World's End (48 page)

Cursing, he took hold of the rusty wrought-iron railing and pulled himself to his feet. He stood there a moment, swaying like a sapling in a storm, glaring angrily at Mrs. Deering's window as if challenging her to show herself again. Then he killed the bottle, dropped it in the bushes and wiped his hands on his shirt. A kid on a bicycle—eight, nine years old, red hair, freckles—came tearing down the sidewalk as he lurched for the car, and it was all Walter could do to avoid him. Unfortunately, the concentration and force of will expended in this tricky maneuver left him vulnerable to other obstacles. Like the fire hydrant. In the next instant, the kid was gone, Mrs. Deering's head had reappeared in the window, and Walter was reclining face down on the lawn.

Back in the car, he examined the grass stains on the knees of his once-beige trousers and the suspicious smear at the base of his clocked tie. What next? he muttered angrily, jerking the tie from his neck and flinging it into the street. It took him a while to fit the key into the little silver slot of the ignition, which kept dodging away from him and bobbing back again, like a float with a nibbling fish beneath it, but at last he succeeded, firing up the car with a vibraphonic rattle of the valve lifters. He looked around him for a moment, the world gone suddenly strange, his face tingling as if a swarm of tiny hairy-legged creatures were trapped beneath the skin and struggling to get out. Then he slammed the car into gear and took off with a screech Mrs. Deering would never forget.

Before he knew it, he was on Van Wart Road. Heading west.
That is, heading in the direction of several significant landmarks. Tom Crane's hubcap, for one. Van Wart Manor, for another. And for yet another, the hellish, mysterious, realigned and reinforced historical marker that had launched him on this trail of tears in the first place.

And where was he going?

Not until he'd come within a cigarette's length of sideswiping a van full of fist-waving teenagers at Cats' Corners, not until he'd lumbered through the wicked
S
curve that followed, not until he slowed at Tom Crane's elm to bore his eyes into the back of the car pulled up on the shoulder beneath it, did it become clear to him: he was going to Van Wart Manor. For Mardi. The MG rolled to a halt and he gazed ruefully at the hubcap leering at him from the bole of the elm
I'm home, yes,
it seemed to mock,
and so is she
—until a station wagon roared past him in the outside lane, horn blaring, and he came to his senses. He jerked the wheel and lurched away from that declamatory hubcap, intent on Van Wart Manor and the solace of Mardi, but almost as soon as he hit the gas—gravel flying, tires protesting, Jessica's Bug falling away to his right—he was stabbing for the brake. Violently. Desperately.

There before him, strung out across the road and down the shoulder as far as he could see, was a line of people. Picnickers. The men in hats and baggy pants, the women in culottes and sandals and ankle socks, their arms laden with baskets, children, lawn chairs, newspapers to spread out on the ground. He was headed right for them, their cries of alarm terrible in his ears, people scattering like dominoes, a single woman—pamphlets tucked under her arm, a toddler at her side—frozen in his path, and his foot, his impotent alien foot, only now finding the brake. There was a scream, a blizzard of paper, his own face, his mother's, and then they were gone and he was wrestling with the wheel, all the way out on the far side of the road.

He wasn't aiming for it, didn't mean it—he was drunk, freaked out, hallucinating—but there it was. The marker. Dead ahead of him. By the time he reached it, he couldn't have been doing more than twenty, battling to keep out of the ditch, billows of dust rocketing up behind him—on the wrong side of the road, for christ's sake! Still, he did hit it, dead on, the bumper of the MG like the prow of an icebreaker, cryptic Cranes and unfathomable Mohonks flung to the winds, metal grinding on metal. In the next instant he was in control
again, swerving back across the road just in time to thread the stone pillars and make the hard cut into the long stately sweeping drive of Van Wart Manor.

Here, peace reigned. The world was static, tranquil, timeless, bathed in the enduring glow of privilege and prosperity. There were no phantasms here, no signs of class strife, of grasping immigrants, trade unionists, workers, Communists and malcontents, no indication that the world had changed at all in the past three hundred years. Walter gazed out on the spreading maples, the flagstone paths, the spill of the lawns and the soft pastel patterns of the roses against the lush backdrop of the woods, and he felt the panic subside. Everything was all right. Really. He was just a little drunk, that was all.

