World's End

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  No, Walter had said, almost as a reflex, no thanks, already seeing himself in dress shirt and tie, ensconced behind a desk with the elusive Miss Egthuysen at his beck and call, Doug and all the rest of the peons cut down in a single stroke, already picturing the new Triumph, racing green, wire wheels, zero to fifty in 6.9 seconds… but work for Van Wart? It was inconceivable. (Never mind that he’d been doing just that for the past two and a half months—he’d been laboring in ignorance.) No, he told him. He appreciated the offer, but what with the shock of his accident and all he needed some time to recuperate before he could take a step like that.

  Later, thinking it over, he wasn’t sure why he’d backed off. Eleven thousand dollars was a lot of money, and Van Wart, despite his preaching, his air of condescension and his Bircherisms, despite the hatred he inspired in Tom Crane’s grandfather, in Hesh and Lola and all the rest, really wasn’t half bad. No ogre, certainly. No mindless, brick-throwing racist. There was a certain style about him, a polish and a toughness that made Hesh seem crude by comparison. And he believed in what he said, the conviction set deep in his eyes—too deep for lies. In fact, by the end of their little chat, Walter had begun to soften toward him. Even more: he’d begun, in an odd and somehow disturbing way, to like him.

  Walter was thinking about all this, and thinking too about the consummate weirdness of the situation—married a month, and here he was sneaking down to the marina for an assignation with the ex-ogre’s daughter—when he felt a tap on his shoulder. It was Mardi. In watch cap and peacoat, in deck shoes and jeans and black leather gloves, looking as if she’d just stepped off a freighter with the rest of the merchant marine. Except for her eyes. Her eyes were pinned to her head, hard and cold as marbles, the pupils shrunk to specks. “Hi,” she said in a breathy voice, and then she kissed him. In greeting. But it was more than a peck on the cheek—it was a full-on osculation with a taste of her tongue in it. Walter didn’t know what to do, so he kissed her back.

  “All set?” she said, grinning up at him.

  “Yeah,” Walter said, rocking back on his good leg. “I mean, I guess so.” He gestured toward the river, the sky. “You sure you want to go through with this?”

  He’d seen Mardi only once since the wedding. He and Jessica and Tom Crane were sitting around the Elbow one night about two weeks back, listening to the jukebox and shooting pool, when she walked in the door with Hector. The game was elimination, it was Walter’s shot, and he was keying in on Jessica’s last ball while she made wisecracks, nudged the cue stick from behind and generally tried to distract, disorient and disarm him. Mardi was wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt, no sleeves, no brassiere. Walter froze. But Tom Crane, all elbows and flapping feet, with his ratty braid jogging in the breeze like the knot of hair over a horse’s ass, rushed up to embrace her, pump Hector’s hand in a power-to-the-people handshake and drag them over to the table. Walter exchanged greetings with Hector, nodded at Mardi and missed his shot.

  Later, after a couple of pitchers of beer, more pool, innumerable treks across the expanse of dirty sawdust that covered the floor like bonemeal to urinate in the reeking rest rooms and share a surreptitious hit of whatever it was Hector had stuffed into the bowl of his pipe, everyone was feeling pretty relaxed. Jessica got up from the table and excused herself. “The ladies’,” she slurred, lurching across the room like one of the wounded.

  Tom had vanished and Hector was up at the bar ordering shots of tequila all around. The table, which had suddenly grown small, was littered with peanut shells, ashes, butts, plates and bottles and glasses. Walter affixed a cautious little smile to his lips. Mardi smiled back. And then, out of nowhere, she asked Walter if he was still serious about the ghost ships—she’d give him a call if he was, no problem. Walter didn’t answer. Instead he posed a question of his own. “What was that business at the wedding?” he asked, trying to keep his voice steady. “You know what I mean. About my foot. I didn’t like that.”

  She was silent a moment, and then she gave him a smile that would have melted the polar ice caps. “Don’t take it so seriously, Walter,” she said, peering into her drink, “I just like to shock people, that’s all—see how they’ll react. You know: épater les bourgeois.” Walter didn’t know. He’d failed French.

  She looked at him and laughed. “Come on, it was a joke, that’s all. I’m really not as wild as I make out. Really.” And then she leaned forward. “The thing I want to know is are you going with me or not?”

