World's End

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Hesh took charge. He sent five teenagers—three boys and two girls who’d come up from Staten Island to serve as ushers—to keep an eye on the crowd at the entrance. “If they set foot on the property, you let me know,” he said. “Right away. Understand?” He asked Truman and Piet to take six of the men, arm themselves with anything they could find and fan out across the field to make sure none of the zealots came at them from the rear. Then he organized the rest of the men in ranks, eight across, their arms linked, and marched them up the road. The women and children—Walter’s mother amongst them—gathered around the empty stage. In the distance, they could hear the sound of shattering glass, truncated cries, the roar of the mob.

  Walter knew the old road into the Crane place, didn’t he? It was no more than a footpath now, walled off since the riots, but in those days it was a pretty well-worn dirt road with a hummock of grass in the middle. Narrow though, and with steep shoulders and impenetrable brush—sticker bushes and poison ivy and whatnot—on either side. The road wound down into the meadow and then turned into a path when it crossed the stream on the far side and climbed up the ridge. People would drive down there for a little privacy—to play their car radios, neck and drink beer. Some nights there’d be ten cars parked in the meadow. Anyway, there was but one other way in and that was by foot only—at the far end of the meadow, where Van Wart Road swung back on it half a mile up. Hesh figured if he could hold the road, they’d be all right. If real trouble started, that is. He hoped the police would show up before then.

  They didn’t.

  The first fracas broke out about seven-thirty. Hesh and his men had stationed themselves just out of sight of the mob, at the road’s narrowest point, and they’d backed the camp truck up against their flank to further obstruct the way. If the patriots got worked up enough to attack—with odds something like fifteen to one—they had to be held here; if they reached the stage, and the women and children, anything could happen. And so they stood there, arms linked, waiting. Thirty-two strangers. A black stevedore in sweatshirt and jeans, a handful of men in merchant marine uniform, pot-bellied car dealers and liquor store owners and shipping clerks, an encyclopedia salesman from Yonkers and three scared black seminary students, who, like the kids at the gate, had come early to serve as ushers. They stood there and listened to the howls and curses of the mob and waited for the police to come and break it up. No one wanted a concert any more, no one wanted speeches or even the inalienable rights guaranteed under the Constitution: all they wanted, to a man, was to be out of there.

  And then it started. There was a roar from the crowd, succeeded by a prolonged hiss and clatter that might have been the blast of a tropical storm thrashing the trees, and then the five ushers suddenly appeared around the bend—the three boys and two girls—running for their lives in a hail of rocks and bottles. The look in their eyes was something Hesh had seen before—at Omaha Beach, at Isigny, St. Lo and Nantes. Both girls were sobbing and one of the boys—he couldn’t have been more than fifteen—was bleeding from a gash over his right eye. They passed through the lines and then Hesh and his recruits locked arms once again.

  A moment later the mob was on them. Five hundred or more strong now, but funneled into the narrow road like cattle in a chute, they burst against the defenders in a frenzied, stick-wielding rush. Hesh was struck across the face, slashed just behind the ear and battered on both forearms. “Kill the commies!” the mob chanted. “Lynch the niggers!”

  It lasted no more than two or three minutes. Hesh’s men were bruised and bleeding, but they’d repulsed the first wave. Rabid, shrieking insults and flinging sticks and stones and whatever else they could lay their hands on, the mob withdrew a hundred feet to regroup. The better part of them were drunk, whipped to a frenzy by irrational hates and prejudices that were like open wounds, but others—there was a knot of them, the ones in dress shirts and ties and Legionnaire’s caps—were as cool as field marshals. Depeyster Van Wart was among this latter group, stiff and formal, his face composed, but with a pair of eyes that could have eaten holes in the camp truck. He was conferring with his brother—the one who was killed in Korea—and LeClerc Outhouse, who’d made all that money in the restaurant business. Did Walter remember him?

  Walter nodded.

  “Go back to Russia!” a man screamed, shaking his fist, and the whole crowd took it up. They were about to break ranks and charge again when the three policemen showed up. These were local cops, not state police, and the patriots knew them by name.

