World's End (61 page)

In the morning—if you could call it morning—the old man was guarded, frazzled, hung over and furious, as communicative as a
stone. At some point, deep in the folds of that interminable night, Walter had heard him stagger up from the floor, pour himself a drink and dial the phone. “I'm not coming in today,” he growled into the receiver. There was a pause. “Yeah, that's right. I'm sick.” Another pause. “Let 'em read the Constitution—better yet, have them copy it out.” Click.

Now it was light—or rather there was a noticeable softening of the darkness that pressed up against the windows—and there was a smell of bacon, strong as life, mixed in with a subtler smell, a mnemonic smell, a cruel and heartless smell: potato pancakes. Walter lurched up out of the sleeping bag as if it were on fire, living flesh in a house of ghosts. The dogs howled. It must have been about noon.

Truman served him bacon, eggs over easy, potato pancakes—“Like your mother used to make,” he said out of a pouchy, expressionless face, and then he said nothing more till the sun flickered out an hour later. “Gone dark,” he said suddenly out of the silence. “Cocktail hour,” he said with a sloppy grin. “Story time.”

There was more gin. Endless gin. Gin that flowed like blood from the gashes under a middleweight's eyes. Not yet two in the afternoon and Walter was reeling. Slouched in the easy chair, his limbs gone plastic and light, so light they seemed detached from his body, Walter cradled a glass of industrial-strength gin and listened to his father tell out history like an Indian
sachem
telling out beads.

“Depeyster,” the old man rumbled by way of introduction, “I was talking about Depeyster Van Wart, wasn't I?”

Walter nodded. This is what he'd come to hear.

Truman ducked his head, stuck a thick finger in his drink—gin and gin—and sucked it. “Maybe I misled you a little last night,” he said. “About that day when I ran into him at the store. It was an accident on my part, I swear it was, but not on his. No. Nothing he ever does is by accident.”

Walter fought down his fear, his anger, fought down the urge to challenge him, and sank deeper into the chair, sipping gin that tasted like cleaning fluid, while the old man went on.

It was funny, he said, the way Depeyster suddenly came back into his life. After that day at Cats' Corners, he began to see more and more of him, even as he fell into the routine of Colony life, attending
the lectures and concerts, even as he joined the association and then the party. Depeyster was everywhere. He was getting a new muffler at Skip's garage when Truman took the car in for shocks and brake pads, he was hunkered over a drink at the Yorktown Tavern when Truman stopped in with one of the guys after work, he was in Genung's buying drapes, at Offenbacher's with a bag of kaiser rolls. He was everywhere. But especially, he was on the train.

Two days a week, when the 4:30 whistle blew at the plant, Truman picked up his lunchbox, pulled an old army rucksack out from under the iron work bench and walked the six blocks down to the train station. He was studying American history at City College, studying sociology, transcendentalism, American labor movements, the causes and effects of the War of Independence, and he chewed a sandwich, sipped coffee and read his texts on the seventy-five-minute ride into New York. One evening he looked up from his books and there was Depeyster, tanned and easy, in a business suit and with a briefcase under his arm. He had business in town, he said, though what sort of business he might have had at six o'clock at night Truman never thought to ask.

After that, Truman saw him frequently on the train, sometimes alone, sometines in the company of LeClerc Outhouse. They made a good group. Van Wart, of course, came from the old family, and he was a real repository of local history, not to mention a Yale B.A., class of '40. LeClerc collected artifacts from the Revolutionary War, most of which he'd dug up himself, and he knew more about the fight for New York than Truman's professor. They talked history, current events, they talked politics. LeClerc and Depeyster were hard-line Republicans, of course, Dewey men, and they saw Communists everywhere. In China, Korea, Turkey, in the incumbent's administration. And, of course, in Kitchawank Colony. Truman found himself in the position of defending the Left, defending Roosevelt and the New Deal, defending the Colony, his wife and father-in-law and Hesh and Lola. He didn't do very well at it.

And why not? Maybe because he was confused himself.

“What did you mean,” Walter asked, interrupting him, “about Dipe never doing anything by accident? You mean he came after you? Purposely?”

