World's End (66 page)

All he wanted, really, after he'd zipped up and plunged off into the gloom, was to find Jessica and crawl back to his bunk and the
comfort of his ptarmigan-down sleeping bag, the one that could keep a man toasty and warm out on the tip of the ice sheet. But which way to go? And Jee-sus! it was cold. Shouldn't have stayed out so long. Shouldn't have smoked so much. Or drunk so much. He belched. His hair had begun to freeze, trailing down his neck in ringlets of ice.

He started toward the lights, but when he was halfway there he realized that they were, after all, the old-fashioned hooded lamps of the railway station. Which meant that, if he turned around one hundred and eighty degrees and marched off toward those lights glimmering behind him, he'd reach the tent. Three minutes' effort, punctuated by a series of desperate arm-flailing slaloms across the slick earth, proved him wrong. He was under a light, all right, but it illuminated a false storefront that carried the legend YONKERS over it. Well that stumped him for a minute, but then the vagueness let go long enough for him to remember
Hello, Dolly,
and how the crew that filmed it had put up all sorts of gingerbread facades over the weathered old buildings to evoke the spirit of Yonkers in some bygone era. He stared stupidly at the sign for a moment, thinking
Yonkers? The spirit of Yonkers?
Yonkers was a derelict place of rotten wharves, blasted tenements and a river that looked like somebody's toilet—that
was
somebody's toilet. And this place, Garrison, had about as much spirit as Disneyland.

God, this snow was something. He couldn't see the nose in front of his face. (He was attempting the experiment, looking cross-eyed at the index finger and thumb of his cold and wet right hand, which were tugging at the cold and wet tip of his nose, when a pair of headlights swept across him.) Ah, so, here he was. In front of the antique shop. And down there, yes, the barn-red duplex with the Hollywood front, and around the corner, the green and the tent. He was on his way now, oh yes, stepping out with real confidence, when he spotted something that caught him up short. Somebody up ahead. Slipping around the corner. He knew that walk. That tottering, footshorn, awkward, big-shouldered walk. “Walter?” he called. “Van?”

No answer.

A car started up behind him, then another farther up the street. Two girls in knit hats rounded the corner, arm in arm, and then an older couple, in matching London Fog raincoats. When Tom got to
the corner, he found the tent, found the party, found about a hundred people milling around over goodbyes and plastic cups of beer. A moment later, he even found Jessica.

“I was worried,” she said, “where were you? God, you're soaked. You must be freezing.”

“I, uh, had too much. … Took a walk, you know. Try to clear my head.”

Onstage, the band had been joined by Will Connell for an encore. Will's goatee was flecked with white. He was thin and hunched, his face like something out of an old painting. He made a few cracks about the weather and then started strumming his banjo like an eggbeater salesman. After a while he set it aside in favor of the guitar and launched into “We Shall Overcome.”

“You're shivering,” Jessica said.

He was. He didn't deny it.

“Let's go,” she whispered, and her hand closed over his.

When they got back to the sloop, everyone was gathered around the woodstove in the tiny galley, eating cookies and drinking hot chocolate. Tom stripped down right there, hugging the stove. He drank chocolate, munched cookies, cracked jokes with his mates. He didn't worry about Mardi or the worrisome fact that he'd failed to mention her to Jessica. He didn't worry about Mardi's father or Walter either. (Had he really seen him? he wondered ever so briefly between sips of hot chocolate. But no, he must have been dreaming.) He didn't worry about tomorrow's sail or the icy decks or his yellowed underwear. He merely yawned. A great, yodeling, jaw-cracking yawn of utter peace and satiation, and then he shrugged into his longjohns and climbed into the ptarmigan-down bag, his lady love at his side. He lay there a moment, breathing in the atmosphere of quiet joy and repletion that closed gently over the cabin, and then he shut his eyes.

The bunk was snug. The river rocked them. The snow fell.

It was one of those pressed-glass lamps with a hand-painted shade, ancient, no doubt, and priceless, and Walter was staring into it as if into a crystal ball. He was sitting hunched over his knees on a loveseat in the front parlor of the museum Dipe called home, clutching a tumbler of single-malt Scotch that had probably been distilled before he was born and trying to smoke a menthol cigarette in a properly nihilistic way. He'd been back from Barrow just over a week now, and he was feeling very peculiar all of a sudden, feeling light-headed and a bit nauseous. His groin ached, he was wet under the arms and the arch of his right foot began to itch so furiously he was actually reaching for it before he caught himself. It was funny—or no, it wasn't funny at all—but it was almost as if he were bracing himself for another attack of history.

