World's End (52 page)

Because he was a coward, that's why. Because he was a fool.

Suddenly, with the night creeping around him, Wouter was seized with a fearful urgency: he had to find Jeremy. Jeremy was the one. Jeremy was his hope and salvation. It was Jeremy who'd stood up to them, Jeremy alone—you didn't see him sitting in the patroon's stocks, you didn't see him working the patroon's road. An hour after their race for the woods, the jellyfish eater had come back empty-handed, his face and forearms scored from the embrace of briar and bramble, his breeches muddied to the crotch, shirt torn and stockings down around his ankles. And Jeremy? He was out there somewhere among the trees, no man's prisoner, no man's servant.

“Jeremy!” Wouter called, slashing through a sea of mountain laurel, nearly choked with excitement, “Jeremy!” He'd find him—any minute now, at the cave or down by the creek—and then they'd run off together. Just the two of them. Across the river, to a place where they could live alone, hunting and fishing, far from patroons,
schouts,
rents, stocks and all the rest—far from
vader.
“Jeremy!” he called, as the owl took wing and night drove down the day, “Jeremy!”

What he couldn't know was that his dark and elusive cousin was so far out of earshot even a salvo from one of His Majesty's men o' war wouldn't have reached him. Van den Post—indefatigable, unshakable, crazed, intransigent, his limbs oiled and fluid, curses spewing from his lips—had chased his quarry up hill and down dale, through brake and briar, swamp, creek and esker. But Jeremy had seen those cuffs of pine, those gaps cut in the unyielding wood to receive him, and he was desperate. Taking the air in measured breaths, churning his legs and beating his arms, he flew through the woods like a sprite, leading van den Post under fallen trees, along ankle-turning streambeds and up slopes that would have prostrated a mountain goat. But he wasn't fleeing blindly: all along he had a plan.

He knew these woods as no adult did—as no jellyfish eater could ever hope to know them—and he was heading for the maze of swamps the Kitchawanks called
Neknanninipake,
That Has No End. It was a place of darkness at noon, of floating islands and hummocks of grass surrounded by muck that tugged you down till it took hold of you by the groin and refused to let go. It was a place Jeremy Mohonk knew as well as any snake or frog. It was a place where even the jellyfish eater would be powerless.

When he reached the fringes of the swamp—skunk cabbage, black slime to the ankles—Jeremy's heart leapt up. By the time he'd reached the heavy stuff, springing lightly from hummock to hummock, van den Post was out of sight, floundering in the slop and cursing like a virtuoso. Five minutes later there was no sound behind him but the
brak-brak
of the frogs and the homely call of the warbler flitting through the thatch of the trees. But he didn't stop. He traversed the swamp, dried his clothes and kept on going—going north, to a place he knew only in dimmest memory, a place his forgotten mother had gone for refuge when his forgotten father had turned his back on her. He didn't know where the camp was, knew the Weckquaesgeeks only as a ragged, scarred and bandaged lot that twice a year crowded the
stoep
at Jan Pieterse's, and knew only the haziest outlines of his parents' story, but somehow something led him to the camp at Suycker Broodt.

It was late. Dogs barked at him. Cook fires glowed in the wilderness of trees. Three braves, not much older than he, confronted him. Sentinels of that hapless and clumsy tribe, one was missing a hand, another was bereft of an ear and the third limped on a fused ankle. They regarded him in silence till the rest of their kith and kin shoved in around him. “What do you want?” One-Hand demanded in his trading-post Dutch, and Jeremy, scorner of the language of words, said nothing. One-Hand repeated the question, and still Jeremy said nothing. When finally, in frustration, the brave reached for his knife, Jeremy realized that even if he'd wanted to answer the question, even if the words were available to him, he couldn't. What did he want? He had no idea.

But then an old woman shuffled forward and cocked her head to regard him with eyes as opaque as a winter storm. She walked around
him twice and then peered again into his face, so close he could smell the hide she'd been chewing with the stumps of her worn molars. “Squagganeek,” she said, and turned her head to spit.

