World's End (25 page)

It was late in the afternoon, and he was out back, spading up the earth around his roses, when he thought of Joanna. He'd been in the house just a moment earlier, looking for a fishing hat to keep the sun out of his eyes, and noted absently that Lula had set but a single place at the dining room table. Now, as the rich black loam of the rose bed turned beneath his spade, that solitary place setting loomed up in his mind till he saw not roots and soil but the pattern of the china, the cut of the crystal, the crease of napkin and glint of silver. It was puzzling. Mardi wouldn't be eating—probably wouldn't be home at all after the scene in the parlor—but where was Joanna? She'd left the previous morning for the Shawangunk reservation, the station wagon packed to the roof with the cast-off pedal pushers, clam-diggers and toreador pants she'd collected door to door in her biannual trouser drive. Which meant that she would spend the night at the Hiawatha Motel, as usual, and be home for dinner in the evening. As usual. And yet he was sure he'd seen just the one place.

It was something to think about as he bent to the rose bushes, mounding the earth in little pyramids at the base of the canes and tamping it down deep over the roots. He was in the act of exhuming
the previous year's mulch from the trough around the Helen Traubels, when a startling thought crept into his head: she'd had an accident, that's what it was.
The
accident. The one he'd always pictured. Yawing over its oppressed springs, the station wagon had veered off one of the tricky bends of Route 17 and wound up on its roof in the icy pellucid waters of the Beaverkill; a semi had jackknifed, crushing the car like an aluminum can: Joanna was gone. Sarabande, Iceberg, Olé: he could already smell the blossoms. But no. If it were anything serious—anything fatal—Lula would have let him know.

Roses. Here it was mid-October already and he was just now getting around to preparing the beds for the hard frost to come. Not that he'd been neglecting them—he exulted in his roses, prided himself in them, wouldn't let the gardener near them—it was just that September had been glorious—Indian summer to the hilt—and he'd found himself out on the
Catherine Depeyster
nearly every afternoon. Or on the links. No, she'd had a flat, that's what it was. The engine had seized, the fan belt disintegrated, she was stuck in Olean, Elmira, Endicott. He stood, knocked the dirt from his work gloves. Little Darling, Blaze, Mister Lincoln, Saratoga: the very names gave him satisfaction. He'd finish up tomorrow, wrap the canes in burlap, manure them. But where was she? Maybe she'd left him. Vanished. Run off. As he strode up the hill to the house, a guilty little fantasy overtook him for just a moment—she was naked, that big freckle-faced dormmate of Mardi's, hovering over him and bucking like a wild animal, and he could feel his seed taking hold, could see them—his sons—marching from her hot and fertile young womb as from the mouth of some ancient cave.

Lula's face dropped when he mentioned the place setting. “Oh my blessed Jesus, it just slipped my mind.” The kitchen, with its concessions to modernity—dishwasher, electric range, frost-free refrigerator—gleamed behind her like something out of a commercial for the newest wonder cleaner. She'd been pounding veal at the kitchen table when he stepped into the room. “Oh Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” she wailed, and you might have thought she'd lost her entire family in a train wreck, “I just can't figure what's come over me.”

Depeyster leaned back against the radiant counter and folded his arms.

“It was one o'clock this afternoon she called. Something's come up up there, something about a protest march—here, I've got it written down.” She heaved herself up from the table, a heavy woman, solid as the oaks along the drive, and snatched a scrap of paper from beneath the phone. “Here it is,” she gasped, breathing hard from the effort, “ ‘Six Tribes Against the War.' She says not to expect her till tomorrow this time.”

Six Tribes Against the War: what a joke. He let the words sit on his tongue a moment before repeating them in a tone of bitter contempt. Six Tribes Against the War. He could picture them—a bunch of unemployed half-looped overfed Indians dressed in toreador pants and carrying placards, his wife out front in curlers and beaded moccasins, marching up and down in front of the feed store in Jamestown. It would almost be funny if they weren't doing the work of the Viet Cong. And Joanna. The relief business was bad enough, but this—this was demeaning. His own wife involved in a demonstration. What next?

“Piccata tonight,” Lula murmured, shuffling back to her veal.

“And Mardi?” he asked after a moment.

Lula just shrugged.

