World's End (60 page)

His father had filled two mugs with hot lemonade and gin before he could even get his parka off, and now Walter sat there in a patched easy chair, cradling the hot cup in his insensate hands and silently reading off book titles. Truman straddled a wooden chair opposite him. The stove snapped. Outside, there was the sound of the Arctic wind, persistent as static. Walter didn't know what to say. Here he was, at long last, face to face with his father, and he didn't know what to say.

“So you found me, huh?” Truman said finally. His voice was thick, slow with alcohol. He didn't exactly seem overjoyed.

“Uh-huh,” Walter said after a moment, staring into his cup. “Didn't you get my letters?”

His father grunted. “Letters? Shit, yeah—I got your letters.” He pushed himself up from the chair and lumbered into the back room, a big square-shouldered man with the sad vague air of a traveler lost in a city of strangers. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, wrong with his legs. Or feet. A moment later he thumped back into the room with a cardboard box and dropped it in Walter's lap.

Inside were the letters: Walter's hopeful script, the postmarks, the canceled stamps. There they were. Every one of them. And not a one had been opened.

He never had a son.
Walter looked up from the box and into his father's glassy stare. They hadn't touched at the door, hadn't even shaken hands.

“How'd you know where to find me?” Truman asked suddenly.

“Piet. Piet told me.”

“Pete? What do you mean ‘Pete'? Pete who?” The old man wore a full beard, red as Eric the Conqueror's, gone gray now about the mouth. His hair was long, drawn back in a ponytail. He was scowling.

Walter felt the gin like antifreeze in his veins. “I forget his name.
A little guy—you know, your friend from all those years ago, when …” He didn't know how to put it. “Lola told me about him, about the riots and how—”

“You mean Piet Aukema? The dwarf?”

Walter nodded.

“Shit. I haven't seen him in twenty years—how the hell would he know where I was?”

Walter's stomach sank. He felt history squeezing him like a vise. “I met him in the hospital,” he said, as if the fact would somehow corroborate his story. “He told me he just got a letter from you. From Barrow. Said you were teaching.”

“Well, he's a goddamned liar!” Truman roared, lurching to his feet, his face puffed with sudden rage. He looked around him wildly, as if he were about to fling his cup against the wall or rip the stove up off the floor or something, but then he waved his hand in dismissal and sat down again. “Ah, piss on it,” he murmured, and looked Walter hard in the eye. “Hey, I'm glad to see you anyway,” he suddenly boomed, a bit too heartily, as if he were trying to convince himself. “You're a good-looking kid, you know that?”

Walter might have thrown it back at him—
What the hell do you know about it?
—and he would have been justified, too, but he didn't. Instead he gave him a shy smile and looked back down into his cup. It was the closest they'd come.

But then the old man surprised him again. “There's nothing wrong with you, is there—physically, I mean? You weren't limping when you walked in here or anything, were you?”

Walter's eyes leapt at him.

“I mean, it's none of my business. … I just … it's easy to get a touch of frostbite up here, you know.” He shrugged his shoulders, then threw back his head to drain his cup.

“You mean you don't know?” Walter looked at him and saw the ghost ships, the dark lane opening up before him with its patches of ice clinging like scabs to the blacktop. He was incredulous. He was indignant. He was angry.

Truman looked uneasy. Now it was his turn to glance away. “How the hell would I know,” he mumbled. “Listen, I'm sorry—I left all that behind. I haven't been much of a father, I admit. …”

“But, but what about that night—?” Walter couldn't finish, it was all a hallucination, of course it was, he'd known that all along. The man sitting before him now was a hallucination, a stranger, the vacant terminus of a hopeless quest.

“I told you I'm sorry, for christ's sake,” Truman snapped, raising his voice. He pushed himself up from the chair and crossed the room to the stove. Walter watched him fill his cup from the kettle perched atop it. “Another toddy?” the old man peered at him over his shoulder, his voice softening.