  “Now boys,” Hesh could hear one of them saying, “we don’t like this any better than you do, but let’s keep it legal, huh?” And then, while his partners placated the mob with more of the same—“If it was up to me I’d shoot ’em down like dogs, right here and now, but you know we can’t do that; not in America, anyways”—the one who’d spoken first hitched up his trousers, squared his crotch and sauntered down to where Hesh and his battered recruits stood with folded arms and lacerated flesh.

  “Who’s in charge here?” he demanded.

  Hesh recognized him in that instant: Anthony Fagnoli. They’d gone to school together. Fagnoli had been two years younger, a criminal type with greased hair who was forever being suspended for smoking in the boys’ room or coming to class drunk. He’d dropped out of school as a sophomore to drive one of his uncle’s garbage trucks. Now he was a cop.

  Hesh glanced around. Sasha Freeman hadn’t made it. Nor Morton Blum either. “I guess I am,” he said.

  “You are, huh?” Fagnoli gave no sign of recognition.

  “Kike!” screamed a patriot. “Hitler didn’t get you, but we will!”

  “So just what in the fuck do you think you’re trying to do here, Mister?” Fagnoli said.

  “You know damn well what we’re doing.” Hesh looked him hard in the eye. “We’re exercising our right of peaceful assembly—on private property, I might add.”

  “Peaceful?” Fagnoli practically howled the word. “Peaceful?” he repeated, and then jerked a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the crowd. “You call that peaceful?”

  Hesh gave it up. “Look,” he said, “we don’t want any part of this. The concert is done. Off. It’s over. All we want is out.”

  Fagnoli was smirking now. “Out?” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “You made this mess, clean it up yourself.” And then he turned his back and started to walk off.

  “Officer. Please. If you tell them to disperse, they’ll listen.”

  Fagnoli swung around as if he’d been hit from behind. His face was like a clenched fist. “Up yours,” he hissed.

  Hesh watched him swagger back up the road and push his way into the mob, where he stopped a moment to confer with Van Wart and Outhouse and the other ringleaders. Then he turned to his two compatriots and said, in a voice that carried all the way back to Hesh and his men, “They want out, boys. What do you think of that?”

  A man in an overseas cap suddenly bawled, “Out! You never get out! Every nigger bastard dies here tonight! Every Jew bastard dies here tonight!” And the crowd began to roar. Fagnoli and the two other cops had disappeared.

  The second charge came a moment later. The patriots screamed down the narrow roadway, swinging fence posts and tire irons, flinging rocks and bottles, slamming with all the weight and fury of those behind them into Hesh’s lines. Hesh stood firm, grappled with a man swinging a fence post and ground his fist into the center of the man’s face till he felt something give. Again, the melee lasted no more than three or four minutes, and the attackers fell back. But Hesh was hurt. And so were his men. Hurt and scared. They had to get word out to the world at large, had to phone the police, the governor, The New York Times—they had to have help. And quick. If it didn’t come soon, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that some of them would die there on the road before the night was out.

  It was at that point that Truman came into the picture. Like Hesh, he’d been out of the service for nearly four years now—but unlike Hesh a
nd most other veterans, he’d never abandoned the habit of regular physical exercise. He kept himself in trim with the daily regimen of calisthenics, cross-country running and weight-lifting he’d begun when he was with Army Intelligence in England. At thirty-one, he’d barely lost a step on the eighteen-year-old dynamo who’d led Hendrick Hudson to the county championship in two sports. When Hesh realized that someone had to get out, he knew Truman was his man.

  Instructing his troops to hold out at all costs, he doubled back down the road to the meadow, passing the forlorn cars and buses of the concertgoers and skirting the stage where a thousand folding chairs stood unoccupied. Hurrying, he caught a glimpse of Christina, white-faced and glum, sitting at the table with her pamphlets, and of the other women gathered in clusters before the empty stage. Here and there children were playing, but in hushed voices and with movements that might have been choreographed for an underwater ballet. One of the unlucky ushers—a girl of sixteen—sat alone beneath the stage, a bright carnation of blood flowering at the neck of her blouse.

