World's End (41 page)

He was chortling to himself when the nurse returned. “I just told him I … I … I stubbed my”—he couldn't go on; it was too much. He was a deflated balloon, all the air knocked out of him with the sheer debilitating hilarity of it. “My toe!” he finally bawled, subsiding into giggles.

Nurse Rosenschweig watched him patiently through all his droll contortions, her big moon face constellated with freckles, her drooping
underlip coaching him on. Her only comment, once he'd delivered his punch line, was: “Well, aren't we lively today.” Then she turned to Walter.

“Hey, sister!” the little man suddenly shouted, his voice twittering with mirth. “Want to dance?”

That was it. Walter had had it. “Who is this man?” he demanded. “What's he doing in here? Why in christ's name did you stick him in here with me?”

Nurse Rosenschweig was no sour fraulein, as she'd just demonstrated, but Walter's protestations made her face go hard. “You want a private room, you've got to make the proper arrangements,” she said. “In advance.”

“But—but who
is
this man?” Something was beginning to dawn on Walter, confused, bereft, drugged and tormented though he may have been. It went like this: if the nurse was real—walking, talking, breathing, flesh, blood and bone—and she admitted Piet's existence, then either the whole world was a hallucination or the phantom in the bed beside him was no phantom at all.

“Name's Piet Aukema,” the dwarf rasped, leaning way out over the chasm between the beds to extend his hand, “and I'm pleased to meet you.”

Nurse Rosenschweig fixed her withering glare on Walter, who reluctantly leaned forward to shake the proferred hand. “Walter,” he mumbled, voice sticking in his throat, “Walter Van Brunt.”

“There now, isn't that better?” the nurse was saying, beaming at Walter like a contented schoolmarm, when Piet suddenly dropped Walter's hand and jerked upright in bed. Slapping his forehead, he gasped “Van Brunt? Did you say Van Brunt?”

Faintly, weakly, almost imperceptibly, Walter nodded.

“I knew it, I knew it,” the dwarf sang. “Soon as I laid eyes on you, I knew it.”

The chill of history was descending yet again—Walter could feel it, familiar as a toothache, and he shivered inwardly.

“Sure,” the dwarf said, marshaling his features into an obscene parody of amity and ingenuousness, “I knew your father.”

Every time Walter opened his eyes during the course of the next three days, Piet was there, the cynosure of the room, the hospital, the
universe, the first and only thing that mattered. He would wake in the morning to the little man's booming “Up and at 'em, lazybones!,” jolt up from a tormented nap to see him calmly paring his nails or crunching into an apple, arouse himself from a sitcom-induced doze to watch him leaf through a pornographic magazine or hold up the centerfold with a complicitous wink. Still, Walter couldn't quite believe he wasn't hallucinating—not until Lola came to visit and recognized the wizened little runt in her first breath. “Piet?” she said, narrowing her eyes to examine him as she might have examined the ghostly figures of a faded photograph.

The dwarf perked up like a dog catching the faintest ring of silverware from the farthest corner of the kitchen. “I know you,” he said, his big leathery lips twisted into the best facsimile of a smile. “Lola, isn't it?”

Lola's hands went to her hair. She fumbled with her purse, her bulky coat, and sat heavily in the visitor's chair. A change came across her face, her mouth grim, lips trembling.

“What's it been,” he said, “twenty years?”

Her voice was dead. “Not long enough.”

Piet went on as if he hadn't noticed, filling her in on the sliding scale of his fortunes over the past two decades. Smirking, winking, rolling his eyes, gesticulating so violently he set the traction wires atremble, the little man told her of his careers in carpentry, Off-Broadway theater (a supporting role in a short-lived musical based on Todd Browning's “Freaks”), commercial fishing, managing a bar and grill in Putnam Valley, selling doughnut makers door-to-door and Renaults, VWs and Mini-Coopers at a lot in Brewster. He chattered on for the better part of an hour, hooting at his own jokes, dropping his voice to an ominous rasp to underscore the bad times, rushing with passion as he described his loves and triumphs, going on and on, signing, guffawing and wisecracking, performing the grand symphony of his little life for an audience chained to their seats. Never once did he mention Truman.

The moment Lola left, Walter turned to him. Puffed up like a toad with the litany of his adventures, Piet regarded him slyly. “You, uh, you said you knew my father,” Walter began, and then faltered.