  And now, here at the marina, hemmed in by spars and halyards and anchor chains, and breathing the very scent of the ghost of his grandfather, he was up against the wall yet again. “I don’t believe you,” Mardi said, and her face went numb for a moment. “Afraid of a little spray or what?” Walter shrugged, as if to say he was afraid of nothing—not cold, nor sleet, nor shadows that flit maliciously across an open roadway in the early hours of the morning. “Good,” she said, grinning so wide he could see the glint of gold in her back teeth, and then he was following her through the boatyard to the dock and the slips at the far end of it.

  There were only two boats in the water. The Catherine Depeyster, a thirty-two-foot cruising sloop with auxiliary engine and woodwork varnished to a high gleam, stood alone among the deserted slips. The other boat, a peeling, nondescript, wide-bottomed thing with a broken mast and dry rot to the water line, lay at anchor beyond it, looking as if it had been dredged up from the bottom the week before. Walter was about to join Mardi aboard the Catherine Depeyster—she was already fumbling through the locker for foul-weather gear—when he saw a puff of smoke rise from the stovepipe of the blistered hulk. At first he couldn’t believe his eyes. But then, unmistakably, a thin gray column of smoke began to issue from the blackened pipe. He was stunned. Somebody was actually living aboard that thing, some crazed river rat who’d wake one morning to find himself under twelve feet of water. It had to be a joke. But no, the smoke was coming steadily now, flattened by the wind and blown back to him with the rich, gut-clenching scent of bacon on it. “Christ,” he said, turning to Mardi, “I can’t believe it.”

  “Can’t believe what?” she said, handing him a black sou’wester as he stepped aboard.

  “Over there. That piece of shit, that floating outhouse. There’s somebody living on it.”

  “You mean Jeremy,” she said.

  The cold stabbed at his ears. He looked from the hulk to Mardi and back again. The wind was slowly swinging the boat around on its anchor, bringing its stern into his line of vision. “Jeremy?” he repeated, never taking his eyes from the boat.

  He heard Mardi at his back. She was saying that Jeremy had been around all summer, that he fished and did odd jobs and helped out at the marina. He was a gypsy or Indian or something, and he was all right for an old guy. Walter heard her as from a great distance, the words echoing in his head as he watched the ship swing around and reveal its name, in chipped and faded letters. He felt odd all of a sudden, felt the grip of history like a noose around his neck and he didn’t know why. The ship’s name was the Kitchawank.

  All right: it was cold. But once they’d left the marina and hoisted sail, once they’d felt the pulse of the river under their feet and the first icy slap of spray in their faces, it no longer mattered. Mardi, the watch cap pulled down to her eyebrows, was at the tiller, drinking coffee from a thermos and mugging as if it were June, and Walter, in rubber boots, pants and slicker, was hiking out over the rail like a kid with his first Sunfish. He hadn’t been sailing since his grandfather died, hadn’t even been out on the river for as long as he could remember. It awakened his blood, flooded him with memories: it was like coming home. The mountains may have been dwarfs by the standards of the Alps or Rockies—Dunderberg and Anthony’s Nose were both under a thousand feet—but from here, on the water, they rose up like a dream of mountains, tall, massive and forbidding. Dead ahead lay Dunderberg, sloping back from the water like a sleeping giant, the ghost fleet nestled at its foot. To the south was Indian Point, with
its power plants and estuarine biologists, with Jessica and her pickled fish; to the north, opening up like a shadowy mouth, was the entrance to the Highlands, where all the great mountains—Taurus, Storm King, Breakneck and Crow’s Nest—stepped down to wade in the river.

  This was the province of the Dunderberg Imp, the capricious gnome in trunk hose and sugarloaf hat who ruled the river through its most treacherous reaches, from Dunderberg to Storm King. It was he who brewed up squalls and flung thunderbolts down on the unsuspecting sloop captains of old, he who made men look foolish and strewed temptation in their paths, he who presided over Kidd’s treasure and ruined any ship that came near. It was he who’d popped all the corks on Stuyvesant’s kegs as old Silver Peg sailed upriver to chastise the Mohicans, he who’d lifted the nightcap from the inviolable pate of Dominie Van Schaik’s wife and deposited it on the steeple of the Esopus church, forty miles distant. His laugh—the wild stuttering whinny of the deranged and irresponsible—could be heard over the keen of the wind, and his diminutive hat could be found perched placidly atop the mainmast during the fiercest gale. Not even the most hardened sea dog would dream of rounding Kidd’s Point without first tacking a horseshoe to the mast and making an offering of Barbados rum to the Heer of the Dunderberg.