Dipe sat on the couch across from him, sipping at his Scotch and furrowing his handsome brow at LeClerc Outhouse and a stranger in trench coat and black leather gloves. The stranger, whose name Walter hadn't caught, wore his hair in a crewcut so severe his scalp shone through like a reflector. He didn't unbutton his trench coat and he didn't remove his gloves. “It's a shame,” the stranger said, slowly shaking his head, “it really is. And nobody seems to care.”

LeClerc, who always seemed to have a suntan, even in winter, and whose favorite expression was “damn straight,” said, “Damn straight.”

Dipe leaned back in his chair with a sigh. He glanced at Walter, then back at LeClerc and the man in the trench coat. “Well, I tried.
Nobody can say I didn't.” He sipped Scotch, and sighed into it. The others made consoling and affirmative noises: yes, he'd tried, they knew that. “If it wasn't for the damn weather—” He waved his hand at the ceiling in futility.

“Damn straight,” LeClerc said.

Depeyster set his glass down and the stranger finished the thought for him, “—they'd never have got that floating circus within half a mile of Garrison.”

“Damn straight,” LeClerc said.

“Snow,” Depeyster grunted, and from the tone of his grunt you would have thought shit was dropping from the trees.

The conversation had been going on along these lines for the better part of an hour. Walter had come home with Depeyster after work and had stayed for supper with Joanna, LeClerc and the grimlooking stranger, who'd kept his gloves on even while buttering his bread. Mardi's seat was vacant. Walter couldn't taste his food. It had been snowing—unseasonably, unreasonably—since three.

The principal theme of the evening was the
Arcadia,
and Dipe's thwarted effort to organize a rally against its landing at Garrison, “or, for shit's sake, anywhere else on this side of the river.” The centerpiece of the rally was to have been a flotilla from the Peterskill Yacht Club—everything from cabin cruisers to dinghies—that would track north with banners and flags, harass the
Arcadia
and then block access to the Garrison dock through sheer force of numbers. The only problem was the weather. Dipe had taken Walter down to the marina at lunch, and only three boat owners had showed up. The rest were presumably discouraged by gale winds and predictions of two to four inches of snow that were later updated to as much as a foot.

“Apathy,” Depeyster growled. “Nobody gives a good goddamn.”

“Damn straight,” LeClerc said.

The stranger nodded.

“If I was twenty years younger,” Depeyster said, glancing at Walter again.

“It's a shame,” the stranger said in a doleful whisper, and whether he was referring to Depeyster's age or the Communist-inspired, anti-American, long-haired hippie outrage being perpetrated that very moment and not five miles from his tumbler of Scotch, wasn't clear.

Walter didn't wait for clarification. All at once he was assailed by the most racking, god-awful stomach pains he'd ever known. He jerked upright, then leaned forward to set his tumbler down on a coffee table older than coffee itself. The pain hit him again. He snubbed his cigarette with a shaking hand. “You all right?” Dipe asked him.

“I'm”—he stood, wincing—“I think I'm … hungry, that's all.”

“Hungry?” echoed LeClerc. “After a meal like that?”

Lula had served stuffed pork chops, mashed potatoes and canned asparagus, with homemade apple pie, ice cream and coffee for dessert. Walter hadn't felt much like eating, but he'd done justice to it anyway, putting away a modest portion, if not exactly polishing his plate. But now, as the words escaped his lips, he realized that the sudden pains, these volcanic contractions and dilations that felt as if they would split him open, were hunger pains. And that he was hungry. But not just hungry. Ravenous, starved, mad—killing mad—for the scent and texture and taste of food.

Dipe laughed. “He's a growing boy. You remember growing, right, LeClerc?” This was a reference to LeClerc's ballooning gut. The stranger laughed. Or rather snickered. The gloom lifted momentarily.

“Go on into the kitchen, Walter,” Dipe was saying. “Stick your head in the refrigerator, go through the cupboards—you're welcome to anything I've got, you know that.”

Walter was already in the hallway when the stranger called out, “Bring me back some peanuts or something, will you?”

