss the subject of little Jeremy's descent (the boy was his father's son, a Kitchawank, one of two surviving members of the once-mighty Turtle Clan and rightful inheritor of the Kitchawank domain to the south, and that was that), but she devoted the rest of her days to the care of her husband. She prepared stewed opossum and venison, collected berries for him in season, greased his hair and diapered him like a second son. And all this was necessary, and more. For Jeremy Mohonk, son of Mohonks uncountable, last of his race but one, would never walk again.