“That's right. He was a real card, your old man.”

When did you see him last? What happened to him? Is he alive?
The questions were stacked up in Walter's head like jetliners over La Guardia—Why did he leave us? What happened that night in 1949? Was he gutless? A fink? A turncoat? Was he the no-account, perfidious, two-faced, backstabbing son of a bitch everyone made him out to be?—but before he could ask the first of them, Piet was off on another jag of reminiscence.

“A card,” he repeated, wagging his head in disbelief. “Did you hear about the time—?” Walter hadn't heard. Or if he had, he was going to hear it again. Waving his stumpy arms like a conductor, leering, grimacing, clucking, chortling, Piet served up the old stories. There were the pranks—flying upside down under the Bear Mountain Bridge, stealing the life-size figures from the crèche outside the Church of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception and hoisting them up the flagpole in front of the monument on Washington Street, substituting distilled vinegar for vodka at the VFW Memorial Day picnic; there were the drinking bouts, the women, the crab boils and card games—names and places and dates that meant nothing to Walter. Finally the rasping atonal voice paused a moment, as if to collect itself—as if perhaps, at last, it had run out of stories—when Piet threw his head back on the pillow, slapped the rock-hard cast with an exclamatory palm and uttered a single astonishing proper noun, one that hadn't been uttered in Walter's presence since the death of his grandmother. “Sachoes,” the dwarf said in what amounted to a prefatory sigh.

“Sachoes?” Walter flung it back at him. “What about him?”

Piet gave him a long, smirking, supremely self-satisfied look, simultaneously plumbing an ear for wax and running a gnarled hand through his hair. “That's all Truman'd talk about when I first met him back in, what?—'40, I guess it was, just before the War. Sachoes this, Sachoes that. You know, the Indian chief. Owned all this”—his hand swept the room in a gesture meant to suggest the dubious worth not only of the paltry room but of the gray landscape that fell away from the windows in a bristle of bare-crowned trees—“before us white men took it away from him, that is. Damndest thing. For a couple of months or so back then your father was all worked up about it, as though we could turn history around or something.” Piet—the gargoyle, the imp—looked him full in the face. “You know the story?”

Walter knew it—one of his grandmother's stories—and suddenly he saw that neat square little house perched over the river, a night of crippling cold, his grandfather hunched hairily over the fire, plucking and jabbing at the muck-smelling length of his drift net like an old lady with her needlepoint, his grandmother busy shaping clay in a maelstrom of newspaper at the kitchen table. She was attempting something big—her major statement on trash fish, a planter in the shape of three intertwined and gaping carp. Walter was nine or ten—it was the winter Hesh and Lola had gone down to Miami over the Christmas break and left him with his grandparents. There was no TV—his grandmother mistrusted televisions as she mistrusted telephones, prying eyes and ears, conduits into which her enemies could pour their malice—but there would have been a radio. Christmas carols maybe, playing softly in the background. Cookies in the oven. Snow flying at the black impervious panes of the big bay window that looked out over the river. Gram, Walter said, tell me a story.

Her hands—big and fleshy, spotted with age—worked at the clay. She rolled out a string of it, formed an O and gave the near carp a set of lips. At first he thought she hadn't heard him, but then she began to speak, her voice barely audible over the snap of the fire, the carols, the wind in the eaves: It was the winter after they'd buried Minewa, and Sachoes, great sachem of the Kitchawanks, was in despair. Smeared with otter fat against the cold, wrapped in the fur of Konoh, the bear, he stared glumly into the fire while the wind flapped the thatch of elm bark and basswood strips till he could have sworn all the geese in the world were beating around his head.

Despair? Walter asked. What's that?

Soon enough, growled his hairy grandfather, looking up from his torn drift net, you'll find out. Soon enough.

Walter's grandmother gave her husband an impatient look, etched a triad of scales under the gill plate of the middle carp, and turned to Walter. He was sad, Walter, she said. He'd lost hope. Fizzled out. Given up. He sat there in the longhouse with Wahwahtaysee, with Matekanis and Witapanoxwe, his elder sons, and Mohonk, the lanky, flat-footed boy who was to disappoint his mother so, and poked at the embers of tobacco and red dogwood bark in the bowl of his pipe. When morning came, Jan Pieterse would be at the door, bearing gifts.
A pair of yellow-eyed dogs, kettles harder than stone, knives, scissors, axes, blankets, nuggets of colored glass that made even the most highly polished disk of
wampumpeak
look like just another pebble. Gifts, yes: but no gift comes without a price.