  He found Truman leaning against a tree that commanded a view of the meadow all the way out to the road at the far end of the property. Piet was with him, and they were conferring in low tones like a pair of military strategists surveying a battlefield—which wasn’t far from the truth of the matter. Their squad had caught two of the patriots out in the open and driven them back, but otherwise things were quiet. Hesh explained the situation and asked Truman if he would try to slip out and get to a phone. It would be dangerous, and he’d have to leave Christina behind, but if he didn’t get through it looked as if the worst was going to happen.

  Truman shrugged. Sure, he’d give it a try.

  “Good,” Hesh said. “Good. If the troopers know we’ve called out, if they know we’ve got to the papers, they’ll have no excuse—they’ll have to bail us out.”

  Truman was staring down at his feet. He glanced up at Hesh and then away again. In the distance, they could hear the mob roaring. “Yeah,” he said, “I’ll go. But I want to take Piet with me.”

  Hesh glanced at Piet. His face was expressionless and pale, and his ears seemed unnaturally large in proportion to the rest of him. He couldn’t have been taller than four-eight or -nine, and if he weighed eighty-five pounds, half of it must have been in the funny old-fashioned buckled boots he always wore. “What the hell,” Hesh murmured. “Take him.” Piet wasn’t in this anyway—he’d come on a lark—and he probably couldn’t have held back one of the rednecks’ grandmothers if he’d wanted to. “You sure he won’t slow you down?”

  Truman replied that Piet could take care of himself, and then he turned and started off across the field, the little man jogging to keep up with him, all but lost in the high stiff grass. It was the last Hesh—or anyone else—would see of them that night.

  Lola paused. She’d lit another cigarette and let it burn itself out. The coffee cup was empty. The first time Walter had heard the story he’d interrupted here to ask what had happened to them; now he wanted to hear it again. “So what happened?”

  No one knew for sure. It was as if he and Piet had simply vanished. There was no record of any call to the police or newspapers, Hesh’s knock sounded hollowly on the Dutch door of Piet’s furnished room in Peterskill next morning, and none of the injured at the local hospitals answered to their descriptions. Hesh was afraid they’d been killed, beaten to death by the mob and dumped in a gully along the road. Though he had a headache that was like a mallet inside his skull, though he’d taken ten stitches in his forearms and half a dozen over his right ear, and though he was haggard from stress and lack of sleep, he was up at first light on the morning following the riot, beating the bushes on either side of Van Wart Road. He found nothing. Little did he realize it at the time, but it would be nearly fifteen months before either he or Lola would lay eyes on Truman again. And Piet—Piet was gone for good.

  Two days after the riot, Truman turned up at the bungalow out back of the Rosenberg place. By that point, Christina was in shock. Walter was three. He clung to his father’s knees, chanting “Daddy, Daddy,” but Truman ignored him. Truman gave Christina a weak grin and began to pack his things. “We thought you were dead,” she said. “What happened? What are you doing?” He wouldn’t answer her. Just kept packing. Sweaters, underwear, books—his precious books. Walter was crying. “Did they hurt you, is that it?” Christina screamed. “Truman, answer me!”

  A car stood in the driveway. It was a Buick, and they say it belonged to Depeyster Van Wart. Piet, barely visible over the dash, was sitting in the passenger seat. “I’m sorry,” Truman said, and then he was gone.

  It was nearly a year after the funeral when he turned up again. Unshaven, drunk, sorrowful-looking, in clothes that hung from him like a beggar’s rags, he showed up at Lola’s door, demanding to see his son. “He was abusive, Walter,” Lola said. “A changed man. He called me names.” This wasn’t the man she knew—this was some crazy on a street corner in Times Square, some bum. When Hesh came up from the basement to see what the commotion was about, Truman tried to shove past him and Hesh hit him, hit him in the face and then in the gut. Truman went down on his hands and knees on the front porch, gasping till the tears came to his eyes. Hesh shut the door.