After a moment, one of the others took it up, an old man so wrinkled and dirty he might have been dug from the ground for the occasion. “Squagganeek,” he rasped, and then, like children with a new plaything, they all tried it out, repeating the phrase over and over in a soft, caressing, rhythmic chant.

Wouter didn't find him that evening, or the next either. Even in the depths of his fright and disillusionment, of his despair and denial, he couldn't have imagined that it would be another eighteen months before he would lay eyes on his cousin again. He did go home eventually, for lack of anything better to do—home to his mother. She tended to his chafed wrists and ankles, fed him, put him to bed. In time, he healed. Or rather, part of him did. His cousin was gone and he missed him as he would have missed a limb wrenched from his body. And his father—he had no father. Sure, the man who sat heavily in the birch rocker or cut and baled hay shirtless in the field looked like his father, but he wasn't. He was an imposter. A spineless man, a man without definition or spirit, a man who floated through his days like a jellyfish at sea, waiting only for some survivor to snatch him up and consume him.

The footing was bad—very bad, treacherous even—and it was all Walter could do to ease himself down the path step by step, clinging like a mountaineer to an extended lifeline of low-hanging branches, willowy saplings and flimsy shrubs that whipped away from him like catapults and left a gummy residue in the palm of his hand. It had rained the night before, and the path was slipperier than an eel's back—or belly, for that matter. And the leaves didn't help any. Wads of them, yellow, red, orange, the dingy brown of crumbling newsprint, all glued wet to the ground and to each other, too. If there were times when the business of life made him forget that he stood upright only through the intercession of two lumps of molded plastic, this wasn't one of them.

Still, he didn't bother asking himself why, on this day before his departure for Fairbanks, Nome and Points North, on this thirty-first day of October, on this Halloween, he was fighting his way down the slope to the infamous pasture that gave onto the bridge that in turn gave onto the path up to Tom Crane's cramped and goat-stinking shack. Especially when the question would have been complicated by the fact, duly noted and painstakingly observed over the course of the past several weeks, that while at this hour of any given day the salutatory hubcap remained in place, the Packard—Tom Crane's Packard—was gone. And the corollary to that fact, that the Bug—Jessica's Bug—sat idly, invitingly, provocatively even, on the shoulder beneath it.

But no, he didn't question himself, didn't think. There was no reason to. Ever since that cleansing afternoon in mid-August, that
afternoon of the Grand Union, he'd entered on a new and intoxicating phase of his life, one in which he acted rather than considered, one in which he accepted his demons for what they were and let his impulses take him where they would. He was leaving for Barrow in the morning. Jessica was home alone. In the cabin. Cut off from the world. Isolated. Without water, electricity, indoor plumbing, without a telephone. He was paying her a visit, that was all.

But these feet!

Damn, and now he was on his ass. In the mud. Some leafy crap in his face, the whole woods stinking of mold and rot, of leaves gone bad and some defunct squirrel or skunk quietly turning to mulch under a bush. Furious, he grabbed hold of a branch and jerked himself to his feet. The seat of his new Levi's was soaked through, and his lumberjacket—the one he'd bought to wear beneath the big down parka in Alaska—was so festooned with dangling bits of twig and leaf he might just as well have used it to line the bottom of his trash can. He beat angrily at his clothes, snatched some catkins from his hair and struggled down the relentless grade to the pasture below.

Here the going was easier. Walking straight ahead, walking on a flat—that he'd mastered. It was the up and down that gave him trouble. He brushed at his clothes as he walked, stepping aside to dodge the occasional cow pie, the new hiking boots with the supergrip tread no more connected to him than the dead appendages that filled them. It was a low-hung day, raw and opaque, and he was just coming up on the bridge when he spotted something moving in the trees along the creek. He gritted his teeth, expecting some further collision, some parting gift of history. He squinted. The haze shifted. It was only a cow.

Moooo.

Going up was a little better, though the path was just as slick. Somehow it was easier to wedge his feet into the dirt here, and there seemed to be more rock, ribs of it washed clean by the runoff of a thousand storms. He snatched at branches, a mountaineer still, and hoisted himself up. Soon he was passing through Tom's garden, with its wet glowing pumpkins and the brown stalks of all the rest, and then he sideskirted a clutch of beehives to emerge in the little clearing beneath the big naked oak.