He stood there a moment longer, listening to the refrigerator start up with a wheeze and gazing out on that single accusatory plate at the dining room table. On the back wall, above the sideboard, hung a murky oil of Stephanus Van Wart, heir to the patroon and first lord of Van Wart Manor, the man who'd doubled and trebled the original holdings and then doubled and trebled them again until he owned every creek and ridge, every fern, every deer and turkey and toad and thistle between the flat gray Hudson and the Connecticut border. Depeyster glanced up at the proud smirking eyes of his ancestor and found that he'd lost his appetite. “Don't bother, Lula,” he said. “I'll eat out.”

When Joanna finally did get home the following evening, it was late—past ten—and Depeyster was sitting before a fire in the parlor, halfheartedly poking through a biography of General Israel Putnam, the man who'd closed his ears to all appeals for clemency and hanged Edmund Palmer for a spy on Gallows Hill in August of 1777. For the
second night running, the heir to Van Wart Manor had eaten a solitary meal in a clean, well-lighted booth at the Peterskill diner, and for the second night running, he was afflicted with indigestion. He was feeling pretty low in any case—frustrated over the land business, incensed with his daughter (who still hadn't deigned to return), deeply mortified by the thought of his wife's making a public spectacle of herself, even if it was in the remotest hinterlands. And so, as he turned at the sound of the latch to confront the spectacle of his tardy wife in her ridiculous Indian costume, he gave himself over to the huffings and puffings of a fine cleansing cathartic rage. “Where the hell have you been?” he demanded, leaping to his feet and flinging the book to the floor.

Joanna was wearing the moccasins and headband she'd affected since first taking up the gauntlet in the name of Indian relief. But now, for some unfathomable reason, she'd got herself up in a ragged deerskin dress and leggings as well. The dress looked like something you'd use on the car after a heavy rain.

“No, don't tell me—it was a costume party, right? Or is this what the fashionable demonstrator is wearing these days?” The diner's stuffed peppers shot up his windpipe to immolate the cavity beneath his breastbone. He suppressed a belch.

Joanna said nothing. There was a peculiar look in her eyes, a look he recognized from the distant past. It was the look she used to give him when they were dating, when they were newlyweds, when they were a fecund young couple with a healthy fat-faced blossoming little daughter. She crossed the room to him, and he noticed that her hair was braided, Indian-fashion, with strips of birch bark. And then her hands were on his shoulders—he could smell her, woodsmoke, wild mint, a certain primordial musk of the outdoors that made his knees go weak—and she was asking him, in a lascivious whisper, if he'd missed her.

Missed her? She was pulling him toward her, hanging from his neck like a schoolgirl, pressing her lips with their faintest taste of wild onion and rose hips to his. Missed her? They hadn't had sex in fifteen years and she was asking him if he'd missed her?

Fifteen years. Over that period, sex for Depeyster had been reduced to a sad series of couplings, a spilling of seed in the desert, a succession of weekends with the Miss Egthuysens of the world or
with one or another of the aggressive sun-tanned lionesses he ran into at the country club bar. But never with Joanna, never with his wife. All that had ended when she'd gathered up his lotions and unguents and aphrodisiacs and thrown them in his face, when she'd torn up his love manuals and shredded his ovulation schedules, when she'd asked him if he thought she was a prize bitch for breeding and nothing more. Mardi had been five or six at the time, entering kindergarten—or was it first grade? They'd slept in separate rooms ever since.

And now here she was, probing his palate with her tongue, pushing him back on the couch, pulling him to the floor and the rug before the fire. Was she drunk? he thought vaguely as she tugged at his trousers. She lifted her dress and he saw with a thrill that she wasn't wearing anything underneath, her breasts high and hard, not a flap or wrinkle on her, forty-three years old and supple as a coed. As she sank into him he felt transported, grateful, hopeful, his fantasy of the big freckled girl realized here on the carpet in the parlor with his own wife, and he closed his eyes and concentrated on the heir to come. Oh yes, there'd be an heir. There had to be. He'd waited so long and now … it was like something out of a fairy tale, The Patient Woodcutter, Sleeping Beauty awakened with a kiss. He gave himself over to the rhythm of it.