Walter waved him off, then struggled to his feet. “All right,' he said, thinking,
the letters, the letters, he never even bothered to open them,
“I know you don't give two shits about me and I know you want to get this over with, so I'm going to tell you why I came all the way up here into the ass-end of nowhere to find you. I'm going to tell you everything, I'm going to tell you what it feels like to lose your feet—yes, both of them—and I'm going to tell you about Depeyster Van Wart.” His heart was hammering. This was it. Finally. The end. “And then,” he said, “I want some answers.”

Truman shrugged. Grinned. Lifted his mug as if to offer a silent toast, and then drained it in a gulp. He brought the bottle of gin back to the chair with him, sat down and filled his cup, nothing to dilute it this time. His expression was strange—sheepish and belligerent at the same time, the look of the schoolyard bully hauled up in front of the principal. “So go ahead,” he said, the gin at his lips, “tell me.” He nodded at the door, the blackness, the unbroken tundra and the icy sea that lay beyond it. “We've got all night.”

Walter told him. With a vengeance. Told him how, when he was twelve, he waited through the summer for him, and then waited again the next summer and the next. Told him how hurt he'd felt, how tainted and unwanted, how culpable. And how he got over it. Told him how Hesh and Lola had nurtured him, sent him to college, how he'd found a soft and sweet girl and married her. And then, when the first bottle was empty and the gin burned like acid in his veins, he told him of his visions, of the poison that infested him, of how he'd skewered Jessica with his bitterness and run up against the ghost of his father till his feet were ground to pulp. He talked, and Truman
listened, till long after the sun should have set and the cows come home. But there were no cows. And there was no sun.

Walter was disoriented. He peered through the iced-over window and saw the deep of night. He hadn't eaten in god knew how many hours and the drink was getting to him. He fell heavily into the chair and glanced up at his father. Truman was slouched over, his head lolling sloppily on the prop of his hand, his eyes weary and red. And it came to Walter then that they were sparring, that was all, and that for all the exhilaration he'd felt in laying out his wrongs, it was only the first round.

“Dad?” he said, and the word felt strange on his tongue. “You awake?”

The old man lurched up as if from a bad dream. “Huh?” he said, instinctively feeling for the bottle. And then: “Oh. Oh, it's you.” Outside, the wind held steady. Unforgiving, relentless, eternal. “All right,” he said, rousing himself. “You've had it tough, I admit it. But think of me.” He leaned forward, the massive shoulders and great brazen head. “Think of me,” he whispered. “You think I live up here because it's a winter wonderland, the great vacation paradise, the Tahiti of the North or some shit? It's penance, Walter. Penance.”

He rose, stretched, then shuffled back to reach under the desk and fish out another bottle. Walter watched him crack the seal with a practiced twist of his hand, pour out a full cup and then proffer the bottle. Walter was going to say no, going to lay his palm over the rim of the cup as he'd done in the café, but he didn't. This was a marathon, a contest, the title bout. He held out his cup.

“You get tired,” Truman said, “you sleep over there, by the stove. I've got a sleeping bag, and you can take the cushions off the couch.” He sat again, arching his back against the hard wooden slats of the chair. He took a long sip from the cup and then walked the chair across the floor till he was so close to Walter he might have been bandaging a wound. “Now,” he said, his voice a hard harsh rumble of phlegm, “now you listen to
my
story.”

“No matter what they tell you, I loved her. I did.”

The old man drained his cup, flung it aside and lifted the bottle to his lips. He didn't offer Walter any. “Your mother, I mean,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his sleeve. “She was something. You probably don't remember her much, but she was so—what do you call it?—earnest, you know? Idealistic. She really bought all that Bolshevik crap, really thought Russia was the workers' paradise and Joe Stalin everybody's wise old uncle.” There was a single lamp burning, brass stand, paper shade, on the desk behind him; the shadows softened his features. “She was like Major Barbara or something. I'd never met anybody like her.”

Walter sat there transfixed, the rasping voice and the everlasting night holding him as if by spell or incantation. His mother, she of the soulful eyes, was right there before him. He could almost smell the potato pancakes.

“But you've been married, right? What was her name?”

“Jessica.” The name was an ache. Jessica and his mother.

“Right,” the old man said, his voice gravelly and deep, ruined by drink and nights that never end. “Well, you know how it is, then—”

“No,” Walter snapped, suddenly belligerent. “How is it?”