There it was, the cabin, in all its ramshackle glory—but was she home, that was the question. Just because her car was out front was no guarantee. What if she'd gone someplace with Tom? What if she was out gathering nuts or acorns or dried flowers? Or washing her undies, taking a shower, painting her pretty toenails in her parents' spacious and well-appointed bathroom? What if she was even then breezing up and down the rarefied aisles of the Peterskill Grand Union? The possibility that he'd find the place empty had haunted him all the way down the path from the road, across the field and up the ridge to the cabin. But now, even before he fastened on the smeared windows or glanced at the porch, he knew he had her—the smoke gave her away. He smelled it first, then lifted his eyes to the rust-eaten stovepipe and there it was, smoke, pale wisps of it against a sky that was like smoke itself.

Suddenly confident, elated even, he started across the yard, the place just as he remembered it: a few scattered stumps, honeysuckle fallen back from the house in frost-killed clumps, rusted machinery poking its bones from the subsiding bushes. The porch, as usual, was cluttered with everything that wouldn't fit in the house but was too valuable yet to toss to the elements, and then there was the venerable old wood of the shack itself, aged to the color of silver fox, no lick of paint ever wasted on its parched and blistered hide. As he mounted the steps, a pair of bandy-legged goats stuck out their necks to peer at him around the far corner of the house, and a cat—brindled, with a patch of white over one eye—shot between his legs and vanished in the litter along the path. And then all at once he could feel Jessica moving across the floorboards inside—the same boards that supported him outside the door. Or at least he thought he could. What the hell. He forced his face into a smile and rapped twice. On the door. With his knuckles.

Dead silence.

Frozen silence.

Silence both watchful and tense.

He tried again,
tap-tap,
and then thought to make use of his voice: “Jessica?”

Now she
was
moving, he could feel her, could hear her, moving across the floor with a pinch and squeak of the dry boards beneath
her, beneath him. One, two, three, four, the door swung open—stove going, bed made, jars of this and that on the shelf—and she was standing there before him.

“Walter,” she said, as if identifying a suspect in a police lineup. He saw the surprise and consternation on her face, and he grinned harder. She was wearing jeans, a pair of men's high-top sneakers and a cable-knit sweater. Her hair hung loose, and bangs—folksingers' bangs, newly cut—concealed the high white patrician swell of her brow. She looked good. Better than good. She looked like the girl he'd married.

“I was just passing by,” he joked, “and thought I'd stop in to say hello, I mean, goodbye—”

Still she stood there, the door poised on its hinges, and for a second he thought she was going to slam it in his face, send him packing, boot him out like a fast-talking door-to-door salesman with a vacuum cleaner strapped to his back. But then her face changed, she stepped back, and, perhaps a little too brightly, said: “Well, why don't you come in out of the cold, at least?”

And then he was in.

As soon as she shut the door, though, confusion took hold of them both—they were in a cell, a box, a cave, there was nowhere to go, they didn't know what to do with their hands, where to cast their eyes, where to sit or stand or what to say. His back was to the door. She was there, two feet from him, her face as white as it was the time they'd carved a sun-warmed melon in a Catskill meadow and the knife had slipped and gashed her palm. Her head was bowed, her hands clasped in front of her. Was this an awkward moment? You bet.

It was Jessica who recovered first. She turned, brushed past him and bent briskly to relieve the room's sole armchair of its burden of hats, jackets, dope pipes, cheese graters, paperback books and other impedimenta, at the same time echoing what he'd said at the door: “Goodbye? What do you mean—are you moving or something?”

And so he was able to settle into the vacant armchair and tell her of his impending journey to the heart of the polar night, to joke about mushers and mukluks and ask, in mock earnestness, if she knew a good dog he could take along to warm his hands in. “But seriously,”
he went on, encouraged by her laugh, “you don't have to worry about me—I'm no tenderfoot. I mean, I know my Jack London cold, and there's no way I'm going to try humping from my motel room to the bar without spitting first.”