As he swung around the parabola of the driveway and approached the house itself, he saw that there were three cars pulled up at the curb in front: Dipe's Mercedes, Joanna's station wagon and Mardi's Fiat. He was a little sloppy with the wheel—almost nodded off while shifting into reverse, in fact—but managed to wedge himself in between the station wagon and Fiat without hitting anything. So far as he could tell, that is. He was standing woozily in front of the MG, inspecting the bumper where the sign had raked it, when he heard the front door slam and looked up to see Joanna coming down the steps toward him.

She was dressed in moccasins and leggings, in fringed buckskin spotted with grease or ink or something, and her skin had a weird rufous cast to it, the color of old brick. Bits of feathers and seashells and whatnot dangled from her hair, which was knotted and tangled and so slick with grease she must have shampooed with salad oil. She had a box with her. A big cardboard supermarket box that bore the logo of a detergent guaranteed to brighten your shirts and socks and your mornings too. The box was overladen and she was balancing it on the apex of her swollen abdomen, waddling a bit, her lips molded in a beatific smile.

“Hi,” Walter said, straightening up and rubbing his hands together, as if crouching down in her driveway were the most natural thing in the world for him to have been doing. “Just, uh, checking to see if the beast was leaking oil again, you know?” he slurred, making it a question, an excuse and a plea all rolled in one.

Joanna acted as if she hadn't heard him. Just kept coming, waddling, embracing the big box full of—what was it, dolls? “Hi,” Walter repeated, as she drew even with him, “need a hand with that?”

Now, for the first time, her eyes seemed to focus on him. “Oh, hi,” she said, her voice as tranquil and steady as if she'd been expecting him, “you startled me.” Her eyes were Mardi's, but all the ice was melted from them. She didn't look startled at all. In fact, if Walter didn't know better, he would have guessed she was stoned. “Yes,” she said, dumping the box in his arms, “please.”

Walter took the box. Inside were dolls. Or rather, parts of dolls: heads, limbless torsos, the odd arm or leg with its molded sock and shoe affixed. Each of them—each face, limb, set of buttocks, belly and chest—had been slathered with some sort of paint or polish that made it look rusty, flesh gone the color of rakes left out in the rain. Walter clutched the box to his chest while Joanna fumbled through her rabbit-skin purse for the keys to the station wagon's rear door.

It seemed to take her forever. Walter began to feel uncomfortable, standing there beneath the unwavering August sun in his stained pants and sweaty shirt, staring drunkenly into the heap of dismembered limbs, frozen smiles and madly winking eyes, and so he said, “For the Indians?” just to say something.

She took the box from him, gave him a look that made him wonder if she really had recognized him after all, then slid the box into the back of the wagon and slammed the door. “Of course,” she said, turning away from him to make her way to the front of the car, “who else is there?”

Next it was Lula.

She knew him now, of course, knew him well—he was the friend of her nephew Herbert and one of Mr. Van Wart's executives. And a very special friend of Mardi too. She greeted him at the door with a smile that showed all the fillings in her teeth. “You look like you been run down in the street,” she said.

Walter gave her a sloppy grin and found himself in the anteroom, glancing first up the staircase to where the door to Mardi's lair lay masked in shadow, and then to his left, where the comforting gloom of the old parlor was steeped in muted sunlight.

“Mardi's upstairs,” Lula said, giving him a sly look, “and Mr.
Van Wart's out back someplace—poking around in the barn, I think. Which one you want?”

Walter was aiming for nonchalance, but the Scotch was drilling holes in his head and his feet seemed to have called in sick. He took hold of the banister for support. “I guess I came to see Mardi,” he said.

Only now did he notice that Lula was clutching her purse, and that a little white straw hat floated atop the typhoon of her hair. “I'm on my way out the door,” she said, “but I'll give her a hoot.” Her voice rose in stentorian summons, practiced, assured and familiar all at once—“Mardi!” she called, “Mardi! Somebody here to see you!”—and then she gave him another great wide lickerish grin and ducked out the door.