The old man leaned back in that Essene chair, that hard untenable rack of a chair, and leveled a contemptuous look on him. “Don't be a jerk, Walter—of course he did. Some of those guys we knew in G2 stayed on after the war and wound up in some pretty high places. Depeyster kept in touch.”

“So you were a spy,” Walter said, and the emotion was gone from his voice.

Truman sat up, cleared his throat and turned his head to spit on the floor. For a long moment he fiddled with the rubber band that held his hair in place. “If you want to call it that,” he said. “They convinced me. Made me see the light. Them and Piet.”

“But—” Walter was defeated, his last hope a fading contrail in a leaden sky. The rumor was truth. His father was shit. “But how could you?” he insisted, angry in his defeat and loud in his anger. “I mean how could anybody convince you—words, how could words convince you—to, to screw over your friends, your own wife, your”—it still stuck in his throat—“your son?”

“I was right, that's how. I did what I did for a higher principle.” The old man spoke as if he had no problem with it, as if it hadn't destroyed his life, taken his family, made him into a drunk and an exile. “There might have been people like Norman Thomas around, people like your mother, but there were also devious little shits like Sasha Freeman and Morton Blum, who set us all up, traitors and crazies like Greenglass, Rosenberg, Hiss, who just wanted to kill everything we had in this country—and they were right there in the Colony too. Still are.”

“But your own wife—I mean, don't you have a conscience? How could you do it?”

The old man was silent a moment, regarding him fixedly over the lip of the bottle. When he spoke, his voice was so soft Walter could barely hear him: “How could you?”

“What? What do you mean?”

“Your wife—what's her name?”

“Jessica.”

“Jessica. You lost it with her, didn't you? You fucked her over, didn't you? And for some reason you can't even name.” Truman's voice came on again, caustic, harsh, a snarl that overrode the wind. “And what about Depeyster Van Wart—‘Dipe,' as you call him. He's
your man now, isn't he? Screw Hesh. Fuck the old man. Dipe's the one. He's more your father than I am.”

The old man's eyes were bright with malice. “Walter,” he whispered. “Hey, Walter: you're already halfway there.”

Walter suddenly felt weak, terminally exhausted, felt as if he were going down for the count. It was all he could do to rise shakily from the chair. “Bathroom,” he murmured, and staggered toward the back room. He tried to walk tall, tried to throw back his shoulders and tough it out, but he hadn't gone five steps before his feet got tangled and he slammed into the doorframe.

Bang. End of Round Two.

For a long while Walter knelt over a bucket in the frigid closet that served the old man for a bathroom, his insides heaving, the sweetsour stench of his own guts overpowering him. There was another smell there too, the smell of his father, of his father's shit, and it made his stomach clench again and again. His father's shit. Shit in a bucket. Christina and Jessica. Truman and Walter.

There was a barrel of water in the kitchenette. Walter cupped his hands and splashed some on his face. He put his mouth to the tap and drank. Outside, the night went on. The old man, rock-still in his chair, meditatively sipped his drink. Walter shivered. The place was cold, though Truman had stoked the stove with coal till the iron door glowed on its hinges. Walter crossed the room, picked his parka up from the floor and shrugged into it.

“Going someplace?” the old man said, faintly mocking.

Walter didn't answer. He plucked his cup from the arm of the chair and held it out for the old man to fill, glaring so hard Truman had to look away. Then he shook a Camel from the old man's pack, lit it and settled back in the chair. It would go three rounds, he could see that now. Then he could take the plane back to Van Wartville and he'd be free of his ghosts forever—
Father? What father? He never had a father
—damaged, but free. There was another possibility, of course. That the old man would triumph. Lay him out. Crush him. And then he'd board that plane with his tail between his legs and go on home to a life scrambled like a plate of eggs, pursued and haunted till he died.

“You'd do it again,” Walter said finally, jabbing, probing, “you
were right, a patriot, and my mother, Hesh and Lola, Paul Robeson himself, they were the traitors.”

Truman brooded over the bottle. He said nothing.

“They got what was coming to them, right?”

Silence. The wind. The snow machines. Muffled shouts. Dogs.