“I mean, once the first glow dies and all that—”

Walter jumped on him. “You mean you screwed her over. From the beginning. You married her so you could destroy her.” He tried to get up, but his feet were numb. “Sure I remember her. I remember her
dead too. And I remember the day you left her—in that car out there, right? Depeyster Van Wart's car, isn't it?”

“Bullshit, Walter. Bullshit. You remember what Hesh taught you to remember.” The old man's voice was steady—he wasn't debating, he was narrating. The pain of it, the pain that made him hide out in the hind end of the world, was up on a shelf in a little bottle with a tight cap. Like smelling salts. “Don't give me that self-righteous look, you little shit—you want to know hurt, you listen to me. I did it. Yes. I'm a fink, I'm a backstabber. I murdered my wife, set up my friends. That's right, I'll tell you that right off. So don't argue with me, you little son of a bitch. Just listen.”

The temperature had gone up high under the old man's voice, and for the second time in as many hours he looked as if he were about to lurch up and tear the place apart. Walter sat frozen, so close he could smell the stink of the gin on his father's breath. “If you want to get beyond all that, I mean. And you do, right? Or you wouldn't have come all the way up here.”

Numb, Walter nodded.

“Okay,” the old man said, “okay,” and the calm had returned to his voice. He was wearing mukluks and a bulky wool sweater with reindeer dancing across the front of it, and when he leaned forward, his hair and beard touched with gray, he looked like some scored and haunted figure out of an old Bergman movie, the pale oracle of the north. “Let me start at the beginning,” he said, “with Depeyster.”

Truman had met him in England during the war—they were both G2, Army Intelligence, and they'd struck an immediate chord on discovering they both hailed from the Peterskill area. Depeyster was a smart guy, good-looking, tough—and a pretty good ball player too. Basketball, that is. They shot some hoop with a couple of other guys once in a while when they were off duty. But then Depeyster got another assignment and they drifted apart. The important thing was that Truman met Christina—and married her—before he ever laid eyes on Depeyster Van Wart again. And that was the truth.

“But you joined the party,” Walter said, “—I mean, that's what Lola—”

“Oh, fuck,” Truman spat, a savage crease cut into his forehead. He pushed himself up from the chair and paced the little room. Outside,
the wolf dogs set up a howl. “Yeah. Okay. I joined the party. But maybe it was because I was in love with your mother, ever think of that? Maybe it was because she had some influence over me and maybe because, in a way, I wanted to believe that happy horseshit about the oppressed worker and the greed of the capitalists and all the rest of it—hey, my father was a fisherman, you know. But who was right, huh? Khrushchev comes along and denounces Stalin and everybody in the Colony shits blood. You got to put things in perspective, Walter.” He paused at his desk, picked up a sheaf of paper covered in a close black typescript, then set it down again. Instead he shook a cigarette—a Camel—from the pack that lay beside it, and raised a lighter to it. Walter could see that his hands were shaking, for all his bravado.

“So then, what—we're married a year, two years—and Depeyster comes back into the picture.
After,
Walter,” he said, something like a plea in his eyes for the first time,
“after
I met your mother and married her, I run into him in the store at Cats' Corners out there, we're going on a picnic, your mother and me and Hesh and Lola, and I stop in for a beer and pack of smokes on a Sunday afternoon, and there he is.” He paused, took another drink from the neck of the bottle. “There's a lot of factors here, things you know nothing about. Don't be so quick to judge.”

Walter found that he was gripping the arms of the chair as if he were afraid he would topple out of it, as if he were high up on a Ferris wheel in a wind like the wind outside the door. “I told you,” he said, “I work for him. He's all right. Really, he is. He says Hesh and Lola are wrong. Says you're a patriot.”

Truman let out a bitter laugh, the pale swampy green of his eyes obscured in smoke, the massive torso swaying ever so slightly with the effect of the alcohol and maybe the emotional charge too. “Patriot,” he repeated, his face contorted as if he'd bitten into something rotten. “Patriot,” he spat, and then he stretched himself out on the floor in front of the stove and fell asleep, the lit cigarette still jammed between his fingers.