  Or so the legend went. Walter knew it well. Knew it as he knew the story of every witch, goblin, pukwidjinny and wailing woman that haunted the Hudson Valley. His grandmother had seen to that. But if he’d believed it once, if there’d been a spark of the old joy in the irrational left in him, of the child who’d sat over a liverwurst sandwich and thrilled to the story of Minewa’s betrayal or the legend of the headless Hessian of Sleepy Hollow, then Philosophy 451, Contemporary Philosophy with Emphasis on Death Obsession and Existentialist Thought, had extinguished it and left only the ash of cynicism behind.

  Still, as the Catherine Depeyster cut for the base of the black mountain under a sky that was blacker still, he couldn’t help thinking of the twisted little Heer of the Dunderberg. What a concept. It wasn’t lousy seamanship or drunkenness or fog that had been scuttling ships in the Highlands since the time of Pieter Minuit and Wouter the Doubter, but the malicious forces of the supernatural as embodied in a leering little homunculus—the Heer of the Dunderberg, in baggy pantaloons and buckled shoes—who lived only to drive boats upon the rocks. Walter remembered his grandfather pouring two cups of rye and ginger every time he rounded Kidd’s Point: one for the belly and one for the river. What’s that for? Walter, twelve years old and wise in the ways of the world, had asked one day. For the Heer, his hairy grandfather had replied, smacking his lips. For luck. And then Walter, not daring to question the humorless old man, had challenged the Imp under his breath. Kill us, he whispered. Come on: I dare you. Strike us with lightning. Overturn the boat. I dare you.

  The Imp had been silent that day. The sun lingered in the sky, the nets were full, they had Coke and crab cakes for dinner. Of course, the next time Walter rounded the point and rode up through the gorge of the mountains with his grandfather, thinking of baseball or a new fly rod or the way Susie Cats’ pedal pushers swelled at the intersection of her thighs, the sky suddenly went dark, the wind howled down off the mountains and the engine coughed, sputtered and went dead. What the—? his grandfather had snorted, rising up over his belly to jerk the starter cord in an automatic rage. They’d just skirted West Point and entered Martyr’s Reach, the most formidable of the fourteen reaches that sectioned the river from New York to Albany, a stretch of water known to generations of sailors for its treacherous winds, unpredictable currents and unforgiving shores. Just below them, two hundred and thirty feet down, lay World’s End, the graveyard for sloops and steamers and cabin cruisers alike, where rotting spars groaned in a current that was like the wind and from which no body had ever been recovered, deepest hole in a river that rarely ran more than a hundred feet deep. It was here that the Neptune capsized in 1824, with the loss of thirty-five passengers, and here too that Captain Benjamin Hunt of the James Coats met his maker when the mainsheet looped around his neck in a sudden gust and severed his head. In wild weather, you could still hear his startled cry, and then, right on its heels, the chilling splash of the trunkless head. Or so the story went.

  Walter’s grandfather didn’t like it a bit. He cursed and fiddled over the motor while the ebbing tide carried them downriver and the first few drops of rain began to pucker the surface. Take the oars! he’d roared, and Walter had obeyed without hesitation. He was scared. He’d never seen the daylight so dark. Swing it around and head for home, his grandfather snarled. Row! Walter rowed, rowed till his arms went numb and his back felt as if someone had driven hot splinters into it, but to no avail. The rain caught them just below West Point. But it wasn’t just rain, it was hail too. And thunder that reverberated in the basin of the mountains like a war at sea. They wound up sitting at anchor beneath an overhang on the west bank, huddled and shivering, not daring to venture out on the open water for fear of the lightning that tore the sky apart over their heads. Two weeks later, Walter’s grandfather had his stroke and toppled into the bait pen.

  Now, as the mountain loomed above them, Walter pushed himself up and made his way back to where Mardi sat at the tiller.

  “Having a good time?” she shouted over the wind.