For her part, Joanna was doing what she had to do. Not that there wasn't a certain nostalgic feel to the whole exercise, not that it was particularly repulsive or anything like that. She supposed she loved him, in a way, this bloodless man, her husband. He was all right—she couldn't imagine being married to anyone else—it was just that he didn't know how to stir her, to move her in her deepest self, didn't know or care about love, romance, passion. He was cold, cold as something you'd find crawling up the riverbed waving its claws. He didn't want to make love, didn't even want to fuck—he wanted to procreate.

Well, all right. She was no Molly Bloom, but for fifteen years she'd found her romance elsewhere. And now it was necessary to do this. With her husband. Her lawful partner. Presumptive father of the child she would bear, wanted to bear.

For she hadn't been with Indians the past two days, hadn't been to the demonstration, hadn't in fact left Peterskill. Indians, no. But
an
Indian,
one
Indian, yes.

It was no day for a pleasure cruise. The wind was howling down out of the Canadian wilds, it was cold enough to turn back the Vikings and the sky looked dead, caught up on the mountains like a skin stretched out to dry. Walter couldn't feel his toes, and when he tried to relight the joint pinched in a vice grip between his thumb and forefinger, a sudden gust snuffed out the match. Three times in a row. Finally he gave up and flicked the thing into the water. He couldn't believe it. Halloween, and already it was cold as December.

Walter turned up the collar of his denim jacket and watched a couple of ducks huddling in the lee of the boat ramp. All around him, on trailers, on cement blocks, propped up on the cracked concrete as if awaiting a second flood, were boats. Ketches, schooners, catboats and runabouts, yawls and yachts and catamarans. And then there were the boats that would never see the water again, ancient hulks rusted through in every bolt, leprous with rot, splintered and bleached and listing on their bows as if they'd been thrown ashore in a hurricane. This was the Peterskill Marina. Three blocks from Depeyster Manufacturing and just across the tracks from the crapped-over train station and the abandoned factories made of brick so old it was the color of mud. Walter was here, at two o'clock in the afternoon, on Halloween, waiting for Mardi. What could be better? she'd said when she called. I mean, going out to the ghost ships on Halloween. Neat, huh?

Neat. That was the word she'd used. Walter spat in the water and then turned to look over his shoulder for her. There were half a
dozen cars in the parking lot, but none of them seemed to contain Mardi. It was funny. Here he was going out sailing with her on a day that was like a blanket for a tombstone, and he didn't even know what kind of car she drove. He looked beyond the parking lot to the string of rust-streaked boxcars that stretched away from the station and around a corner toward the mouth of Van Wart Creek, and then up at the hills of Peterskill, a dependency of rooftops among the big ascending hummocks of trees. In the foreground, huddled in the lee of some seagoing monster with gleaming rails and curtains hung in the windows, stood his motorcycle, freshly repainted and with a new footpeg and throttle. The helmet, the one Jessica had given him, was hooked over the handlebar, and even at this distance he could make out the dull blotches where he'd scratched off the daisy decals with his penknife.

She hadn't liked it, this defacing of his birthday present, but he explained to her that daisy decals just didn't fit his image. He was no flower child—he was harder than that, colder, the nihilist and existential hero still. Then he grinned, as if to say I'm only joking, and she grinned back.

Jessica. She was at work now. His wife, who'd forgone Scripps, Miami, N.Y.U. and Mayaguez for him, was at work, counting fish larvae preserved in trays of formalin. Tom Crane had gotten her the job. Over at the nuclear power plant, the stacks and domes of which rose up from the near shoreline like the minarets and cupolas of some fantastic high-tech mosque. The larva count was part of an environmental impact study Con Ed was funding to atone for the sin of sucking up great stinking mounds of fish in their intake pipes. An old lab mate of Tom's had got him a job piloting a boat for the project two nights a week, and when a position came open, Tom thought of Jessica. She was in there now. Sniffing formalin, her eyes wet from the fumes of it.

Walter himself was out of work. Not that he didn't want to work—eventually, maybe, if the right thing came along. He just didn't feature standing up all day at a greasy whining lathe, turning out those little winged machine parts that had no use under the sun as far as he could figure (unless, as rumor had it, they were used in fragmentation bombs to grind up little children in places with names like
Duk Foo and Bu Wop). Or so he told Hesh and Lola. What he didn't tell them was that Van Wart had offered him a desk job. On the spot. No questions asked.