When Jan Pieterse came amongst them some six years before, the Kitchawanks were amazed not only by the limitless supply of wellmade and bewitching objects he brought with him for trade, but also by the persistence and subtlety of his haggling, by the stream of graceless and mangled Mohican words that never stopped dribbling from his lips. “Composed of Mouth” is what they called him, and they came to him in all their strength and dignity to trade skins for these fine wares with which he'd loaded his little sloop to the gunwales. But it wasn't just beaver pelts he wanted, no—it was the land itself. It was the Blue Rock and the land that lay around it. Sachoes, as chief and elder statesman, came forward to negotiate with him.

And what did Sachoes get for his people in exchange for the land on which Composed of Mouth set up the boxy inhospitable fortress of his trading post? Things. Possessions. Objects of envy and covetousness. Axes whose handles broke and whose blades went dull, jars that shattered, scissors that locked at the joint with rust and the gleaming insuperable coins that introduced theft and murder to the village of bark huts on Acquasinnick Bay. And where were these things now? All gone their own careless way—even the blankets eaten up by some mysterious corruption from within—while the beaver that helped buy them were as scarce as hairs on a Mohawk's head. Composed of Mouth was no fool. He had the land. Incorruptible and eternal.

In the early days, Jan Pieterse came to them. But now they came to Jan Pieterse. Wasted by the English pox, sick with drink, starved with a winter severe beyond the recall of old Gaindowana, eldest man of the tribe, they'd crept like dogs in the humiliation of their need to the big barred door of Composed of Mouth's trading post and begged him to remember the land they'd given him. They wanted cloth, food, things of iron, things of beauty—to their everlasting shame, they wanted rum. Sure, Composed of Mouth told them, certainly, of course and why not? Credit, he said, in his barker's patois, a Dutch term festering deep in a felicitous Mohican sentence, Credit for all, and especially for you, my reverend friend, my dear, dear, dear Sachoes.

Nothing for nothing, Walter's grandmother said, giving the far carp a round and staring eye with a swirl of her little finger. The old chief owed that canny Dutchman, and he knew it.

Well, Jan Pieterse, so the story goes, had a friend. Two friends. They were the Van Wart brothers, Oloffe and Lubbertus. Oloffe, who had influence in the Company, was granted a patroonship by Their High Mightinesses that encompassed not only all the Kitchawanks' tribal lands, but those of the Sint Sinks and Weckquaesgeeks as well. It was already carved up and mapped out, plenty for him and his brother and half the population of the Netherlands too. All he had to do was satisfy the original owners, who, as everybody in Haarlem knew, were a bunch of naked, illiterate, drink-besotted and disease-ridden beggars who couldn't add up their fingers and toes, let alone survey the land and read the fine print of your basic, binding, inviolate and ironclad contract. Jan Pieterse, an adept in Indian ways, was to be his go-between. For a fee, of course.

Now Sachoes didn't know anything of this—couldn't begin to imagine the polders and dikes and cobbled streets, the factories, breweries and cozy pristine parlors of that distant and legendary Dutch homeland—but he did know that come morning, with its pale streaks of Arctic light, Composed of Mouth would be on his hut step, with the great mustachioed and bloat-bellied patroon-chief in tow, and that the patroon-chief was hungry to own what no man had a right to own: the imperishable land beneath his feet. But what could the old chief do? Deer were dropping dead in the woods, their stomachs stuffed with bark; snowdrifts buried the village; Mother Corn was comatose till spring; and the people wanted everything the trader put up for sale. If he didn't deal with Jan Pieterse, then Wasamapah, his bitterest rival for control of the tribe, a man who understood credit, spoke with the wind and leaped tall trees in a single bound, would. And Manitou help the old chief if he let Composed of Mouth and the patroon-chief cheat him.

But cheat him they did, Walter's grandmother said, rising with a groan to rinse her hands at the sink in the kitchen. And do you know how they managed it? she asked over her shoulder.