  He just grinned in response, rocking with the boat, and then settled down beside her and helped himself to a cup of coffee from the thermos. The coffee was good. Hot and black and tasting of Depeyster Van Wart’s ten-year-old cognac. “Seen the Imp?” he said.

  “Who?”

  “You know, the little guy in the high hat and buckled shoes that runs around sitting on people’s masts and whipping up storms and whatnot.”

  Mardi gave him a long slow look and a wet-lipped smile that took a moment to spread across her face. She looked good, with the cap pulled down low like that and her hair fanned out behind her in the wind. Real good. She put her free arm through his and drew him closer. “What’ve you been smoking?” she said.

  It was Halloween, the night the dead rise from their graves and people hide behind masks, Halloween, and getting dark. Walter stood on the deck of the Catherine Depeyster and gazed up at the ranks of mothballed ships that rose above him on either side in great depthless fields of shadow. This time he hadn’t tried to hoist himself up the anchor chain of the U.S.S. Anima, nor of any of the other ships either. This time he’d been content merely to shove his hands deep in his pockets and stare up at them.

  Mardi was in the cabin, sipping cognac and warming herself over the electric space heater. She’d furled the sails and started up the engine when they got in close, afraid the wind would push her into one of the big ships. Then, when they’d maneuvered their way through the picket of steel monsters and anchored amongst them, she picked up the thermos and headed for the cabin. “Come on,” she said, “let’s get in out of this wind,” but Walter wasn’t moving. Not yet, anyway. He was thinking of Jessica and feeling the stab of guilt and betrayal, knowing full well what was going to happen once he got into that cabin with Mardi. Oh, he could delay it, exercise his will, stand out here in the wind and gawk up at the ships as if they meant anything at all to him, but eventually he would follow her into the cabin. It was inevitable. Preordained. A role in a play he’d been rehearsing all his life. This was why he’d come out to the ghost ships—this, and nothing more. “Come on,” she repeated, and her voice dropped to a purr.

  “In a minute,” he said.

  The cabin door clicked shut behind him, and he never turned his head. This ship that hung over him, with its rusted anchor chain and hull streaked with bird crap, had suddenly become fascinating, riveting, a thing rare and unique in the world. He was thinking nothing. The wind bit at him. He counted off thirty seconds and was about to turn around and submit himself to the inevitable, when something—a sudden displacement of shadow, a furtive movement—caught his eye. Up there. High against the rail of the near ship.

  It was almos
t dark. He couldn’t be sure. But yes, there it was again: something was roaming around up there. A bird? A rat? He tried to keep his eyes fixed on the spot, but at some point he must have blinked involuntarily—because the next thing he knew there was an object perched on the rail, where no object had been a fraction of a second earlier. From down here, beneath the great soaring wall of the ship, it appeared to be a hat—wide of brim, high of crown, and of a fashion that had its day centuries ago, a hat the pilgrims might have worn, or Rembrandt himself. It was at that moment, as Walter stood puzzling over this shadowy apparition, that an odd flatulent sound began to insinuate itself in the niche between the slosh of the waves and the moan of the wind, a sound that brought back memories of elementary school, of playgrounds and ballfields: someone was razzing him.

  Walter looked to his right, and then to his left. He looked behind him, above him, he peered over the rail, tore open the locker, searched the sky—all to no avail. The sound seemed to be coming from everywhere, from nowhere, caught up in the very woof of the air itself. The hat was still perched atop the rail of the big rotting merchantman before him, and Mardi—he could see her through the little rectangular windows—was still ensconced in the cabin. The razzing grew louder, faded, pulsed back again, and Walter began to feel an odd sensation creeping up on him, déjà vu, a sensation grown old since the day of his accident.

  Sure enough, when he looked up again, the rail of the ship was crowded with ragged figures—bums, the bums he’d seen the night of the accident—each with his fingers to his nose and a vibrating tongue between his lips. And there, in the middle of them, sat their ringleader—the little guy in baggy trousers and work boots his father had called Piet. Piet’s face was expressionless—as stolid as an executioner’s—and the antiquated hat was now sitting atop his head like an overturned milk can. As Walter focused on him, he saw the tip of the little man’s tongue emerge from between his tightly compressed lips to augment the mocking chorus with its own feathery but distinctive raspberry.