  By then, people were certain that Truman had betrayed them, that his sympathies had always been with the “patriots” and that he’d turned his back on family and friends in the most calculating and callous way. Rose Pollack, who hadn’t been able to get into the concert grounds that night, had seen him on the road with Depeyster Van Wart and LeClerc Outhouse just before a criminal put a brick through her windshield, and the day he turned up in the Colony to break the heart of Walter’s mother and pack up his books and underwear, Lorelee Shapiro had seen him driving Van Wart’s car. Or so she said. Lola didn’t know what to think—or Hesh either. They’d loved him, this jubilant and quick-smiling man, their comrade and friend, husband of Christina Alving, father of their godson. After the riots people were hysterical—they were looking for scapegoats. Lola—and Hesh too, Hesh too—had wanted to believe in him, but the evidence was against him. There was the way he’d disappeared, for one thing. And then there was that terrible fateful night of the riot itself.

  Truman never called the state police; he never called the Times. And twenty minutes after he started off across the field, a hundred patriots swarmed in from the same direction—unchecked, and shouting filth. “Was it a coincidence, Walter? Was it?” Lola was asking the questions now. Walter said nothing.

  It was getting dark, and out on the road the mob had begun to pelt Hesh and his defenders with rocks—fist-sized and bigger, hundreds upon hundreds of them, thudding against the flank of the camp truck, striking men in the face, in the chest and legs and groin. One of the seminary students was knocked flat, his nose smashed to pulp; the stevedore, a huge black man who made a conspicuous target, was already bleeding from a scalp wound when a barrage of stones brought him to his knees.

  The patriots were thirty feet away now and closing. Their arms whipped forward, stones boomed off the truck, skittered across the road, hit home with a dull wet thump. Hesh heard that sound, the sound of the butcher’s mallet on a slab of meat—thump, thump, thump—and knew they were finished. He saw the stevedore go down, and then felt himself hit in both legs; in the same instant a stone glanced off his cheek, and when he raised an arm to shield his face, a beer bottle caught him in the ribs. This was ridiculous. Useless. Suicidal. He was no martyr. “Break!” he suddenly roared. “Break and run!” Bleeding, battered, their suits and sportshirts torn to rags, the defenders dropped back, skirted the truck and flung themselves headlong down the darkened road. Behind them, the patriots surged forward with a shout.

  At first, Hesh and the others retreated in panic, without direction, every man for himself. All that changed when they came upon the arena. The field was brightly lit—one of the women had started up the generator and flashed on the stage lights as night fell—and He
sh and his dazed comrades were suddenly confronted by the spectacle of a hundred wild-eyed men running amuck amidst their wives and children. It was unendurable. Without hesitation—without even breaking stride—they came together again, charging into the melee in a wedge, swinging sticks and fists, sick and maddened and ready to die. The patriots fell back under the fury of the assault, and the women and children who’d been caught out in the open made for the stage as if it were a life raft in a churning sea. Hesh and his men grappled with their adversaries for a moment and then broke for the stage themselves as the patriots from above roared down on them. It was then that an unknown hand let loose the bottle that laid Hesh low. One moment he was handing a child up to the stage, and the next he was stretched out on the ground.

  Hesh never knew how long he was out—half an hour? Forty-five minutes? But when he woke, the night was black, lit only by a bonfire in front of the stage, and the patriots were gone. They’d spent their rage on the folding chairs, on the pamphlets and tables and sound equipment. One of them had cut the lights and then they’d rampaged through the field, smashing chairs, burning books and pamphlets, putting stones through the windows of the buses and cars in the lot. They were like Indians in a movie, Christina said later. Savages. Whooping, screaming like animals. They destroyed everything they could get their hands on, and then, as if by a prearranged signal, they vanished. A few of the women had been hurt in the scuffle, a dozen others were hysterical (Christina included, who couldn’t locate either Truman or Hesh and feared the worst), and several of the men had broken bones and gashes that required stitches, but no one had been lynched, no one died.