There was a moment of restive silence, as if the old house were caught in that briefest hiatus between one breath and another, and then Mardi's voice—querulous, world-weary, so shot through with boredom it was almost a whine—came back to him: “Well, who is it—Rick?” Silence. Then her voice again, faint, muffled, as if she'd already lost interest and turned away, “So send him up already.”

Walter was not Rick. Walter did not in fact know who Rick was, nor did he much care. Shakily, unsteadily, he lifted the stones of his feet, gripping the banister as if it were a lifeline, and mounted the stairs. At the top, Mardi's door, first one on the right. The door stood slightly ajar, a garish poster of a band Walter had never heard of crudely affixed to the face of it. He hesitated a moment, staring into the hungry shameless eyes of the band's members, trying out the ponderous flat-footed syllables of their esoteric name on his tongue, wondering if he should knock. The booze decided for him. He pushed his way in.

The room was as dark as any cave, a low moan of bass and guitar caught in the far speaker, Mardi, in the light from the door, hunkered over an ashtray in the middle of the bed. She was wearing a T-shirt and panties, nothing more. “Rick?” she said, squinting against the invasion of light.

“No,” Walter murmured, feeling immeasurably weary, vastly drunk, “it's me, Walter.”

The light fell across her face, the wild teased bush of her hair. She
lifted a hand to shield her eyes. “Oh, fuck,” she spat, “shut the door, will you? The top of my head feels like it's about to lift off.”

Walter stepped inside and shut the door. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dark, a moment during which the plaint of bass and guitar was amplified by the addition of a muddy quavering vocal track—some guy who sounded as if he were singing through his socks. From the bottom of a sewer. In hell. “Nice music,” Walter said. “Who is it—the guys on the door?”

Mardi didn't answer. Her cigarette—or no, it was a joint; he could smell it—glowed in the dark.

He started for the bed, thinking to ease himself down on it, maybe take a hit of the joint, help her off with her T-shirt, forget himself for a space. But he didn't quite make it. Something immovable—the beveled edge of her bureau?—caught him in the groin, and his foot came down hard on something else, something frangible, that gave way with a splintering crack.

Still Mardi said nothing.

“You got a headache?” he said, struggling for balance, bending low to reach for the near corner of the mattress, “is that it?” And then, mercifully, he was sinking into the mattress, off his feet at last and so close to her he could feel the heat of her body, smell her hair, her sweat, the least maddening essence of her secret self.

“I'm waiting for Rick,” she said, and her voice was strange, distant, as if it weren't really plugged in. “Rick,” she repeated, in a murmur. And then: “I'm stoned, really stoned. I'm tripping. Seeing things. Scary things.”

Walter pondered this revelation for a minute, then confessed that he wasn't feeling so hot himself. This, he hoped, would be the prelude to some meliorative embraces and consolatory sex, but his hopes were immediately dashed when she sprang up from the bed as if she'd been stung, stalked across the room and flung the door open. Her face was twisted with fury and the cold hard irises of her eyes contracted round the pinpoints of her pupils. “Get out!” she shouted, her voice rising to a shriek with the punch of the adverb.

The term “flipping out” came to him, but he didn't know whether it properly applied to Mardi or himself. In any case, he got up off the bed with alacrity, envisioning a vindictive Depeyster taking the stairs
two at a time to see what his most trusted employee was doing to his half-dressed and hysterical daughter in the darkness of her room. As he staggered toward her, though, all the hurts and dislocations of the day began to fester in him, and he stopped short to demand an explanation along the lines of
I thought we were friends
and
what about last month when we … and then we…?

“No,” she said, trembling in her T-shirt, nipples hard, navel exposed, legs strong and naked and brown, “never again. Not with you.”

They were face to face now, inches apart. He looked down at her: a tic had invaded the right side of her face, her lips were parted and dry. All of a sudden he was seized with an urge to choke her, throttle her, knead that perfect throat till all the tightness went out of it, till she dropped from his hands limp as a fish slapped against the gunwale. But in the same instant she shouted “You're just like him!” and the accusation caught him off balance.

“Like who?” he sputtered, wondering what she was talking about, how he'd managed to put his foot in it in the space of two minutes, and even, for a second there, wondering who he was. He watched her closely, drunk but wary. She was swaying on her feet. He was swaying on his feet. Her breath was hot in his face.