“The children too. I could have been there that day, your own son. What about the children playing in front of the stage—did they deserve it too? Do patriots beat the shit out of Communists' children? Do they?” Walter was reviving, coming alive again, so hot for the fight he forgot which side he was on. Let him refute that, he thought. Let him convince me. And then I can rest.

Truman rose with a sigh, stirred his drink vaguely and then crossed the room to where his own coat—animal skin, just like the Eskimos'—hung from a peg. He took down the hat that hung above it, a Sergeant-Preston-of-the-Yukon sort of affair, leather and fur, with earflaps pinned up like wings, and dropped it on his head. He circled the chair twice, as if reluctant to sit, and then, mashing the hat down low over his eyes, he eased himself down again. “You want black-and-white,” he sighed. “Good guys and bad guys. You want simple.”

“ ‘I was right,' you said. ‘I loved her,' you said. So which was it?”

The old man ignored the question. Then he looked up suddenly and held Walter's eyes. “I didn't know she was going to die, Walter. It was a divorce, you know, that's how I saw it. Happens every day.”

“You twisted the knife,” Walter said.

“I was young, confused. Like you. We didn't shack up in those days, you know, we got married. I loved her. I loved Marx and Engels and the Socialist revolution. Three and a half years, Walter—it's a long time. It can be, anyway. I changed, all right? Is that a crime? Like you, like you, Walter.

“Your mother was a saint, yeah. Selfless. Good. Righteous. Those eyes of her. But maybe too good, too pure, you know what I mean? Maybe she made me feel like shit in comparison, made me feel like hurting her—just a little, maybe. Like your Jessica, right? Am I right? Goody-good?”

“You're a son of a bitch,” Walter said.

Truman smiled. “So are you.”

There was a silence. Then Truman went on. He'd been wrong to hurt her so deeply, he said, he knew it, and this life was his penance, this talk his act of contrition. He should have just left, got out. He should have warned her. But for a year and a half he'd been meeting secretly with Depeyster, LeClerc and the others—vets, like himself—and he'd fed them information. It was no big deal—minutes of the association, who said what at party meetings—nothing, really, and he didn't take a cent for it. Didn't want it. He'd turned around, one hundred eighty degrees, and he believed in his heart that he was right.

Sure it hurt him. He drank more, stayed away from the house, looked into Christina's martyred eyes and felt like a criminal, like shit, like the two-faced Judas he was. “But you know, Walter,” he said, “sometimes it feels good to feel like shit, you know what I mean? It's a need, almost. Something in the blood.”

The week that preceded the concert was the worst of his life. The end was coming and he knew it. He was out every night, drunk. Piet was with him then, and that helped. Piet was there with a joke, with an arm around the shoulder. Funny little guy. “What should I do, Piet?” Truman asked him. “Do it,” Piet said. “Stick it to 'em. Jews, Commies, niggers. The world's gone rotten like an apple.” There was money this time. Money to get away and start over, sort things out. Someplace. Anyplace. Barrow, even. He wasn't supposed to take the car—permanently, that is. But when it was all over, he hated Depeyster more than he hated Sasha Freeman and the Worldwide Communist Conspiracy. For making him hate himself. So he kept it. Drove the shit out of it. Seven, eight years, up here and back. Till it gave out. Till there was no reason to go back.

The funny thing was, it was all in vain.

Sasha Freeman and Morton Blum and whoever controlled them were one step ahead of Depeyster all along. “You want to talk expediency,” Truman growled, “you want to talk cynicism, Freeman and Blum, those sons of bitches had a corner on the market.”

Truman was supposed to let the boys in at some point so they could break things up—really tan the asses of Robeson and Connell and all the rest of the nigger lovers, teach them a lesson they'd never forget:
Wake Up, America: Peterskill Did!
That's how Depeyster saw it. That was the plan. Truman would help the cause and he'd get a
thousand dollars to bail himself out of his life and start someplace else. But it all backfired, of course. If Sasha Freeman had been there he would have let the animals in himself. Gladly. It was his idea all along to stir thing up till they were good and hot, work in a little slaughter of the innocents with some broken bones and bloody noses thrown in for good measure and get a bunch of pictures of women in blood-stained skirts into the newspapers. And if some poor coon got lynched, so much the better. A peaceful sing-along? What the hell good was that?