The first think he saw on opening the refrigerator door was a six-pack of Budweiser. He didn't want beer, not exactly, but he popped one and drained it anyway. Beside the beer were the remains of the apple pie—nearly half of it, in fact—still in its baking dish. Walter made short work of it. In the meat compartment he found half a pound of pastrami, a rock-hard fragment of Parmesan and six thin pink slices of roast beef in an Offenbacher's bag. Before he knew what he was doing, he had the whole mess in his mouth and was washing it down with another beer. He was reaching for the glossy bright can of whipped cream, thinking to squirt some of it down his throat, when Mardi walked in on him.

“Oh, uh, hi,” he said, guiltily closing the refrigerator door. He held a beer in one hand, and, somehow, a jar of marinated artichoke hearts had appeared in the other.

“What's happening?” Mardi said, laconic, her eyes wide and amused, yet a bit blunted too. She was wearing a flesh-colored body stocking, no brassiere, cowgirl boots. Her raccoon coat and woolen scarf were thrown over one arm. She reeked of pot. “Pigging out, huh?”

Walter set the beer down to unscrew the lid of the jar. He fished out a couple of artichoke hearts with his fingers and wedged them in his mouth, dabbing with the back of his hand at the oil dribbling down his chin. “I'm hungry,” he said simply.

“Why don't you just move in?” she said in a breathy whisper. “Take my room.” She opened the refrigerator and took a beer herself.

From across the house came the rumble of lamentation and the muffled but unmistakable tones of LeClerc Outhouse affirming an unheard proposition: “Damn straight!”

Walter couldn't help himself. He finished the artichoke hearts—there were only about twelve of them—and, still chewing, tilted back the jar and drank off the thick, herb-flavored olive oil in which they'd been preserved.

Mardi pulled the short-necked bottle from her lips and gave him a look of mock horror. “Disgusting,” she said.

Walter shrugged, and went for the crullers in the bread box.

She watched him eat a moment, then asked him how Alaska was.

“You know,” he said between mouthfuls, “cold.”

There was a silence. The voices from the parlor became more animated. Joanna, hugely pregnant Joanna, passed by in the hallway in a silk dressing gown. Her skin was white, her hair upswept in a conventional coif. She wasn't even wearing moccasins.

“What's going on in there,” Mardi asked, indicating the parlor with a jerk of her head, “—they plotting something or what?”

Walter shrugged. He was considering the half loaf of thin-sliced whole wheat bread he'd found beside the crullers. Peanut butter? he was thinking. Or pimento cream cheese?

Suddenly Mardi had hold of his arm and she was leaning into him, brushing his cheek with her own. “Want to go upstairs for a quickie?” she breathed, and for a minute, just a minute, he stopped chewing. But then she pushed away from him with a laugh—“Had you, didn't I? Huh? Admit it.”

He looked from the loaf in his hand to her breasts, her lovely, familiar breasts, the upturned nipples so well delineated she might
just as well have forgone the body stocking. The hunger—the hunger of the gut, anyway—began to subside.

Mardi was grinning, poised to dodge away from him like a kid with a swiped cap or notebook. “Only kidding,” she said. “Hey, I'm on my way out the door.”

Walter managed to summon a “where to?” look, though at the moment he couldn't have cared less.

“Garrison,” she said, “where else?” And then she was gone.

Walter stood there a long moment, listening to the voices drifting in from the parlor, listening to Dipe Van Wart, his employer, his mentor, his best and only friend. Dipe Van Wart, who'd molded his father into a piece of shit. He thought about that a moment longer, and thought about Hesh and Lola, Tom Crane, Jessica, the late lamented Peletiah, Sasha Freeman, Morton Blum, Rose Pollack. They were pieces of shit too. All of them. He was alone. He was hard, soulless and free. He was Meursault shooting the Arab. He could do anything, anything he wanted.

He put the bread back in the bread box and poured the rest of his beer down the drain. His coat was in the parlor, but he wouldn't need it. He didn't feel like going back in there now, and besides, it wasn't cold—not when you've just come back from Barrow, anyway. He leaned against the counter and focused on the clock over the stove, forcing himself to wait until the second hand had circled it twice.
It's in the blood, Walter,
he heard his father say. And then he crossed the kitchen and slipped out the back door.